Southern California Edison President Ron Nichols on how the utility is approaching the opportunity of installing electric transportation infrastructure across California.
County Supervisor Kuehl and Chief Sustainability Officer Gary Gero catch up on the county's water resiliency plan.
Steve Westly, former California State Controller and Chief Financial Officer, delivered remarks at the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI)’s GloSho’15 conference, drawing on his long experience in energy innovation to focus on the remarkable progress of renewable energy technology and commercialization. Here, VX News presents an edited transcript of his address. Westly comments on trends in the sustainability and cleantech markets, such as the dropping costs of renewables and the surge of Internet of Things technologies, offering his perspective on the forces driving these trends and how companies across industries can take advantage of them. Having traced the trajectory of technological and financial innovations aimed at sustainability, he concludes by divulging his predictions for the cleantech market’s future—a future, he argues, centered in California.
CEO of Bloomberg L.P. and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke to Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp during the 2015 Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in New York last month. Reflecting on his career in business, philanthropy, and politics, Bloomberg emphasizes the private sector’s essential role in effecting greenhouse gas reductions. He comments on his current role at the United Nations, which has led him to consider the energy challenges facing countries like India and China. Finally, Bloomberg encourages environmentalists to “get tough” in the face of public-sector paralysis.
As California seeks to meet greenhouse-gas emissions reduction goals set out by AB32, utilities are grappling with the intermittence of renewable resources like solar and wind. George Minter, Senior Director of Policy and Environment at the Southern California Gas Company, works on SoCalGas’s electrolysis commercialization and expansion program, which aims to address this challenge. In the following interview with VerdeXchange News, Minter discusses power-to-gas—how it works, precedents for its use in the European Union, and its potential as a solution to excess power on the grid. Minter also discusses natural gas’ impact on transportation, the “hydrogen highway,” and efforts to decarbonize the pipeline—lowering the carbon content of California’s natural gas supply.
Lennar Corporation is the second-largest homebuilder in the US. As President of Lennar Ventures and CEO of SunStreet Energy Group, David Kaiserman is pioneering a new model for residential developers: including solar systems as standard features on new homes. Kaiserman spoke with VerdeXchange News in the midst of SunStreet’s market-by-market deployment about the intersection of homebuilding and alternative energy, explaining SunStreet’s innovative approach and its potential impact on the solar industry if adopted more widely.
With extensive expertise in Arizona energy, transportation, and politics, Martin Shultz now holds the position of Senior Policy Director at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. He sat down with VX News to cover a range of topics that will be addressed at VX Arizona 2014—charting the progress of solar energy in the state, evaluating the viability of traditional utilities’ business model moving forward, and considering whether nuclear energy will grow in the US. Schultz also comments on Arizona’s needed investments in infrastructure and the status of water in the Southwest.
Jonathan Weisgall serves as Vice President for Legislative and Regulatory Affairs at MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. Since 2012, the company has invested extensively in unregulated solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal projects, under the primary subsidiary MidAmerican Renewables. Weisgall spoke with VerdeXchange News to update readers on MidAmerican Renewables’ progress since its founding, as well as the promise of energy imbalance markets and MidAmerican’s role in bringing an EIM to the western United States.
The Los Angeles Business Council held its annual Sustainability Summit on April 25 at the Getty Center, to discuss the city and region’s progress on producing renewable energy, protecting water resources, and building the city resiliently. Speakers included business leaders, elected officials, regulators, and utility representatives. VX News presents a transcript of California Governor Jerry Brown’s keynote address, in which he discusses the importance of prioritizing sustainability, the challenges it presents, and California’s continued leadership around environmental stewardship.
Nate Lewis is the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry and Scientific Director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) at Caltech. JCAP is one of several federally funded Energy Innovation Hubs, with a specific focus on deriving fuel from sunlight. In a recent talk given at the LAEDC Mid Year Economic Forecast, republished here in VerdeXchange News and TPR, Professor Lewis puts the earth’s current greenhouse gas levels in historic perspective, noting that no energy source has the power to both clean our atmosphere and meet civilization’s growing energy demands except the sun. Yet harnessing the sun’s energy with current solar panel technology presents problems of space and storage. Lewis outlines how artificial photosynthesis might solve these problems, as well as the steps Caltech is taking to make this hypothetical technology a game-changing reality.