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News focused exclusively on financing for
energy efficiency and renewable energy
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CEFF offers a new vehicle you can use to learn practical and strategic frames from experts and innovators. We're welcoming a series of monthly Guest Editors to share stories, books, and policies that influenced their careers.
We've handed this newsletter over to Carishma Gokhale-Welch. Carishma graduated with the first cohort of our Financing and Deploying Clean Energy certificate program. You can join the next cohort if you apply by March 13.
We hope you will - and we hope Carishma's inspirations also inspire you.
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Carishma Gokhale-Welch
(M.E.M. '05, F.D.C.E. '20)Job:
Program Manager,
United States Department of Energy's
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
What That Means I Do:
I lead complex, multi-stakeholder technical teams in emerging markets and in the United States to implement clean energy and resilience programs.
Where We Can Collaborate:
We’re working with communities, cities, utilities, and countries to accelerate decarbonization. This means we think a lot about the pathways to an equitable and clean energy transition by leveraging models and tools, providing technical assistance, and thinking through new methods for research and innovation.
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What Started Me On This Journey
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The revered 1987 United Nations report Our Common Future, with Gro Brundtland as lead author, was an impactful read early in my career for showcasing sustainability and intergenerational equity. (I owe that term to James Tobin.)
Growing up in India, I had a keen awareness for how innovative energy technologies can dramatically improve livelihoods. The report clarified the importance of clean energy in addressing the twin challenges of sustaining economic growth and implementing environmental policy globally without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. We're linking to the report in its prescient, unsentimental entirety.
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A Policy Innovation You Should Know Inside and Out
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You've seen the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order 2222 in your news feed. You'd reward the next generation (no pun intended) through reading it. The new policy requires system operators to develop participation models for distributed energy resources. This can help drive innovation by opening up electricity markets to startups creating small-scale clean energy systems and services, and can help ensure fair compensation to everyone trading electricity. Here's an example of a future-focused response to the order.
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What I Read (Without Skimming) And Suggest You Do, Too
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Approaching Solar Equity From a Practical Perspective, This Guidebook Goes All In
True, my boss' name appears on the guidebook for community-driven solar investment that forms the focus of this recent pv Magazine story. I recommend it as a watermark for how solar generation keeps taking root in neighborhoods of all sizes. It's evolving not as a perk or status symbol but as a unit of economic stability and real-estate value. The guidebook can accelerate that.
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The Next Upswell in Utility Design Goes With the Next Leap in Generation, Which Goes...
When you picture the closing of your next agreement, you might content yourself with hoping for an in-person celebration. This long article in Utility Dive sets out steeper hopes, including laws that oblige utilities to procure power through competitive bids and systems that combine transmission and distribution to make big draws from efficient, distributed systems. Read all (yes, all) about it.
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There's Rich Supply of Transmission From the (Still-)Frozen North and On Across the Plain
My workday involves seeing metaphorically around blockades so that engineers, financiers and construction experts can get on with swapping out oil, coal and gas for a renewable energy system. This Utility Dive story captures how experts at regional transmission organizations have seen around real blocks to interconnection. The experts point to 81 gigawatts of potential transmission across the Upper Midwest in a cogent white paper.
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| | Something Longer I Valued (And Would Love to Discuss)
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Growing Momentum and Gaining Traction Starts With Defining Scope. See Here.
Many's the time I've spent part of my workday sorting out the tasks ahead - not in order of importance but in order of addressability. Thinking about transforming worldwide power systems makes for a larger intellectual burden that benefits from conversion to defined steps. The Global Power System Transformation Consortium serves to define those steps in operators' terms. Its first-ever research agenda crystallizes a lot about where our finance needs to flow.
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| | Sources That Light My Way Every Week
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| | The Book That Keeps Coming Back to Me (and Why)
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I went around a bit in choosing a favorite book to share with you. I decided to complement the Brundtland Commission report, which taught me a lot about creating an enabling environment through policy, with something that celebrates smaller scale. James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State reminds us about how natural systems always and everywhere interconnect. Written in 1999, it dwells on the reality of unintended consequences for actions, and champions local expertise in finding clean energy solutions that support sustainable, equitable growth everywhere in this fractured world.
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