CLEAN ENERGY NOW!

Spring 2002 Energy Summit Speakers

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.