franknews

Vishaan Chakrabarti, Part 1

by Vishaan Chakrabarti

May 10, 2018

This interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of PAU, was conducted and condensed by frank news. This is part one of an ongoing conversation between frank and PAU.

Okay, let’s begin. Would you introduce yourself?

I’m Vishaan Chakrabarti. I’m an architect and city planner, trained in both. I founded my practice, Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, or PAU for short. I also teach at Columbia.

Then there's this third nebulous thing I do out in the clouds, which is lecture, write, or talk about issues I think are pressing to our field, that don't necessarily neatly fit into either practice or teaching. I wrote a book a few years ago called Country of Cities, I’m thinking about a second book right now. That’s always a third line of activity beyond practice and teaching.

What does planning as a profession look like?

It’s evolved. City planning dates back to ancient China and ancient Greece. It goes back millennia. It’s always had poetic and pragmatic aspects to it. A lot of Roman cities had different ways in which they felt humanity related to the cosmos, and would lay out cities according to that. Similarly with China, in which cities laid out in Cardinal directions, were related to the way in which people interpreted their relationship to deities. City planning has a very, very long tradition.

If you go to a city like Rome, you'll see layers and layers of planning that happened under Pope Sixtus VI, and in more modern times, axis that have been cut through the cities, and that ended up influencing post-enlightenment city planning. Haussmann and ultimately Robert Moses. There is a lineage. And all of that lineage was largely top-down. City planning was always thought to be a somewhat authoritarian enterprise until Jane Jacobs came along. She was really the person who revolutionized this idea of cities being planned by the communities that live in them, and not having top-down structures that would tell them where highways would go.

There are both good sides and bad sides to that story. Unfortunately, too often in city planning education, and even among lay people, there is this sense that the story is all good. The reason that it is not all good is that it has put us in a certain kind of paralysis, particularly in the United States.

There are questions Jacobs never answered. For instance, how do you build big infrastructure under that model? Jacobs did not give us any kind of tool kit for how to fix Penn Station, or the subway lines we need. Because some of that takes governmental planning and agency. It is not all going to be done by communities.

Jacobs also never answered questions about how there are a lot of communities that don’t want people of color living in them. Are you supposed to listen to the community in that instance? Where that really plays out is the affordable housing battle, and through federal housing guidelines. Communities are supposed to take their share of affordable housing, and most cities actually fight that.

Look at what's happening in California today. Jerry Brown tried to pass this thing that said, if a certain neighborhood is within proximity to a mass transit line, we need to build density there, and we need to build a certain amount of affordable housing there. And it got defeated largely by a progressive state legislature because of this idea that communities would lose control.

To me, it's not necessary to come down on one side of that argument or the other,

but to understand that it's an argument — that this idea of community control isn't the be all end all in terms of answering every problem we might have.

Where that really comes to the tip of the spear is climate change. Climate change is completely changing the way we think about, not just city planning, but landscape planning, regional planning, how we are stewards of the planet. A lot of that stewardship requires an adult way of discussing what is rational, in terms of using that land, and often flies in the face of direct community control.

For instance, building density around transit stops, that's an easy one. When Katrina happened, people said, why should we rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward? It’s an area in harm's way. Yet no one seems to ask that question about suburban subdivisions in California that are in harm's way of wildfires or landslides. Or Fire Island. I've seen entire houses washed away in the Hamptons. If you go to a lot of those California hillside communities, in the wealthy parts of Berkeley, or Oakland, what it costs to provide water or fire up there, are not rational land use patterns.

How does one balance this idea? That it should not be all top-down authoritarian, yet we're not going to get at a lot of the problems associated with climate change unless we have a more rational way of using land. That is particularly true in a world that's urbanizing very rapidly.

You have some 200,000 people a day moving to cities, mainly in the Global South. If all of those folks choose to live the way a few hundred million rich people choose to live in the West, the world is screwed. The numbers are really quite clear on this. So, I think this is part of why I do what I do.

