Friday, April 15, 2011

Welcome to the Energy Leaders Forum

By Mitch Tyson, Tyson Associates, co-founder and executive committee member, New England Clean Energy Council

Welcome to a conversation. This is the launch of the Energy Leaders Forum – a collaboration between the New England Clean Energy Council and Mass High Tech. We have brought together approximately 20 leaders from the clean energy cluster in New England to start a dialogue on the energy issues of the day. The cluster doesn’t speak with one voice, and we’ve tried to include representatives from different parts of the cluster to get a range of perspectives in order to enhance awareness, communication and collaboration. And, we hope that you will accept our invitation to join us in the conversation.

Why focus on the cluster? While we need a national clean energy policy, energy markets are regional, and innovation accelerates in clusters. In the absence of a national price on carbon, our region needs to focus on deploying our talent and resources as effectively as possible in our efforts to meet our energy challenges and capitalize on the economic opportunity offered by the global cleantech sector. Growing our clean energy cluster is crucial to those efforts. To do that, we need significantly more collaboration and coordination. We have enormous talent and resources that we need to deploy intelligently. Connecting energy users and solution providers, employers and employees, entrepreneurs and funders, businesses leaders and policy makers, entrepreneurs and mentors, universities and companies, are some of the vital links needed to optimize our assets. 

What do we need to talk about? Almost everyone in the cluster agrees that we must increase energy efficiency and deploy renewable energy sources. A vast majority believe that addressing the energy challenge helps us reduce the likelihood and impact of climate change, helps to create a cleantech industry that spurs economic development and creates jobs, and helps to reduce our region’s and our nation’s vulnerability to supply interruptions and price volatility. That makes us more competitive. 

Virtually everyone agrees that a collaboration among the private sector, the government and our academic institutions is essential. That’s great. And this consensus helps to explain why we’ve been able to create organizations like the New England Clean Energy Council, why we’ve been able to rally other organizations like the Progressive Business Leaders Network and the Mass High Tech Council, and why we’ve been able to enact some of the most forward thinking and comprehensive energy policies in the nation. But what about the issues on which we might disagree? 

We would like this forum to strengthen the cluster and promote clean energy by helping to educate, illuminate and thoughtfully discuss some of the tradeoffs and the choices we face as we continue to create a world class clean energy cluster and make the New England economy and the companies that make it up more sustainable. But we also want to confront some of the difficult questions that we aren’t focusing on or have avoided up until now as we have built consensus and built momentum.  

Here are some of the questions that keep me up at night:

*Are we incentivizing efficiency and renewables in a way that minimizes the cost to the region and does not make the companies in our region less competitive?

*Are the region’s VCs becoming more conservative, or are there fewer fundable companies? Or is everything fine?

*In our enthusiasm to promote clean energy, have we incrementally made the process overly complex and difficult for developers?

*Given that conventional energy sources receive greater subsidies than clean energy, would elimination of all subsidies level the playing field and spur the adoption of cleantech?

*Should the government or the private sector fill the gaps in funding at the seed stage or that arise when cleantech companies take longer to commercialize?

*Are energy users adopting new clean energy technologies as fast as they should? Could the role of “chief sustainability officer” help accelerate this?

*Can we achieve meaningful reductions in greenhouse gases without a comprehensive federal energy policy? How much effort should we spend on achieving this versus taking incremental actions that we can enact in the region?

*How do we build a long-term bipartisan coalition that can pass comprehensive energy policy?

*Are we doing enough to educate the public about our energy challenges, encourage consumer adoption and build support for clean energy policies and investment?

*Are we training the right people with the right skills for the right jobs?

*When we measure and evaluate the growth of the cluster, besides looking at the number of renewable projects and the amount spent on efficiency, do we also examine whether the benefits are broadly shared so that individuals and small businesses aren’t unfairly burdened? 

*Can we combine the tradition of home rule in New England towns with the urgent need to site clean energy projects for the benefit of the region?

*Do we have enough media coverage of the clean energy cluster? Is it accurate, and is it comprehensible to the public?

*What percentage of the high-potential technology in our research universities and corporate and government research labs are we commercializing? What needs to change in order to do it more effectively and faster?

*How many degrees of separation are there between those with requirements and those with solutions in our clean energy cluster? How do we connect people and organizations more effectively?

*Are we creating too much duplication and competition, given all the regional activity, including incubators, mentor networks, angel groups, research centers, business plan competitions, trade associations, government programs, citizen and environmental groups, daily energy conferences and seminars, networks, blogs, etc.?

*How do we leverage the innovation strengths of our regional economies to compete with China, especially considering that it is outspending us in clean energy investment?

I hope you’re interested in some of these questions. But perhaps you have some of your own that you’d like to see discussed over the next year. Let us know the topics you’re interested in discussing by responding to this blog and we’ll do our best to start a thoughtful conversation. We’ll be posting a new Energy Leaders Forum piece each week with comments from other forum members. You can read it on either the New England Clean Energy Council website or Mass High Tech’s website.

I’m glad you’ve stayed with us this far, and we look forward to the conversation.
 

Energy Leaders Forum Responses

Raphael Herz:
“I’d like to add a question: How are the state’s clean energy investment funds being optimized?”

Russ Landon:
“Another question to add: Given the early risk profile and the longer time to commercialize and adopt for clean energy technologies, do we have the appropriate financial mechanisms in place to turn startups into thriving corporations? Or do we need to do some financial engineering to fill the gaps?”