Rocky Mountain Institute Magazine

SolutionsJournal

The Smart Garage = V2G:Guiding the Next BigEnergy Solution

Firming the Grid

Indiana: MOVEing Green Jobs to the Midwest

Building Sustainable Cities, Block by Block

RMI

July 2008

II RMI Solutions Journal RMI Solutions Journal III

SolutionsJournal

Volume 1 . Number 1 . July 2008

RMI

Innovation Man

By Jonah Bea-Taylor

RMI Vice President Stephen Doig lives life at afrenetic pace. But, through it all, he still finds timeto crack jokes and muse on the next big idea.

Getting a FirmGrip on Renewables

By Noah Buhayar

Wind and solar power currently supply only a smallfraction of U.S. electricity demand. But RMI’sEnergy & Resources Team is hard at work, provingthat both renewable resources can be a valuable andreliable addition to the country’s energy mix.

The Smart Garage (V2G):Guiding the Next Big EnergySolution

By Cameron M. Burns

In the early 1990s, RMI researchers dreamed up anew energy paradigm, integrating cars, buildings,and the electric grid. The only problem was that thetechnologies needed were either too expensive or notyet developed. Today, all that is changing.

A Vacation with a Purpose

By Cameron M. Burns

RMI Chief Scientist Amory Lovins traveled toBorneo on his vacation to visit a world-classorganization working to protect orangutans. Whathe found was an inspiring story about rainforestrehabilitation and sustainable economicdevelopment.

4 16 22 34

ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTEPresident/CEO Michael Potts

Chairman/Chief Scientist Amory B. LovinsExecutive Director Marty Pickett

Rocky Mountain Institute® (RMI) is an independent, entrepreneurial, non-profit think-and-do tank.

We foster the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining.

1 Launch of the RMI Solutions Journal .............................Llewellyn Wells2 Transformational Change at RMI ...................................Michael Potts3 What a Difference a Year Makes!...................................Marty Pickett7 RMI on the Web ................................................................Andrew Demaria8 Indiana Launches an Ambitious Clean Energy Plan ....Stephanie L. Johns12 Doing Well by Doing Good ..............................................Noah Buhayar

20 The Right Question at the Right Time ..........................Cindy Cash29 Did You Know? ..................................................................Jennifer Walton30 Building Sustainable Cities, Block by Block .................Katie Crane36 Breaking Ground, Building Green..................................Cameron M. Burns40 Friends of RMI ...................................................................Ginni Galicinao42 Contributions

Contents

Cover Illustration by Kyle Duba

IV RMI Solutions Journal RMI Solutions Journal 1

WELCOME TO THE RMISOLUTIONS JOURNAL, the newlyredesigned tri-annual publication fromRocky Mountain Institute.

The past year has been one of greatgrowth and greater accomplishment forRMI. It has been marked by a number ofhigh-profile client engagements, in-depthresearch projects, our 25th anniversary, anda renewed commitment to communicatingour ideas and work to the rest of the world.

But which of our stories do we chooseto tell first? RMI is so many differentthings. Research. Barrier Busting.Implementation. Big thinking. Radicalsolutions for attacking the world’s direneeds around energy efficiency and therestorative use of natural resources.

But more than any of those things RMIis its people and their ideas. Inside this issueof the Solutions Journal we will beintroducing you to a number of thosepeople and a host of their ideas. Some ofthese people work here at RMI; some ofthem once worked at RMI; some have beenlong and dedicated supporters. But they areall members of the RMI family, deeplydedicated to our mission, and we invite youto get to know them a little better.

Among the questions asked in this issue:How does a Midwestern state place itself atthe forefront of the “green jobs” movement?How can we begin to change the way wethink about sustainable cities, one block ata time? How can we make the electrical gridstable with up to 40 percent or more of ourpower coming from renewable sources likewind and solar?

And the most visionary of all is thequestion asked in our initial cover story:How does RMI help bring the building,transportation, and utility sectors togetherto help create the energy solutions of thefuture?

Also, we think that you will enjoy seeinga different side of our Chief Scientist andChairman Amory B. Lovins, a man whospends his holiday trying to bring newawareness and support to a Borneo projectdedicated to saving orangutans and theirnatural rainforest eco-system.

We hope you enjoy the read. If you haveany comments or suggestions, please sendthem to us at [email protected].

Thanks again for your support.

Llewellyn WellsVP of Communications and Media

Launch of theRMI Solutions Journal

Publisher Rocky Mountain Institute

Executive Editor Llewellyn Wells

Art Director Lauren di Scipio

Managing Editor Cindy Cash

Senior Editors Noah Buhayar, Cameron Burns

Associate Publisher Robert Wilson

Web Editor Andrew Demaria

Photo Editors Jonah Bea-Taylor, Lauren di Scipio

Contributors Jonah Bea-Taylor, Katie Crane, Stephanie Johns

Contributing Staff Ginni Galicinao, Jim Kozel, Jennifer Walton

Photography Jonah Bea-Taylor, James Brew, Lauren di Scipio

Kyle Duba, Judy Hill, Jamie Horton, Aris Yi

Design + Production Lauren di Scipio . www.laurendiscipio.com

Volume 1 . Number 1 . July 2008

Jonah Bea-Taylor is taking his first steps into the media and communicationsworld. He previously attended the London School of Economics where he studiedorganizational psychology and learned about the theory of business innovationand creativity. His profile article of Stephen Doig was a wonderful chance to seesome of those ideas coming to life in the real world.

Jonah Bea-Taylor

Noah Buhayar is a freelance journalist and fellow at Rocky Mountain Institute. Heformerly reported for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in Washington D.C. andis a regular contributor to many print and online publications.“RMI’s forward-thinking work and its talented, passionate supporters are truly inspiring,” he says.“Sharing these ideas and stories with this audience is a pleasure.”

Noah Buhayar

Long-time Boulder resident Cindy Cash graduated from the S.I. NewhouseSchool of Public Communications, jumped a fast train to Colorado out ofSyracuse and never looked back. A seasoned advocate for Colorado children, she’sdonned many hats during her RMI tenure, but none as “rewarding as working onthe first Solutions Journal.” Interviewing Simon Rose was “the plum assignment.He’s done it all and made a huge difference. What an inspiration!”

Cindy Cash

Kyle Duba blew into Boulder a few short months ago from the Pacific Northwestto take on the position of creative intern for RMI. Little did he know that threemonths later he’d be designing the very first Solutions Journal cover. A graduate ofPacific Lutheran University, who has a passion for rock climbing and photography,Kyle appreciates the opportunity to “use his creative forces to make a differencein how people live on this earth” and to help bring about change.

Kyle Duba

Cameron Burns’ work with RMI has included everything from judging anarchitectural design competition to helping film crews negotiate the banana "trees"at RMI's headquarters building. Mostly, though, he tweaks words in the hundredsof consulting reports, conference submissions, and articles put out by RMI eachyear. ‘RMI’s Smart Garage initiative is really inspiring ... it’s great to see how itdraws all these somewhat disparate threads together.”

Cameron M. Burns

R O C K Y M OU N TA I N I N S T I T U T E S O L U T I O N S J OU R NA L

2317 Snowmass Creek RoadSnowmass, Colorado 81654

(970) 927-3851

1820 Folsom StreetBoulder, Colorado 80302

(303) 245-1003

[email protected]

This and all future issues of RMISolutions Journal are available indigital PDF format and can bedownloaded directly from ourwebsite at www.rmi.org. If youwould prefer to download anelectronic version of RMI SolutionsJournal instead of receiving aprinted copy by mail, notify us [email protected]. Wewill add you to our email list andnotify you whenever a new digitaledition is available.

SolutionsJournal

RMI

THIS TIME LAST YEAR, WE WERE IN THEthroes of planning a huge event to celebrate RMI’s25th year. We identified multi-year, game-changinginitiatives to make huge inroads toward endingclimate change. Our Built Environment Team had adream to produce a film about high-performancebuildings, making the business case for buildings thathave zero energy use—or better yet, are regenerative and giveenergy back to the grid. We made sustainable communitiesone of our priorities. RMI’s transportation team, MOVE,knew it could help prove that ultralight automobiles are safe—if only we had the funding for the needed research andcrashworthiness testing. We were prepared to spin off a for-profit company to pursue innovations in plug-in hybridelectric vehicles once we raised enough funds to complete ourproof of concept. Our Energy & Resources Team stood readyto put its expertise to work to enhance the use of solar energyand integrate it with wind power and plug-in hybrid electricvehicles. The list went on.

An amazing number of friends and supporters steppedforward to partner with RMI in these and other efforts overthe past year. A record total of more than 2,300 individualsdonated a total of more than $7.5 million, with gifts rangingfrom $10 to $1 million (thanks again to Fred and AliceStanback). We had support from 55 foundations, with grantsfor specific work as well as general support. Thanks tonumerous RMI25 sponsors, symposia contributors, and morethan 800 attendees, we raised more than a half million dollarsat our RMI25 event last August. And many donors earnedmiles by donating online throughout the year!

Miriam Beard Vagts once said, “The results of philanthropyare always beyond calculation.” Though I generally agree that

philanthropic gifts are immeasurable in many ways, we cansurely calculate some great results from the generous support—large and small—of so many individuals and foundations overthe past year. To name a few significant ones:

RMI partnered with the U.S. Green Building Council toproduce the film, “High Performance Building: Perspective& Practice” and we’ve distributed hundreds of copies. InDecember, RMI spun off a for-profit corporation, thanks tofunded research that mapped a path for design andproduction of a certain class of plug-in hybrid electricvehicles. In February, our transportation (MOVE) team wrotea Yahoo! Green blog post about automotive safety and weightthat generated dozens of responses, indicating that the publicis hungry for more information. Thanks to the William andFlora Hewlett Foundation, we now have funding for in-depthresearch and collaboration with a crashworthiness expert tohelp prove RMI’s arguments about the safety of ultralightvehicles. Because of support from the Kohlberg Foundation,we’ll be collaborating with the Association for theAdvancement of Sustainability in Higher Education toaccelerate progress in campus climate initiatives, an obviousplace to focus our efforts in sustainable communities. Andsupporters are helping us expand our work on energyefficiency, specifically solar and wind power and otherrenewables.

What a difference a year makes, indeed. •

2 RMI Solutions Journal RMI Solutions Journal 3

What a Differencea Year Makes!

MOST CHANGES IN INDUSTRY AND SOCIETY AREincremental, focused on a single component or aspect thatmight improve performance, but often fall short of changingthe fundamental design of a system. Incremental changes arenecessary and helpful, but they aren’t our specialty at RMI.

We look for opportunities to drive transformational change:to shake up the very foundations of a system or process. Forexample, we love to design high-performance buildings thatconsume 50 to 80 percent less energy than typical structures.These kinds of projects require a fundamental rethinking ofthe way buildings are built.

In other sectors, we are also striving for breakthrough change:trucks that are three-timesmore fuel efficient than currentmodels,cars that achieve 150 miles per gallon, large-scale industrialprocesses that use 80 percent less energy, and electricity grids thatrely on renewable energy instead of coal and natural gas.

In the past few years, companies and organizations havegrown increasingly receptive to these kinds of forward-thinkingideas. Skyrocketing fossil-fuel prices are only increasing thesense of urgency. The public’s growing awareness, combinedwith our own desire to dramatically increase our impact andeffectiveness, is motivating us to drive transformational changein yet another arena: RMI itself.

Hopefully, you’ve noticed some of the changes that we’vealready made. RMI’s increasingly transformed Web presence,our successful RMI25 event, upcoming National SolutionsCouncil weekends, and the very journal you are reading right

now are all signs of how we are changing the way wecommunicate our work and innovation to the world.

This past fiscal year, our staff grew to more than 100people. Philanthropy supporting our research and outreachgrew by 50 percent. RMI also attracted the attention andpartnership of pivotal industry leaders.

