Expanding access to clean energy like solar is essential to global climate goals, and it is especially impactful for the residents on island nations in the Caribbean that face high energy costs and are exposed to increasingly violent storms. As the director of projects for the Rocky Mountain Institute (now known as RMI), Chris Burgess navigates the decarbonization and decentralization of energy in markets that have previously been left out of the energy transition. Hilary Langer and Chris Burgess (Director of Projects for RMI) discuss why decentralized power is especially important to quality of life in underserved communities, how to establish alignment among disparate stakeholders, and how urgent action can be scaled.
Expanding access to clean energy like solar is essential to global climate goals, and it is especially impactful for the residents on island nations in the Caribbean that face high energy costs and are exposed to increasingly violent storms. As the director of projects for the Rocky Mountain Institute (now known as RMI), Chris Burgess navigates the decarbonization and decentralization of energy in markets that have previously been left out of the energy transition.
Hilary Langer and Chris Burgess (Director of Projects for RMI) discuss why decentralized power is especially important to quality of life in underserved communities, how to establish alignment among disparate stakeholders, and how urgent action can be scaled.
Links:
RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute)
RMI’s “Solar Under Storm” Report
Christopher Burgess on LinkedIn
Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths
Mia Mottley UN Profile: Champions of the Earth
Episode recorded: March 23, 2023
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.comor tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Chris Burgess: We're always challenging the utilities to be a little bit progressive and we have to show them that these technologies are not a threat to their futures, their technical grid, their unions, or their existence. We have to show them that they are a huge part of this transition.
Hilary: Expanding access to clean energy like solar is essential to the world’s climate goals, and it’s especially impactful for island nations in the caribbean that face high energy costs but don’t always have the political momentum needed to attract developers.
As the director of projects for the Rocky Mountain Institute, or RMI, Chris Burgess navigates the decarbonization and decentralization of energy in markets that have previously been left out of the energy transition.
This episode was recorded in our Annapolis studio, and a colleague who met with Chris remarked that he “glows with enthusiasm” for his work. I hope this episode brings that enthusiasm to you, and if you’d like to learn more, check out the shownotes for a link to a 60 Minutes feature on Chris’ team at RMI.
Hilary: Chris, thanks so much for joining us here in Annapolis today. It's great to have you.
Chris: It's awesome to be here.
Hilary: Before we dig into your current work at RMI, I want to get a sense of your background. You were with the EPA, focused on brownfield for a while then worked at Alpha Energy here in Annapolis and hold a masters from Johns Hopkins Environmental Science and Policy. What is it about the environment that drew you to the space?
Chris: I think that happened in college. I just was drawn to the challenges, the human environment mixing with the natural environment, and all of the open career paths that one could take. What I really like about the industry is it's so multidiscipline. You're not pigeonholed in one scientific expertise. You can dabble in geology, you can look in geotechnical science, you can look at the human environment through urban planning as well as the ecology which I was really drawn to growing up and living on the Chesapeake Bay.
I think it was that multidisciplinary approach that brought me to the environmental sciences where you do have to know a little bit about everything and how they interact and with the most fair and equal way is to regulate that. That's what really drew me at an early age in my early 20s.
Then when the renewables became very competitive with traditional energy sources, it really drew me there from an entrepreneurial standpoint. Instead of regulating away the problem, why not just out-compete it with a better energy source? That's what drew me to renewables. I found two really cool entrepreneurs right here in Annapolis, David Marn and Marcellus Butler and Alpha Energy was born.
Hilary: I do love that interdisciplinary side of the environmental space. When I was studying environmental science as an undergrad we got to take classes from all the different departments. You still draw on that working in this area now and especially with your work at RMI, you need to know the people on the ground and the stakeholders.
Chris: That's it. Anybody that's developed a solar project or a wind project will thank their professors from the multi-disciplines in college that you really do touch on so many of the aspects of the environment and the way they're regulated from clean water to how far are you away from a brownfield, what's your setbacks on certain tributaries, all that comes into play when you're developing projects.
