More than 200 Innovators Kick Off Next Agenda’s Clean Energy Challenge. For those who could not make it to the kickoff to Next Agenda’s Clean Energy Challenge, we thought you would appreciate a brief report out on what was a hugely successful day. More than 200 experts and innovators from diverse fields gathered in San Francisco’s Presidio in late September for the day-long working meeting. It was a terrific turnout: roughly half those invited showed up to help start the ambitious but necessary effort to figure out how America could get all its electricity from clean energy as quickly as possible.
For now here’s the quick summary for insiders like you of what took place: The morning focused on the technical and engineering side of the challenge – just what would the final technical solution look like assuming we get there by 2020? We had a range of scientific experts – like serial entrepreneur Saul Griffith, professor Cristina Archer, investor Sunil Paul – stimulate the group with short talks which then led to discussions in working groups around key technologies like wind, solar and key topics like the grid. The initial general conclusion from the morning was that getting America’s electricity fully off carbon and onto clean energy by 2020 is doable – but extremely ambitious given where we are now.The entire day was captured by six camera crews so that those who could not attend, or who join the effort later, can understand the framing and get up-to-speed on the beginning of these important conversations. The video of the main talks, small group discussions, and close to 100 side interviews are getting professionally edited in a web-friendly format and will be released over the fall on a completely re-designed Next Agenda website to launch. We hope this plethora of video and these ideas will reach larger web audiences in what will be an important fall for climate and energy issues with Copenhagen and the fight over the US energy bill.
The afternoon focused on how we could get there in such an accelerated fashion by looking at the non-technical yet critical social side of the equation and drawing off experts and innovators in politics, finance, business, media, etc. This part of the conversation was stimulated by strategists like 1Sky Founder Gillian Caldwell, Venture Capitalist Bill Green, Californian Public Utilities Commissioner Dian Grueneich, and Moveon’s Eli Pariser. A form of open space led to brainstorming of about 40 specific ideas on how to make breakthroughs towards the goal, of which about 10 went into deeper group work, such as one to launch a national contest to develop model green cities.
The day ended with a synthesis of the work from both morning and afternoon, emotional discussion on the need to commit to such big swing efforts, and a look at next steps. No one expected to figure out the answer to such an audacious and complex Clean Energy Challenge in one day. But in one day we did meet all our goals for setting this longer six-month project in motion and transitioning these efforts into the web.
The web holds the potential to scale up participation with numbers well beyond the confines of any physical gathering, to allow complex problems to be broken down and worked on in parallel processes, and to allow meaningful collaboration between people from afar. This is the next big step for Next Agenda, and the next frontier in solving complex public problems: linking face-to-face collaboration with the new tools of collaboration online.
Our new website will begin to introduce some new tools, with more under development. We will explain more later. For now, we will just mention several categories of needs that you may be interested in helping us solve in the weeks ahead.
We will need a larger number of energy experts and innovators in many fields to engage the web tools when they are ready. If you could not make the gathering, there will be online opportunities.
Some of you might be interested in the business side of this effort. Next Agenda is a startup business with a plan to scale and grow that is up to the scale of the problems we face. If you want to know more, contact jim.kiles@nextagenda.com.