This growth, however, is only the first step toward changingthe nature of our work. As more for-profit practitioners enterour fields, we will be shifting our efforts “upstream” towardresearch and innovation. Rather than let market forces sort outimportant questions, such as our reliance on the diminishingsupply of fossil fuels, we are actively seeking out answers toguide industry and policy over the next several decades. Thisinternal transformation requires a deeper commitment tophilanthropy, which has been generously provided to us inproportion to the mounting evidence of our impact.

To encourage a smooth and thoughtful transition to this newmodel, I have asked our own team, our clients, our extensivenetwork of advisors and collaborators, and our dedicated boardof trustees, to help forge a new strategy for RMI. In this nextyear, we are embarking on a fundamental quest to determineour future direction in terms of scale, focus, and global reach.

These times at RMI are truly transformative. This work iscrucial, fascinating, and fulfilling—and we are delighted thatyou have chosen to collaborate with us in striving to make ourworld a secure, life-sustaining, and prosperous place. •

Transformational Change at RMI

The View From Here

By Michael Potts, RMI President and CEO

By Marty Pickett,RMI Executive Director

Background

PhotobyKyleDuba

PhotobyArisYi

Doig in Jakarta attending the Sustainability for theWorld’s Mega-Cities Project. How do you shape asustainable mega-city for 30 million people?

The Ph.D. he’s referring to is in chemistry from UC Berkeley,where he specialized in bacterial photosynthesis. Through researchfellowships, he also explored a number of other topics in chemistry,including the functioning of proteins and the design ofphotovoltaic solar cells. But it was the time between fellowshipsthat ended up changing his career path.

In 1996, a colleague who was joining McKinsey & Companypersuaded Doig to take a hiatus from academia and join the worldof business consulting. The move was supposed to be onlytemporary—“for a year at most, and then I was going to go backto science,” Doig says now. He ended up staying for ten.

“It was thrilling and a little bit shocking,” Doig says about thetransition from an academic schedule to McKinsey’s businessoperations practice. While there, he worked with a wide range offirms in industries as diverse as aerospace and health care. Hisspecialties at McKinsey comprise a laundry list of terms only aprofessional consultant can decipher: “operations strategy, frontlinechange management, supply chain optimization, and operationalcost reduction, strategy and growth.”

As opaque as these specialties may sound, Doig now parlayssome of his talents and experience into the education of futurebusiness leaders, as an adjunct professor at the University ofPennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Since joining RMIlast year, Doig has been thinking how to create curriculum aroundtwo of the Institute’s seminal ideas: whole-system thinking andend-use efficiency.

When he has time to design that curriculum is anyone’s guess.After setting aside the the Cottage sketches—but before his 10a.m. conference call—Doig andMims joined ERT Principal KittyWang to discuss another form of education: Sharing knowledgeabout the many exciting energy efficiency initiatives that utilitiesare already undertaking. The model is California, which uses farless energy per dollar of GDP than other state. Were the rest ofthe country to adopt California’s practices, explained Wang, thecountry could realize huge energy savings. The biggest challenge ishelping utility operators see beyond perceived barriers. With hischaracteristic touch of humor, Doig noted that some utilitymanagers “grow up fossilized in the industry, then… keep getting

“We shake the tree really hard... there’s lots of fruit on

the ground, but we go backsaying, ‘Now, how didwe shake that tree?’”

IT’S 10 A.M. ON A WEDNESDAY MORNING ANDStephen Doig, RMI’s Vice President for Energy & Resources,has already been working for four hours. He’s sitting in a largeconference room taking RMI’s basic process for creatinginnovation to the next level. On the speakerphone with him isChristian Terwiesch, an expert on corporate innovationprocesses at the Wharton School of Business. Josh Traube, afellow with the Energy & Resources Team (ERT), is listening tothe conversation, taking notes on his laptop. The lights are offin the conference room, but early morning sunlight illuminateshalf of the long conference table, as Doig scribbles notes on awhiteboard. It seems like an unusually large, empty space for aconference call. But the big ideas fill every corner.

The problem, according to Doig, is that RMI has a greatinnovation process, but it needs to clarify its underlyingmechanisms. Comparing truly breakthrough ideas to fruit on

a tree he says, “We come in, we shake the tree really hard,everybody really likes it, there’s lots of fruit on the ground,but we go back saying, ‘Now, how did we shake that tree?’” Byworking with experts like Terwiesch, Doig intends to helpRMI create a process that is even more effective andsystematized—one that we can easily explain and replicatethroughout our client work.

Deep thinking may be Doig’s forte, but he’s also a very facilemanager, handling the day-to-day needs of his team withaplomb. Before the conference call, he and Natalie Mims, aconsultant with ERT, sketched out plans for ERT’s new office,an annex to the 1820 Folsom Street facility affectionately namedthe “Cottage.” The team is moving into that space so they canwork more closely together and still have room to grow. “I’musing the full power of my Ph.D.,” Doig joked while sketchingout room dimensions with a Sharpie.

Innovation ManBy Jonah Bea-Taylor

4 RMI Solutions Journal

Photo©www.laurendiscipio.com

PhotobyJamesBrew

PhotobyJonahBea-Taylor

RMI Solutions Journal 5

messages from very risk-adverse people not to try anything new.If we were to give them a clear roadmap, we could help makethese options less threatening,” he adds.

As the conversation bounced among the three colleagues,Doig furiously sketched an outline on the board, asked refiningquestions, and synthesized the discussion into a fullimplementation plan. Always making sure their ideas weregrounded in reality, he often bent over Mims andWang’s laptopscreens to refer to the California utility data they had gatheredso far. In working these ideas to the next level, Doig againshowed his unique ability to break conceptual ground—often inRMI’s tradition of finding huge potential in very small changes.“It’s the human condition to keep looking for that next ‘magicbullet’ thing that will be really cool and solve all the currentproblems—and the search goes on for indeterminable lengths.We miss what is going on right now.”

By the time Doig makes it back to his office, it’s already1:00 p.m. A camping backpack sits in the middle of the floor;Doig uses it to keep his office mobile while on a rigorous travelschedule. Stacks of paper (one for each project) are neatly linedup against the wall. Multiple spreadsheets and planners coverthe desk. The clutter speaks to the pace of his life. In the pastnine months Doig has been to Europe a couple of times,Australia, China, and New Brunswick—among many othermore local destinations. His next trip will take him to Jakarta,Indonesia, where he will attend a conference on sustainablemegacities with the Built Environment Team’s James Brew.

He admits that fitting in all these responsibilities requires a

bit of finagling. In particularly crammed moments, he has triedmaking cell phone calls while riding his bike to work—a tactiche describes as “possible, but stupid.”

Ultimately, though, Doig says he would like to find threemonths to sit down and use his strongest skills to advance RMI’sbasic research. While it is exciting to apply conceptual workwith clients on a day-to-day basis, Doig notes that realbreakthroughs might require a different kind of focus. “It’s beenmy experience that good research takes concerted works of time… I mean weeks strung together … in a relatively looselycontrolled manner, with some goals about what you want to getdone by when.When I came here people were trying to squeezein four hours one day and five later that week to do theirresearch. And that pattern isn’t going to help us be veryeffective.” In the future, Doig would like to see the Energy &Resources Team have the support it needs to focus as much of70 percent of its time on research.

Taking a break from the fifty or so e-mails that have piled upin his inbox during the day, Doig leans back in his chair andmuses again about the potential that people are still missing tomake a huge difference in how we use energy today. “We’re stillcaught up in the idea that there is a crisis and we’ll have to makebig sacrifices,” he says. “But I think a lot of what needs to happenright now is to demonstrate that this works now; what is beingdone currently.This [high-performance] house really is 80 percentmore efficient and it’s the same price; this utility has already donethis; you can really conserve like this … and everybody is stillgoing to the coffee shop. What’s so bad about that?” •


Doig with ERT Principal Kitty Wang(left) and Consultant Natalie Mims.

PhotobyJonahBea-Taylor


Ingredients:

Three RMI R&Cteams

Groundbreakin

g research, ideas,

publications &

case studies

RMI's newonline strategy

The World Wide Web

Instructions:Outsource a designer/developer to assist you. For this recipe,we used Imulus - a Boulder, Colorado-based company.

Prepare each team individually. Begin with BET, thenMOVE and finally, ERT.

Gather a wealth of information about each -- its staff, itswork and its projects. Ensure you have some good casestudies to represent the team's high level of expertise.

Assemble this information in an easy to use format,incorporating eye-catching design with functionality.

Sprinkle in imagery, flash, video, forums,interactive visuals together with othermultimedia and online tools.

Blend in the latest news, events andpublications from each team.

Your micro sites are now ready for use.

But if you don't have the time to make your own, hereis what we prepared earlier:

Our next recipe:Watch out for our biggest online project to date --the redesign and redevelopment of RMI.org. Thispromises to be the most challenging recipe yet forRMI's web team.

The site shouldbe availablethis fall andpromises todramaticallyboost RMI'sonline reachand readership,with a betterdesign, easieraccess to ourvast library ofresearch andintegrated socialmedia tools. •

RMI on the Web

move.rmi.org . bet.rmi.org . ert.rmi.org (coming soon)

Indiana.

It’s known for wide, open fields of corn and soy, scattered farm towns, and laid-backHoosiers famous for their warm hospitality. Indiana doesn’t strike most visitors as a placeyou’d find an aggressive economic development plan centered on advanced transportationand energy systems. But it is. Indiana may not be known for advanced manufacturing,advanced transportation components, lithium-ion batteries, and the capability to put them

all together in fresh and exciting ways, but those capabilities and assets do exist in the state.Which is why the State of Indiana is establishing something called the Indiana Energy System Network (IESN).

The idea for the IESN has its nucleus in Governor Mitch Daniels 2006 economic development plan for Indiana,‘Accelerating Growth.’ The plan identified intellectual clusters and industry networks (think high-level research parks) aspowerful drivers of economic activity and global competitiveness.

“‘Accelerating Growth’ is intended to help revive Indiana’s remarkable history of pragmatic entrepreneurship and economicdynamism,” Governor Daniels wrote. “By focusing on innovation, talent, and investment—the key themes of our plan—wecan build for the future by rediscovering the excitement of Indiana’s innovative past.”

Pragmatic entrepreneurship and economic dynamism sound like a pretty tall order, but with the help of RMI and aforward-thinking group of businesses, academics, and workforce development entities, the State is finding the lofty goaldoable. And it’s mostly because Indiana has extensive untapped assets in the automotive, power electronics, and energy storageand conversion sectors. Now, Indiana leaders want to leverage those assets to make the region a hub for research, development,and execution of whole-system solutions that will reduce fossil-fuel use, expand business opportunities, and revitalize thearea’s economy. The IESN was formed as a collaborative network of businesses, academia, and workforce development entitiesto achieve that mission.


Indiana LaunchesAn AmbitiousClean EnergyPlan

By Stephanie L. Johns

llustrationbyKyleDuba

Once such a system was working, the Network could marketits collective value to the wind power industry. Other possiblevalue streams based in Indiana included advanced powertraincomponents for hybrid and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles,vehicle-to-grid systems, distributed generation systems, andwaste-to-power systems.

Once the core value stream for a particular opportunity area ismapped out, any gaps identified must be filled to create acompetitive advantage for the region. These gaps could be incommercially available technologies or in missing, undevelopedtechnologies. For the former, the IESN could identify companiesin the region with the right capabilities, and, for the latter, theNetwork might identify companies that could develop therequired technology and facilitate joint venture agreements (JVAs)for development, testing, and commercialization of the technology.

A great example that the group focused on is thedevelopment of a “black box” needed to accelerate thecommercialization of PHEVs and vehicle-to-gridtechnologies. This black box would handle the transfer andconversion of all forms of energy and information betweendevices, such as the vehicle and the grid and variouscomponents within the vehicle. Indiana already has a numberof companies working to refine this technology, and the IESNcould clearly play a role in facilitating that collaboration.

In time, the Network could facilitate the realization ofmany projects, but Workshop participants felt one high-profileproject was needed to kick-start the Network. Ultimately, theyfelt it should be in the advanced vehicle and vehicle-to-gridspace. Thus, they recommended that the Network build a fleet

of PHEVs using regional companies to demonstrate the viabilityof PHEVs and the management of power between the grid andthe vehicles.