Hilary: Talk to me about your transition from the EPA and Alpha Energy to RMI. What drew you towards this nonprofit? It was originally started as a think tank decades ago and was at the forefront of this discussion about decarbonization and decentralization.
Chris: It's actually a cool story. Alpha was drawn to the Caribbean by one business deal which was going to be a waste-to-energy plant coupled with solar. The solar was going to make it more economical.
Hilary: Where was that?
Chris: At Nevis.
Hilary: Cool.
Chris: I think its at Saint Kitts and Nevis, a Federation in the Eastern Caribbean. We went down there a couple times, met with the stakeholders, understood that small power system, the rates that they were paying were astronomical. I think that was 2012 and 2011 was the peak of the oil. I think it was $140 a barrel at one point. When oil peaks like that, the utilities in the region have no choice but to raise their fuel past their rates. I may think they were paying 28 to 32 cents a kilowatt hour back then, so it's pretty high.
We were like economically this is a slam dunk.
Then you realize where the market barriers really are with the scale, the regulation, the lack of fiscal space and credit. A lot of these off-takers have the utilities and the governments. After about a year or so, not being able to get that deal done there was a friend of a friend that said, "Hey listen, the Carbon War Room in Washington DC is looking for an operations manager." Which was short for a developer.
I interviewed for it, not thinking much of it. A couple months later I got the job and had to make a career decision at that point. When I took the job I was thinking it was going to be short-term, it was going to help with some of the market barriers in various jurisdictions including the Caribbean. That I would get back to the private sector. I even told Justin Locke who's still my managing director, "Hey, man, I'll give you 24 months. Just all I can give you. Then I can get back to hustling deals and putting steel in the ground."
After the first year I just fell in love with the work, fell in love with the culture, the travel, being on the tip of the spear. The [unintelligible 00:05:00] edge of these markets was really inspiring. Of course, being able to hire people from the region, who have an immense skill set, and just don't have the opportunities that we do here in the States. By 2016, this was 2014 was good hire, by 2016, I was all in. I was not looking back, still doing some part-time work with Alpha, had retired from the EPA, and really put my heart and soul into optimize Island's Energy Program.
Hilary: You're hired by the Carbon War Room. Can you talk a little bit about what the goal was of that group and then how it later merged with RMI?
Chris: Yes, sure. the Carbon War Room was an idea from Sir Richard Branson, to bring the power of the commercial sector and entrepreneurs to the climate challenge and there were a number of sectors that he really wanted to focus on; trucking, shipping, aviation buildings, and islands. Islands really stuck out. That's a weird one. That's not an industry but it's where the economics were really, really compelling. Our kilowatt hours are just cheaper than your kilowatt hours.
We don't need any grants. We don't need any tax incentives. We don't need any solar carve-outs, right? We don't need any of the things that were in place and in the States and Canada, and Europe, in terms of the tariffs, we could just go down there and show them economically how it was done. Well, that was pretty naive [laughter] because there's a lot of things besides the economics that are in the way, especially an industry that has been built around fossil fuels for the last 60 years. All the regulations, all the legal frameworks, people's jobs, the unions, everything's built around that complex.
You had to navigate it very strategically, very fairly, and very accurately and that really was the challenge of the islands that we were faced with in those early years. I think, within the first couple of months of being hired by the Carbon War Room, it was apparent that there was a marriage about to happen between RMI and the Carbon War Room, and Sir Richard Branson and Amory Lovins who was the founder of RMI had a mutual respect for each other had a relationship, and they made that merger happen. RMI basically took over Carbon War Room, brought in most of the employees, brought in most of the intellectual works and the networks that they were establishing in the commercial sector and it's been that way ever since.
Hilary: What is RMI story? When we came into this recording room, you would notice the Soft Energy Paths, which was written by your founder and is a favorite of the chairman of HASI, Jeff Eckel. What is the premise, and talk to me about when it was started and why it made sense at that time.
