The Research University: A Catalyst for Equitable Climate Solutions and Education
(Intro music) Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for joining our session today titled The Research University Catalyst for Equitable Climate Solutions and Education. It's a weighty topic and we hope that we do it justice today. I'm Dave Hamilton, Chief Operating Officer of The Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center as well as Executive Director of The Clean Energy Business Incubator program both located here at Stony Brook University. I have the honor of moderating today's discussion with a distinguished panel of experts on this topic. We have representatives from academia, research, industry and economic development programs so I'm going to let them all briefly introduce themselves but you can find more detailed bios for all the speakers on the event website, so please go look for some of the information there.
I'll call out the individuals and just say hi and introduce yourself so we'll start with Paul. Hi, I am Paul Shepson and I'm Dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. Great, thanks Paul. Jim. Good morning, thanks David. Oh good afternoon. i'm Jim Misewich.
I am the Associate Lab Director at Brookhaven National Laboratory for Energy and Photon Science. I'm also Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University. Great. Jon. Good afternoon I'm Jon Longtin I'm the Interim Dean for the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences also a professor here in Mechanical Engineering and a Joint Appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Great. Adele. Hi my name is Adele Ferranti. I am the Director of Workforce Development and Training at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority or (NYSERDA) and thank you for inviting me today. Got it, welcome. Thank you. Nse. Good afternoon, I am Nse Esema and I'm the Vice President of Smart and Sustainable Cities at the New York City Economic Development Corporation. It's good to
be with you all. Great, thank you. Pat. Good afternoon, I'm Pat Malone the Associate Vice President for Professional Education at Stony Brook and the Director of the Advanced Energy Training Institute. Wonderful. Marie-Lou. So hello everyone. First of all I am very happy to be part of the panel. So I am Marie-Lou Picherit. I am an R&D and Innovation Manager um and I will also represent Ørsted on the now RDC Board of Director. I have to say that I'm new though. Um I only started working at Ørsted a month ago and before that I was developing innovative energy management solution for an energy supplier always was objective to be cleaner and always working closely with academics.
Great. Well just because you're new there's no excuse so we're going to ask you questions and I know it's going to be. No problem, i'm there for that. So all right, thank you everyone. I'm looking forward to diving deeper into specific areas of expertise over the next hour. So i was thrilled
to be asked to be involved today. It's an honor to be sitting at the same virtual table as our guests. I have a very unique opportunity in my position to see firsthand the interaction between academia, researchers, startup companies and industry. Having the chance to run a climate tech incubator as well as the New York Center of Excellence in Advanced Energy has allowed me to help ensure that the incredible R&D efforts within Stony Brook which is driven by our brilliant researchers and students that it aligns with the wants and needs of the commercial world in a joint effort to address climate change. We have a unique ability at Stony Brook to connect the dots to combat climate change. We have a robust and influential advisory boards associated with the Energy Center
and the National Offshore Wind R&D Consortium. Um consisting of industry and policy makers that can help shape our future efforts against climate change. We are continuing to grow and enhance our regional workforce ecosystem ranging from workshops and seminars offered to our incubation companies, to the larger workforce training of more established industry leaders, to the very critical hands-on training being developed to support the Offshore Wind industry. On top of that every two years the Energy Center hosts the Advanced Energy Conference where thousands of energy experts attend from around the world to talk about technology, policy, workforce development and forward-looking plans to help change the world. So expect to see our next conference in the fall of next year where we will continue to work together to chart the course of energy to build a stronger and more resilient energy world to combat climate change. On top of everything we do at Stony Brook we have strong relationships with other research universities across the region including NYU, Clarkson the SUNY and CUNY systems and UMass Lowell just to name a few. And I can go on for hours listing the national and
international universities that our researchers work hand-in-hand with on awarded federal grants. So we are working with as many people as possible to help drive technology and innovation forward. And we can't forget the relationship that we have with Brookhaven National Lab, which is one of 17 national labs across the U.S. A number of Stony Brook researchers have co-appointments at BNL as Jim mentioned he is one of them. Ensuring that they have access to the best possible resources and minds to help drive their research forward the ability of these individuals to bounce back and forth between both institutions allows for an incredible exchange of information and opportunities for success. You'll hear more about BNL shortly from Jim. So today
you will learn about the collaboration that exists between academia research and industry. You already see that at Stony Brook right now where we have multiple centers, institutes and consortiums all with their own missions and goals supported by federal, state and industry funds all driven to impact climate change one way or the other. Just to name several that are located within the Energy Center, which happens to be funded by NYSTAR a New York State agency, we have our Clean Energy Business Incubator Program, the Offshore Wind R&D Consortium, which is a national consortium. We have the Offshore Wind Training Consortium, The Institute of Gas Innovation and Technologies, we have The DOE Energy Frontier Center, we have The Center for Integrated Electric Energy Systems and we have a Center for Clean Water. I can go on and on. We cover all the basics of climate change. But research in an academic setting can't be the end-all solution. We need industry and here at Stony Brook we have access to the top levels of utility leadership in the Northeast.
