Rocky Mountain Institute Podcast

For the second year, RMI hosted a lunch workshop at Greentech Media’s Grid Edge Innovation Summit, with this year’s event titled: "Grid Modernization Done Right." This workshop follows RMI’sThe Economics of Clean Energy Portfolios report, which makes the case on how portfolios of renewable and distributed energy resources can help avoid $1 trillion of costs for new gas-fired power plants in the US. Our workshop was led by our own Chaz Teplin, and Chaz was joined in San Diego by Jay Oliver, General Manager, Grid Solutions Engineering and Technology, Duke Energy, Ric O’Connell, Executive Director, GridLab, and Curt Kirkeby, Fellow Engineer, Technology Strategy, Avista Utilities. We had a tremendous turnout for the workshop and wanted to make the content of this event available to our network.

Paul Bodnar and James Mitchell of Rocky Mountain Institute sit down to talk about the launch of the Poseidon Principles and just what this means for the shipping industry and for global climate impacts. For the last two years, James has been working with leading financial institutions to develop the Poseidon Principles, the world's first climate alignment agreement for financial institutions. These principles establish a simple, transparent way to integrate climate considerations into lending decisions to incentivize shipping's decarbonization. The Poseidon Principles officially launched today with support from Citi, Societe General, DNB, Danske Bank, and many others.

The second of two podcasts recorded at e-LabAccelerator 2019, RMI sits down over breakfast with three participants to discuss their experience at this year's event. Now in its sixth year, e-Lab Accelerator is a unique collaboration of leading industry actors to develop, implement and spread new solutions that enable a rapid transition to a clean, secure, prosperous and equitable electricity system. RMI welcomed 13 project teams, focused on four core topic areas: new business models for utilities and other solutions providers, grid modernization and planning for distributed energy resources (DERs), electrification of buildings and DER adoption at scale.

Albany Law School Professor Eleanor Stein is a longtime advocate for underrepresented communities, energy equity, and climate justice. After serving for more than two decades as an administrative law judge at the New York Public Service Commission (PSC), she was a project manager for the New York PSC's Reforming the Energy Vision, the state's comprehensive energy strategy. Eleanor has also served as a longtime faculty member for RMI's Electricity Innovation Lab (eLab), where she graciously spent a few minutes with us at the recent eLab Accelerator 2019 to discuss how she has seen the change lab's impact expand to reach a growing number of the industry's thought leaders and advance innovative approaches to a larger set of challenges confronting the energy grid's evolution.