Imagine you are sipping your morning beverage 10 years from now. You open your source of news and learn that your local investor-owned electric utility has just achieved 100% renewable energy. You wonder, “How did they do it?”
You read that decision-makers at the utility achieved 100% renewable energy by adopting 1000 MW of energy cost-saving renewable energy options over the last 10 years. They adopted 600 MW of energy cost-saving demand-side management (DSM) options. The 600 MW of DSM options delivered grid performance benefits that allowed them to adopt 400 MW of energy cost-saving renewable generation options
The 1000 MW of DSM and renewable generation options allowed the utility to halve its generation costs, double its earnings, double its cash payouts to its investor-owners and double the share holder value of the utility for its investor-owners.
The avoided greenhouse gas emissions from 1000 MW of DSM and renewable generation options allowed the utility to halve its greenhouse gas emissions.
The breakthrough occurred when decision-makers came into consensus on creating a planning process having the following steps:
- Decision-makers identify energy options available for adoption.
- Decision-makers evaluate benefits of those energy options.
- Decision-makers compare benefits of those energy options.
- Decision-makers persuade themselves (and come into consensus) what energy options they want to adopt immediately, and what energy options they might want to adopt later, to deliver greatest benefits for energy service users and achieve 100% renewable energy.
Decision-makers at the utility realized that they could use such a decision-making process to:
- Maintain grid performance and reliable delivery of electric power service.
- Halve their generation costs.
- Deliver most of those energy cost savings to their customers.
- Double their earnings with the rest of those energy cost savings.
- Double the shareholder value of the utility.
- Halve their greenhouse gas emissions, and.
- Secure their energy supply by obtaining 100% of their generation from renewable sources
Once decision-makers realized the benefits to be gained from creating and using that kind of decision-making process, the game was on. They started doing the math to figure out what renewable energy options they wanted to adopt immediately, and what renewable energy options they might want to adopt later, to deliver greatest benefits for the utility’s customers and greatest shareholder value for the utility’s investor-owners.
Decision-makers were excited by the benefits delivered by the renewable energy options that they adopted. They were enthused to evaluate more options faster to adopt more options faster to deliver more benefits faster for the utility’s customers.
They called that virtuous feedback loop an Adoption Accelerator. Here is what their Adoption Accelerator looked like:
The benefits delivered to utility customers included the energy security benefits of obtaining 100% of their generation from inexhaustible renewable resources. You read the next story in your news source. It’s about the collapse of fossil fuel imports to the part of your nation served by your electric utility. Your utility achieved 100% renewable energy just in time.
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If you want to learn more about what a decision-making process looks like for swiftly achieving 100% renewable energy and reversing global warming, you might want to read my book, You Can Reverse Global Warming.
When you read You Can Reverse Global Warming, you will learn:
- How to design a decision-making process for reversing global warming.
- How to design a consensus decision-making process that yields swift decisions, and swift action on those decisions, for reversing global warming.
- How to design a decision-making process through which decision-makers adopt energy options that deliver greatest benefits for energy service users.
- How to design a decision-making process for swiftly achieving 100% renewable energy and — through that method — reversing global warming.
- How to activate your right-question-asking, consensus-decision-making and successful-solution-imitating powers of mind for reversing global warming.
You can take a “Look Inside” at the first 5 chapters of You Can Reverse Global Warming by visiting my website at https://www.erikkvam.com/look-inside/.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I’m grateful for your comments that you may make below.