Chris: Yes, Amory Lovins is like the great grandfather of energy efficiency, right? He's like our Albert Einstein in terms of really discovering scientifically and economically, the power of energy efficiency and distributed energy resources way, way before its time. There's a lot of people in the industry, particularly some of the more veteran people in the industry that know Amory or know of his works in his books. The Soft Energy Pathway is not one that many people know. Most people know Reinventing Fire, as well as Natural Capitalism. You really have to be into Amory Lovins to know the Soft Energy Pathways. When I walked in this room and saw that I was pretty delighted that Jeff Hackl actually had that book here.
Hilary: Well read too.
Chris: Yes.
Hilary: It's been flipped through more than a few times.
Chris: Yes. It's been flipped through, you can definitely tell. It's like a library book at this point but it really highlights the opportunity that we have in the built environment, not to build gargantuan in power plants and gargantuan in transmission lines, and environmentally, socially, put that impact on our country when we can really build out the energy resources we need right here in town, or right in the next farm field, or right on the roof. It's a distributed energy pathway, as opposed to a big centralized pathway.
At the time in 1977, when that was written, that was almost laughable, the way energy was built and distributed at the time but if you look back some what 45 years later, it's exactly what is happening, right. Especially in jurisdictions like Bermuda where I just got back from a couple of weeks ago, where they literally don't have extra land resources on that small island, and they're going to go 80% renewable literally on their own rooftops. It's pretty, pretty exciting.
Hilary: That's got to be exciting to see.
Chris: Yes.
Hilary: RMI was started, I believe, in the Carter administration, but it's nonpartisan and their goal right now is, and this on the website to identify and scale energy system interventions to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030. What does that look like on the ground for you? What are some of the projects that you're engaged in?
Chris: Yes, so RMI for a couple decades starting in the late seventies it was with Think Tank. It was really about the economic arguments needed for policy, particularly domestic policy on where the US could put their time, talent, and resources to have more energy security, to have more energy equity across this great country. It wasn't until the Carbon War Room that the think tank met the do tank. Right. I think that's why there's a mutual respect for each other because Amory's an academic, and Amory is well known globally. He's consulted every US president since the Carter administration. It wasn't a project shop, right?
It wasn't a project development shop. With the Carbon War Room, we were able to marry the analysts with the entrepreneurs. Since that time we've been in a number of markets really trying to knock down those market barriers to help the proliferation of energy transition happen through the commercial sector.
That's very difficult in places that don't have an entrepreneurial class or they don't have the resources, even if they had the entrepreneurial class to identify, develop, and invest in these renewables. What's great about RMI is because we're funded philanthropically, we can come in and act as an owner's representative or a developer and do that on grant funds and then bring projects to the market that are completely de-risked and permitted and ready to go.
Hilary: When you're looking to engage on a project, who do you talk to first? Who are the initial stakeholders that you need to win over to understand how to bring the project to life?
Chris: Yes, so the Islands Energy Program is really founded on three primary pillars. There is project planning or what we call energy planning. That's very similar to an IRP in the US content since an integrated resource plan that the utilities have to do every, whatever, three to five years for the public service commissions, what's the load going to be, what's the load growth, how are you going to meet that load? That's fairly regulated almost every US jurisdiction.
We're bringing that type of capital planning and forethought to the islands, but then bringing in all the other governmental and commercial stakeholders. The hotels, the industries that are there, the governments, the community groups. Everyone has a seat at the table to really put the facts on the table and have a common vision, right? Where do we want to take this jurisdiction? Where do we want to take this island? We coined the National Energy Transition Strategies [unintelligible 00:13:30] the NETS.
We did that in about six different jurisdictions in the Caribbean. That provided the foundation that everybody could look at and that foundation can influence policy, can influence regulation, and can influence the utilities capital planning. From that point, a lot of other NGOs would just walk away. Their claim to fame would be a report or a convening. We take it all the way from concept to commissioning.
The next step was to identify a project that everybody can agree on, and that we are going to knock down the market barriers that are preventing that project from happening. We'll find the land, we'll de-risk the land, we'll do the geotechs, we'll do the interconnection studies, we'll do the environmental social impact studies. We'll hire local professionals to do all those disciplines.