I think a lot of people in the affiliated fields, like architecture, planning, landscape architecture, environmentalism, are driven to go to work every day by this set of concerns. Again, going back to the ancients, how humans design habitation has an enormous impact on the planet, and on every ecosystem. We are at this inflection point, and it’s interesting that Jacobs didn’t really have a good answer to this.

It’s interesting because Jane Jacobs was a contemporary of Rachel Carson. You wish the two of them had gotten together. You can’t protect nature without a sustainable way for 7 billion people to occupy the planet. That 7 billion is going to be 10 billion by 2100. Those two things have to sit in balance. We have to find a way to balance the natural world and the physical world. That is at the heart of what good city planning is about.

Do you think there’s been enough progress since Jacobs’ book came out?

I think things have progressed. Certainly because technology has allowed a lot more communication within the community, and communities are much more interconnected than they used to be, and can organize around ideas in very important ways. People don't really believe it, but Friends of The Highline really did start as a grassroots organization. The notion that people can get together, volunteer their time, be concerned about their physical environment, and get things done, is very valid.

The larger issues since Jacobs wrote, is not so much at the community level, where I think people have been doing what communities do, which is organize around things that they’re passionate about.

The real problem is at the academic and pedagogical levels. I think city planning departments have largely become a mess.

They don't know what they’re about anymore. That's changing slowly, but it was a field that really went into doldrums in the 70’s and 80’s because all the stuff that Jacobs fought against. Robert Moses, urban renewal, all of that was seen as politically incorrect. People couldn't be city planners as you would traditionally think of them, physical planners: blocks are here or there, highways, transit systems.

Jacobs completely cut the feet out underneath that paradigm. The problem is nothing replaced it.

When I went to school, I studied planning before I studied architecture, and I was interested in physical planning, and that is part of why I went into architecture because I had to keep pushing the idea of understanding the physical environment, it was really not PC. I went to MIT for City Planning, and I can’t remember how many people were in our class, but I would say maybe 15-20% were studying physical planning because it was considered verboten.

Is the profession coming out of that now?

Yes and no. Our firm just won a big master planning project for the city of New York,

and what I find increasingly is that either architecture or landscape architecture firms are actually commissioned with the big city planning tasks because there are very few “city planning” firms.

You have to approach some of these questions a differently in terms of how you professionally get city planning done.

Do you think academia is still stuck? Do people think it is not PC to be a planner?

Again, it is changing. For example at Columbia, there is a built environment portion in the program now. I think things are changing.

What you notice between the architecture and planning students, is most planning students are not taught to be speculative.

What I mean by that is, in architecture and landscape architecture, it is still very common that you’re given a site and asked, what would you do? You are asked to speculate. But planning students are taught to ask, what does the community think, what does the data show you? Those are all incredibly valid questions, in fact that has permeated architecture and landscape architecture as well.

Most students work on a research basis rather than think they can invent the world on a blank piece of paper. Speculation, in terms of design-thinking, is what allows us to imagine a future that doesn't exist. And that is incredibly important.

Think about bike lanes in New York City. When the bike lanes and Citi Bike were first introduced, people thought Janette Sadik-Khan was crazy. I don’t know what the numbers are right now, but the modal share is pretty high.

Look at places like Brooklyn Navy Yard. It has 7,000 jobs and it's 25 minutes away from the nearest subway station. I think Citi Bike has created a whole new modality of how people move around a place like New York City. That to me is speculation, it’s saying, what if...

I’m not interested in autonomous vehicles for the technology as much as thinking, how can we design the streets differently? If AV’s did learn how not to hit people, could you design a street completely different? In terms of the curbs, parking, how the curb cuts for wheelchairs. Think about New York City two days after a snowstorm, it’s just a nasty mess. That has a lot to do with the way our streets are designed. Keeping pedestrians safe from vehicles operated by people. Those forms of speculation are incredibly important because we have to design better cities, because we have to attract people to live in denser circumstances around mass transit, because we clearly have the data that shows those people have a much lower carbon footprint than their suburban counterparts. We have to create a much higher quality of life in our cities than we have today. That's going to require a lot of intervention.

