Talking Trash About COP

I hate seeing litter. Hate it. I don’t understand why people can’t pick up after themselves.

I see a wrapper on the street and sometimes pick it up, but sometimes I don’t. We all know the experience of reaching down to pick up a wrapper and a breeze blows it further away. Then we have to chase the wrapper, having made an investment in picking it up, and we end up in an awkward situation. You really just can’t give up at that point.

I grew up in California, which had a fine of $500 for littering, and authorities posted signs all over the place reminding you of this; as if the signs weren’t litter in themselves. I guess that some people found throwing a wrapper out the window was worth $500, so the fine was raised to $1,000. The fine also applied to “burning objects,” which must mean cigarettes, because few would light an object to throw out the window for the sake of enjoyment.

I woke up this morning remembering an offensive image that I experienced in Key West, Florida when I was in my early 20’s. I was walking in Old Town when a loudly-dressed man came out of a bar with a go-cup half drunken, sat in his Corvette, threw back the drink, and tossed the icy remains INCLUDING THE PLASTIC CUP, under his ‘vette. I was in a complete state of shock and disgust and just stood jaw agape. My image of everybody on the entire East Coast was stained for years. Did they need signs?

I think we have a much better handle on litter now thanks to public-service campaigns like the Keep America Beautiful (KAB) campaign, which featured a Native American (played by an Italian-American) paddling his canoe down a river into an industrial mess, and ultimately being doused in trash thrown from a car window. This made a huge impression on me as a young boy, along with Woodsy Owl.

Now I work to reduce emissions daily. Public-service messages and the beautiful natural environment of coastal California where I was raised drove me to get a Geology degree and work as an environmental consultant in California and Massachusetts. Smokestacks set the theme of the litter-removal video featuring Espera Oscar de Corti as an American Indian, but we reduced visible emissions a lot since I was a kid. Oddly enough, this has made reducing emissions now that much harder, because you can’t see, taste, touch, or smell the problem.

As a Geologist, I worked on some very interesting projects involving releases of gasoline, diesel, and other hydrocarbons to soil and groundwater. My early career took me all over Sonoma County, California and onto some beautiful estates, some dilapidated and abandoned commercial properties, and everything in between.

In Massachusetts, I got to work on more interesting spills of chlorinated solvents and other contaminants that stretched back through several episodes of poor industrial hygiene. I was the consultant that was always pushing to move on to remediation rather than study the problem to death. I designed and installed some pretty interesting methods of cleaning up the mess, and like the litter problem, we’re in a lot better situation when it comes to soil and groundwater contamination because companies have learned that it’s a costly mistake.

I write this as COP 28 is coming to a close. It’s great to see fossil-fuel stakeholders take such a pro-active role. My environmental friends are alarmed by the lack of resolve in moving forward, but I’m not. I see that reducing oil consumption by 60-80% is unstoppable at this point, and it’s going to happen faster than most people think. That’s why fossil-fuel stakeholders are involved; survival instinct has kicked in.

I know from my environmental consulting experience that the last thing I want to do is tell somebody that they have an environmental problem. By contrast, many people that are alarmed by climate change really want to tell you that you have an environmental problem. What’s more, they want you to admit that you have an environmental problem. And, they want you to stop driving your car, eating meat and don’t want you to be comfortable. That’s the extremist view, but we all have a little enmity in us for that large SUV driver taking up two parking spaces. If you must consume, there are green products for green people, and up to 25% of us enjoy that lifestyle. The majority of us don’t want to give up anything we enjoy and don’t want to be told what to do by you.

I began working on the emissions problem when I heard President Obama’s inauguration speech. I was living in Mill Valley at the time, aware of the issues with fossil fuels of course, and it was clear to me that we were finally going to ween ourselves off of oil. I knew that I had to be a part of it and spoke to a venture capitalist friend of mine, expressing the opportunity to him in business and investment terms. He understood quite clearly that I was wrong. President Obama didn’t know what was coming. I thought he was being cynical, but he was right, as we now know. I don’t think I had seen Fox News up to that point.

I tackled the problem of climate change by developing an original financial instrument that enabled investors to put solar on the rooftops that would save the most money. I called it the Renewable Energy Exchange System, and pitched it to investors in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. It was essentially a solar lease with a different flavor, funded by Angel Investors. At the same time, my partner Dennis and I worked to provide energy audits in Fresno, California, which had the best potential to save money using solar compared to anywhere else. Both the investors and the consumers weren’t ready for it yet. I thought that I had made the best product ever created, but customer acquisition was too expensive.

I learned a lot from that experience. After I recovered and reflected on the learnings, I came up with the Wind Number. What is the Wind Number? The Wind Number is wind power divided by electric power coming from fossil fuels, times 100. That sounds easy enough, but requires a little background. As part of the energy-audit process, I would obtain smart meter data from PG&E that showed hourly energy usage over a billing period. This data can be disaggregated to determine where your energy consumption goes. At the same time, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) had started streaming energy generation data, breaking generation down into wind, solar, thermal resources (fossil fuels), and other components. I saw the correlation between wind power generation and low costs under a time-of-use rate, saw that consumers could shift some of their usage to those hours, and VOILA…Wind Number.

