Dawn Lippert earned her degree in environmental studies from Yale University, and it didn’t take long after graduation for her to be drawn into the ambitious clean-energy goals of the far-off 50th State.
The consulting firm where she worked in Washington, D.C., was involved in researching the prospects for the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, leading to the partnership of the state with the U.S. Department of Energy. Some years after flying back and forth, she found moving here a logical step. Saved energy, after all.
At 34, the chief executive officer for Elemental Excelerator often bikes from the home where she and her husband live to the downtown offices of the nonprofit. “EEx” last week presented an energy summit spotlighting a report about how much faster Hawaii could make the shift away from fossil fuels than anyone thought.
The organization’s main mission, though, lies in “accelerating” the growth of startup companies that can create innovations addressing island concerns ranging from transportation to agriculture, but all involving energy at some level.
More than 60 startups have received funding through about $5 million annually in grants underwritten largely by the Office of Naval Research, supplemented by corporate partners. EEx also helps foster the companies by linking their products to partners. Hawaiian Electric Co., Tokyo Electric Power, Vector Ltd. in New Zealand, First Philippine Holdings Corp. and SK Gas in Korea are among these.
Innovations have ranged from energy storage projects to controllers that help manage grid fluctuations in zones nearing grid capacity, she said.
The growth of distributed energy resources — small-scale units of local power generation connected to the grid, such as solar and wind generators — is a key focus of her work, which also addresses agriculture, mobility and other “elemental” needs. And being an island state isn’t always a detriment where innovation is concerned, she said.
“Transportation and mobility, we have a really unique advantage being islands. … We can make changes to the whole system and see what happens on the whole island,” Lippert said.
“For water and food and agriculture, those are really key needs, and they all touch our dependence on oil,” she added. “People are doing really interesting research on agriculture and food, microgrids, and how to create sustainable power systems there. … these systems are actually all connected.”
QUESTION: The Clean Energy Initiative seemed really aggressive at the start. Have the facts of the market overtaken us? Did we set our sights too low after all?
ANSWER: It’s a great question, because initially when we started the initiative, it was ambitious. And people said, “We don’t know if it’s possible”… The market has changed just dramatically. Technology change has accelerated hugely over the past 10 years. So we’re now at a point where we actually are beating our existing goals and it’s time to re-evaluate how fast can we go…
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the Excelerator itself?
A: The genesis of the Excelerator was in 2009. I initially moved here to work with Maurice Kaya, who had led our state energy office for a number of years. As he was leaving, there was a recognition that we would need innovation to get to our goals, absolutely. And is there a way that we could design our innovation economy and our clean-energy transition so that it’s not just importing other renewable energy to Hawaii, but can we actually help create an innovation economy here? What would that look like? And can we start attracting some of the best innovators from around the world also, to start solving problems here?
Q: People talked about the innovation economy here for a long time. And people are a bit cynical about it. So what was the game plan your organization saw?
A: I think for Hawaii, we have to really lean in where we have an advantage. And energy is one of those areas where we have a real advantage to create an innovation economy.
And it’s partly because of economics, it’s partly because we’re trying to do something here that hasn’t really been done before, in terms of integrating all these distributed energy resources into an island grid. And if we do that here we can explore that knowledge and that expertise elsewhere. …
The Excelerator itself, we’re a nonprofit organization. So our mission is to bring in innovation that can help our system move forward toward a clean-energy economy. …
You’ve heard of accelerators trying to find the best startups specifically for financial return.
Our metric is a little different. We’re trying to find the best startups for systems change. And then we also are looking at financial return. But we are really optimizing for systems change and impact.
Q:If you are a nonprofit, why is financial return a metric? Is that because you want to make sure it’s viable long-term?
A:That’s exactly it. Our theory of change is around sustainable businesses and being able to grow an economic sector that can create jobs and opportunity and really help move us forward. And so from that perspective having companies that can generate revenue, that can solve a customer need, that can get customers, is really important to that thesis.
We try to select companies for impact, but the more they grow in scale, the more good happens.
Q: I notice you have an office in Palo Alto. Is that where some of the investment capital is?
A: Absolutely. That’s a really key part. We have one ingredient, one piece of funding, but what we’re looking to do is help companies find follow-on funding help them actually scale up, and a lot of that is around investment.
One of our key things we’re trying to do is actually bring a lot of those investors and sources of capital to Hawaii to see what we’re doing here. And so we have a couple ways we do that.
One is that we engage closely with the investment community in Silicon Valley and other places. We have events there, we have companies there. And we’ve worked to build the ecosystem of partners that are mission-aligned and values-aligned. And we’ve been pretty successful in helping companies raise funding. …
Q: The summit that you had last week, have you done them before?
A: Not exactly in that way. We’ve had an event called EEx (Elemental Excelerators) Town Square, where we bring together people from industry, farmers, agriculture, real estate, other people who are partnering with our communities, including the city and county and the state and others….
Before this we were called Energy Excelerator, then last year we changed our name to Elemental Excelerator, to acknowledge the fact that we were working also in mobility and water and food and agriculture, not just energy. …
We’re really looking at the whole system, the infrastructure system, sustainability-type technologies and systems. …
Q: We have our own problems here; are any of these innovations useful elsewhere?
A: I think what we’re excited about is that in Hawaii we’ll see some of these problems two, three, maybe five years earlier than in other places. But other places are really starting to learn from us and get a sense of how they might be able to solve some of these same challenges they see coming in a couple of years.
Q: Do you see any wisdom in cabling each island’s grid together, as planners once discussed doing?
A:In this analysis in particular, we didn’t look at interconnecting them because the utility and this report have shown that we probably have enough resources on each island to be able to power individually…
Our approach would never be to take anything off the table, and say it doesn’t make sense. But in this analysis it does look like we probably could get there with the sources on each island.
Q: The confidence is high for Oahu as well to get there?
A: It is! It does look possible and it will take quite a bit of solar, in terms of rooftop as well as utility-scale solar. But where technology is today, it absolutely looks possible.
