Episode Description:

First is the importance of taking initiative.

Rich Sonstelie, Retired CEO of Puget Sound Energy,

- People worry about being noticed for mistakes but they forget that they also need to be noticed for successes as well. Always ask questions and take on new challenges

Jackie Drumheller, former Dir. Of Sustainability at Alaska Airlines

- Take initiative. If you don't reach out beyond the resume process, what's the point? That's not showing initiative to get things done. You have to be a self-starter, be independent and take initiative.

Finding the right balance between taking initiative and innovations.

Shilpa Patel, currently of ClimateWorks, spent many years at the World Bank

- Somehow, the World Bank was very innovative on the inside. It's easy to say the pace of change is slow inside of a large, bureaucratic institution. But the pace of change to adopt new ideas in the market, isn't that fast on the outside either.

Rich Sonstelie

- Utilities faced de-regulation as a challenge to their business models in the 1990's and 2000. Today they face EV, batteries, and solar panels as disruption to their business models. Embrace it rather than feel threatened by it. There is so much opportunity.

Steve Klein, Former CEO of Snohomish PUD

- Business model needs to change from volumetric charge to a fee for service - service for shipping your electrons from your solar panel to your neighbor across the street. Just like the doughnut van rides on top of the roadway that is built off of taxes.

The second point is systems thinking. If everything’s connected, where do you start?

Karen Wayland, Senior Policy Advisor to Nancy Pelosi

- The Quadrennial Energy Review was successful because it saw the connections. We looked at the energy system and how it connected to the non-energy topics. People bored with energy found the energy/water nexus fascinating. Or were really engaged with the cybersecurity issues.

Jameson Morrell, Sustainability Intelligence at Jacobs Engineering

- The systems are connected but you can't impact the whole system at once. You impact the part that you're touching and work on the issues that are material to that part. From there, you trace the red threads through the systems

Interconnected systems create implementation challenges thought!

Brewster Earle, former President of Energy Services at Comfort Systems

- The handoff is critical - from the architects to the mechanical contractor and then to the operators. There are cracks in each transfer of knowledge. Someone needs to unify it. That person can be an Owner's Commissioning Agent, when constructing a new building

Sabrina Watkins, former Head of Sustainability, ConocoPhillips

- Over 300 Oil & Gas companies, some focus on mining and extraction (upstream), some on just the refining (midstream), and others on marketing and consumer sales (downstream), and still others do all three. Each have a different definition for sustainability and work towards slightly different goals. Coming to agreement as an industry can be extremely difficult, beyond the broad strokes of the concept.

Steve Klein helped bring it all together

- We train electrical engineers, accountants, financers, lawyers to work in utilities. But who's going to figure out a tidal project, where don't even know who the regulator will be? Someone has to take the lead and someone has to have the skill set to pull the project together. That was the motivation in the creation of the WWU Energy Institute.

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