Once the market space and value stream for PHEVs has beenidentified, the IESN can help various companies collaborate toproduce the vehicles. The final goal would be a large-scale, multi-state demonstration of these vehicles, their components, andenergy management between the vehicles and the grid.

Underlying the business potential is the job creationpotential. The Workshop included a number of representativesfrom the workforce arena, including representatives fromacademia and Indiana Workforce Innovations in RegionalEconomic Development (WIRED), who tried to figure out howto best connect the regional workforce to the Network initiatives.One idea that came up was the need for a centralized workforceorganization, where job listings could be posted, interviewsarranged, and various training programs made available.

Indiana could become a hotbed of high-tech, cutting-edgeR&D in advanced transportation and energy systems. And theState is moving quickly to capitalize on the momentum of thisWorkshop. As RMI’s research and the Workshop showed, thekeys to success are speed and collaboration. This is a hugeopportunity for the region, and the time is right for Indiana tomove forward and establish itself as a leader in the advancedenergy system space. RMI is honored to be part of thisimportant process. •

Stephanie Johns is an Analyst with RMI’sMOVE (Mobility + Vehicle Efficiency) Team.

But building a viable industry network is no small task.Successful networks—like the world-renowned ResearchTriangle Park in North Carolina and the younger AdvancedMaterials Research Center in Sheffield, England—required ahuge amount of time and commitment for success. Consideringthe speed with which technology, global markets, and expertiseare shifting, figuring out the right way to go and doing so inshort order, is critical.

Immediately after the State engaged RMI, it becameapparent that the best way to launch the Network and buildmomentum was to hold an InnovationWorkshop, one of RMI’sunique information- and idea-sharing events, with about 50representatives from a cross-section of organizations. TheWorkshop was designed to do several things: establishconnections between organizations, enhance the awareness ofassets and opportunities for collaboration, and identify somekey projects the Network could pursue.

In the very large and fuzzy energy arena, defining focus iseverything, so RMI worked with the State and Conexus Indiana(a group of companies collaborating to enhance advancedmanufacturing and logistics in Indiana) to identify keydiscussion points for the Workshop. RMI staff also recognizedthat the Workshop would probably produce a number ofadditional opportunities that the Network could pursue onceestablished. In addition, the Institute worked with the State andConexus to identify appropriate attendees. The end result wasa list of more than 40 participants, ranging from auto-sectorfirms like Delphi and Cummins and Rolls Royce, to universitieslike Purdue and Notre Dame, to energy companies like Duke

and I-Power. Finally, in June, RMI brought them together fortwo dynamic days of brainstorming ideas and drafting a planfor launching the Network.

Over the course of the Workshop, it became apparent thatnot only are there numerous companies and considerableresearch and expertise in advanced transportation and energysupply in Indiana, there is a remarkable consensus about thedirection and focus of that work. On the first day, thebrainstorming groups were broken up by topic: advancedtransportation, energy supply, energy demand, and strategy andresources. At the end of the day, the top ideas that weregenerated were evaluated. Groups were then reformed based oncategories that could define the activities of the Network. Thecategories included value stream development, technologyrefinement, and demonstration projects. An additional groupwas formed to examine the role the Network could play inworkforce development, while the original “strategy andresources” group was assigned to refine the mission and strategyof the IESN.

One of the key challenges of forming networks is gettingparties with disparate interests to collaborate. At theWorkshop,participants realized that the Network could act as an aggregatorof entities. The value wouldn’t be in the entities themselves, butin the technology they collectively produced—think of aconductor and an orchestra or a project manager on a job site.Wind-power component manufacturing offers a great example.If the Network found there were gaps along the supply chain,it could identify companies that could fill those gaps (ideallycompanies already in the region), and then work to fill them.


PhotobyStephanieL.Johns

With a new energy paradigm quickly developing, Indiana’sassets in automotive and energy storage solutions couldhelp it become a hub of innovation.

Paul Mitchell, Policy Director, Economic & WorkforceDevelopment for the State of Indiana, exploring ideasat MOVE’s recent Innovation Workshop.


Sue Woolsey has spent her career helping governments, businesses, and non-profits

operate more effectively. Looking back on her dynamic career, she says working with

organizations that have great missions and

creative people is what keeps her going.

“We’re not competition. We should be well ahead of competition.”

VISIT SUEWOOLSEY AT HERHOMEOUTSIDEAnnapolis, Maryland and you might think you’vestepped onto a proving ground for renewable energyand energy-efficient technologies. A 3.75-kilowattphotovoltaic array covers the farmhouse’s southwest-facing roof. Out on the dock,Woolsey and her husbandJim have installed two small wind turbines. Ageothermal heating system keeps the house reliablywarm in the cold Maryland winters and cool in the hotand humid summers. To maintain a comfortabletemperature, they’ve filmed their windows, installedattic tents, and re-insulated electrical sockets and otheropenings. Look in the garage and you’ll find a plug-inPrius, modified by battery manufacturer A123.

“The first month the geothermal was operative, ourelectricity bill went down by nearly 70 percent from thesame month the year before, although we added thecharging of the Prius to the load,”Woolsey says proudly.

Her fascination with renewable energy and energyefficiency dates back to the late-70s when she wasAssociate Director for Human Resources at the Office ofManagement and Budget (OMB) in the CarterAdministration.

RMI cofounder and Chief Scientist Amory Lovinshad recently published his landmark Foreign Affairs essay“Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” in which heargued for an “end-use/least-cost” approach to theenergy problem.

“There was a big buzz about him in the whiz-kidpolicy community,” Woolsey remembers. “So I wasreally excited to meet him.”

One day, she and her colleague Elliot Cutler, thenAssociate Director for Natural Resources at OMB,decided to seek him out. Woolsey still remembers thehallway on the second floor of the old Executive OfficeBuilding where the three first met.

Doing Well by Doing GoodBy Noah Buhayar

PhotosbyJaimeHorton/Blue

PixelPhotography


Even though her work at the time was very focused on the“human, domestic side of the budget,” Lovins’ analysis andreasoning appealed to her. He really exemplified how, “if youquestion the assumptions effectively, you can turn the issue onits head and see a whole new range of answers,” she says.

Prior to joining OMB,Woolsey had worked for five years atthe Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, evaluatingHeadStart and many other programs.

The experience taught her that federal policies often containsome startling internal contradictions. For many years, the foodstamp program, for instance, required an eligible family to paymoney to receive the government benefit. Five dollars of foodstamps might cost $1.50. But “if you didn’t have $1.50 to buy$5.00 worth of food stamps, you couldn’t get anything,” saysWoolsey. That posed serious problems for people who weremost in need—the people who didn’t have any money to beginwith. The purchase requirement had been imposed to limit thecost of the program, but the disincentives to participation hadoperated in exactly the wrong fashion.

At OMB, Woolsey worked with Congress to eliminate thepurchase requirement. This increased the cost of the food stampprogram because it encouraged more people to enroll, andCongress decided not to apply the incentives to those higher onthe income scale. But it also helped the government achieve itsstated objective: feeding the country’s poor.

These early experiences in Washington not only revealedWoolsey’s knack for taking on big responsibilities—at OMB,she was running 51 percent of the federal budget—but also herkeen eye for process and organizational dynamics.

A Stanford- and Harvard-educated psychologist, Woolseysays her understanding of the way people think and act ingroups was invaluable. For her, academic concepts like grouptheory and role theory found practical application in the hallsof government. The key was parlaying that understanding intoaction and progress.

“I found in my government career that youcould get a lot done in bureaucracies if you keptyour eye on” what you wanted to accomplish, shesays.

In 1980, Woolsey left government andlanded a job writing editorials for theWashington Post. Nonetheless, she retained anabiding interest in government programs andtheir inconsistencies.

On Memorial Day, 1980, she published anunsigned editorial describing the compensationfor naval petty officers returning from the PersianGulf versus the federally set wage other workerswere paid under the ComprehensiveEmployment and Training Act (CETA), thegovernment’s program to reduce unemployment

rates. The results were shocking. According toWoolsey’s analysis,sailors returning home to Norfolk, Virginia made as little as$2.54 per hour—even after housing allowances, tax advantages,and food were factored in to their wages. In contrast, peopleemployed under CETA were making $3.75 per hour.

According to officials who accompanied him that MemorialDay, President Carter read the editorial on his way to greetreturning sailors in Norfolk. He immediately scrapped hisspeech and rewrote it to include his support for a military payincrease that was working its way through Congress.

If Woolsey had not been convinced of the importance ofcommunications and media before, she was now. “I probablyhad more effect on Jimmy Carter as a member of the press thanI did in his administration,” she jokes.

Her career as a pundit was short lived, however. By the end of1980, she joined the consulting and accounting firm Coopers &Lybrand (later to become part of PricewaterhouseCoopers) as aconsulting partner. It was there, she says, that she deepened herunderstanding of organizationalmanagement and operations, a skillset she would later use in her posts at the National Academies.

The position at Coopers & Lybrand “gave me a lot ofbackground about how things are done by a wide range ofcompanies, universities, and nonprofits,” she says. “So when Iwent to the Academies, and people said, ‘This is just the waythings are done,’ I could say ‘Well, the people at X organizationtried it this other way and had a lot of success.’”

Of all the places she worked in her distinguished career,Woolsey says the National Academies were the most obsessiveabout process. For over a decade and a half, she would serve asthe Academies’ Executive Director of Behavioral and SocialSciences and Education, Chief Operating Officer and, finally,Chief Communications Officer.

Listening to her discuss committee selection, publiccomment periods, and technical reviews at the independent

research organization reveals a world of deeply entrenchedbehavior. But it was a world she was well suited to help.During her tenure, the Academies streamlined theiroperations and became far more effective at communicatingits research to the public. In this latter endeavor it was, again,her willingness to rethink processes that paid off.

Most studies at the Academies are initiated when agovernment agency asks a question, explains Woolsey. Forexample, the EPA wants to know whether it is using the rightkind of metrics to measure mercury levels in groundwater.“Generally, you put together a committee with all the areasof specialization, and they look at all the available data anddraw conclusions and make recommendations,” she says.

But the problem with this approach was that these reportsended up being written primarily for the client (e.g., theEPA) or for colleagues of the scientists and engineers on thecommittee. Though technically of the highest quality, theygenerally went unread by most of the public.

“What we decided to do was ask, from the audience pointof view, ‘Who cares about the mercury in the groundwater?’People who work on developmental psychology,pediatricians, parents care,” saysWoolsey. The EPA might beasking the question that prompts the research, but theresearch can have a larger impact if you think about theaudience in broader terms. In the case of the groundwaterstudy, the Academies published a popular summary of thehealth research on mercury for the general public.

In 2004,Woolsey made yet another career change. She nowserves on the boards of a number of companies, non-profits, anduniversities, including Colorado College, Caltech, the Institutefor Defense Analysis, the German Marshall Fund, FluorCorporation, and Van KampenMutual Funds—and of course,RockyMountain Institute. “To some extent, this is a dilettante’sparadise. I love new challenges, steep learning curves,” she says.But this humbleness belies her deep understanding about howto make these organizations run better.

And not everything she’s doing is entirely new, either. Herinterest in efficient and productive ways to beenvironmentally responsible—“doing well by doing good”—that Lovins sparked more than three decades ago, remains atthe core of her involvement with RMI.

“Of all the work that I’ve done on figuring out howorganizations work best—working with highly scientifictypes, working with development—this comes together forme in a lot of interesting ways.” •

In April, Sue Woolsey was elected RMI’s LeadTrustee. Along with her extensive managementand operations experience, she brings a truepassion for the Institute’s mission.

Over the last three decades, her long friendshipwith RMI cofounder and Chief Scientist AmoryLovins has deepened her own interest in energyand natural resource issues.

Woolsey sees both exciting and challenging timesahead for the Institute. Over the last few years,RMI’s work and interests have moved to thecenter of policy, economic, and business debates.“Green” has become mainstream in nearly everyaspect of life.