There's a lot of data telling us that Uber and Lyft are actually increasing the amount of traffic we're seeing in our cities. I’m a huge mass transit advocate. People ask, why do you need mass transit if you have Uber? Do you know what Uber is doing? Both in terms of traffic, and in terms of air pollution?

We have to continue investment in mass transit. It's just fundamentally inefficient to use a 12- foot lane for vehicles with one or two people in them. When we can carry hundreds of people in that same lane.

We have to be careful with technology. Technologists are interesting. They think because they've invented something super cool that it’s a panacea. And oftentimes it can make things a hundred times worse. We redesigned the world around the internal combustion engine in the 20th century, largely to very poor effect. Our cities were much more interesting, wonderful places to be, pre-internal-combustion-engine world. There's a reason gobs of tourists go to Rome every year and not to Houston.

You really can't build very interesting cities if everything is based on the turning radius of an 18 wheeler.

Becoming Prosumers Of Energy

by Ruth Santiago

February 16, 2019

This interview with Ruth Santiago, a lawyer who works with community and environmental groups in southeastern Puerto Rico, was conducted and condensed by frank news.

How do you think of energy democracy?

Energy democracy stems from the effects of energy coloniality and how certain jurisdictions have been used for extractive and exploitative practices and have become sacrifice zones for operations that create great wealth for other people over time.

How did you get involved in this work?

I got involved because of proximity. We have this saying in one of the groups I work with that says, "The environment unites us and identifies us." Not just the subtropical dry forest, and mangrove forest, and salt flats, and offshore cays, but also things that impact that environment – they also unite us and define us.

I was raised to a certain extent in Salinas. I spent my formative, adolescent years here. I was born in the South Bronx, my parents were part of the return migration to Southeastern Puerto Rico. They were from a municipality that's a little bit further east of Salinas, but very similar in many ways in terms of being part of the sugarcane monoculture, a high concentration of Afro descendent people, and real situations of struggle and survival. They decided to return to Puerto Rico when I was 12. I was raised along this Southeastern coast on and off from that time. One of my memories of growing up here as an adolescent was the Aguirre Power Complex being built in the early 70s. It was something that came to us. We did not come to the nuisances. Nuisance was built where we are.

The government of Puerto Rico tried Operation Bootstrap. Rapid industrialization and a very intense industrialization program that affected Guayama with industry coming in. First, light manufacturing and then the petrochemical industry. Then, pharmaceuticals, which are still very present. These energy plants were meant to serve more than the communities. These big, central station, fossil fuel plants were meant to provide energy to those heavy industrial uses that consumed and required a lot of energy.

What we saw in two places in Southern Puerto Rico, one here in Salinas and the other over in Guayanilla in Southwestern Puerto Rico, was how the power plants were set up very close to the petrochemical industries. We had the Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petro Refinery. Aguirre Power Complex was basically in service to that and other heavy industrial users. People were told they would get jobs. They said, "Oh, we're going to generate upwards of 2,000 jobs." People were a little skeptical and concerned about how that would impact the possibility of safe fishing at least. They were told it would not be impacted. Ultimately, what happened was Phillips did not generate anything close to 2,000 jobs and folded after a few decades, but did leave a terrible legacy of contamination to air, water, and land. People lost a lot of their ability to do the subsistence fishing even.

Aguirre Power Complex came in stages. They had two power plants in one. In 1972, they set up what was known as the Thermoelectric Plant. Again, people were told they’d get jobs from this. Again, the plant does not hire many local residents. It’s estimated there was 20-25% local hires, and the rest came from all over, anywhere but Salinas and Guayama. The same thing with the Combined Cycle units, because as I said, it's two plants in one.

At the dawn of the 20th century Puerto Rico got its first coal-burning power plant and the only coal-burning power plant that was established by AES. They're a Delaware corporation with their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but they do business all over the world. In November 2002, they started a brand-new, so called clean-coal power plant. It's been disastrous. Again, people were told, this is going to be beneficial in terms of stimulating the local economy and bringing down the electric rates. None of that happened. What has happened is that people are getting more and more exposed to pollutants and heavy metals and public health is being impacted.

