Olympic Rower, head of the Conservation Law Foundation, Super-secretary of Commonwealth Development under Mitt Romney, and now head of Serrafix, Doug Foy has been a trailblazer since his first stroke. With his nuanced background combining law, policy, and private industry, Doug’s career has all the trappings of a “g(re)enius.” Sitting down with Doug in person to get a better handle on the hip and fairly ambiguous notion of “sustainability,” Doug’s hour of insight gave material enough for an entire week’s worth of digestion.
Sustainability: Before the language of sustainability, there was the language of litigation. Decades of legal battles paved the way for future policy and business strategies to emerge. As an example, Foy mentions his participation in the 1983 Boston Harbor cleanup—noting how the case really “triggered” the whole concept of sustainable thinking. Urban initiatives such as Boulder’s Smart City and Renew Boston are coming together as the sustainable face of cities, the roots of which, indeed, began with litigation.
RGGI – a Benchmark for National Cap & Trade: Instrumental in developing the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) during his tenure as Secretary of Commonwealth Development, Foy’s work backs his belief that states are laboratories of innovation. Refusing to wait for Washington, Foy took action at the state level and crafted RGGI, now recognized as the standard for Washington to (hopefully) surpass with a future emission reduction program at the national level. Interestingly, RGGI engaged EU support prior to that of the federal government. Doug recalls confronting the foreign notion of the U.S. as a federal monolith, eventually gaining EU support by pointing to the fact that, at the time, RGGI and its Western counterparts accounted for 2/3 of U.S. GDP. In RGGI, Foy and his team provided the U.S. government with a standard that has turned out to be a success story. We will have to wait until the spring of 2010 to see whether Congress will choose to build off RGGI’s platform.
View with CO2: The future of sustainability must come from an integrated base, which is to say, state and federal agencies must communicate with one another. Sustainability requires both intra- and inter-agency communication such that sustainable initiatives from one agency are not offset by inefficient policies of another. In Foy’s view, the best way to facilitate communication is to employ a common CO2 lens. Today, many of these large agencies – DOE, HUD, DOT, to name a few – function like silos: unable to see the lateral effects their policies have on fellow agencies. The path to a sustainable future lies in the effective integration of state and federal policy in terms of energy efficiency and reduction. Thus, Doug recommends every initiative be scrutinized through a common CO2 lens to ensure that policies at both the state and federal level work symbiotically toward the shared goal of a sustainable future.
The Take-away? Learning how to grow with less will mean learning how to listen with more.
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What’s even cooler is Fran Cummings himself. Noted for his humble nature and rare ability to translate technical, and rather complicated concepts into basic language for the rest of us laymen, Fran’s genuine interest in both energy and the environment radiates from behind the desk physically separating us, and I can’t help but smile and share in his contagious enthusiasm. “I’ve been doing this stuff for 35 years,” remarks Fran, “and suddenly everyone is taking interest…it’s so COOL!”
Smart Grid: Everybody hears the buzz term, but few understand beyond the enormous dollar amount of stimulus money allocated toward re-configuring U.S. energy systems. As such, I specifically asked Fran to give me a simple description of the elusive smart grid. Here’s what I came away with: For starters, the name assumes that the grid we have right now is far from smart. Our current “dumb” grid results from a draconian mechanical system where electrons (i.e. energy) flow in one direction (from utility to consumer) without any sort of intelligence or communication on the side of the consumer; as if electricity magically grows out of the wall?!While able to handle peak usage, our existing grid wastes exorbitant amounts of energy in transmission, fails to capture and store excess energy, and precludes energy users from giving back to the grid as small producers. In lieu of any kind of “smart meter” the system also creates a one-way relationship where consumers have little control or interaction in understanding individual energy use.
The smart grid proposes adding IT instruments to grid infrastructure in order to create a give and take system – one where users and producers retain a two-way interaction, and where all connected entities communicate in order to effectively allocate energy at the most opportune time (i.e. the lowest price). Adding software and data-collection technology also brings smart meters into homes and businesses, which immediately translates data into consumer friendly information. For years consumers have been constrained by limited access, control, and understanding with regard to energy. The advent of the smart grid brings transparency to a previously opaque consumer-utility relationship.
Electric utilities transitioning to the new energy economy: Most complaints against larger utilities rely on the monopoly these giant companies maintain on power generation. Until recently, a lack of incentives to encourage utilities to upgrade or innovate effectively coddled an industry into complacency. As Fran so eloquently points out, thankfully State and Federal governing bodies are now forcing electrical companies to become proactive in opening up the grid to distributed power generation. Strategic legislation such as Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPF’s) and net-metering policies orchestrate a framework for not only including clean energy suppliers, but forcing utilities to help renewable generators via project finance and power-purchase agreements guaranteeing certain prices per kilowatt-hour.
The Take-Away? It’s time to get Smart!
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