Thirty Years of "Baby Steps"April 2016 - I just
finished teaching a four-week class called “The Journey from Drama to
Empowerment” at The heart
of the TED* program is learning how to shift from being a Victim (where life
happens to you) to being a Creator
(so life happens through you): find
your Vision, leverage the Passion it brings in order to take small, incremental
Baby Steps toward your Vision; then REPEAT. The
important thing is to keep taking those Baby Steps, to keep moving forward. I
say this as I look back on 30 years of taking Baby Steps and frankly, I am amazed by
where they have led. In the
Spring of 1986, while living in the This was still five years before the “world wide web” was open to the public,
of course, but it still made so much sense to me, I wondered who, if anyone,
was working on this global energy grid project and, since I was between jobs,
if they needed any help. I phoned
SIU-Carbondale, where Fuller had been working and spoke to one of his protégés
named Bill Perk, who in turn put me in touch with Peter Meisen; Peter had just
started a non-profit group called Global Energy Network Institute (GENI), in
Mainly, I
was searching for developments that were favorable to the Global Energy Grid
(via news clippings) but also for ways that it could be implemented locally. I
was only 33 years old but I was working in the newspaper business at that time,
so I had access to lots of news clippings. One of my
other heroes, John Naisbitt (author of Megatrends) had just completed a consulting
project on When I spoke to Florida Power, its new CEO, Dr. Jack Critchfield, told me
that the electric
utility
industry didn’t really understand what business it was in; i.e., where
its main value was -- from the customer's perspective. He had just
left United Telephone to run Florida Power so his thinking was
still fresh. “We think
we’re in the
energy-making business,” he said. “But really, electric utilities are in the
energy-moving business.” I never forgot this. A
few years later, in 1990, I took to heart the old adage that if you
want to change
the world, you need to start with yourself. A second marriage was
ending badly
and I finally accepted the fact that I was the cause. With my life in
shambles,
I surrendered to a 12-step program and my life began to improve.
Fortunately, the program has taught me many valuable lessons about
humility and generosity and it continues to inform my spiritual life
today. Also in 1990,
I wrote an essay called “Electric Utilities: A Changing Industry, An
Instrument of Change,”
based on the research I’d been able to do up to then. I
assumed that at some point, I would find the “Achilles heel” that made the
global energy grid unworkable and then I’d finally put this "hobby" aside -- but I hadn't found it yet. So, I
continued my correspondence with GENI and Peter Meisen and in July 1991, GENI
organized a three-day international conference in In 1994,
I felt that I had lived in It turned
out to be a good time to be in San Diego. In July 1995, Peter Meisen and GENI were organizing
the Buckminster Fuller Centennial event in In 1998,
a lot of interesting things took place and the pace picked up. For one, the
local catalog supply company where I worked was acquired by Home Depot
corporation. For another, I was asked through a friend to work on an interesting
freelance project: a local government contractor, SAIC Corp., was bidding on a contract
to manage the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and needed some
freelance writers with an energy background to help put the proposal together. Thanks to
this project, I was able to put into the proposal a sidebar story on “Facilitating
the Global Market for Renewable Energy” in order to support the “world wide web” of
renewable energy that was coming in the 21st Century. While
working on the SAIC project, I also came face-to-face with solar energy for the first time. When I
asked when it would be more readily available, I was told that solar was still
not a “mainstream” technology. When I asked how we would know when it was
“mainstream,” the friend (who knew about my new corporate employer) replied,
“When we can walk into Home Depot and buy it, solar will be mainstream.” I decided
to see if I could help make that happen and get solar panels into some Home
Depot stores. Also in 1998, I attended a week-long spiritual retreat in Portland that culminated in writing a vision statement and sacred covenant. My focus was to be “creating abundance through the wisdom of love” and I decided to give this effort the name “Loaves and Fishes,” after the gospel story. Later that year, American Express offered me a business charge account and although I did not have my own company yet, I accepted their offer in the name of “Loaves and Fishes” (which is still on my American Express gold card today). I also created a website called "TerraWatts" and started uploading all of the GENI and other documentation I had found up to that point, along with a daily news page on renewable energy issues (now a Twitter feed). After two
and a half years of friendship, I also proposed to the woman of my
dreams -- and she accepted! We moved into our new dream house (on
Wednesday) and got married in that house (the following Sunday), the week
before Christmas. Without her constant support, a big part of this story would be missing. And so the Baby Steps continued. By the
summer of 2000, the energy market manipulations of Enron Corp. had roiled the As
troubled as anyone by the events of 9/11, I wrote an essay on using the global
energy grid concept as a strategy to fight terrorism, by creating a “world that
works for everyone.” It was a
disruptive time, but we were able to generate enough solar installation business
in the rest of that year that the program was expanded to all 20 San Diego
stores in 2002 and to Orange County and Los Angeles stores in 2003. (Home
Depot’s in-store solar program is now a $200 million business, covering over a dozen states and hundreds of
stores and is operated by SunRun.) In
2005,
two of my solar co-workers and I learned that our employer planned to
close down the operation so we asked Home Depot to let us take it over
and they said yes. This is how my company Stellar Solar was born and within a
year, we were responsible for customer leads from all 20 Home Depot stores in In March
2007, Peter Meisen asked me to speak on behalf of GENI at a In the
meantime, GENI continued to attend high-level meetings like the World Energy
Congress, meetings of IEEE-Power Engineering Society and Rotary International Peace Symposium and was able to garner a host of
endorsements from important world leaders. In 2012,
Stellar Solar completed a solar energy installation for the In 2015,
I came across a book called The Power of TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic) by David Emerald and I began