Your work seems two-fold. One is dedicated to producing energy that is actually clean and that will not leave a legacy of toxicity. The other is in trying to invert the power structure of how that energy is produced and sold. Correct?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Can you talk about your work in both areas and how they come together?

We have done a lot of resistance work, and a lot of work to promote community alternatives on energy and sustainability issues. There's a long history of activism here. I became more active in energy issues around 2003. We started participating in the monitoring of the Aguirre Power Complex and how it impacts public health, air quality, and water. Both the sea water and the potable water. The only source of potable water here is the South Coast Aquifer. That was monitoring.

We started participating in different administrative proceedings with a group called Comite Dialogo Ambiental, the Environmental Dialogue Committee. Then we participated in proceedings against PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, but also the AES Corporation.

I've done both administrative proceedings and litigation in courts related to different impacts from those plants, and most recently a company called Excelerate Energy out of Texas was proposing to build what they call an offshore gas port and a marine natural gas pipeline, that we just defeated. It would have been running right through the middle of Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and impacted corals and seagrass beds and offshore cays and all kinds of things, and the ability of people to do subsistence fishing and ecotourism and otherwise just use and be in the environment.

We've done a huge amount of work with respect to the coal combustion residuals or coal ash waste related to the AES Power Plant. The coal ash waste is a concentration of heavy metals, toxic heavy metals that were being spread all over, and is now being accumulated at the AES Power Plant site in Guayama, Puerto Rico.

That summarizes the energy resistance work that we've done. In terms of going beyond resistance and seeking to build the solutions and the alternatives, we've done a lot of environmental education, both with Comite Dialogo Ambiental Inc. and another group, an umbrella organization called, Eco Development Initiative.

Prior to the hurricane in conjunction with IDEBAJO and a community board called Junta Comunitaria del Poblado Coqui, in Salinas, we helped start what is known as the Coqui Solar project. It's a community solar initiative. It was started with lots of workshops and consultation and collaboration with professors, like Efrain O’Neill from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, which is the technical campus here.

It was, for years, before the hurricane, quite a struggle to get people to understand, to want to move towards solar energy, especially rooftop solar communities. It was going very slow. We were certainly doing the education work and the policy work, but not getting very far on the ground in terms of actual implementation of the first steps, the pilot project for the solar community. But right after the hurricane when it became clear to, I think, everyone in Puerto Rico and probably anyone familiar with Puerto Rico that the current electric grid does not work for the people of Puerto Rico. People have been much more receptive to the Coqui Solar project and initiatives of solar communities and other alternatives to central station, fossil fuel generation.

Can you tell me how a solar community works?

That's something that's being developed right now. The way people in Coqui Solar envision it is people who have the appropriate rooftops, usually cement, which is not the case for everyone, are able to come together to think about and work on generating energy using PV systems on their rooftops. It's certainly much more than just everyone in the community having PV equipment. This is beyond just a technological solution. It's about the social agreements necessary to make that energy and that technology serve community needs in the most efficient way.

Are you seeing a lot of progress in new ways of approaching energy? From the community, but also from a municipal government level?

That's really hard to answer. Certainly with the mind set and attitudes. There's much more receptiveness to the things that we've been talking about for years about solar communities. That has definitely changed and there's a lot more interest and it's a very dynamic situation with respect to energy. After the hurricane, honestly, people realized we're basically on our own here and the government, local, federal, municipal, comes to help us. We have to figure out these solutions.

We're seeing a lot more on the formal scale. A group called ACONER, the Association of Renewable Energy Consultants and Contractors, say they're doing five to six times the number of installations they were prior to the hurricane.

Things have definitely changed. We don't know exactly how much.

There is what can be called, lip service. A lot of lip service about renewable energy which is dangerous, especially with the government of Puerto Rico. They're saying they're adopting the 100% renewable energy goal for 2050, and I think 50% by 2040, but their actions are promoting lots of natural and fracked gas. It's a tricky situation in that sense because you hear everyone saying we adopt renewable energy, but not only are they putting the money elsewhere, they're also talking about a kind of renewable energy that's not community-based,.

