Vermont Environmental Consortium

And

BRATTLEBORO REFORMER

August 7, 2007
Allan Baer's Bold Proposal Challenges Vermont to Lead
by
Daniel Hecht

My conversations with Allan Baer require a notepad on which he scribbles diagrams of ideas, schemes, scenarios, instutional structures. By the time we finish our tea, the paper is covered with boxes representing, say, U.N. aid programs, international banks, nations, regional energy and education authorities, and other entities. The boxes are linked by lines and arrows, circled, filled with text and figures. These are complicated concepts.

Allan is soft-spoken yet intense in a professorial way, with dark hair and trim beard starting to go white; he could be a separated-at-birth twin to Robin Williams. Though he lives in Chelsea, he’s spent half his time in the Galapagos Islands during the last six years, working on a project to build wind and solar energy plants that will produce about half the islands’ electricity.

He’s the proverbial “big thinker.” When he was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, he says, “People told me I had delusions of grandeur, because I’d say ‘I’m going to do something about this. I’m going to solve the world’s problems.’”

For the last 30 years, as educator, electrical engineer, policy consultant, he’s been doing just that, focusing on the way societal, energy-related, and economic factors affect each other: what “habits” of behavior and economics shape energy use, how our energy habits affect behavior and economics.

Allan worked with the Clinton White House for the Millennium Council, created to envision a future in which the remote parts of the world moved onto the ladder of development through education, high-tech, and renewable energy development. He built the first remote telecenter, using computers and satellites and new methods of teaching, to bring education to remote areas of Uganda, Tanzania, and Bolivia.

“That’s where I first earned my ‘international notoriety,’” he admits wryly.

In the Galapagos, his company SolarQuest contracted to develop residents’ capacity to maintain renewable energy installations, integrate them into a rustic power grid, and study their impact.

The course he recently taught at Middlebury College drew upon a lifetime of such experiences. The course was entirely problem- and practice-based; the problem he assigned was to determine whether 1% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), invested in remedies for global warming, could indeed stabilize carbon emissions. One percent was the estimate projected in the famous Stern Report on global warming, released last year.

Applying data from the Galapagos micro-grid, the students used Ecuador as their subject. They studied energy supply, employment, health, GDP, investment, debt, natural resources, GHG emissions, etc., modeling hundreds of interdependent variables.

That’s a huge challenge. Change the cost of energy, and you change the disposable income of workers and company profits, impacting employment trends, investment patterns, and so on. To study these feedback loops requires agile computer software that can calculate how changes in any one parameter percolate through the system, and project models of various resulting scenarios.

They used the Threshold 21 (T21) software developed by the Millennium Institute as a tool for national policy planning, one of a new breed of holistic systems-analysis programs. Using data from Ecuador’s electrical sector, Allan’s Middlebury students found that investing 1% of the GDP yearly in carbon mitigation would not be nearly enough to stabilize GHG emissions in 10 years. Try 30%.

That’s discouragingly expensive. But, undaunted, thinking big, Allan has a plan. He proposes to create the Renewable Nations Consortium (RNC), a resource for countries and regions seeking to get on the track to renewable energy and carbon neutrality. Using tools like T21, the RNC would study a participating nation’s current energy generation/use profile, project the effects of business as usual, look at the social and economic implications of developing renewable energy, and develop viable financing tools to make it happen. A few million dollars should get the project rolling.

Now hold onto your hat: Allan Baer wants Vermont to become the first demonstration project for the Renewable Nations Consortium methodology. We’re small enough, a bit insular, energy-dependent, to test its feasibility and work out the bugs.

The RNC pilot study would run an analysis of Vermont’s energy portfolio, greenhouse gas emissions, economy, jobs, social parameters, renewables potentials, finances. Then design the transition – socially, technologically, financially, organizationally – to sustainability and carbon neutrality. If the analytical, institutional, and economic model works here, it can then be replicated in bigger and more complex places.

We’d be guinea pigs in a huge social, technological, and economic experiment. For starters, we’d invest major bucks in renewable energy and efficiency, immediately, and we’d redirect our economic development priorities.

It’s an outrageously bold proposal. But, in fact, the technology is already here, the need is obvious, the data’s just waiting to be modeled. The real question is whether we’re willing to be guinea pigs.

Of course, as Allan Baer sees it, that’s a semantic issue. A better word for “guinea pigs” might be “leaders.”

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For information on T21 and other national planning tools, contact Millennium Institute at www.millennium-institute.org, (703) 841-0048.

Daniel Hecht is a novelist and executive director of Vermont Environmental Consortium. For more information on any Green Grapevine topic, contact vec@norwich.edu.

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