Episode 116 – The Caribbean Islands Clean Energy Program

The podcast for project managers by project managers. Dr. Kaitlyn Bunker, Ph.D., P.E. is a Principal with Rocky Mountain Institute’s Islands Energy Program. Kaitlyn leads a diverse team that partners with islands in the Caribbean to support and accelerate their clean energy transitions. Their projects result in many benefits, including the use of more local, renewable energy sources and less imported fuel. Table of Contents 01:33 … Meet Kaitlyn 02:56 … The Rocky Mountain Institute 05:31 … Projects in the Caribbean Islands 08:20 … Program Partners 09:10 … Local Island Energy Resources 10:15 … Aligning Stakeholders, Local Communities and Project Priorities 13:11 … Project funding 14:28 … Compliance and Regulatory Guidelines and Knowledge Sharing 17:59 … Project Risks 20:10 … Leading a Very Diverse Team 22:27 … Leading Remotely 23:25 … The Resilience of Clean Energy 27:05 … Impact of Battery Technology 28:51 … Cultural and Communication Challenges 31:18 … Kaitlyn’s Lessons Learned and a Success Story 34:27 … Hear More about RMI 35:04 … Closing KAITLYN BUNKER:  So we really come in and do a lot of listening, meet with as many people as we can, understand different perspectives and try to bring that all together, and then pair that with our experience. WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Please make sure to visit our website, Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to the show so you’ll never miss an episode, or you can join us on Velociteach Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn.  And if you know a friend who would like to hear our show, please tell them about Manage This. I’m Wendy Grounds, and with me today is Bill Yates.  Bill, so you know I’m always trying to find interesting projects. BILL YATES:  Yes. WENDY GROUNDS:  Projects that are all over the world, not necessarily in one spot, and so this one is all over the islands, the Caribbean islands.  Our guest is Kaitlyn Bunker, and she’s a principal with the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Island Energy Program, where she leads a team that partners with islands in the Caribbean to support their clean energy transitions. BILL YATES:  Yeah, and just to be clear, this is Ph.D. Kaitlyn Bunker, so Dr. Bunker, I just wanted to say that, Dr. Bunker.  She also leads modeling efforts related to small island microgrid opportunities.  So a microgrid, she’ll explain that further.  But it’s a new strategy for having power distributed across an island, especially in the cases of places like the islands in the Caribbean that are prone to hurricanes and other types of storms.  So a microgrid strategy is a very interesting strategy, and we’ll talk about her projects. Meet Kaitlyn WENDY GROUNDS:  Let’s meet Kaitlyn.  Kaitlyn, welcome to Manage This. KAITLYN BUNKER:  Thank you for having me. WENDY GROUNDS:  Tell us about your career path, how you got to where you are today. KAITLYN BUNKER:  Sure, so I’m now a principal with the Islands Energy Program at Rocky Mountain Institute.  But my background is that I studied electrical engineering,  I went to school at Michigan Technological University and got really excited in the field of power and energy, and also control systems.  And so bringing those two topics together led me to the concept of microgrids, which are small electricity systems that have their own sources of electricity.  So they’re able to use that to serve local electricity needs in a small confined system.  But they also typically can connect to the larger electricity grid. So they’re able to operate in kind of those two modes.  And so that was really exciting for me, especially the concept of incorporating more renewable energy into microgrids and combining those concepts together. So I got really excited about that in school and decided I wanted to dig into that further.  So I stayed right at Michigan Tech for graduate school, completed my Ph.D. in electrical engineering.  Really enjoyed that and then was ready to kind of zoom back out from a very specific research topic on control of microgrids with renewable energy, and so that brought me to Rocky Mountain Institute.  That’s where I’ve been the last six years or so, working on broader opportunities to really transform our energy systems. The Rocky Mountain Institute BILL YATES:  Kaitlyn, so tell us more about the Rocky Mountain Institute, what’s the mission of that organization? KAITLYN BUNKER:   So Rocky Mountain Institute is a global nonprofit organization, and our mission is to transform global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.  So we were founded back in 1982 by Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, who are really leading thinkers and implementers when it comes to energy efficiency and renewable energy.  