What we're seeing is that the government is being pushed by every energy company you can imagine. It seems everyone has an interest in doing some kind of project here, including at utility scale. That it is not the same as the kind of alternatives we're talking about in terms of solar communities.

Why is this an urgent issue for you right now?

We saw here in Puerto Rico, that it's a matter of life or death. People need to take this into their own hands, energy by and for the people. Become more than just passive consumers but actual producers of energy and control their means of production.

We knew before the hurricanes, and we experienced it afterwards. This huge and deadly hurricane was compounded by this terrible electric infrastructure system. It's not serving the people of Puerto Rico in a real way. Maybe that was the best we could do at some point, but that's no longer the situation here and we an opportunity to do things differently. To do better. Much better.

Energy Access Is The Foundation Of True Democratization

by Shazia Khan

February 13, 2019

This interview with Shazia Khan, an environmental lawyer, expert in off-grid clean energy solutions, and founder of EcoEnergy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.

Can you tell me about your background and how you came to this work?

I'm a Pakistani-American. I visited Pakistan a lot as a child, and speak the language, so I have a lot of personal ties there. My professional background is as an environmental lawyer. Energy is my area of specialization. I started my career at the World Bank, but had this idea in my mind, even when I was in law school. How do we take something like energy access and make it a priority for the private sector? Which is often times the group that has the resources to make the changes that need to be changed. What can you structure to create incentive for them to get involved and support a social mission or goal?

The idea came in 2001, but since then so much has changed. This concept of social enterprise and entrepreneurship, which didn't have a name back then, started to evolve in a really beautiful way. A lot of companies in the private sector, and a lot of investment firms, decided that a triple bottom line, including an environmental and a social impact component to their investment decisions, was important. For whatever reason, it's important to them, whether it's part of the PR campaign, or whether it's genuinely important to them, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that some resource dollars are now being allocated towards social impact projects.

While I was at World Bank, my boss's boss was working on the Inga Dam Power Project. The World Bank decided they were going to increase their renewable energy portfolio by 20%. They started by building huge hydropower plants all over the world. The Inga Dam Power Project would have the ability to electrify all of Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East, but they put it in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was and still is, quite conflict ridden.

Even if somehow the energy that was generated wasn't all diverted for industrial or commercial purposes, how was it going to trickle down to people living off the national electric grid? Would there be an incentive to electrify those people? The way energy access has unfolded in the West is through government subsidized programs. There's been grid expansion so that anybody, no matter how remote, within the country, will be electrified. But emerging economies and frontier markets don't have the money to do that. So what can they do? One thing they can do is leverage technology. Mobile technology has made a lot of things possible that weren't possible 20 years ago, certainly not 50 years ago.

I started thinking about, is there a more grassroots approach to electrification, and does it have to be as expensive as it is now? Does it have to be that a power plant has to be built, it has to cost millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, and then need to be very labor intensive? Even after the fact, the costs are so high, is the customer whose been connected able to pay for that service? Maybe not. I run across people all the time where power lines go over their homes in rural Pakistan, and they choose not to be connected because it might cost them $60 or $70 a month. The reason it's so expensive is because they're having to cover the cost of building that infrastructure.

What we do is called distributed solar. It's taking small solar home systems and putting them on the roofs of homes and small businesses. Some people are like, "That's cute, but it's not a long term solution. You really need to wait for the infrastructure for the grid connectivity."

And to me, that's like someone saying, "Well your cell phone's really cute, but you should really be waiting for the infrastructure for a landline to be built into your house." That's ridiculous.

That's really antiquated, and as soon as people found that cellular phones were actually much more convenient and much cheaper, they started adopting them in a widespread manner. That's happened all over the world, and wasn't anticipated. In this same way, I feel that distributed solar can be adopted, deployed rapidly, much more efficiently, and cheaply, than traditional grid expansion.

