Victoria Mills, Managing Director of Corporate Partnerships for the Environmental Defense Fund, discusses the impact that the Fellows from the EDF’s Climate Corps Program has on the execution of meaning energy efficient projects within companies and government.

Full Transcript:

Ben Lack: Can you give us a little bit of a background to the Climate Corps fellows program and why the Environmental Defense Fund chose to create this initiative?
Victoria Mills: The EDF was seeing the tremendous opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency and we were wondering why with all of the money to be saved through energy efficiency, companies were still leaving all this good money on the table. We figured it must be because of some organizational barriers. No one has time to focus on it perhaps, the information is just aggregated, it’s nobody’s primary job. We figured these are really more business problems than environmental problems, so we thought they could benefit from the expert spreadsheet skills of some top-notch MBA students. So, that’s how EDF Climate Corps was born.We started in 2008 with 7 fellows placed in companies. Over the last 4 years the program has expanded to 96 fellows working all over the country in companies and cities and universities.
Ben Lack: And the students are coming from which schools?
Victoria Mills: They come from all of the top MBA programs across the country. We have fellows from Michigan MIT, University of Chicago, Darden, UCLA, Harvard Business School, you name it. What we are really looking for is a self-starter, someone who could come in and be an effective champion for energy efficiency within a company, could work really well with the company’s own employees, the energy manager, the facility manager, the CSR department, finance, someone who can work very effectively across the company and build the business case for energy efficiency.
Ben Lack: What kind of impact has this recent class of Climate Corps done with the cities, universities and companies that you’ve placed them in?
Victoria Mills: This recent class found 600 million kilowatt hours of energy savings and 27 million therms of natural gas. To understand what that means, that’s enough energy to heat and power 88,000 homes. This class found $650 million in net operating cost savings over the project lifetime.
Ben Lack: That’s a pretty big game-changing number.
Victoria Mills: It really is. And, the last number is 440,000 metric tons of CO2 reductions which would be like taking 87,000 cars off the road.
Ben Lack: So to give our audience a kind of an idea of what types of projects these students are working on, do you have an example of a student that has worked with one of the partners and what their project really looked like?
Victoria Mills: We had a Fellow at AT&T for example, who worked on a project to analyze the impact of free air cooling which is when you use outside air to remove heat from data centers and other equipment spaces, so you can turn off your air conditioner and they found the potential to reduce the building’s total electricity consumption by over 20%.Another Fellow worked at Hospital Corporation of America and he looked at feasibility of installing a variable refrigerant volume or VRV heating and cooling system. He found that a VRV system could reduce energy use annually by more than 30% compared to a conventional roof-top unit. He projected potential savings of $16 million in net operating costs over 20 years.
Ben Lack: Are you finding that these companies that end up allowing these students to do this research on their business operations, are these students ultimately getting placement for hire with these companies? Or, is it just a good project while they are in school and then they go and look for something else when they graduate?
Victoria Mills: It’s a really important part of what we are trying to do here is to train the next generation of leaders in business, government and academia and what we’re finding is that’s really bearing out. A number of our fellows have gone on to positions either with the company where they served as Climate Corps fellows or in other companies. We had a fellow, Megan Rast, who was at eBay last year or two years ago and now she is at Sony working on energy and sustainability. Another fellow, Elizabeth Turnbull, was hired by her host company Adidas and this year supervised two Climate Corps fellows there. Another fellow, Ryan Whisnant, was placed at SunGard in 2009, and then the company hired him and he has since supervised two years of Climate Corps fellows. So, whether they go on to work in that particular company or another company, they are in positions of leadership and they are in a position to influence the way energy decisions are made in their companies. So that’s really a huge lasting benefit of the EDF Climate Corps program.
Ben Lack: How are the partners selected? Do the students say they want to work on a project for a specific organization? Or does EDF reach out and say, hey, do you need help and if so, can we place you in this program?
Victoria Mills: EDF recruits both fellows and companies and we match them in a process that has as much art as science to it. We look at the fellows’ backgrounds, their professional experience and we see where there’s a good fit with what the company is looking for in terms of specific projects that they have in mind and the fellow profile that they request. We’ve been very successful in matching fellows to companies, both companies and organizations and we had very high level of satisfaction amongst the organizations that participate.
Ben Lack: It’s very easy to paint a rosy picture because of the type of impact that this program has. What would like to improve with the program as you guys continue to grow it?
Victoria Mills: I think what we are looking at is we take Climate Corps to scale. It’s not just increasing the number of participants. We definitely plan to do that. But, I think our biggest challenge and really where the biggest opportunity for the program lies is in moving companies past one-off low-hanging fruit investments to real systemic and lasting reductions in energy use. That has to do with not just overcoming or jumping over the organizational barriers that I described at the beginning, but actually knocking them down permanently. So, creating the kind of organizational changes that make the bigger investments; the strategic investments in energy efficiency possible.For example, things like establishing a dedicated fund for energy efficiency investment, establishing accountability for energy savings throughout a company, addressing the challenges associated with green-leasing. Those are the necessary conditions for energy management to become systemic and strategic within a company.
Ben Lack: How would you grade the business community as far as setting aside funds for energy efficiency projects? Is that starting to take hold? Are we still a long way away from hitting the tipping point?
Victoria Mills: It’s still more the exception than the rule. I think, too often companies fail to see that energy efficiency investments are just like any other kind of investment, that they need a portfolio to have the biggest impact. You want to have some projects that have a really short payback and you want to have some projects that have a really high return. I think one company that does this really well is Diversey. They have adopted what they call a portfolio approach to energy efficiency investments where they bundle together projects all across the globe considering the energy saving potential, the carbon reduction, the cost of carbon and things like NPV and payback-time. They bundle the projects together to deliver an attractive return to the company.
Ben Lack: Why have you decided to spend your time working in this industry and why are you doing what you’re doing?
Victoria Mills: For me, personally, it’s concern about climate change. EDF is an advocacy organization and we want to get the biggest greenhouse gas reductions as fast and as cost effectively as possible and we see energy efficiency as the way to do that. I’m really proud of this program, of what it’s been able to accomplish. We have an 86% implementation rate on the energy saving projects that the fellows have recommended. The impact that we’ve been able to have in the first 4 years has been huge and I’m looking forward to even bigger things to come.

 

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