“For a long time, we were the dog chasing theschool bus,” she says. “But now we’ve caughtthe bus.”

That change, says Woolsey, means that RMI needsto refocus its mission and make sure that itsresearch remains leading edge.

“We’re not competition. We should be wellahead of competition,” she adds.According to Woolsey, getting to that pointrequires taking a serious look at the Institute’sbusiness model and making sure that projects aretruly mission-driven and that they foster thecreative talents of RMI staff.

“Sue is a fully engaged board member who hasearned enormous respect from the othertrustees as well as staff.” says RMI ExecutiveDirector Marty Pickett. “She will play a key rolein shaping RMI’s strategic vision.”

Reflecting on her growing role, Woolsey says,“I am passionate about enabling organizationswith a great mission to work well so that thepeople in them can do their best work and enjoytheir efforts and creativity.”

Sue WoolseyElected Lead Trustee

RMI’s Board of Trustees is comprised of an extraordinarygroup of accomplished and forward-thinking individuals. It isour pleasure to introduce you to each of them though a seriesof profiles and interviews.


Getting a(Firm) Grip onRenewables

By Noah Buhayar

ONE OF THE BIGGEST DRAWBACKSINVESTORS and utilities have found with solar andwind power is that they are “variable.” Simply put: theycan’t generate electricity when the sun’s not shining orthe wind isn’t blowing. That’s problematic because we’vegrown accustomed to getting energy whenever we wantit. Flick a switch and the lights should go on, regardlessof whether it’s sunny or windy outside.

In the past, utilities believed that they had tocompensate for this variability by installing moretraditional, fossil-fueled power plants. The more windor solar power on the grid, the thinking went, the greaterthe need for backup generating facilities to be there whenthe wind or sun wasn’t.

Enter RMI’s Energy & Resources Team. Over thepast year, Senior Consultant Lena Hansen has led a seriesof research projects to rethink the implications of windand solar’s variability. In the process, she and hercolleagues are re-evaluating the economics of puttingmore renewable energy on the grid.

The key, according to Hansen, is for utility managersto think of all their wind and solar installations as aportfolio.

“No person would invest in just one stock,” saysHansen. In the financial markets, most people forego thehuge risks and potentially large gains of owning shares ofone company for the reduced risk and smaller rates ofreturn of owning shares in multiple companies, sheexplains.

Hansen argues that the same should go for utilitiesinvesting in wind and solar. “By diversifying theportfolio of sites, you mitigate variability,” she says. “Putanother way, the wind blows differently in differentlocations. So spread out your resource to reduce totalvariability.”

©EyeW

ire,Inc.


The trick is to balance risks and rewards. Very windy andvery sunny sites produce more power than sites that are lesswindy or less sunny. But they also tend to be more variable.

Ultimately, explains Hansen, utility managers have tomake a tradeoff between variability and power output.However, by modeling a bunch of geographically spread-outsites, Hansen and her colleagues hypothesized, utilities can startto make educated guesses about the optimal portfolio—one thatmaximizes power generation and minimizes variability.

To test the hypothesis, Hansen and former RMI fellowJonah Levine compiled hundreds of tables of meteorologicaldata for a one-year period, then set about looking for overlapsin the times when the wind is blowing.

As it turned out, 2004 data were the most complete, enoughto model what would happen at 63 sites across the Great Plains.

“The basic idea,” explains Levine, “was to look for acomplementary effect.” Simulating wind sites over a largegeographic area should have decreased variability in the wholesystem without adversely affecting power output. The resultswere promising. Overall, Hansen and Levine noticed decreasesin system variability for all the portfolios they studied.

Those findings spurred a second study, conducted earlier thisyear, that combined both wind and solar resources in oneportfolio. The team’s hypothesis was that just as wind tends toblow differently in different places, the sun often shines whenthere is no wind. Using data from theNational Renewable Energy

Lab and Levine’s study, Hansen and ERT fellow Bryan Palmintiersimulated 43 wind and solar sites throughout theMidwest. All 43sites were within the Midwest Reliability Organization’s (MRO)area of responsibility regarding the grid. MRO is one of nineNorth American electric reliability regions, comprisingMinnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, as well as portions ofMontana, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsulaof Michigan, and two Canadian provinces. After running thenumbers, they found that variability in the whole system wentdown by 55 percent compared to the average of all sites studied.Surprisingly, those results bore out whether they looked at theentire study group, or as few as six optimally selected sites.

“If you look at the average wind or solar site alone, there’s agood amount of time each day that it’s not generatingelectricity,” explains Palmintier. “But if you combine all thewind and solar sites together, you find that 90 percent of thetime you can get seven megawatts out” of facilities that at peakproduction might generate 100 megawatts.

That increase in electric output may sound small, butPalmintier contends that it’s substantial enough to get utilitiesto think differently about their investments, especially if pairedwith programs to help users better manage the times at whichthey draw power from the grid.

To bolster these findings, the RMI team then expanded theiranalysis, first over a longer time period and then over a largergeographic area.

For MRO, Hansen and her colleagues simulated what wouldhappen if they took into account three years of data.The findingswere essentially the same as those from the first simulation,meaning that under “normal” weather patterns, the “optimal”portfolio of sites still reduced variability by the same amount.

Also, the composition of the optimal portfolio didn’t changemuch between the one-year and three-year simulations that theteam did, explains Josh Traube, a fellow with the Energy &Resources Team. Three-quarters of the sites that were in theoptimal one-year portfolio were also in the optimal three-yearportfolio. And even if the three-year simulation wereconstrained to the sites chosen by the one-year simulation, theelectrical output and variability stayed relatively similar.

This means utilities don’t necessarily have to gather multipleyears of data to make an informed decision about where to sitethe wind or solar installations in their portfolios.

“At least in this example, if you were to do only a one-yearanalysis, you wouldn’t penalize yourself unnecessarily,” saysTraube.

The next step was to expand the simulation to include mostof the Great Plains. Using additional data from the SouthwestPower Pool and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Traubeand Hansen simulated the power output and variability for 63sites. Their conclusions: increasing the size of the study areatends to decrease variability as well. Much like the previoussimulation, these results could be obtained with an optimalportfolio of as few as eight sites.

For Hansen, this last finding is crucial. If you’re a utility, she

explains, “you don’t have to spend all yourmoney on a huge numberof sites to get the really big benefit” of a diversified portfolio.

Ultimately, the RMI team hopes its research will demonstrateto utilities how to put more solar and wind on the grid. There’sa financial incentive to decrease wind and solar’s variability, saysHansen. If utilities can rely even a little more on power fromthese installations, they won’t have to make as large of capitalexpenditures on coal or natural gas plants.

“The industry needs to properly understand the value (orconversely the cost) of variability,” she says.

During the spring, the team presentedtheir findings at the Power-Gen RenewableEnergy & Fuels conference, the AmericanSolar Energy Society’s annual conference, andthe American Wind Energy Association’sannual conference. By participating in theseindustry forums, Hansen says she and hercolleagues hoped to “seed the conversationwith these kind of strategies and help wind[and solar] developers think about how theycan apply them” in their long-term planning.

There’s no panacea for moving away fromfossil-fueled power generation. But Hansenand her colleagues’ leading-edge research onvariability, together with new storagetechnologies, better methods for respondingto electricity demand, and two-waycommunication on the grid can go a long waytoward supplying electricity—when we wantit—without emitting greenhouse gases. •

Fellow Bryan Palmintier (center) of the Energy & Resources Team getsa “firm grip” on Senior Consultant Lena Hansen and Fellow Josh Traube.

By combining multiple wind sites with solar generation,total power generated for the grid becomes much morestable. This potentially replaces base load generationsources such as coal and nuclear.

©istockphoto.com

,byllwill

PhotobyKyleDuba

Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Rose learnedabout the power of individuals taking action—“the Power ofOne,” as he calls it—from a very young age. Civil rights events,anti-war rallies, protest marches. He remembers his mothertaking him to all these and more.

From these experiences, he learned “that most people sit itout on the sidelines, and that the people who are activists canaffect change.”

Sideline sitting isn’t Rose’s style. He’s racked-up a lifetime ofremarkable adventures since leaving Westchester in the early1970s. And along the way, he’s effected change and impactedeveryday lives in countries around the world and throughoutthe United States.

These experiences all set the stage for his epiphany aboutmail trucks going hybrid. “It just got me back to that Power ofOne,” he recalls. “Unless somebody stands up and says, ‘Whynot try this idea?’ It can get overlooked completely.”

All it took was a phone call. Rose approached RMI with anoffer to fund research exploring the energy optimization of fleetvehicles, like delivery trucks. John Waters, then head of RMI’sBreakthrough Design Team, thought the idea was spot on andstarted organizing research efforts.

Two years earlier, the Institute had published Winning theOil Endgame (another project for which Rose helped obtain

essential funding), and now was devising plans to implementvarious aspects of that strategy. “It was good synergy,” saysMarty Pickett, RMI’s Executive Director and interim VicePresident of Development. “His idea came at a time when wewere focusing in that area generally.”

Rose began by providing foundation funding for a technicalassessment of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). Oneof RMI’s senior consultants at the time, Jeff Ronning, had builtsome of the first such vehicles in the 1990s and was eager totest the feasibility of Rose’s idea. The results were promising.

Shortly thereafter, Rose managed to obtain furtherfoundation funding for yet another study to test the businesscase for the idea. Michael Brylawski, vice president of RMI’stransportation group, MOVE, led the research once they

realized the project was feasible. “If you do it this way,” he says,“[we realized] you could actually make some money. … It ledus to look at emerging markets for PHEVs.”

With the groundwork laid, RMI set about convening aconsortium of industry and non-profit partners, includingGoogle, Alcoa, Johnson Controls, and the Turner Foundation,for an Innovation Design Workshop in Palo Alto, California.The goal was to develop breakthrough approaches to fleet fueleconomy, lightweighting, and other design issues. Rose wasinvited to participate.

Looking back on the event now, he can hardly believe howfar his idea has developed and advanced. “It was just a talk witha mailman, and then I’m out at a design conference whereyou’ve got some incredible minds sitting around the tablecoming up with all these breakthrough discoveries.”

The groundwork and potential suggested by thiscollaboration was so compelling that, in early 2008, Watersspun off a for-profit venture to pursue some of the ideas further.

“By merely looking out his window, analyzing a situation,and placing a phone call, Simon Rose was instrumental in RMIassessing the vast inefficiencies of the U.S. Postal Fleet andinspiring us to ‘go fix that problem,’” he wrote in a recent e-mailmessage. “Without Simon’s involvement and willingness to leadwith his funding, there may be no solutions underway to

replace 162,000 vehicles averaging10 miles per gallon.”

Rose is a little more humbleabout his contribution,giving much credit to RMIand its Development staff.“The fact that RMI is soopen—and also so open to

really fostering relationshipswith its donors—is something

that enabled things like the plug-in hybrid project,” he says.

“Sometimes it takes a person with an idea—and a desire to seeit happen. But thanks to an organization like RMI, this idea isup and off and running right now. It never would have goneanywhere if I had pitched it to the government, or maybeanother kind oforganization. Thetiming was right andI hope it continuesto be that way.” •

Three years ago, while watching his mailmanmake the neighborhood rounds, Simon Rose wassuddenly struck with a remarkable idea: What ifmail trucks went hybrid? This question and hisgenerous funding sparked some of RMI’s latestbreakthrough ideas on transportation.

THE SQUAT, BOXY TRUCK ROLLEDAROUND the corner hugging the curb, andthen jerked to a stop. It was just another run-of-the-mill day in South Miami, lush, green, andfragrant. But, for some reason on this particularday in 2005, the vehicle’s awkward movementswere oddly mesmerizing. So much so, theycaptivated Simon Rose’s attention.