Then we bring in the technical specifications and we'll actually build the RFP and we'll help the utility or the government or the financial sponsor who might be a development bank, take that to market and bring in well-qualified, well-capitalized, insured, and bonded companies to build the first project.
After it's operating, you really get to see the demystification and the de-risking in that market and say, "Wow, this power plant works every day when the sun rises and it's 40% cheaper than burning diesel." [crosstalk] Why are we doing more of this? Not to mention it unemployed X more people, and we're building the workforce for the future. The first two pillars, planning, second pillar projects, and the most important pillars, people and partnerships. The people we want to hire, we want to hire locally. We want to train and invest in people that we don't hire, so they're more skilled at the utility or in the governments and the private sector, those jurisdictions, to take the energy transition on themselves. Then the partnerships, because there's so many other organizations doing great work in the region, that we want to make sure that we're not stepping on toes and that we're completely aligned with the energy and transition.
Those four pillars is really what we stand on in the region. It's been so successful. We've had six of the first utility-scale projects done in six different jurisdictions, which a private sector company would have lost their shirt five times over in terms of the transaction costs and what had to happen but we're setting that really good precedent, and it's been so popular that the general council or the Executive Council at RMI said, "Listen, let's take that model from the islands and let's apply it to the jurisdictions that are really going to have the most carbon impact over the next couple of decades. Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asian."
Now, the island's program, which was this little program that came from the Carbon War Room, is now called the Global South. It's taking those four pillars and putting in those other jurisdictions so we can help navigate the very difficult pathway to renewables over fossil fuels.
Hilary: It's interesting how you're able to bring everyone to the table and get that real deep buy-in at the beginning. As you say, typically that's where a lot of USAIDs or nonprofits would then step back or even the think tanks, and how powerful that you're then able to leverage those relationships and actually see projects to completion.
Chris: Right. That's why the four pillars are important because without the people, without the partnerships that would be much more difficult. That would be another plan on a shelf. We've seen so many times. I think the other challenge is what was true in 2015 in terms of least costs economics, is not true in 2023. Back then battery storage was so expensive, it was almost unheard of that you would actually have a battery project in the Caribbean. Well, now we don't do a project without battery storage, because everybody wants firm dispatchable power, and storage has gotten so cheap.
We have to remember that we're on a technology curve that's extremely fast for the electricity industry that doesn't innovate all that much, all that well. We're disrupting a mechanical, analog, hardware-type system, with a ton of software, and a ton of technology that's really been borrowed from the manufacturing of LCD TVs and lithium-ion batteries for phones and all those things that have made our lives so technologically advanced in the last 20 years is now being applied to the energy space.
That's really tough for a regulator, really tough for utility to keep up with. Wind power and geothermal power which may have been least cost back in 2010 to 2015 is easily being lapped by solar and battery now. You got to make sure that your plans are updated every two years instead of every five years because the economics changed rapidly.
Hilary: When you go to some of these islands, imagine some of the dominant players are the utilities, and they have customers who are accustomed to paying the bills and they recognize that there are outages and they're just dealing with it for better or for worse. How do you get their buy-in? What's their incentive to bring in new solar projects and support them?
Chris: Yes, excellent question. That's actually a sore spot in the early days of the Carbon War Room is when I got there all the memorandums of understanding with governments. Governments can say almost anything they want, because they're not directly responsible for the utility, especially on the international stage where grant funding and popularity can come from the UN if you're pledging 100%. A lot of the prime ministers and a lot of the cabinets really want it to go 100% renewable, but if you look at the economics, it's still really, really tough to go 100%, unless you have a geothermal resource that you can tap into. Back then I think least costs was somewhere around 30%. We really wanted to put the facts on the table and that's where that planning process came in to not discourage the politicians but to bring them back down to earth. Say, this is what we can do now, but the goal should be 100% as the technology and the calls catch up. That really won us respect with the utilities. The fact that I had been dealing with the utilities for a number of years with interconnections here in Maryland, I understood that vernacular and understood their conservative nature when it come to their grid, which has to be balanced at the millisecond between supply and load.
