How climate activists can help get things built

09/20/23 • 61 min

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In this episode, organizer Jeff Ordower of 350.org talks about how the environmental movement can shift its focus from blocking what it doesn’t like to building what it does.

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David Roberts

It is a much-discussed fact that the environmental movement cut its teeth blocking things — mines, pipelines, power plants, and what have you. It is structured around blocking things. Habituated to it.

However, what we need to do today is build, build, build — new renewable energy, batteries, transmission lines, and all the rest of the infrastructure of the net-zero economy. Green groups are as often an impediment to that as they are a help.

So how can the green movement help things get built? How can it organize around saying yes?

Recently, the activist organization 350.org hired Jeff Ordower, a 30-year veteran organizer with the labor and queer movements, in part to help figure these questions out. As director of North America for 350, Ordower will help lead a campaign focused on utilities standing in the way of clean energy.

I talked with him about organizing around building instead of blocking, the right way to go after utilities, the role green groups can play in connecting vulnerable communities with IRA money, and what it means to focus on power.

All right then, with no further ado, Jeff Ordower of 350, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jeff Ordower

Thank you so much, David, for having me. I'm excited to be here.

David Roberts

Okay, well, I want to get to 350 and climate activism in a second, but first I'd like to just hear a little bit about your history in activism, which is mainly on the labor side. And what I'd really like to hear, and this is probably like a whole pot of its own, but insofar as you can summarize, I'd love to hear from your perspective when you were working as an organizer in labor. Looking over the fence at climate activism, what was your sort of take or critique like from the labor perspective? What did you think climate activism was doing right or wrong?

Or what did you think you could bring to climate activism from the labor side?

Jeff Ordower

Yeah, I both did labor organizing and I come out of base-building community organizing. I actually come out of the notorious ACORN was where I spent the first half of my organizing.

David Roberts

The late, lamented —

Jeff Ordower

Yeah. So it's very similar. But I started in labor, moved to ACORN very quickly, and then as ACORN was destroyed, both helped to start new community organizing efforts. And then lately, over the last few years have been involved with labor organizing. And it's interesting because I really started tracking what was happening in climate around Copenhagen, which was 2008, 2009, at the same time where ACORN was going through its difficulties. And we were trying to figure out what to build and how to build it and how to build something that was more intersectional. So I was — the personal piece of my story is I was working in St. Louis, which is where I'm from, and part of what we do as community organizers is think about how do we challenge the local power structure?

It's about power and it's about how we build power for folks who don't have the power that they need and help collectively do that. And St. Louis is, like many midwestern towns, is kind of a branch office for many Fortune 500 companies these days. So the most powerful players in the region were coal companies. Peabody Coal was the largest private sector coal company in the world. Arch coal was the second largest in North America.

Both were headquartered in the St. Louis region because it's at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. So, as the only Fortune 500 company in the city limits of St. Louis that was getting tax breaks, there were lots of reasons to fight Peabody and so started on a campaign about that, but there was also this tremendous excitement that was happening. So we were both at the beginning of the Obama administration. There was a time of great hope. For those of us who —

David Roberts

I recall vaguely, vaguely distantly.

Jeff Ordower

Well that's interesting. So, for climate folks, they're like, "Oh, this is not a time of g...

In this episode, organizer Jeff Ordower of 350.org talks about how the environmental movement can shift its focus from blocking what it doesn’t like to building what it does.

(PDF transcript)

(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

So how can the green movement help things get built? How can it organize around saying yes?

All right then, with no further ado, Jeff Ordower of 350, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Jeff Ordower

Thank you so much, David, for having me. I'm excited to be here.

David Roberts

Or what did you think you could bring to climate activism from the labor side?

Jeff Ordower

Yeah, I both did labor organizing and I come out of base-building community organizing. I actually come out of the notorious ACORN was where I spent the first half of my organizing.

David Roberts

The late, lamented —

Jeff Ordower

David Roberts

I recall vaguely, vaguely distantly.

Jeff Ordower

Well that's interesting. So, for climate folks, they're like, "Oh, this is not a time of g...

Previous Episode

How to accelerate rooftop solar & household batteries in the US

How can the US make it easier, faster, and cheaper for homeowners to install rooftop solar? In this episode, Sunrun CEO Mary Powell shares her vision for boosting not only residential solar, but other forms of residential electrification too.

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David Roberts

In Australia, one out of three households has solar panels on the roof. In the US, it’s one out of 25. That probably has something to do with the fact that in the US, rooftop solar is twice as expensive, twice the hassle, and takes twice as long to get installed.

Why is the process so broken? And what could be done to make it smoother and faster?

To discuss these and related matters, I went to the source: Mary Powell, the CEO of Sunrun, the nation’s largest residential rooftop solar company — or more accurately, the nation’s largest residential electrification company.

Before taking the top spot at Sunrun, Powell spent more than 20 years in leadership at Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest power utility and a nationally recognized pioneer in clean energy. Sunrun brought her on to help the company move into products — batteries, EV chargers, virtual power plants — that were once thought the province of utilities.