Suddenly the engine cut out and the ocean breeze sweptthrough the royal palms, returning a sense of peace to theneighborhood. The mail carrier, blue-clad and moving quickly,trotted away from his truck with a small brown box under hisarm and a stack of neatly organized envelopes. He stuffed themailbox full, turned around, and headed back toward the curb.As Rose opened his gate, the sound of the engine revving upinterrupted the tranquil afternoon once again and the trucklumbered ahead to the next driveway. The long-time RMI

supporter watched intently as his mailcarrier, Alfredo, repeated the very sameset of motions: he shut off the engine,emerged with a handful of mail,deposited it in the box, climbed backinto his seat, cranked up the engine,and the vehicle lumbered ahead.

Before long, the truck slowlysidled up to Rose’s gate and eased to a stop. Thetwo men had developed a friendship over theyears and Rose liked to check in and ask Alfredoabout his family.

That day, however, Rose’s mind waselsewhere. He recalls asking his mailman, “Why the

heck doesn’t the USPS use hybrids? You don’t have to shut itoff. You’re going to be on batteries most of the time, and whenyou’re braking—which you’re doing a lot—these hybridsrecharge. It just seems like a perfect application for a hybrid.”

Simon pauses before continuing, “And Alfredo looked mein the eye and said, ‘You know why they don’t do it, Simon? It’sbecause it makes too much sense!’ ”

Rose thought of RMI “almost instantly,” as he remembers it.

By Cindy Cash

The Right Question at the Right Time


PhotobyJodyFinver

PhotobyMuskegon,MIChronicle,M

erissaFerguson

Rose (right)with Alfredo

Long-time RMIdonor Simon Rose

With nearly 300,000vehicles, the U.S. Postal

Service is an ideal candidatefor using plug-in hybrid

electric vehicles.

llustrationbyKyleDuba



The Smart Garage (V2G*): Guiding the Next Big Energy Solution

ROCKYMOUNTAIN INSTITUTE HASlong been a leader in the diverse fields ofenergy, transportation, and green building.But today the Institute stands on the cusp ofa completely new era that will see all threecoalescing into a new energy paradigm: the“Smart Garage.”

Smart Garage is an idea, a sweepingconcept, about the seamless integration ofvehicles, homes, and offices via the electricpower grid. The components of the systemwould share power and share it in such a waythat consumers would make better choicesabout the energy they use, they would haveaccess to more reliable, cheaper, and cleanerenergy, and they would need less of it. Thisshift—which could help change the way weinteract with energy systems in our society—is occurring because of recent advancesin both the grid and vehicles. Theseinnovations are happening so quickly thatRMI is gearing up to guide the hundreds ofproducts, the thousands of players, and thebillions of dollars that will come together inthis next big energy solution.

A Simple Concept

Electricity is a beautiful but ficklemistress. It’s best made in the amounts thatsociety needs, generally near where it’sneeded, and nearly exactly when. Andbecause it’s the life support system ofeverything from medical equipment tofinancial data, we are slaves to its ways. Thesimple problem is electricity cannot becost-effectively stored in large quantities.

Seventeen years ago, RMI Chief ScientistAmory Lovins and a small groupof transportation researchers—includingMichael Brylawski, Vice President of RMI’stransportation group, MOVE—developed aconcept about vehicles and the grid.

The idea was simple: vehicles withelectric drivetrains would, by mostextensions, include some kind of electricstorage or conversion device or combinationof devices—batteries, fuel cells, whatever.Even back then it was obvious that there wasa lot more power in electrified vehicles andtheir storage devices than there was in all thepower plants connected to the grid.

The real benefit of electric vehicles,however, is that they bring a new level ofstability and control to the grid—includinggiving power back when it’s needed most (inblackouts or at times of peak demand). Bysome estimates, a battery-electric vehicle,with about 40 kilowatt-hours of usableenergy, could power an entire residentialblock for over an hour if necessary.

In 1991, however, this technology was justa gleam in the eye of RMI’s researchers forseveral reasons. For starters, there was nothingclose to an electric grid that could handle suchoperations. Cost-effective electric traction forvehicles was still years away. Batteries that couldstore the required power had yet to bedeveloped. Integrated renewables and buildingswere relatively unsophisticated. And digital,Internet-based, and wireless communicationswere mere infants. Today that’s all changed.

By Cameron M. Burns


*Vehicle to GridIn the early 1990s, RMI researchers dreamed up a new energyparadigm integrating cars,buildings, and the electric grid.

The only problem was that the technologies neededwere either too expensive or not yet developed.

Today, all that is changing.

Green Trends for the Car, Home, Office, and the Grid

Even if you pay only passing attention to the electricityindustry, you’re probably aware of talk about a so-called “SmartGrid.” Although the smart grid is largely an idea at this point,those exploring it are already touting its virtues.

The smart grid is basically the same grid you’ve grown upwith except that it’s tricked out with modern equipment—sensors, rapid communications devices, and distributedintelligence. Its various components talk to each other andreport problems and failures, update each other’s data, and sendmessages to users like homeowners and factory managers.

Proponents say its capabilities could range from turning partsof the grid off when power failures occur (so that they don’tpropagate across wide areas) to energy management activities like“demand response” (a way of letting customers know whenpower is scarce, and thus expensive, so they can opt to trim ordefer power use). The Smart Grid can also accept power in better,more intelligent ways from storage systems—like electric cars.

Numerous organizations are quickly investigating thepotential of a smart grid, what it can do, what it might cost,and how to set one up. In the early 2000s, RMI was part of amulti-year project with PECO Energy in Pennsylvania, Nevada

Power, and all three major California utilities to see howmuch demand could be reduced using smart technologiesand demand response. Another example comes fromBoulder, Colorado. In March 2008, Xcel Energy announcedthat it would start implementing a full-blown smart gridthere sometime this year.

A second important trend is the vehicle sector’s rapidmove toward fully electric orpartially electrified vehicles,notably plug-in hybridelectric vehicles (PHEVs).The causes are many andvaried ($4-a-gallon gasoline,greenhouse-gas emissions,consumer energy choices,etc.), but the reality isundeniable.

“Vehicle start-ups aresprouting like mushrooms,and we haven’t seen this inyears,” notes RMI Analyst Laura Schewel, who manages theInstitute’s Smart Garage project. She lists new automakerssuch as ZEN, Miles EV, Fisker, Phoenix, Aptera, Vectrix,GEM, Zap, and Venture Vehicles—all of which came on thescene within the past few years, or even months—asevidence of what’s happening.

Companies such as Tesla Motors and Th!nk are alreadyselling electric vehicles in small quantities, and Toyota andGeneral Motors have both committed to having a plug-inhybrid electric vehicle for the U.S. market by 2011.Renault-Nissan recently announced the development of amass-market electric vehicle in conjunction with MorganStanley-backed Project Better Place, a business based onrevenues from charging the new vehicles.

RMI got into the fray as well, spinning off a for-profitPHEV technology developer, Bright Automotive, earlythis year.

Green building design has also come a long way, as havephotovoltaic (PV) cells. Increasingly, PV systems are beingincorporated into the exterior walls and roofs of buildings,inconspicuously absorbing light and generating a charge.

“It would be potentially a minor adaptation inmost cases,”says RMI Principal Architect and Senior Vice President GregFranta, FAIA. “On the other hand, some situations would notjust be suitable at all, and in some climates we’re going to havemore problems than in others in terms of renewables. In newbuildings it should be easy to incorporate.”

Several green building projects that RMI has worked onin recent years point the way to the Smart Garage paradigm,namely the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law andthe Missouri Department of Natural Resource’s Lewis andClark State Office Building. Both have power outlets sovisitors and employees can hook up electric vehicles forcharging (the Law School planned to buy green power forthose vehicles; the Lewis and Clark building has its ownphotovoltaic system).

“Depending on how you evaluate . . . there’s a 30–75%

reduction in emissions by using coal-based electricity

rather than liquid fossil fuels in cars and trucks”.

— John Waters, former RMI Practice Leader

Photos©www.laurendiscipio.com

RMI Top Brass Greg Franta, Mike Brylawski,Stephen Doig, and Amory B. Lovins

©flickr.com

,MatthiasPabst

Economic Motivations

The economic prize for developing a Smart Garage energyparadigm is considerable.

Utilities sell a disproportional amount of their power on hotsummer afternoons. At night, business plummets. For theutility, that means their expensive generation and transmissionequipment stands idle. “Night-charging” vehicles, therefore,could be a lucrative twist on the business of selling electrons.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory recentlyestimated that if half the nation’s light vehicles were ordinaryplug-in hybrids they would represent a night-charging marketof 230 gigawatts. That’s good news for the U.S. wind industry.In many areas, wind tends to blow harder at night, creatingmore energy when the vehicles would be charging.

“The utilities are going to sell a lot more electricity withplug-in hybrid electric vehicles,” notes Brylawski. “[A] utilitywill be able to better match variable supply resources (like wind)with demand. … [C]ars will buy power mostly at night whenthe utility wouldn’t normally sell power. In other words, thesekilowatt-hours would normally not even be used. The SmartGarage paradigm is like a discount store for the utilities becausethey can then sell their previously unwanted kilowatt-hours toa really hungry new market.”

The Smart Garage could even create revenue for theconsumer. On hot summer afternoons, utilities often struggle tokeep power flowing so offices are lit and buildings are cool.Electricity is sometimes in such demand that it could be worthdollars per kilowatt-hour, not cents. Under this new paradigm, carowners could let their batteries drain onto the grid during theday, then drive home from work on gasoline. The value of this“load shaping” could be credited to the car owner’s electricity bill.

Additionally, utilities must reserve some portion of theircapacity to respond to second-by-second variations in the loadand to provide “reserve” power in case of power plant ortransmission line failure. The storage capacity of cars could beused to provide these “ancillary services” to the utility. And,again, the utility would pay the customerfor using his battery.

Aside from utilities, many other industries stand to gainfrom the Smart Garage, too. Companies specializing ineverything from the wireless telecommunications business tothe financial sector to component-making to electric-loadaggregation could see their markets expand or even find ways toenter entirely new markets.

The battery industry offers a stunning example of thepotential: lithium-ion batteries—which are becoming popularwith electric car companies—represent a business that’s less thanfifteen years old. And yet, worldwide investment in lithium-ionbattery technology R&D is well over $1 billion annually, andexpected to grow to more than $5 billion by 2015, according toRMI’s survey of the industry.

Carbon Reduction Benefits

The carbon reduction benefits are also huge. A Smart Garageenergy paradigm could simultaneously reduce the environmentalimpact of both the transport sector and the electricity sector.Driving a vehicle that uses electricity creates fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than driving a vehicle that uses gasoline, even ifthe electricity is made from fossil fuels (such as coal).

“There have been more than seventy studies on thisquestion,” noted John Waters, a former RMI practice leaderwho left last year to lead The Bright Automotive spin-off.“Do we net a better carbon dioxide reduction by relying onthe grid rather than relying on gasoline or diesel? Dependingon how you evaluate it and which region of the country youstudy, there’s a 30 to 75 percent reduction in emissions byusing coal-based electricity rather than liquid fossil fuels incars and trucks.”

A fleet of 500,000 PHEVs could reduce carbon dioxideequivalent emissions by 40 million tons compared with theequivalent gasoline-powered vehicles over the ten-year life ofthe PHEV, RMI calculated last year.

A recent study by the Natural Resources Defense Council(NRDC) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI),which RMI believes uses conservative estimates onachievable mileage, found that widespread deployment of

plug-in hybrid electric vehicles by 2050 couldreduce the U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions

by more than 500 million tonsannually.


Also, improving the finances ofPHEVs by reaping benefits from thepower sector, Smart Garage will acceleratethe penetration of important greentechnologies—hybrid cars and windturbines, to name two.

More importantly, wind turbinesbuilt to serve the night car-chargingmarket would still spin whenever thewind blew and may eventually be ableto meet a considerable portion ofAmerica’s electricity demand—a hugestep toward reducing the country’sreliance on fossil fuels.

The Smart Garage Summit and Model

Rocky Mountain Institute is in aunique position to steer the SmartGarage paradigm.

“We know a lot about the grid, theneeds of buffering wind and solar withsome sort of storage, and we have astrong vehicles background,” notes RMIVice President and Energy & ResourcesTeam Leader Stephen Doig. “That’s anice combo that most can’t match. Butin the end, this is going to take a lot ofcollaboration so for now we are reallyjust instigators.”