At that point, that first project is really where the utilities and governments can agree sometimes for the first time on where they want to go. Having the utilities' buy-in early is super important. We're always challenging the utilities to be a little bit progressive and we have to show them that these technologies are not a threat to their futures, their technical grid, their unions, or their existence.
We have to show them that they are a huge part of this transition and then they turn around and say, "Listen, we love to be a huge part of this transition, but our rules and regulations are from 1982 and so the Arab oil embargo really impacted the business model in the Caribbean so no longer were these utilities able to take risk on fuel, which had been very, very straight line for the whole basically all the '60s and the '70s to one that's incredibly volatile.
At that point, they regulated in the fuel pass-through. Based on the Houston, whatever index they could raise and lower your fuel costs on a monthly basis. That helped them to stay solvent, but what it did is took away all the incentive for them to do anything else. We are now trying to dismantle the fuel pass-through so the utilities are more incentivized to go with renewables because right now they can just literally pass through the fuel to their customers.
Sometimes very painfully, particularly this past year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the spike that did globally to oil prices, particularly gas and diesel prices. If we can dismantle that and make it a win-win for the utilities, I think we can exponentially accelerate the pace of renewable adoption.
Hilary: When you're looking to start in a new market, how do you even get the utilities to the table? I used to work in the Middle East and there you have to spend a lot of time building trust with the people who live there and work with these companies before they'll even take a phone call, much less come to a meeting for maybe half a day. Do you have your partners on the ground scoping out who's in charge and what their incentives are?
Chris: Yes. The great thing about the Islands program is we're almost entirely from the Caribbean. We have former utility CEOs on our staff. Matter of fact, David Gumbs is the former CEO of the Anguilla Electricity Company, ANGLEC. Great guy, lives in Montgomery County. Having him on board is huge. Obviously, he has the network and understands. We also have another gentleman named Fidel Neverson who used to work for the St. Vincent utility.
We have another board member, Owen Lewis, who's on the Montserrat Utilities Limited Board. We understand-
Hilary: You're entrenched.
Chris: -that space and we are entrenched in that space. I think we built a lot of trust with our first planning process in St. Lucia where the utility was under a ton of pressure from the government but we came in as that broker, that independent agent that could hear both sides and bridge a compromise or a solution, which was the National Energy Transition Strategy.
Because we weren't anti-utility, we were able to build respect within the community of utilities in the Caribbean. It's called CARILEC. It's very similar to the American Power Association here, APA.
Hilary: You've touched on some of the challenges that the islands face with these high and often volatile prices and they are by definition more isolated. They're also very susceptible to hurricanes. When you're putting in these solar installations, how do those hold up in category-five hurricanes?
Chris: There was quite a ramp-up in solar from say 2011 to 2017 and so a lot of jurisdictions in the Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico and USVI, who could lean back on the US tax code right through the investment tax credit had built out quite a bit of solar, hundreds of megawatts between those two islands, but they were built when hurricanes were at a low. There wasn't a lot of hurricane activity between say, 2010 and 2017. If there was, it was category three-ish. I think Katrina was a big five, but that was 2005. We didn't really have super-powerful hurricanes for that time. People were just building solar to what they thought was the average wind resilience.
2017 was a reckoning. Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria ripped through the Caribbean. When I say ripped, I mean total devastation. Two, three years' worth of GDP just demolished over two days and solar was definitely impacted in many of those jurisdictions.
We also found quite a number surviving solar firms in rooftops and we really wanted to figure out what's happening. Why did this solar firm, which maybe even experienced longer sustained winds at 185, nine hours survive versus this one that was just clipped with 185, that's been totally decimated? We hired two structural engineers that had spent the better part of their careers in wind tunnels. They used to work for SunEdison back in the day, so they were designing these structures for almost every type of environment. Frank and Chris from FCX Solar 2 really, really great guys, structural engineers that got their PhDs in wind resilience and wind loading.