And Amory is still with RMI as a chairman emeritus, so coming up on 40 years here of some great work in the fields of efficiency and renewable energy. WENDY GROUNDS:  What are some of the impacts that RMI has had in communities worldwide? KAITLYN BUNKER:  So because we are a nonprofit organization, we’re often in a very unique position to work with all kinds of different partners and bring them together in ways that they might not otherwise connect.  We also have a very strong analytical foundation for doing modeling and technical analysis, and we use that to identify opportunities for all sorts of benefits that renewable energy can bring.  So things like cost savings, increased resilience, job creation, all sorts of different opportunities for benefits that are out there that might be important to different people or groups. And so we often partner to try some of these solutions out. So we consider ourselves more than a think tank.  We’re really a “think and do” tank.  Some recent specific examples include a prize program that we’ve been facilitating called the Global Cooling Prize.  It’s focused on designing efficient cooling options.  So as our world keeps getting warmer and warmer, how do we keep people cool without just adding to the warming problem with more emissions from traditional air conditioning?  So that’s been an exciting effort really recently. We’ve supported a lot of cities in identifying and pursuing clean energy options, as well as moving towards electrifying their public transportation systems.  So we often take a very whole systems view of energy, not just electricity or transportation or buildings or industry, but how do those pieces fit together?  And then in my particular program we have supported resilience, redesign, and rebuilding of electricity systems that were damaged in recent hurricanes.  So those are just a few examples of the broad type of work that we do at RMI. Projects in the Caribbean BILL YATES:  Tell us more about these projects that you’ve been working on in the Caribbean. KAITLYN BUNKER: So our Islands Energy Program is focused in the Caribbean, as you mentioned, and we do really three main types of work with the islands that we partner with.  We complete analysis to identify optimal pathways for clean energy transition, so what’s the long-term pathway that’s going to be the best fit for a particular island.  Then we help to prepare and de-risk specific clean energy and resilient projects to help get them actually in the ground and operating, get these first projects going with our island partners.  And then the third thing is we work to connect island stakeholders so that they can share their expertise with each other and build even more expertise through communities of practice.  So that’s broadly what we do with our island partners. And so some specific examples of things that we’re working on right now are looking at an integrated process for planning for the future of energy and resilience, to find optimal pathways for Belize’s electricity system. So in the Bahamas we’re working on redesigning and rebuilding the electricity system in specific islands within the Bahamas that were really devastated by Hurricane Dorian last year.  We’re working in Bermuda, supporting Bermuda in accelerating their transition to use more local renewable energy sources, while making a switch to electric transportation options at the same time.  And then one other example is in Puerto Rico, we’re working to increase opportunities for communities in Puerto Rico to build resilient and clean microgrids. BILL YATES:  I was doing some reading on some of the things that you wrote about the project with the islands,  I was surprised that they import so much fossil fuel for consumption to create energy.  What are some of those statistics?  Because that’s one of the things the microgrid and your initiative is trying to change. KAITLYN BUNKER:  So most islands in the Caribbean today get their electricity from burning diesel fuel which, just as you said, they have to import.  We are seeing islands move towards clean energy and start to make a dent in that, but still the majority of islands’ electricity today comes from that imported diesel fuel. So that makes it very expensive, Islands in the Caribbean might pay about three times what we would pay on average in the United States per kilowatt hour of electricity.  So it’s quite expensive, and it can also fluctuate month to month based on global oil prices. If you’re a resident or a business owner in an island, it’s expensive to start with, and then it can change over time.  So lots of opportunities to use more local options that also happen to be cleaner, but are often much lower cost than importing the fuel as it’s done today. Program Partners WENDY GROUNDS:  Who are you partnering with in these programs? KAITLYN BUNKER: So we do a lot of partnering, it’s really important to our strategy and being able to be successful in what we’re trying to do.  Our main partners are often the governments of the islands where we’re working,