RMI’s position today is somewhatanalogous to the Institute’s position in

2003, when RMI devised and publisheda strategy around energy-efficient datacenters. That effort required deepknowledge of the grid, power supplies,building design, and server architecture—among others.

“Obvious analogies will be in thedevelopment of the cell phone,” notesLovins. “About twenty things cametogether to make a cell phone possible,like packet switching [in whichmessages are cut up into chunks beforebeing sent then transmittedindividually—often times via differentroutes—and then reassembled at theirdestinations] and developments inmicro electronics and batteries andminiature antennas as well as theconvergence between global wirelessand the Internet.”

So how do you steer a massivelycomplex paradigm shift? One way is todevelop the leading analytical model toshow how the implementation of thevarious aspects of the full Smart Garageconcept might come together, and tohold a summit to talk it through withindustry partners. To date, those partnersinclude the Google Foundation, Ford,Johnson Controls, Duke Energy, andDanaher, with at least ten more expectedto participate.

The model would include the obvious,like different kinds of batteries, differentkinds of car models, themiles a commuter drives, and othercharacteristics of a wide range of scenarios.Even within the battery sphere, as Schewelpoints out, differences in chemistry, cost,size, durability, environmental impacts,and other factors can mean very differentoutcomes. The greatest complexity lies inhow those factors interact over time.Coupled with a dozen automobileconfigurations, there are hundreds ofdifferent scenarios the model will describein the near-, medium-, and long-term.

“We’re trying to design it so that it hasa very simple interface,” Schewel says. “Andwe’re going to publish it open-source onthe Internet so the public can use it. Theymight log on and change, say, the 35 mostrelevant parameters like their region’sweather, or gas prices, or driving patterns,and each will get unique results.”

The results could include everythingfrom emissions to energy prices toinformation about the optimal hoursfor charging.

MOVE team members LauraSchewel and Dave Anderson atRMI’s Snowmass Headquarters.

PhotobyArisYi

PhotobyCalCars.org


The state-of-the-industry analysis will include a descriptionof the business case for all the sectors involved, an analysis ofhow to implement Smart Garage so that early investors aren’tpenalized, and a description of how to influence investment inthe various aspects of it. The report will also include adescription of technical aspects of Smart Garage—howelectricity flows from grid to car and back, what kind ofconnectors would work, what kind of standards for software areneeded, how metering will work, and other nuts and bolts. Thethird component of the analysis will be an overall “Roadmap”of the way that the Smart Garage might come together.Obviously, coordination is critical.

“There are roughly 30 to 40 manufacturers of vehicles, thereare 300 to 400 car and truck models, and there are 3,000 retailelectricity providers,” notes Brylawski. “So you clearly needstandards so that the hundreds of models of car can talk to thethousands of retail electricity providers and provide a somewhatseamless system. And you can’t do that without standards, and

you can’t do that when you collaborate with only threeautomakers and three utilities. You really have to have a broadconsortium of companies across the value chain.”

Clearly, with so many players, with such interwoven cross-sector participation, and with such huge financial, environmental,and lifestyle incentives, the Smart Garage might ultimately proveto be one of RMI’s most important projects ever.

“There are lot of people working very hard to implementmajor shifts towards a greener world, doing things like installingsolar on their roofs, or pushing Detroit and Japan to come outwith radically new cars, or fighting to get wind power mandatedby the government,” Schewel says. “Sometimes, it feels like alot of environmental movements are happening in isolation, or,worse, fighting for limited resources, public attention, andfunding. Smart Garage gives us the opportunity to worktogether, on a mutually beneficial technology that drives allthese threads of the green movement forward together.” •

Monthly retail gasoline prices per $US gallon of gas(including tax) in different countries

So you think we need to Win the Oil Endgame?Go to www.oilendgame.com

It may seem like idling uses less gas than turning your car off and on again, but it usually doesn't. In fact,idling 15 minutes per weekday can cost you up to $100 in wasted gas over the course of a year, andAmerican drivers use more than 2 billion gallons of fuel each year while idling. To top it off, an idling carproduces twice the emissions of a car in motion.

If you plan to stay put for more than 10 seconds, turn your car off.Contribute to reducing our dependence on oil by reducing your own oil consumption. Rocky MountainInstitute’s Mobility and Vehicle Efficiency team exists to catalyze profitable, efficiency-led solutions toreduce our reliance on oil as fuel, following the guidelines outlined in RMI’s groundbreaking,solutions-oriented analysis to tackle the oil challenge, Winning the Oil Endgame.

This tip was brought to you by Ideal Bite atwww.idealbite.com

TAKING ACTION ON IDLING

DID YOU KNOW?

Jürgen

undMichaelUtech

©EyeW

ire,Inc.

IllustrationbyKyleDuba


BuildingSustainableCities,BlockbyBlock


For all the fanfare, green buildings are often just

“islands of sustainability”—excellent case studies in

what’s possible, but ultimately unconnected to their

surroundings. RMI’s Built Environment Team is

partnering with an innovative California non-profit to

change that.

By Katie Crane

IT’S APRIL AND RMI PRINCIPLE JAMES BREW

is hard at work on a presentation for a fundraising event hosted

the next day by the San Francisco–based non-profit Urban

Re:Vision. As he double checks his slides, Brew explains why

the green building community needs to step up its game a

notch—and begin thinking not just of individual buildings,

but in terms of entire city blocks and communities. Presently,

more than half the world’s population lives in urban areas. If

current trends continue, there could be as many as five

billion people living in cities by 2030, according to a United

Nations study. Clearly, Brew says, there’s a need for

integrated planning.

PhotoIllustrationbyKyleDuba


needs and provides a healthy, vibranteconomy without necessarily beingdependent on and attached to a largerinfrastructure.”

Frost grew up in northwesternPennsylvania and received herundergraduate degree fromPrinceton University in architectureand neuropsychology. “For me, thisis exactly the combination of thetwo,” she says. “I’ve always believedyou can design your experiences,and your experiences create yourneuropathways and your emotional,physical, and social well-being.”For instance, if city governmentsdesign ugly structures and provide

little access to green space, that canhave a measurable effect onresidents’ welfare, an effect Frostrefers to as “nature deficit disorder.”It is clear that Frost has larger goals

in mind, ones that fully incorporate social well-being into theconcept of sustainability.

At its core, Urban Re:Vision’s competition aims to developconcepts for making such urbanization sustainable—not just bychanging one building or transportation system at a time, butby considering all the elements that comprise a city blocksimultaneously. “Doing one building at a time that achievesLEED platinum is interesting, but it’s not enough,” Brew says,referring to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Designgreen building certification program. “LEED is a starting point,but LEED is not sustainable. This type of project is a true testingpoint for RMI’s Next Generation Utility concept, for example,”Brew says. “How do you implement distributed generation?Come play in the sandbox with us and test out your ideas.”

Urban Re:Vision is targeting cities from each region of theUnited States for the competition: Atlanta, Austin, Boulder,Bozeman, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles,Miami, New York, Phoenix, Portland, St. Louis, and Seattle areamong those under consideration. But Frost says that herteam—three employees, herself and some independentcontractors—is open to suggestions. “Certainly, if a developercame to us with a site that met our criteria, we would definitelyconsider it. Our goal is implementation … sites that not onlyhave real development potential but would also have a positiveimpact on the surrounding communities should they bedeveloped. We would like the site to represent one of manyurban challenges faced by cities today,” she says. There will beno sites outside the United States, but international architecturalfirms, students, and designers will be invited to participate inthe competition.

The winner of the contest will receive a cash prize, one thatis “compelling but notobscene,” says Frost, who atthe moment is personallyfunding Urban Re:Vision.

So what will the winningentry entail? “We would seethis completely regenerativecity block that is self-supporting in all its systemsand processes but is still partof the entire city,” Brew says.Moreover, the city blockwould help people change theway they interact with thecity. “There would be placesand spaces both inside andoutside of buildings topromote and support social

interaction. It’s the part of building ratings system that isoverlooked, but it is at least one-third of the definition ofsustainability,” Brew says.

For Frost, the solution is less clear. “What I love aboutthis is that I don’t know the answer,” she says. “What I’masking for is more than I’ve asked for in the past,” she adds,referring to previous sustainability-themed competitions thatUrban Re:Vision has held. The design would consider thewhole system, including social support and education,aspects not necessarily included in the sustainabilitydiscussion currently. “There’s no reason to be leaving thesethings out, it’s a closed loop,” she says. “As we’re faced withpopulation density, it will be even more important to creategroups within that density. I can only imagine that will createvibrancy at all levels.” According to Frost, the overall goal is“a system that enables people to make design decisions thatresult in beauty, efficiency, equity, and interconnectedness.Something people can really be proud of.” •

In late August, Brew and other RMI staff members will beparticipating in a charrette with Urban Re:Vision to develop aframework for the ideal sustainable city block. The twoorganizations will hold additional sessions throughout fall 2008to refine the framework with help from energy, transportation,engineering, architecture, design, and natural resource experts,as well as municipal officials. Once the basic requirements havebeen set, Urban Re:Vision will launch a competition in January2009, challenging architects and designers to apply theframework to actual blocks in six American cities.

“It’s all about scalability,” says Brew. “It’s about taking whatwe do at RMI every day to a higher level.”

Architectural firms and universities from each city will beasked to develop designs for demonstration projects focused on

sustainable energy, transportation, buildings, among otherelements. Actual components of the block will vary dependingon the city, Brew explains. “Every specific site is all aboutcontext. In one city it could be about skyscrapers, or a transithub or station on a light rail line; housing is likely to be anothercomponent,” Brew says. Ideally, after the competition, the sixcities will take the designs further and use them as startingpoints for a master plan and ultimately build a block.

The project is the brainchild of Stacy Frost. In November2006, Frost foundedUrban Re:Vision to promote a whole systemsapproach to designing city blocks. “People are used to looking atwhole cities, not on the scale of just one city block,” she says. “Yetcontemplating change for an entire city can be overwhelming,whereas city blocks are what people care about. Even within a city,they want to live in a community, one that responds to their social


Beddington Zero Energy Development

(BedZED), the UK’s largest eco-village. The

first large-scale, carbon-neutral community is

a mixed housing and work space development

located near London.

At its core,

Urban Re:Vision’s

competition aims to develop

concepts for making

urbanization sustainable...

by considering all the elements

that comprise a city

block simultaneously.

PhotobyFlickr.com

/Telex4

As Lovins tells it, the land in East Kalimantan on whichBOS’s experimental rainforest was established had beenrepeatedly logged and burned. About the only thing that wasleft was Alang-alang (Imperata cylindrica), a species of razor-edged, silica-rich grass that secretes cyanide, depletes soilnutrients, and is almost impossible to get rid of.

But in the early 2000s, BOS founder Dr. Willie Smitsdiscovered that he could kill the grass in a year and a half byshading it out with fast-growing acacia trees, which can thenbe harvested and used in construction. Once the land wasshaded, BOS staffers were able to create a local-floraunderstory that held water, moderated temperatures, andbegan building duff, the partly decayed matter on the forestfloor. Ultimately, the team planted 1,300 species of trees—millions of them, more than a thousand per day—along withsoil mycorrhizae and other microbiota to stimulate growth.Some six or seven years later, during the Lovinses’ visit, thetrees were maturing and some had reached full height.

“You could just about see the forest grow,” Lovins says. “Itdidn’t have the density and diversity of insects and birds thatyou have in a mature primary forest. But they’re coming inand already there are 137 bird species, nine primate species,and they’re all bringing seeds for whatever was missing. …When reintroduced, the orangutans, which are the capstonespecies, actually farm the forest. They excrete the seeds of whatthey want to grow where they want it to grow. So when theyrevisit that fig tree when it’s ready to harvest, it’ll also havethis other kind of tree right next to it that they really like toeat the fruit of at the same time and fruits about the sametime. The rainforest and the orangutans all coevolved.”