We hired them to go down to three different installations to figure out what went wrong. They did a failure mode analysis on these installations and they also took a look at the surviving solar firms as well. Not to get too deep in the structural wes, but what they found out is it came down to really two things; design, so they were only designing these things from 120 to 150 mile an hour. Obviously, you have sustained winds of 185 up to 220 with gusts. That's a big, big difference in wind resilience. The other was workmanship and fasteners. Workmanship, the cover of solar understorm, which I'll get into. They had an entire bottom row that the bolts had went through, but no one ever put the nuts on just because it was low to the ground, it was probably hard to get to, they just stuck them in there.
No one QAQC did, so they didn't actually have the bottom row of bolts fastened at all. The other failure mode was where they had fastened them in a number of places they had just vibrated loose, so they actually didn't have the anti-vibratory washers and locks. Once we figured out design fastening and workmanship, we'd be able to backtrack how you could actually design these for the future. We wrote a publication called Solar Under Storm. It was the most downloaded report in RMI history, believe it or not, and that happened--
Hilary: Which is really saying something because you're a think tank. You put out a lot of good research.
Chris: Exactly. We were very surprised by that. We thought this was going to be a niche industry paper just for the few people who were designing projects in hurricane regions, but we had forgotten that it was an incredibly active typhoon and cyclone season as well. All throughout the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, think about the energy transition that's happening in the Southeast Asia, where it's the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Indonesia. They were also being impacted by these storms and they are also building the solar plants are the rooftop to a category three-ish, four-ish standard.
It was the international downloads coupled with the downloads from Florida and the Caribbean that really took that number pretty high. We've seen it work, so we built every project now to category five. We had an installation survive Hurricane Dorian, which ripped through in 2019 and we're finding that if installed correctly, particularly on rooftops, solar actually helps the structure retain itself. That's the cover of Solar Under Storm 2, which is all about rooftops.
Hilary: I should add you have a fantastic photo here of what-- Walk us through this. This is a house or a building with the roof of solar.
Chris: That's a small school in Abaco. Abaco is the island in The Bahamas that was absolutely decimated by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. If you look at the photo, the entire backside of the roof and the side of the roof, the sheathing is completely ripped off, but where they had the solar installation is completely intact. That's just because the design of those particular rails is crossed to the [unintelligible 00:30:16] and is able to provide another layer of security and wind resilience on that particular roof. That's not going to be the case in every roof, but we just thought that that was very telling of what solar can be versus what it was in 2017, which was just part of the wreckage.
Hilary: Which I think has scared some people off from solar developments in these hurricane-prone areas, even in Florida. But you've shown that doesn't have to be the case.
Chris: Absolutely. That was the rhetoric. Particularly from the fossil fuel industries. Renewables aren't resilient. Look at this wind turbine that was ripped apart. Look at this solar firm that was completely wiped off and it is nothing but rubble now. They don't want to talk about the survivorships that we also saw.
The way these structures are built now, they're actually being installed at critical facilities because they are so resilient and reliable. A really sad story, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, many communities in the interior of the island depend on pumping stations to bring them potable water. After Hurricane Maria, the pumping stations were off grid, but many of them had backup diesel. They were able to provide clean, potable water, pumped up to these communities in some cases for up to a week.
But then they were cut off from their fuel supply entirely because the roads were impassable, the ports were destroyed, they weren't able to import the fuel. Sadly, many, many people that they think up to like 1200 people died because of the lack of potable water in these communities. If they would've had solar built to category five standard without battery, they could at least pump the water during the daylight hours.
Now you couple that with battery, and they can give a 24/7 support system to that critical facility. We've taken a lot of those lessons learned and applied them in the islands that have been decimated by their hurricanes the last several years. Schools that double as hurricane shelters now have solar and storage. That is where they can go to stay cool with AC, they can plug in their cell phones, they can keep medical supplies cool. All the things that you take for granted with electricity that really come full scale in your face after the hurricane, we're able to put that in a number of communities. We're also seeing this at a larger scale. Hospitals, and you say, "Well, how do you make that economical?" Which the great thing about distributed energy is that it doesn't have to be just a backup power source.