I did field work in 2008 in Pakistan, and in 2009 launched a non-profit called Eco Energy Finance. The purpose of Eco Energy Finance was to build a business case for affordable solar energy for off-grid people in Pakistan. We had to do extensive market research first to understand who this group of people were, what all the different segments were, and then what their purchasing power was? What their purchasing power was genuinely. Not, "Let's shove this product down their throats and hope that they can afford it, but what can they actually afford? And can we match a technology and a product to them, and distribute it to them?”

I met my co-founder in 2010. He was working on energy access surveys, and I had just received a very small grant. We decided to team up and build a skeletal team of 12 people to go and collect this data. We went to 44,000 households. Really trying to understand the true picture of what their lives were. We wanted to understand their consumer preferences without any sort of bias. What type of technology or what use cases are really going to fit their lifestyle? Then we spent three years market building.

We tested a number of different products, and within that time, a new technology became available. It's called "Pay-As-You-Go Solar." The concept is that in the same way somebody in a developing country will go every month and pay for their cell phone. Pay-As-You-Go technology for solar allows you to do the same thing. You go to the same mobile money agent and you give them a fee – we can remotely unlock the corresponding amount of electricity to them, and they get an automatic receipt on their cell phone. If they don't pay, we can shut the system off remotely. When they do pay again, we can turn it back on. It's just like a cell phone.

Only 13% of people in Pakistan have bank accounts. We're, at the same time, generating a credit score for them and deciding who we're going to take a bet on because ultimately what we're doing is financing the cost of a solar home system for them. We're buying it, they pay us a deposit, and then they give us monthly payments until the system is theirs. They can also pay rent every month and we can just perpetually rent the system to them.

We did that for seven years, had 200 customers, and a repayment rate of over 85%, which is pretty high. We decided, "Okay, this is a commercially viable model that we can take to investors." So we re-launched as Eco Energy Global. Eco Energy Finance, the non-profit still exists and we will use it again to go and explore other markets, but Eco Energy Global went out to raise investment money.

Things are going well, but it's been a long road.

To clarify, you’re using off-grid solar as your primary energy system? Do you feel like that's the future of energy? That everything will be private?

I think we'll get a happy medium. For instance, our customers all have these independent solar systems on their houses. But that's because they're coming from having zero demand, to now having a little bit. Eventually we’ll have to connect them. We’re going to be piloting a mini grid next year. I think what will end up happening is that people will either have community based micro or mini grids, and they will be able to plug and play the systems they already have into that system.

Alternatively, in areas that are much more established, I think there will be a way for private, maybe community based solar to feed into and supplement the grid that already exists. I don't think in developed countries the grid is going away necessarily. It's relatively affordable. It's relatively efficient. But I think there are other ways to have an interface between these newer technologies where people feel like they have more say and more control in the fuel source. People will start pushing towards renewable and demand that of their utility companies. As long as there's a way to integrate new energy capacity being generated into those systems, I think that's where a lot of the work and the evolution will come.

With solar and wind I worry about resiliency. When you're dependent on something natural that you can't control, and there is no mass process for storing energy, what happens in a scenario where there is no sunshine, or too much sunshine? How do you deal with that?

That's a really great question, and that's becoming an increasingly important question as time goes on. There's this race for storage capacity. How do you take renewables and store them? I think a lot more innovations will come out of that. In a country like Pakistan with very high solar radiation, it's not as much of an issue just because it's sunny all the time.

Does too much sun ever cause outages?

No. Our customer will be able to power the product for four hours during the day, and then they'll have, say 16 hours of power. There is a battery being used. There is a battery in the system. The batteries will have to get larger and larger and more and more efficient. It's not a problem to us right now, but that will be a problem for the whole industry moving forward.

A race in the tech to create storage.

Yes.

How affordable is solar?

We've got a solution that's a four watt solution that costs $35 a system. Somebody will pay a couple dollars a month for 18 months until they pay it off. Then there's a larger system that's a 12 watt, and costs $80. People will pay $9 a month until they pay that off. Then there's the one we sell the most, the 50 watt system, and that costs $100. Whatever configuration a person wants, we can supply them with that. Then like I said, we're going to be piloting a mini grid soon too.