What will protect the forest from the rampant illegal loggers,whom the Lovinses saw at work nearly everywhere they went?The local people, because Dr. Smits’s strategy so bases theproject’s design on their welfare, and makes them so muchbetter off, that now they won’t allow wood thieves, howeverpowerful, to destroy their newfound livelihoods in agroforestry.

In addition to these insights, Lovins also learned about thesugar palm (Arenga saccharifera), a promising biofuel feedstock.To combat deforestation, Dr. Smits began researching whatcould grow in a complex rainforest, where soils can lackhumus, sunlight can be scarce, and harvesting is tricky. Sugarpalm, he discovered, grows very well in rainforest settings, isnot a seasonal crop, and requires careful manual tapping (soharvesting it creates year-round jobs).

Dr. Smits’s research suggests that sugar palm can produce19 tons of ethanol per hectare per year (or much more withselection), far outdistancing oil palm, which can produce 4.7tons, and jatropha, which can produce 4.3 tons—both ofwhich are typically considered excellent crops for biofuels

(sugar cane, by comparison, produces about 3.5 tons ofethanol). But those fuel crops are suitable for monoculture,and rainforest is often cleared for oil-palm plantations (inBorneo, generally as an excuse, not an intention: the hiddencentral aim is to steal timber). Sugar palm, requiring diverseforest around it to flourish, is thus a way to grow the energycrop—and scores of important medicinal and other crops—while protecting, not destroying, biodiversity.

Making biofuel from sugar palm would also create a lot ofjobs. According to Dr. Smits’s calculations, sugar palms provideat least 50 times more jobs per hectare than making biofuelfrom sugar cane because of the manual tapping. That tapping,he concludes, “is affordable due to the [sugar palm’s] muchhigher productivity.”

Cottage biofuels industry or not, Lovins says the maintakeaways from his trip are: “Yes, you can restore rainforests,which are vital to biodiversity and climate, and you canintegrate ecological and economic and cultural restoration verysuccessfully by making the welfare of the local people your toppriority. [It’s] kind of like Gandhi-ji’s remark that if you lookafter the poorest, everything else will look after itself.” •


A Vacation with a Purpose

By Cameron M. Burns

RMI CHIEF SCIENTIST AMORYLovins has long been a fan of “higherprimates”—species that use theirintellect for the benefit of theircommunities and the environment, evenif inadvertently. One of his favorite suchcreatures is the orangutan (Pongo abeliiand Pongo pygmaeus; in fact about three-dozen orangutan dolls populate theentryway to the Lovinses’ home.) So,when they had some vacation time inMay, Amory and his wife Judy, bothlandscape photographers, decided totravel to Borneo “to hang out with ourorange swinger buddies.”

The couple visited a number ofoutposts of the Balikpapan OrangutanSociety/Borneo Orangutan SurvivalFoundation (BOS), one of the world’sleading organizations dedicated toprotecting and advocating for the orangeand their habitat. Characteristically,while Lovins was on a personal trip, heended up learning as much as he couldabout rainforest rehabilitation and theremarkable attributes of the modestsugar palm—both of which tie intoRocky Mountain Institute’s approachand belief that ecosystems are vital,resilient, and reparable.

At one of the BOS sites, Lovinsexplains, “They showed us … a 19-square-kilometer lush rainforest that[the] staff has rapidly created, one squaremeter at a time. Nobody knew this waseven possible.”

RMI Chief Scientist Amory Lovins traveled to Borneo on hisvacation to visit a world-class organization working to protectorangutans.What he found was an inspiring story aboutrainforest rehabilitation and sustainable economic development.

Judy Hill, Amory’s wife, shares his passion forprotecting primates and their rainforest home.

PhotosbyJudyHill


BreakingGround, Building Green

Formany who have

worked at Rocky

Mountain Institute,

life experiences play

a big role in how they

see the world and

ultimately, what they

do for it. Former

RMI consultant

Bill Browning, one

of the nation’s

leading advocates of

green building, is

no exception.

By Cameron M. Burns

PICTURE A GEODESIC DOME HIGHin the Rockies. It’s covered with a transparentfilm that lets the sunlight in and traps heat.Even on the coldest winter days, thetemperature inside is warm enough to keepfish alive and swimming in a smallpool and to grow vegetables without amechanical heating system. It’s only 25 feet indiameter, but the dome can theoretically feeda family of four.

“Sadly, Bucky died two weeks before hewas supposed to arrive at Windstar to spendthe summer working on the project,”Browning recalls. “So while I met him andtalked with him, I did not get to work directlywith him.”

Despite this setback, the group perseveredand finished the full-size greenhouse. It wasoperational for a few years, but by the late 1980s,Windstar ran into financial troubles and had toshut it down.

That early brush with integrated design,however, stuck with Browning. He leftWindstar in 1987, but stayed in the RoaringFork Valley to pursue other opportunities,including research and consulting work atRMI. He was keenly interested in howcommunities get built and the relationship ofthat process to the environment. At RMI, hefinally came to the conclusion that it wasn’tthe architects who were making thedecisions—it was the developers.


Photo©JamieHorton;Blue

PixelPhotography


“At one point, Bill said, ‘You know, I think we can changethe whole development paradigm from the bad guys who ripup the land to a force for healing natural and humancommunities for profit,’” recalls RMI cofounder and ChiefScientist Amory Lovins.

Browning then left RMI to get a graduate degree in realestate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His thesisincluded case studies of green developments in California andargued that development projects that take a piecemealapproach to green design cost more than those that take anintegrated approach. Designing for the whole system, he found,could achieve more with no additional up-front cost.

With diploma in hand, Browning returned to RMI and in1991 founded the Institute’s longstanding green buildingconsulting arm, Green Development Services (GDS).

“It’s somewhat strange that there was some push back fromsome staff and the board when we were starting GDS,” Browning

says. “The thought was, ‘Real estate developers are not exactly thekinds of people we want to work with.’ My response was, ‘If youdon’t like the way they’re doing things and you’re not willing toengage them, then there’s not going to be any change.’”

Almost immediately, RMIwas hired to work on a varietyof green building projects.But it wasn’t until a couple ofyears later that GDS’s impactwas really felt. Prior tostarting GDS, RMI had beenan advisor to the originalAmerican Institute ofArchitects Committee on theEnvironment, and there wasconsiderable momentumaround what would later becalled the “green buildingmovement.” Then, RMI wasbrought into a meeting by theClinton Administration toexplore a lighting retrofit ofthe White House.

“One of the things thatreally made GDS’s reputationwas the ‘Greening of theWhite House in 1993,’”Browning recalls. “Initially,the White House wasthinking they just needed alighting retrofit and somerecycling, then severalenvironmental consultantsand I convinced them theycould do much more,including auditing the results.

That event, really, was the first large-scale green design charretteever held. It involved 130 people for three days. The U.S. GreenBuilding Council was formed about the same time, and many ofthe people who helped form the USGBC were there. It was oneof the signature events of the green building community.”

Over the next decade GDS consulted on hundreds of greenbuilding retrofits, new developments, and general sustainabilitygoals for such high-profile clients as the Pentagon, Wal-Mart(the firm’s Eco Mart), and the organizing committee for the2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney.

GDS was not only successful in influencing design, the teamof talented thinkers and designers was able to also inform thebuilding industry though books, CD-ROMs, speakingengagements, and writing. Lovins notes that one of the mostimportant papers ever produced at RMI came from the hands ofBrowning and DOE researcher Joseph Romm. In “Greening theBuilding and the Bottom Line,” Browning and Romm were able

Just like Bill Browning before them, RMI’s current interns and fellowsenjoy getting up close and personal with Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome.Left to right: Sally DeLeon, David Anderson, Aristotle Yi, Alok Pradhan,Jonah Bea-Taylor, Jamie Ponce, Drew Sloan, and Laurie Ramroth.

to describe and support with eight case studies for thefirst time the link between efficient green buildings andhuman productivity.

“[It was] the notion that if you can see what you’redoing, hear yourself think, breathe cleaner air, and feelmore comfortable, you’ll domore andbetterwork,” notesLovins. “It was immensely valuable.”

Browning left RMI in 2004 when he was offeredthe director of design and environment position atHaymount, a 4,000-home “new town” in Virginia.Nine months later, he formed his own consultingfirm with RMI colleague Jeff Bannon, which latermorphed into a new business with renowned greenarchitect Bob Fox: Terrapin Bright Green(terrapinbrightgreen.com).

Today, Browning’s projects with Terrapin aretypically large-scale developments, not individualbuildings. One of his current efforts is a new city inKorea that will boast some 50 million square feet ofcommercial space and 50,000 residences. Anotherproject aims to redevelop a disturbed site in Arizonawith 20,000 residences and 20 million square feetof commercial space. Even with this busy schedule,he still manages to find time for research. He’scurrently leading a multi-year study that looks atworker productivity issues in buildings, expandingon the work he started at RMI in the 1990s.

“There’s an original curious mind there that’salready done a career’s worth of important creativity,”says Lovins. “And there’s a lot more left in him.” •

He was keenly interested in

how communities get built

and the relationship of

that process to the environ-

ment...Browning finally

came to the conclusion that

it wasn’t the architects who

were making the decisions

— it was the developers.

Coming Next Issue:

Crash Test Dummies

Greening the Purple “Y!”

Do lightweight, fuel-efficient cars have to be less safe than heavy,inefficient cars? Not at all. Armed with crash test data and marketresearch, RMI’s MOVE team is debunking this piece of conventionalwisdom and pushing the automotive sector to adopt light, safe designs.

Helping internet giant Yahoo! go carbon neutral is no small undertaking.But RMI alumna Christina Page is up for the challenge.

For Denver-based banker DonWoods, the newest member of RMI’sBoard of Trustees, banking is an activity that can bring value not onlyto the bank itself, but to the people and economy of a community, aswell as the natural environment. Read about Don in the next issue ofRMI Solutions Journal.

Don Woods

PhotobyArisYi

RMI Development Officer JustineNathanson and a committee of Denver-basedNSC members have been busy planning afascinating and inspirational weekend ofactivities for fellow NSC attendees. The themefor the 4th Annual National Solutions CouncilWeekend is “From Ideas to Solutions.” Thisevent is a unique opportunity to learn moreabout RMI’s work and to expand yourknowledge and understanding of key issues.

A special RMIQ (RMI’s Quest forSolutions) lecture Friday evening kicks off theNSC Weekend with panelists discussing“Solutions for a New Energy Paradigm.”Saturday morning, participants will meetwith one of the three RMI research teams toexplore current projects and global concernsspecific to their area of expertise. Theseactivities run concurrently, so participants willchoose which track to attend.

A highlight of the Weekend is time withAmory Lovins. “Tea with Amory” will be a special a time to relax and explorequestions, ideas, and solutions with RMI’s cofounder and Lead Scientist.

The Weekend closes on Sunday with brainstorming breakout sessionswhere participants will have the opportunity toexperience the dynamics of working throughbarriers, by sharing their insights and knowledgeon real topics of the day.

The NSC Weekend is a wonderful time todiscover new and vital ways to be part of thesolution. A benefit to RMI’s NSC membership,

the NSC Weekend is free for members of the NSC. For those interested inattending, but unable to join RMI’s National Solutions Council prior toSeptember 19th, the conference fee is $500. Check out www.rmi/nsc formore detailed information.

We look forward to seeing you there!


ProfitableSolutions forClimate Change

In April, Amory Lovins and Greg Frantawere invited by NSC members to speak atspecial events throughout Florida.According to Senior Development OfficerJim Kozel, “Profitable Solutions for ClimateChange,” was presented to members of theJupiter Island Club, Palm City’s SandhillCove Community members, and to a fullhouse at Morton’s Steakhouse in PalmBeach. Hosts included RMI Trustees MaryCaulkins and Sharmy Altshuler (alsomembers of the NSC); RMI friend andbenefactor John Pratt; NSC member FrankNavarro; and Mrs. Alex Anylie, mother ofNSC member Sebastian de Atucha. Thewhirlwind tour wrapped up with Amoryand Jim joining NSC members Bill andJane Knapp—who had driven down fromSarasota—for breakfast inWest PalmBeach. •

Friends of RMI ... Helping Us Bring Solutions to the World

Ginni Galicinao

From Ideas to Solutions

Friday, September 19, 2008through Sunday, September 21, 2008

Sharmy Altschuler, Amory Lovins, Karl Kister, Mary Caulkins,and Greg Franta outside the Tangerine Theatre on Florida’s Jupiter Island.