That only took about another year. During this period I had contracted with an Upwork programmer to produce a prototype that combined the smart-meter data with the CAISO database to churn out a monthly report of a household’s Wind Number. The Wind Number App was the first Green-Button App to combine energy generation data with energy consumption data to show people how much clean energy they use.

Around this time, the Department of Energy launched the American Energy Challenge, and I entered the Wind Number into the contest. Two other notable contestants were OhmConnect and WattTime, who have each moved on to become viable business enterprises. Almost every other entry did not.

I connected with WattTime about using their streaming CAISO data API in our Green-Button App. WattTime was interested in showing emissions to consumers and spent a great deal of time developing their marginal emissions methodology. I knew from my experience that consumers did not want to contemplate their impact on the environment, so after spending a great deal of time developing an application using their API that did not work, we parted ways.

OhmConnect went on to grow rapidly by paying consumers to not use energy during OhmHours when wholesale energy costs are extremely high. This follows the prosumer model wherein a consumer can produce income. There is a market for this, of course, since people need money. One problem with this approach is that consumers learn to use more energy prior to an event in order to increase the payout. Another problem is that paying people is an expensive business model to manage profitably.

I offered the Wind Number contest on Facebook and had people competing to see who would use the most clean energy. People with rooftop solar won, people with EV’s won, and people that had both technologies beat people that had either technology. People liked it, but it too was expensive as a stand-alone sales approach.

California was then implementing years of planning and installing so much solar that it started to distort the wholesale energy market. The Wind Number still worked to show this pretty well, since increased solar generation reduced the denominator (thermal resources) of the equation. However, by defining a second variable, the Solar Boost, the market distortions of solar could be accounted for more accurately. I defined the Clean Energy Factor as the Wind Number plus the Solar Boost.

The Clean Energy Factor describes the energy component of the wholesale energy market in a consumer-friendly format. It doesn’t describe the dollar amount, and since consumers don’t pay the dollar amount of a megawatt-hour of electricity, it would be confusing to report that dollar amount. What the Clean Energy Factor does is report the daily, weekly, and seasonal changes in energy to provide intrinsic value to energy. There a many reasons why you might use energy at any hour of the day, and having this knowledge is one way to influence your behavior. There’s a body of work in behavior science and professional marketing that supports this approach to consumer engagement. That’s another topic of discussion.

I wrote this to talk about trash; that wrapper on the street or the plastic cup revealed when you pull out from the curb in your Corvette. Unlike the success that we had with litter, I think that showing people their emissions is a huge mistake. As we develop marketing programs to engage consumers into buying heat pumps, heat-pump water heaters, solar, storage, new connected appliances, and EV’s, it’s a mistake to show them their emissions everyday. Bathroom tissue companies don’t talk about emissions for good reason; we react better to pitches of softness and strength. As if that wasn’t enough reason to buy toilet paper, they introduced us to stretch. We spend way more money on energy than we do on bathroom tissue, yet we know little about energy and are acutely aware of the other product.

At Sabreez, we talk about emissions very rarely because if you ask a roomful of people if they want to use clean energy over power from fossil fuels, every hand goes up. That’s our formula. We’re going to give people what they want, just like our customers already do with their awesome products and services.

Moreover, money isn’t everything. Consumers across demographic groups have been conditioned to find value in products and services that keep them coming back for more because they enjoy the experience. That’s sustainability. If you offer consumers emissions reductions or direct payment in exchange for a service provided by them for the sake of society, it’s costly and will stop once you reach a certain point.

There are consistent themes in the regulatory proceedings of the California Public Utilities Commission. California is over-regulated but leading the energy transition, an expensive process that needs to be paid for by somebody. The regulatory arguments associated with net energy metering, time of use rates, demand response programs, low-income subsidies, and other issues can be reviewed online, but let me sum it up for you; clean energy costs less. If you use energy when it’s cleaner, you’ll save money. You might want to start today from 10am to 3pm, but this weekend during those same hours will probably be better. Our neighborhood clean energy forecast shows you when energy is cleaner and how you can use it to save money. You’re going to be seeing a lot of this, just like KAB and Woodsy Owl.

Clean energy at the touch of a button is the best product since we discovered fire. There are now myriad ways to automate energy consumption. People have been working on this for a long time, including me. There are lots of companies that have the button, and Sabreez is dedicated to making sure that you enjoy using clean energy.

Don’t worry about climate change, because despite the shortcomings of politicians, companies are stepping up to replace fossil fuels with clean energy. It costs less, addresses liabilities and ensures that their supply chain won’t be interrupted through the energy transition. At this point, choose companies that are solving climate change rather than those that have looked into their crystal ball and see no future for their business because they’ve caused climate change. You’ll be a happier person because of it.