CLEAN
ENERGY NOW!
Spring 2002 Energy Summit Speakers
(Sorry, current contact info for these speakers is not available from the Environmental Center.)
Sarah
Brush
Kristen
Jule
Melissa
Payne
Steve
Smith
Kristin
Casper
Patrick
Keegan
Karl
Rábago
Joel
Swisher
Sarah
Creighton
Duncan
Marsh
Kassie
Rorhbach
Mark
Udall
Faith
Gemmill
Peter
Morton
Claudine
Schneider
Randy
Udall
Susan
Innis
David
Orr
Walter
Simpson
Sarah
Zisa
Karl
Rábago
Karl
R. Rábago is a managing director with the Rocky Mountain Institute.
The Rocky Mountain Institute is an entrepreneurial non-profit organization
that fosters the efficient and restorative use of resources to create
a more secure, prosperous, and life-sustaining world. Rábago helps
businesses achieve sustainability through application and incorporation
of Natural Capitalism principles. He also works to increase market opportunities
for clean and distributed energy resources. An environmental law attorney
by training, Karl has held a variety of positions in the electricity field,
including public utility commissioner for the state of Texas, Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Utility Technologies at the U.S. Department of Energy, Energy
Program Manager for the Environmental Defense Fund, and vice president
in the engineering firm of CH2M HILL. He chairs the Green Power Board,
which oversees the Green-e Certification program for green power products,
and is a member of the Green Pricing Accreditation Board for utility green
pricing programs.
Presentation
View Karl Rábago's presentation
for the Spring 2002 Energy Summit.
Interview
Can you briefly describe the Rocky Mountain Institute?
Rocky Mountain Institute is an entrepreneurial, nonprofit organization
that fosters the efficient and restorative use of resources to create
a more secure, prosperous, and life-sustaining world.
Our staff shows businesses, communities, individuals, and governments
how to create more wealth and employment, protect and enhance natural
and human capital, increase profit and competitive advantage, and
enjoy many other benefits—largely by doing what they do far
more efficiently.
Our work is independent, non-adversarial, and trans-ideological,
with a strong emphasis on market-based solutions.
Are there economically feasible methods for colleges to significantly
reduce energy use with currently available technologies?
Absolutely. State-of-the-shelf (not even state of the art) technologies
and solutions can make existing buildings three to four times more
efficient than average. New buildings can be ten times as efficient
at no additional cost. Today, harnessing market forces and using
widely demonstrated synergistic design, technology and management
techniques can deliver the high quality of life available in Western
economies at much lower financial and environmental cost. Industry
surveys of utility-directed “demand side management” efforts
to save electricity show saved watts—or “negawatts”—typically
costing society in the range of 0.5 to 2.5 cents per saved kilowatt-hour,
with well-run industrial and commercial programs usually falling
toward the low end of that range. While scores of specific market
and regulatory barriers prevent fuller realization of efficiency’s
potential, clever organizations are finding ways to turn these obstacles
into opportunities.
A serious effort to pursue energy efficiency could be far more
valuable in generating resources for education, teacher salaries
and program support than any traditional capital campaign.
Are there renewable energy technologies which colleges can make
use of today?
Absolutely. There are abundant opportunities for colleges to make
cost-effective use of wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal resources.
Direct ownership and operation of renewable energy resources can act
like energy efficiency, enhance campus energy security, hedge against
energy price volatility, and even create new revenue streams for the
college through export of energy or tradable renewable energy credits.
Are there steps these institutions could take now to accelerate
the transition to renewable energy over the next 2 decades?
Yes. The essential first steps include understanding energy use
patterns, reducing use through efficiency, green power or green tag
purchases, technology demonstrations, and direct incorporation of
renewable energy into buildings and infrastructure. Student housing
buildings are a great place to start.
Can you describe the principles of natural capitalism? How can these
principles be applied in a campus setting?
Previous industrial revolutions made people 100 times more productive
when low per-capita output was limiting progress by exploiting a
seemingly boundless natural world. Today we face a different pattern
of scarcity: abundant people and labor-saving machines, but diminishing
natural capital.
Natural capital refers to the earth’s natural resources and
the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services
to society and all living things. These services are of immense
economic value; some are literally priceless, since they have no
known substitutes. Yet current practices typically fail to take
into account the value of these assets—which is rising with
their scarcity. As a result, natural capital is being degraded and
liquidated by the very wasteful use of resources such as energy,
materials, water, fiber, and topsoil.
The next industrial revolution, like the previous ones, will be
a response to changing patterns of scarcity. It will create upheaval,
but more importantly, it will create opportunities.
Natural capitalism is a new sustainability model that enables
organizations to fully realize these opportunities. The journey
to natural capitalism involves four major shifts in practices, all
vitally interlinked:
- Radically increase the productivity of natural resources. Through
fundamental changes in both production design and technology,
farsighted organizations are developing ways to make natural resources—energy,
minerals, water, forests—stretch 5, 10, even 100 times further
than they do today. The resulting savings in operational costs,
capital investment, and time can help natural capitalists implement
the other three principles.
- Shift to biologically inspired production models and materials.
Natural capitalism seeks not merely to reduce waste but to eliminate
the very concept of waste. In closed-loop production systems,
modeled on nature’s designs, every output either is returned
harmlessly to the ecosystem as a nutrient, like compost, or becomes
an input for another manufacturing process. Industrial, building
and operations processes that emulate the benign chemistry of
nature reduce dependence on nonrenewable inputs, make possible
often phenomenally more efficient production, and can result in
elegantly simple products that rival anything man-made.
- Move to a “service-and-flow” business model. The business
model of traditional manufacturing rests on the sale of goods.
In the new model, value is instead delivered as a continuous flow
of services—such as providing illumination rather than selling
light bulbs. This aligns the interests of providers and customers
in ways that reward them for resource productivity. A focus on
delivering and/or obtaining the ultimate end use service is the
key.
- Reinvest in natural capital. Capital begets more capital; an
organization that depletes its own capital is eroding the basis
of its future prosperity. Pressures on all organizations to restore,
sustain, and expand natural capital are mounting as human needs
expand, the costs of deteriorating ecosystems rise, and the environmental
awareness of consumers increases. Fortunately, these pressures
all create opportunity.
The next Industrial Revolution is now being led by organizations
that are learning to profit and gain competitive advantage from
these four principles. Not only that, their leaders and employees
and other affected individuals and communities are feeling better
about what they do.
Shortages of work and hope, of satisfaction and security, are not
mere isolated pathologies, but result from clear linkages between
the waste of resources, money, and people. The solutions are intertwined
and synergistic: organizations that downsize their unproductive
tons, gallons, and kilowatt-hours can support more people, who will
foster the innovation that drives future improvement.
The application of this thinking to the college and/or campus setting
is limited only by imagination.