If you think about all the diesel plants or all the diesel generators at hospitals, and that's globally, they just sit there, right? They sit there idle. They have to be maintained. They rust. Fuel has to be changed out. They have to be tested. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may not run for a whole year, right? They may not run for three, four years. They are just a backup energy source.
Well, when you have distributed energy like solar and battery, that can be built on the hospital, adjacent to the hospital, on the same feeder as the hospital, whatever the configuration is best served, it can be installed there, work with the grid all day, every day as the least cost generator, right? The Solar's going in cheaper than the diesel's going in that's working all day every day. The battery's coming in as a firm source.
The hospitals, if we had a diesel generator, it would just be 50, a hundred thousand dollars investment that would really sit there and wait for the worst-case scenario where you can apply that same investment to solar and battery. That can work with the grid all day, every day. It can provide ancillary services through the battery. It can provide energy, [unintelligible 00:34:23] project if you need that.
Of course, the solar is being sold into the grid or injected into the grid way cheaper than business as usual, which is burning diesel. That's really the groundwork of the new distributed energy paradigm. Instead of having these large, centralized fossil fuel plants or power plants that have to be transmitted over miles and miles and miles, you can put your energy sources where you need them most. That way they work with the grid every day. If the grid goes down, which, and inevitably will in almost any storm you still have that power resource local to the hospital. It's almost like a data center where they don't even feel the flinch of the grid being lost. It's just automatic transfer switch nanoseconds you're on the battery and the solar. We're building that out in a number of islands. Letting those critical facilities be the hubs of clean energy generation that then can proliferate to small businesses, residential communities, and government facilities.
Hilary: Do the economics of these projects work in some of the Southeast Asian countries where you're active and some of the regions like Africa and the Middle East where there are a lot of fuel subsidies? The people who are entrenched with the utilities are often some of the wealthier people who have all the political connections and have an interest in not changing how the subsidies work.
Chris: It's funny you say that. This isn't my arm I hat, this is my alpha hat. We got hired by a military contractor to do a feasibility study for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia subsidizes all their electricity, particularly to the public. When they do water treatment, water pumping, wastewater treatment, wastewater pumping, that's all done with diesel. That's all done from the grid. They had us do a study to see if we could just convert that to solar and battery. That way less of their fuel, which is their global commodity that they had to sell for their economy, can go away from subsidy and out to the market. It doesn't matter--
Hilary: There are some mixed incentives there.
Chris: Exactly. It doesn't matter what seat of the table you're on. Solar and battery is kicking butt everywhere. When it comes to Southeast Asia, there are a ton of islands there and many of those islands are not interconnected back to the main island or back to the mainland. They are also in diesel generators. Anywhere there's a diesel energy source, solar and battery is 30%, 40%, 50% cheaper. Sub-Saharan Africa is a bit different. The electricity grid isn't really built out there, you're actually electrifying these communities for the first time, which is really exciting.
It's almost like the mobile phone jump. They didn't need the wires. They went right to mobile phones. Very similar with the mini-grid entrepreneurs and developers that are there in Sub-Saharan Africa where you're bringing a new service, you're bringing a new resource to these communities for the first time, and it's illuminating for education, for light at night, for cleaning, to run a laptop to run a small business. It's a different problem there, but everywhere you turn solar and battery is making an impact on the economy.
Hilary: What keeps you excited about this work? What motivates you to continue with RMI?
Chris: I think it's the people. The people are so passionate and so dedicated because I think they can see the light at the end of the tunnel. These are very small power systems. We work with a power system that is only two megawatts in terms of peak. Really flipping that from 100% diesel to right now it's about 93% is the least cost penetration right now with where battery prices are. Still at 93% is amazing. The diesels only come on a few hundred hours of the year out of the 8,760 hours that it needs to run. It's a phenomenal jump and you're really proud that you're not just doing that for the good of the environment for them to meet their climate goals. You're actually doing that to lower their energy bills because it is the least cost pathway you can go.