Save the Date:

Ellie Caulkins, Daniel Ritchie, andMarty Pickett at the Denver launch ofthe High Performance Building film.

Denver screeningof our HighPerformanceBuilding film

RMI hosted over 180 community andcorporate leaders interested in sustainablebuilding to view the premiere of “HighPerformance: Building Perspective andPractice.” RMI partnered with the U.S.Green Building Council to produce thiscompelling film that documents the businesscase for building green. This film is theinaugural project of the Built EnvironmentTeam’s Cooling the Warming initiative. •

4th Annual National Solutions Council Weekend

PhotobyJayKlinghorn

Background



ContributionsVISIONARIES$100,000 - $499,999William & Flora Hewlett FoundationThe Kohlberg Foundation, Inc.Clarence Foster Stanback

PATHFINDERS$50,000-$99,999The J.M. Kaplan Fund, Richard D. KaplanTAUPO FundThe Tides Foundation

PIONEERS$10,000-$49,999Judith M. BuechnerCommunity Banks of ColoradoLederhausen FoundationThe Alice P. & L. Thomas Melly FoundationAnonymous

INTEGRATORS$5,000-$9,9993 Form, Inc.The Chisholm FoundationSuzanne Farver & Clint P. Van ZeeBarry & Donna FeinbergAnne JonesMineral Acquisition Partners, Inc.John & Jane Pratt

OPTIMIZERS$1,000-$4,999B.J. & Michael AdamsDr. & Mrs. David & Marilyn AldrichRichard & Joanne BarsantiNancy BrachThomas & Noel CongdonCottle Carr Yaw ArchitectsEarth ShareGordon EatmanSandra Pierson EndyCharles & Marian FallenFanwood FoundationMichael FullerJohn B. GilpinCarol & Mike HundertErika Leaf & Christopher MeekerCharles P. McQuaidMichael & Judith MeyersNicole Miller & Kim Taipale, in honor of Eric KonheimMichael & Sandra MinaidesRick Powell & Rita AyyangerFranz Reichsman & Judith BellamyRising Sun EnterprisesRobert J. Schloss & Emily M. SackFord SchumannGordon & Carole SegalSinging FieldThe Joseph B. Thomas & Etel Thomas Charitable Remainder UnitrustCynthia VergesFlorance WallinWichita Falls Area Community FoundationJohn Hirschi Donor Advised Fund

STEWARDS$500-$99942/40 Architecture IncCarter F. & Suzanne Bales, in honor of Eric KonheimRita & Frank Castagna, in honor of Eric KonheimContinuum PartnersLois-ellin DattaAntelo Devereux, Jr.Robert M. HadleyThe Leeds Family Foundation, in honor of Eric KonheimRobert L. Lenzner, in honor of Eric KonheimCalleen & Francois Letaconnoux, in honor of Eric KonheimConnie Moak Mazur & Jay Mazur, in honor of Eric KonheimRobert G. MerrillMicrosoft Matching Gifts Program / Giving CampaignConstance Hoguet NeelRichard L. OttingerThe Judge John C. & Katherine A. Pappas FamilyThe PG&E Corporation FoundationPipe Renewal Service, Inc.Sam & Linda SnyderMichael TottenStephen & Ann WestDon R. Westbrook

IN-KIND CONTRIBUTIONSJonathan Peretz Chance

RMI Legacy SocietyEsther and Francis BlighJoanne and Michael CaffreyVirginia CollierAnne CookeRichard FordMarcia and John HarterStanton KloseErika LeafSusan and Arthur LloydMargaret Wurgel and Keith MesecherDavid MuckenhirnMark and Judith SchafferJoan SemmerJoel ShapiroJane Sharp-MacRaeAnonymous

National Solutions CouncilPeter Boyer, Co-ChairDouglas Weiser, Co-ChairKathryn Finley, FounderElaine LeBuhn, FounderMaryvonne and Curtis AbbottMary and John AbeleB.J. and Michael AdamsRachel and Adam AlbrightDr. and Mrs. David and Marilyn AldrichPat and Ray AndersonJim ArestyElyse Arnow Brill and Joshua ArnowJoan Abrahamson and Jonathan AronsonLeslie and Rutgers Barclay

Mitzi and Woody BeardsleyBen BeattieR.A. BeattieMolly and Tom BedellSami BedellMac Bell and FamilyVivian and Norman BelmonteCheryl and Chris BentleyAndy BernsteinThe Bialis FamilyMaryam Mohit and Erik BlachfordPamela and John BlackfordRita and Irwin BlittKathy and Bjorn BorgenTerry Gamble Boyer and Peter BoyerWendie Kellington and Josh BrattCarolyn BrodyMarkell BrooksAnne H. BrownAbby and Doug BrownAlison Teal and Sam BrownJohn and Kathleen BuckJacolyn and John BucksbaumShelley Burke and Al NemoffSusanne B. Bush and Robert B. WilcoxNicole and Patrick CallahanSteve CampbellRobin and Dan CatlinEleanor CaulkinsMary Caulkins and Karl KisterRamey and Max CaulkinsBetsy and James J. Chaffin, Jr.Patti and Ray ChambersAnn and Doug ChristensenSally ColePamela Levy and Rick CrandallHilary and Kip CrosbyCharles CunniffeLois-ellin DattaMartha DavisJinny and Tim DitzlerMarion Cass and Stephen DoigJohn and Marcia DonnellAugusta and Bruce DrosteGordon EatmanMelissa and Peter EvansThe Fackert FamilyJudith Barnard and Michael FainCharles FarverSuzanne Farver and Clint P. Van ZeeChrissy and Andrew FedorowiczBetsy and Jesse FinkKathryn FinleyKathryn FleckAngela and Jeremy FosterBob Fox, Cook + Fox ArchitectsAnn and Thomas FriedmanJessica and John FullertonJared and Cindi GellertElliot GersonJennie Muir-Gordon and Mark GordonDana and Jonathan Gottsegen

Bob GrahamDiane Troderman and Harold GrinspoonChristina and Christopher GuidoAnne and Nick HackstockRobert M. HadleyYancey HaiMargie and John HaleyMargot HamplemanJamie and Leanna HarrisMarcia and John HarterSue HelmElaine Ply and David HenryJessica HerzsteinKaren and Bayard HollinsAbby and Mark HorowitzPam and Bob HowardJacqueline Merrill and James E. Hughes, Jr.Nancy Reynolds and Logan HurstMaureen JeromeMary and Michael JohnstonSam and Sarah JonesIrene and Al JuvshikDiana and C. A. KalmanMichelle Escudero and Scott KaneMoira and Ward KaneInga and Nicholas J. KarolidesBruce KatzHelen J. KesslerKatie Kitchen and Paul KovachSteven KlineKathy Bole and Paul KlingensteinBill and Jane KnappColleen and Bud KonheimKaren and Tom KonradPeter LaundyErika Leaf and Christopher MeekerElaine and Robert LeBuhnJane Leddy and Robert AndrewsMartin and Jenny LevionPeter LightPaula and Monty LoudGerald LovinsJudy Hill Lovins and Amory B. LovinsNancy Gerdt and Glenn LyonsJanice and Arthur MartinElizabeth and Lou MatlackBert J. MaxonGeraldine and Donald McLauchlanCharles P. McQuaidLeslie and Mac McQuownLee MellyKathleen and Bob MillerIrene G. MillerJames T. MillsSandra and Michael MinaidesBarbara Mitchell and Robert BoyarElizabeth MitchellCyndi and Jerry MixKaren Setterfield and David MuckenhirnMindy and Reuben MungerJustine NathansonKelly Erin O'Brien and Martha Joy Watson

Elaine and David OrrMelinda and Norm PaysonJulia Pershan and Jonathon CohenRobert PhilippeMarty Pickett and Edgell PylesMichael PottsRita Ayyanger and Rick PowellRebecca R. PritchardSara RansfordXiaomei and Joseph ReckfordMartha Records and Rich RainaldiFranz ReichsmanNancy and Cy RichPhilip E. RichterDiana and Jonathan F. P. RoseHope and Paul RudnickVicki and Roger SantEmily M. Sack and Robert J. SchlossJune and Paul Schorr, IIIJean and Arent SchuylerSeymour SchwartzJoan SemmerMr. and Mrs. Thomas L. SeymourJane Sharp-MacRae and Duncan MacRaeSally Dudley and Charles SieloffDawn Holt and Shaun SimpkinsAmy SpringerSrinija SrinivasanCoco and Foster StanbackAlice and Fred StanbackHope and Robert T. Stevens, Jr.Linda StoneDaniel StreiffertBente StrongAndrea and Lubert StryerPeter SunRoselyne Chroman SwigNancy Kitzmiller TaylorAnne and Bardyl TiranaDeborah and Ken TuchmanCynthia VergesLeah and Ralph WangerAllison Wear and Frank NavarroLynda and Douglas WeiserLlewellyn WellsKevin D. WhiteWilliam B. Wiener, Jr.Jane Woodward, Mineral Acquisition PartnersSue and Jim WoolseyB. Wu and Eric LarsonLinda Yates and Paul HollandMargaret and Martin ZankelToni ZurcherAnonymous


A big thanks to all our supporters this spring.The following contributions to RMI were made between April 1, 2008 and June 15, 2008


Non-Profit OrgU.S. Postage Paid

Permit No. # 266

Fort Collins, CO

RMI V2G (Vehicle to Grid) SummitEarly Fall, 2008Interactive meeting bringing RMI together with experts and stakeholdersfrom throughout and beyond the Smart Garage system, discussing theinterconnection of the vehicle fleet, buildings, and the power grid to createenergy system synergies in efficiency, cost, and emissions. nc.rmi.org

RMI National Solutions CouncilSeptember 19–21, 2008 . Denver, COJoin RMI for a unique opportunity to learn more about its work. Take partin stimulating discussions with staff and explore global projects in whichRMI is playing an influential role. rmi.org

West Coast Green ConferenceSeptember 25–27, 2008 . Silicon Valley, CAGreen building expo and conference.westcoastgreen.com

Annual Clinton Global InitiativeSeptember 24–26, 2008 . New York, NYConvenes a diverse group of approximately 1,000 world leaders to examinetoday’s most pressing global challenges. The program for the 2008 annualmeeting will concentrate on four focus areas: education, energy and climatechange, global health, and poverty alleviation. clintonglobalinitiative.org

Alternative Car & Transportation ExpoSeptember 26–27, 2008 . Santa Monica, CASeminars, panels, and exhibits on the latest information and examples ofvehicle and transportation technologies. altcarexpo.com

SustainCommWorld’s Green Media Show & ExpoOctober 1–2, 2008 . Boston, MAForum for education, solutions exploration, and dialogue among thoughtleaders, solution providers, brand owners and other key players engaged inthe creation, production, and distribution of communication media withregard to sustainability. sustaincommworld.com

World Energy Engineering CongressOctober 1–3, 2008 . Washington, DCConferences and seminars on a variety of current topics and acomprehensive exposition of the market’s most promising new energy andgreen energy technologies. energycongress.com

Greenbuild Conference and ExpoNovember 19–21, 2008 . Boston, MAUSGBC’s Greenbuild conference and expo is an unparalleled opportunityto connect with other green building peers, industry experts, and influentialleaders as they share insights on the green building movement and itsdiverse specialties. RMI staff attending. greenbuildexpo.org

RMI Event Calendar July through November, 2008

Here are a few events that RMItes are hoping to attend in the coming months. We list these as suggestions for our readers.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE

2317 Snowmass Creek RoadSnowmass, Colorado 81654 USA

Documents

Rocky Mountain Institute Magazine