What we really look to do is figure out what people are currently spending and then try something comparable in cost to, or less than, what they are already spending. A lot of the small business owners, for instance, don't usually use kerosene, they use diesel generators, but that diesel generator might cost $35 a month. We can offer them something for $28 a month, and as they're paying $28 dollars a month to us and paying off the product, the fuel source becomes free. Whereas a diesel generator you have to pay in perpetuity.

Are you looking also to integrate this idea into U.S. energy systems?

Probably not to be honest with you. There's 1.4 billion people globally who are completely off the grid, zero electricity. We will look more at markets similar to Pakistan. We're looking at Afghanistan next. I'm really interested in looking at overlooked markets, and for whatever reason, people are not interested in going into these countries, but there's definitely a demand. Bringing something as basic as electricity could be life changing.

We're not the only ones doing this. I would say globally there's about 15-20 entrepreneurs just like me who do this in frontier markets. I met colleagues that are working in the Philippines, all over east and west Africa, Vietnam. Any place there's a high density population and a huge off grid population is a good place for us to go to.

Energy access is a basic infrastructure people need to improve the quality of their life. Electricity is an underlying basic infrastructural need that needs to be in place before anything else can be delivered.

Energy access for us is a starting point and a very, very critically important one because it's a foundation to so many other things, and to true democratization.

If somebody has to walk eight hours a day to go and collect fuel wood, they're contributing to deforestation, and that eight hours a day could be spent doing something more productive. As far as countries like the United States, what I see happening is that consumers have demands unlike the consumers of 20, 30, 50 years ago. People care about where their money is going, where their dollar is going, and they want to know that it's being used in a way that drives what their personal values are. Consumers will probably be demanding more and more clean energy, to be integrated into the traditional grid system. The technology to become grid independent if you're a person that wants to do that, is becoming available. So, that might happen too.

I wonder how we'll be able to participate in clean energy on a large scale in Western countries with our current grid.

It takes, on average in a developing country, nine years to have a grid line built out to you and hook you onto it. That's somebody's entire childhood. Being an environmentalist with my family originating in Pakistan, I was thinking, this is a country of 210 million people. It's about to be the fifth largest country in the world in terms of population, and the population's not slowing like it is in India or in China. How are we going to meet the demand of these new people? Two thirds of the population is under the age of 35. We need to figure out ways to meet the demand. They're going to continue to have growing energy needs.

How do you define energy democracy?

Democratization means giving people access to the basic infrastructure that's available to people in other parts of the country. If you extrapolate from that globally, developing countries are not able to contribute to their local or national economies, or to the world economy, because they don't have access to basic infrastructure, and that's why they're not able to break the cycle of poverty.

Globally, there needs to be a democratization of energy, because it's one of the fastest ways to allow people to break the cycle of poverty and enable them to contribute to their household and to the local and national economy.

It has to be done. Now it’s just how are we going to do it, and how can we do it quickly, and can we think of new ways to do it? Why do we have to rely on antiquated ways of doing things now that we have new technology? It's an equalizer.

International development experts have figured out it's really important for developed countries to help developing countries have democratized energy, and for everybody in these countries to have access to basic infrastructure, like clean drinking water, electricity, healthcare, and education. It makes for a much more stable population.

Any time we speak with or work with the U.S. government, there is a clear recognition that if the United States wants to spend their money on security, outside of military aid, building basic infrastructure and making sure people have access to basic infrastructure, is good for security.

That's interesting.

We need people to have a chance at living within a certain standard. You don't know where the next major insight or breakthrough is going to come from. If people don't have a fighting chance to develop a thought or an idea, because they're so focused on meeting their basic needs, those innovations won't come to light. A rising tide lifts all boats.

If we can leverage technology to make energy access quickly and cheaply and efficiently, I think it's a win-win globally. It's definitely a priority globally. It's one of the sustainable development goals. It's Number 7 in the Universal Energy Act, so there is a recognition globally that this should be a priority, and it's just a matter of getting there.

There are a lot of us working on it, we'll get there eventually.

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