There are a number of small islands that are already flipped. They're already at 93% and the larger jurisdictions are next. It'll be really, really exciting to transition this region fast and let them be the pioneers of distributed energy, resilience, and energy equity. That way they don't have to import so much of the fuel from other jurisdictions at a really high rate. Not to mention the volatility that really hampers them economically. To fiscally look down and know exactly what you're going to pay for energy for the next 20 to 25 years, which is the life of a project is really liberating.
Hilary: That's powerful.
Chris: Instead of every month just crossing your fingers that it's not another 20% spike in fuel that's really going to hamper some of your operational funds, particularly as a government where you want to invest in education, you want to invest in ports. You want to invest in fiber optics and telecom. You can't do that because every month you have a different fuel bill. Fiscally, I think it's really powerful and you're going to see really an ignition, if you will, of economic forces in the Caribbean, hopefully in the next 10 years.
Hilary: You've done some work in Barbados, and they have very progressive policies there. Could you talk to us about those a bit?
Chris: Yes. We have a Bayesian on the team, and that's what they call if you're from Barbados.
Hilary: I would not have known that.
Chris: Yes. If you're from Barbados, you're a Bayesian. Just an incredible culture and incredible people. They have a fearless leader named Mia Mottley, who I saw you had featured for Women's Month here in the lobby. She is fantastic. She's becoming the face of climate change and climate equity. She is super charismatic and she put it in a policy domestically. It's called solar by right.
You literally have the right to put solar on your property up to a certain KW, whether you're a business or a homeowner. That sounds pedestrian, right? It's not. It's actually really precedent-setting that someone has the right to put solar on the roof. It's almost like you are having the right to generate your own energy for your own energy security. It's really caused a lot of ruffles down there, so to speak, and a lot of challenges with the utility and permitting and all these type of things.
You have to be bold. She was willing to break some eggs to make an omelet. I think you're seeing that the distributed energy pathway is getting more and more milestones in that transition. I think people will look back at that particular policy and say that might have been the start of solar by right.
Hilary: We're going to switch to rapid-fire questions. First up, when I want to recharge, I?
Chris: Fish.
Hilary: Nice. Where?
Chris: Right in your backyard, most of the time.
Hilary: Full disclosure, both our families live in West Annapolis, which is an awesome little neighborhood.
Chris: Yes, Weems Creek fishing, or the Southern River.
Hilary: A key to my productivity is?
Chris: Collaboration. It's good to get other viewpoints, particularly from other jurisdictions and other cultures, before you make sound decisions.
Hilary: Great. A book or an event that changed my perspective is?
Chris: An event? Yes. Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria really changed my perspective on where we're at in the climate crisis and where we need to be secured, to be resilient, and to be thoughtful about the future.
Hilary: With the urgency that it showed you because you were already active in that space.
Chris: Yes, I think it was very academic before that time. You read about all these things that were going to happen, but to actually experience it and to know that business as usual is not going to work. Business as usual will fail. We have to transition and we have to build back better. We have to build with adaptation, particularly on these islands that everybody thinks that these islands are going to disappear with sea level rise.
Some of these islands are thousands of feet in elevation because they're volcanic. These islands are not going to disappear, but many of the services, many of the critical facilities are going to be severely impacted. The next time we build one, we're going to have to build it at a higher elevation. We're going to have to build it differently, and we're going to have to reorient the economy in order for that culture to survive.
Hilary: Finally, to me, climate-positive means?
Chris: Climate positive means opportunity. I just think there's an incredible amount of disruption in many different sectors globally that people should see this as not a crisis, but an opportunity. Whether you're a young person just coming into the working world or someone that is going into school or someone that's had a career in telecom or another industry that wants to get in a new industry. This industry is wide open with opportunities, needs new ideas, and needs innovation.
Hilary: Chris, it has been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for coming in.
Chris: Absolutely.
Hilary: Thanks for all of your work with RMI.
Gil: If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
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I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.