to understand that the greatest barrier to having a “world that works for
everyone” is the false belief that we simply don’t deserve it. This false
belief is what keeps us locked inside the “Dreaded Drama Triangle” as the
book’s author put it. The antidote, he said, was to shift to Creator mode
and focus on what we want to see (instead of what we don't want to see). This
sounded so much like what Bucky Fuller had said in Critical Path so many years ago: “The things to do are: the things
that need doing: that you see
need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you
will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one
else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you…” Impressed
by The Power of TED* program, I decided to take their “deep dive”
training December 2015 and become a TED* practitioner. I’ve been able to lead several
successful workshops and classes on TED* principles since then. Which
brings us to this past week. On Wednesday, March 30th, In the words
of State Grid chairman, Liu Zhenya: "The global grid enables everyone to benefit from
clean energy and smart services that are abundant but cheap, and to enjoy more
comfortable life, more prosperous economy, more livable environment and more
harmonious society. We sincerely expect a reached consensus and strengthened
cooperation based on the principled of mutual trust and benefit, common
development, to pragmatically carry forward innovative development of the
global grid." The highlight
of the conference, which was attended by a host of energy and academic leaders,
was the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding by representatives from Japan,
Russia, China and Korea to begin with the deployment of an Asian Super Grid
that would connect the countries of Southeast Asia. As I
write this, it has been only two days since this all took place but over a dozen major news
stories about the global energy grid have already appeared in specialized publications, along with mainstream
media such as the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. We
will
see where things go from here but as for me, it feels like a 30-year
journey
“from Drama to Empowerment” has clearly opened up onto an entirely new
vista.As it says in the song, “The future’s so bright, we gotta wear
shades.” Michael
Powers Update: February 23, 2017 What a difference a year makes! Since this essay was first posted, some major new developments have taken place: 1) State Grid Corp. chairman Liu Zhenya retired from that post to become chairman of Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization (GEIDCO)
and spent much of 2016 meeting with various industry groups and
organizations around the world, gaining the support of the United
Nations, corporate grid builders Siemens and ABB, the World Business Sustainable Development Council and the International Hydropower Association. Other meetings held by chairman Liu are listed here. 2) GEIDCO named Dr. Steven Chu as its vice-chairman along with other key personnel. Dr. Chu served as served as the 12th United States Secretary of Energy from 2009 to 2013 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. 3) GEIDCO launched a new website which also published its overall strategic vision through 2050. The website also lists major endorsements from various industry experts and organizations. 4) In October 2016, Bloomberg Philanthropies entered into a new strategic partnership with GEIDCO, announced by chairman Mike Bloomberg. The environment team lead for Bloomberg.org is Antha Williams. 5) In association with the International Electrotechnical Commission's
(IEC) Market Strategy Board, GEIDCO published a major new White Paper
on the Global Energy Interconnection initiative, with support from the International Energy Agency and State Grid Corp. The white paper can be downloaded free here. 6) GEIDCO also announced its 2017 events and meeting schedule which can be downloaded here. Meetings include the 2017 International Conference on Global Energy Interconnection (April 20-12 in Beijing, China), a GEI European Seminar (June 21 in Paris), a GEI High Level Forum on GEI's 2nd Anniversary (Sept. 26 in Beijing) and the GEI African Seminar (Dec. 5-6 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia). Update: September 2020 2019 turned out to be a significant year for new developments in the status of the Global Energy Grid concept (aka Global Energy Interconnection). Here are some of the new steps that we were able to take: 1) June 2019 - Mr. Frank Qiankun Wang, Executive Director of GEIDCO North America Office, offered an affiliated membership in GEIDCO to both Stellar Solar and GENI, waiving the $10K annual fee; both offers were accepted.2) As a result of this new partnership, Peter Meisen of GENI and I (representing Stellar Solar) were invited to attend The Global Grid Forum on Sept. 10-11 in Vancouver. The event was co-sponsored by IEEE International and GEIDCO, among others. After his keynote address, I was able to meet GEIDCO chairman Liu Zhenya in person and he graciously agreed to autograph my copy of his book, "Global Energy Interconnection." I was also able to meet with journalist Peter Fairley, who wrote a major article on the conference for IEEE Spectrum magazine. 3) As a result of connections made in Vancouver, GEIDCO's Frank Wang and a partner visited San Diego for two days in October and I set up a series of meetings for them, introducing them to a number of high-tech organizations and businesses. This led to another new membership in GEIDCO being offered and accepted by the Climate Action Campaign. 4) This, in turn, led to an invitation from GEIDCO for me to attend the Global Energy Interconnection and China-Africa Energy and Power Conference which was held in Beijing on November 5-8. Another speaker at the conference was Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. As the date approached, this invitation was expanded to include a place on the agenda to give a brief presentation at the event and also serve on a Q&A panel. Due to the present worldwide coronavirus challenge, many conferences planned for 2020 were put on hold. However, it's clear that the global economic slump caused by COVID-19 will require some type of global economic stimulus to restart the global economy and many organizations and businesses believe that rebuilding the world's electric grids would be an ideal solution to this economic problem. As the U.S. election in November 2020 grows closer, it's clear that a great deal of work remains to be done. However, it's equally clear that re-building the world's electricity grids is the key to new economic development (JOBS) and a new level of global prosperity... "a world that works for everyone." Empower Points TerraWatts Global Energy Network Institute |