At the 2022 Energy Thought Summit, Jarred Metoyer, SVP, Energy Systems North America, addressed executive thought leaders across the industry on how to achieve a just energy transition.
Hosted once a year in Austin, TX, ETS is the leading event for thought leaders across the industry to gather and address the biggest energy-related ideas and challenges of today.
In a brief yet powerful presentation, Jarred explored how leaders can overcome challenges, invest in communities, and embrace more nuanced thinking as we all work toward achieving an equitable energy transition.
Environmental and systemic challenges
Jarred began by presenting the three biggest energy challenges today’s thought leaders must face. First, the U.S. must achieve carbon negative by 2050. For the past five years, DNV has conducted an energy transition outlook, our best projection of what the energy future holds. In the pandemic year of 2020, we saw carbon pollution decline. However, for the world to achieve net zero, the U.S. must continue this level of decline for the next twenty years. Unfortunately, 2021 showed a familiar growth in global emissions, proving much of the work has yet to be done.
Second, we have not achieved energy equity. Thought leaders must acknowledge other complications inherent in systemic inequities. Without proper intervention, the energy transition could deepen the racial, social, and economic disparities that make up energy inequality.
The third challenge, Jarred said, lies in the inequitable distribution of energy transition technologies. “We’re moving into a phase where these energy transition technologies are leaving others behind. The early adopters get all the technologies, and everyone else gets virtually none of them, but they’ll be left to pay for all the stranded assets.”
As great as these challenges may be, thought leaders can meet our energy transition commitments with solutions both technologically optimistic and people focused. Jarred proposed fighting these three big challenges in three big ways, calling for thought leaders to be “intentional, accountable, and more radical or non-traditional in [their] thinking.” Jarred acknowledged that it’s the thought leaders, the utilities/long-standing providers in their communities who are the ideal candidates for re-visioning how we address environmental and systemic issues. “We’re thought leaders,” he said. “We’ve got this.”
Leaders must be intentional
To achieve an equitable energy transition, thought leaders must focus on the people and communities they serve not just on the systems and advancing technologies. This may require a worldview shift. Jarred referenced two Native American Speakers who spoke with DNV that year: Vanessa Roanhorse, CEO of Roanhorse Consulting LLC, and Suzanne Singer, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Native Renewables. They spoke about the need for leaders to re-focus their attention on human beings. “[They said] we need to get [people] from an extractive type worldview and economy into a regenerative circular renewable mindset,” Jarred said. “I whole-heartedly agree with that and think it’s the number one starting point. It’s the people we’re really trying to fight and protect. That’s why we’re doing all of this.”
Another way to become more intentional in our thinking is to understand how wealth grows and gets distributed. Supplier diversity and discounts for low-income customers, Jarred noted, are not the only factors in developing wealth or leading with intentionality. Creating new wealth and intention comes down to investing in the entrepreneur; specificity is paramount. “Let’s be really intentional,” he said. How much do we want specifically from black woman-owned businesses? How much specifically do we want to look at the workforce of the diverse-owned businesses so that we’re really redistributing the wealth and changing the game?”
Leaders must be accountable
While there will always be regulatory-driven goals, thought leaders should consider the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals on investors’ minds. Jarred briefly noted a few examples of ESG goals at work in the industry. The SEC climate disclosure, renewables, and distributed generation, he explained, all contribute to the industry’s necessary environmental goals. While environmental goals play an important role in the energy transition, accountably truly lies in an organization’s governance and social goals.
Governance goals, Jared said, help leaders think deeply about diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within their own organizations. He noted that social goals help leaders address how their decisions will impact customers, service territories, and the environment. It’s time leaders really thought about “how we can create those accountability metrics so that you and I can hold ourselves accountable on what we’re actually doing and how it has the right outcomes.” Jarred referenced a few organizations present in the room such as the Equity and Clean Energy Economy organization and ACEEE which focuses on such equity and accountability metrics.
Leaders must be radical or non-traditional in their thinking
The Energy Thought Summit has long championed radical or non-traditional solutions. Jarred encouraged thought leaders to not be beholden to past solutions but rather those centered on community and the natural world. He referenced a few organizations that invest in their communities and beckoned thought leaders to “take a page” from investment firms focused on other means to grow and redistribute wealth.
Kapor Kapital, for example, is an Oakland-based venture capital firm that focuses on minority-owned and women-owned businesses to create a more equitable society for underrepresented communities. Resilience Capital Ventures, a private equity firm, uses blended investment (venture, private equity, etc.) along with other forms of capital. BlocPower, a Brooklyn-based renewable energy company brings climate justice to America’s urban core. Jarred acknowledged the company’s success in crowdfunding, a non-traditional way of bringing in new capital and engaging the community. “[BlocPower] starts from the other end of that market adoption scale. They start with people who traditionally can’t afford new technologies, are not traditionally new adopters, and are centering those people.”
Lastly, Jarred called thought leaders to turn to programs that don’t just focus on technical solutions. Greening programs, urban renewal, and transportation solutions are all other avenues for growing and redistributing wealth. Natural carbon capture is still one of the most powerful forms of carbon capture in existence. As longstanding providers in these communities, Jarred concluded, thought leaders ought to feel empowered to re-imagine and re-think how they must address these systemic issues.
“You have to really center equity in all decisions. You’re going to make hundreds of decisions in just the next couple of months. Is there another way to do it more equitably that’s going to really go back and address some of the systemic issues that we’ve seen? How can we center black women-owned businesses, how can we center native and indigenous solutions that have been here for a long, long time that we might have forgotten but are there? They might not be the solution that comes to mind first. They might not be the thing that’s going to help us with the next technology, but they’re going to be a blend of how humans can utilize all the technology for good.”
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