Is What I am Doing to Reduce GHG Emissions Enough?

This is a comment posted as a link under the energyblogs.com post "Please pass Al Gore a Valium -- and better make it a double," (please hit red hyperlinks), by Warren Causey in his Reinventing the U.S. Utility Blog.

First posted on the GMH Blog on April 9th, 2009.

After an illuminating must read interchange under said post, Alan Belcher inquired:

Jose,

Since you share my opposition to the "wait and see" view, may I ask exactly what, in practical terms, have you done or are currently doing to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions?

Thank you Alan for the opportunity to summarize what I have been doing for quite some time. What I have been doing I believe would help reduce GHG emissions. I have been trying to help the power industry become sustainable.

My initial aim was to help the power industry of my country, the Dominican Republic, become sustainable. But, in the process, through a lot of research, that got me into areas such as systemic thinking, I learned that most of the influence to change it need to come from outside, especially the US. Thus I am a researcher that in the process became aware that we need to protect the environment.

As it happens, the solution whole that emerged to solve the Dominican problem became exactly the same for the global power industry. I have been working on the development of what evolve and emerged as the electricity without price control (EWPC) basic innovation framework, as you can see from the EWPC Blog here on enegyblogs.com. That framework is an extension of the research that, the late M.I.T. professor, Fred C. Schweppe and his colleagues integrated into the book Spot Pricing of Electricity.

EWPC is a technology neutral market architecture and design paradigm, architected to replace the investor owned utilities (IOUs) paradigm or framework. Technology neutral means that it works fine for both fossil fuels and renewable energy, so it is a framework that without any doubt helps to transition smoothly to clean energy.

The IOUs paradigm has a strong attraction force to fossil fuels, as they are supply side utility oriented, centered on an obsolete business model of winning rate cases to the regulator. That business model is the main barrier to sustainability.

The EWPC paradigm is neutral on the supply side and the demand side. But, as the demand side is highly undeveloped, most value can be added by developing the resources of the demand side, to enable business model innovations, which in turns breaks the strong barriers of the IOUs paradigm against renewable energy and energy efficiency.

Back in September 2007, the first article of the EWPC Blog was EWPC Superiority in Carbon Emission Reductions." I introduced it with "A comparison between the power industry vertical integration and electricity without price controls (EWPC) non-trivial paradigms, will show that EWPC should be adopted in the new US Energy Bill, as part of a new deal, like the one of the 1930s, to get the world power industry in a superior development path."

Since then, I have written more than 160 articles or post on many views of the EWPC framework. Please browse them by searching within the EWPC Blog. Please also be aware that the blogs themselves on energyblogs.com only return the last 10 entries, which it seems to be a software bug. To get around it, to see a "More entries" link at the bottom of the page, you can simply search for EWPC within the EWPC Blog itself.

There is not time to waste to get the message to the public that GHG emission need to be reduced as soon as possible. In that sense, I just hope that I have been doing is enough.

Thanks once again for the opportunity to tell other readers what I have been doing.

Regards,

José Antonio