I talked with her about how to speed up the rooftop solar interconnection process, the role of net metering, Sunrun’s move into vehicle charging and VPPs, and the future of distributed energy.

All right, then, with no further ado, Mary Powell of Sunrun. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Mary Powell

Oh, my pleasure. I was looking forward to chatting with you.

David Roberts

Mary, I'm looking at my notes here and I have — let me just count real quick — one million questions to ask you. So, we're going to have to move quick here because I've got so much. But just by way of framing, I was in Australia recently and was listening to them talk about their rooftop solar success story there, the sort of rooftop solar miracle. So the US is at, I think, something like 4% rooftop solar penetration. And Australia is up around 30%, 35%, something like that. One out of every three households, mainly because it is two to three times less expensive and way, way, way faster to get on your roof there.

Most of what I want to talk about are in different forms. How can the US process be made cheaper and faster? That's kind of, I think, the theme of our discussion here today. But before we get to the reality of why things take so long, let's talk a little bit about perception. So I guess Sunrun is now the biggest residential solar company in the world — I know, in the US.

Mary Powell

Yeah, certainly in the US. Yeah, we're the largest, not just residential solar company, but we are the largest in the combination of solar-plus-storage. So we really see ourselves as a clean energy lifestyle company, and we're really well positioned to meet customers wherever they are on their clean energy journey and help them transform their lives to something that's more affordable, certainly something that's cleaner. So we have solar, we have storage, we have sophisticated electric panels, we have EV chargers, and of course, we have that amazing partnership with Ford on the F-150 that you can use to back up your home.

David Roberts

Going to get into all that later.

Mary Powell

Good.

David Roberts

But I assume as part of what you do, you do a lot of consumer research, a lot of talking to homeowners. So the first thing I'm interested in really is what do US homeowners say they want when they come to you? Why are they now installing rooftop solar and batteries? Why are they doing it? Or perhaps even more to the point, what do they say about why they're not doing it? What are the sort of pain points you hear ...

Next Episode

The campaign for public power in Maine

In this episode, Maine State Senator Nicole Grohoski discusses an upcoming ballot measure that gives Maine voters the opportunity to replace the state’s unpopular for-profit utilities with a nonprofit public utility.

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(Active transcript)

Text transcript:

David Roberts

Maine’s two big investor-owned power utilities — Central Maine Power and Versant Power — are not very popular. In fact, they boast among the lowest customer satisfaction scores of any utilities in the country, perhaps because their customers face some of the nation’s highest rates, suffer more and longer outages than average Americans, and pay more to connect rooftop solar than ratepayers in almost any other state.

This November, Mainers will vote on a radical alternative: a ballot measure to replace the two for-profit utilities with a single nonprofit utility that would be called Pine Tree Power. Maine and many other states already have lots of small nonprofit municipal utilities, but this would mark the first time a whole state with existing private utilities decided to make them public en masse.

Naturally the utilities are opposed and have dumped $27 million and counting into a campaign to crush the measure; supporters have mustered just under $1 million.

To discuss this David vs. Goliath fight, I contacted one of its champions, Democratic state Senator Nicole Grohoski. We discussed why she thinks a public utility would perform better, what it would do for clean energy, how it would be governed, and what other states can learn from the effort.

With no further ado, Maine State Senator Nicole Grohoski. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Nicole Grohoski

Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be with you today.

David Roberts

I am super excited to talk about this issue. There's a lot of ins and outs I want to cover, but maybe let's just start with a brief history of this thing. So the idea here is, as I said in the intro, to replace Maine's two big investor-owned utilities, Central Maine Power and Versant Power, with a single publicly owned main utility called Pine Tree Power. Tell me who first had that idea? Where did it first pop up? I know it was legislation and then it got vetoed. Just tell us a little bit about how we got to where we are now.

Nicole Grohoski

The history is really interesting, and I'll try to not spend too much time on it, but I think it's really important to start with the reality here in Maine as a backdrop. So a couple of things that are important to know for listeners is that we, as Mainers, find that our electricity isn't really affordable or reliable and our utilities aren't trustworthy. So we have, for many years running now, the worst customer satisfaction in the country, some of the highest rates in the country for electricity, and those just keep going up. We have experienced a 20% increase this summer, with another increase coming in January.

And we also have the most frequent outages in the country. And there are a couple of other reliability metrics that we're not doing so well on, including the length of outages and how long it takes to restore power. So basically what we see here in Maine is that the status quo of these for-profit multinational corporations is just not working for us. About a tenth of our residents in Maine received disconnection notices earlier this year because they just couldn't afford to pay their bills. And it's not working for companies or big corporations that really rely on low cost and reliable electricity to compete.

So that's kind of the background. So a number of us were wondering, does it have to be this way? Is there an alternative to worst of the worst? We are Maine, we are very proud and independent, and we like to be leading, but this is not the way that we wanted to be leading. So there was a lot of grassroots pressure. In 2017 we had a big storm, and the power was out for days. But at the same time, there was a billing fiasco, which resulted in billing errors for over 100,000 customers, which is in a state of 1.3 million people, that's a very big percent.

So there was a lot of pressure, a lot of phone calls to legisla...