Utilities such as National Grid, LIPA, PSEG, Con Ed, NextEra, Eversource and NYPA are all affiliated with the Energy Center and the Offshore Wind Consortium working closely with us to ensure that the research we are pursuing will also solve real world problems. We also have direct access to the Offshore Wind developers including Ørsted and Ecuador just to name it too. These developers will be instrumental to the maturation of the very nascent offshore wind industry here in New York and working closely with them will ensure that Stony Brook and our partners continue to support them as needed. Research for the sake of research will not help us achieve our goals we need research and industry to work together to frame the problems and possible solutions allowing the best minds to solve those problems that is what we do at Stony Brook.
So, enough from me. Let's get back to our experts and hear their thoughts. So everyone we have a lot to cover today so let's try to hit the high points and get to as much as we can. So and we're hoping to get some audience Q&A at the end so our attendees when the Q&A opens up later the chat please put your questions in there for our speakers. So let's start with an easy question
for everyone. We'll start with Paul and then we'll go through the same order of introductions. So easy question. What do you see is the key challenges for a sustainable future? Paul. Well you know I'm going to just refer to first of all the opportunity for universities
to be a key asset for society in managing the path to to a sustainable world. Universities, research universities are are a key component of our future success given that they contain all the complementary disciplines within them needed to tackle grand challenge problems and here we have one in climate change. As long as we can connect the disciplines to each other and to stakeholder partners in industry and in government. Research universities have a couple of important assets. One is that we have the ability to focus on problems over the long term and to provide deep understanding in areas that where we would like to have predictive power like what does the future look like under a variety of scenarios with respect to climate change? We also play a unique role in our ability to for example use universities as a living laboratory for change to do experiments. In the university community in that setting where we develop and test new technologies like battery storage technologies that are so essential to the challenge before us and when we engage students in the process of learning by doing we are simultaneously producing leaders of the future. Anyway to answer your question directly you know
the challenge is about leveraging complementary assets, bringing together government university and the private sector to meet the enormous challenge we have. Succinctly, what is that challenge? Changing the way that we do everything on the planet. Fortunately we've laid the groundwork in New York State with the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act for us all to lead if we can do it together. Piece of cake, easy lift. Thank you, Paul. Jim. Well first
of all I completely agree with Paul. I think he made a really good point that these are complex problems that are going to require partnerships we've got to bring a wide variety of folks and disciplines together to solve some of these. And so, I'll take Paul as the starting point and drill down maybe one step further and I'll talk about one of the challenges that he already mentioned and talk a little bit about how we're working together to address it and that is storage. So you know we all are excited about the renewables the massive offshore wind that's coming
the increase in solar but one of the challenges of course with renewables is intermittency. So we know we're going to need storage but uh and and there's a big challenge in you know generating all that offshore electricity and getting it on shore I want to focus on the challenge of plugging it in. This is where energy storage is going to be extremely important and the the three challenges or three questions that i think are really important along the lines of of integration of renewable electricity are number one, What is the technology? What, you know, what kind of battery do you need for doing this? Or maybe not even a battery you might do something like making hydrogen through electrolyzers and then using fuel cells to convert that back to electricity when you need it. It could be electrochemical, energy storage batteries. So you know you have to look at the what is the technology that's going to get there.
Second question is well how much do we really need? I don't think anybody completely understands that we don't know what the intermittency is going to be and uh we really have to have a better model of what we expect that the you know the the renewable resources to look like what kind of noise is going to exist on the power that's coming out of it and you know how are we gonna distribute that you know through the existing grid. And then the final question or final challenge is where do you put it? Where do you put it on the system that makes the most sense? And these are all really critical questions that are tough that require bringing people together and and this particular one we're gonna have to bring together the energy storage folks along with the folks that do the grid modeling and this is a good example of how Brookhaven and Stony Brook are working together. David already mentioned we have an Energy Frontier Research Center on energy storage. We're looking at the technology that would be appropriate for scalable storage that is what you'd need on a grid scale level. We also have at Brookhaven a tremendous resource in grid modeling we have folks that are able to model the transmission and distribution system which is essential for putting in renewables and understanding the impact and helping us identify where it would be. All of these folks have to work together and then to get it deployed we have to bring in folks like New York Best and NYSERDA and you know develop the workforce develop the supply chain make sure that folks are out there to deliver those technologies and the policy has to be in place for somebody to make money on it so that they put up the investment.
So you know just looking at one aspect of that challenge the integration of the renewables is already a pretty you know interesting and tough, tough challenge but we have the resources within New York State to address that and I'm really excited about our potential to do that. Great, thanks Jim. I think we're going to touch on some of those points in the coming questions and conversation as well on how to use our resources together. Jon what are your thoughts? To comment and build upon what Paul and Jim said maybe three thoughts. The first is the complexity. Arguably solving or addressing this problem is the most complex challenge that we as a society and really a global community face and that's unprecedented. The good news it comes at a time when we're at our very best in terms of technological advances and our knowledge base and so on. The second is the comprehensive
nature of this solution it will not be a silver bullet be it science or policy or economics this really is going to require a large number of entities to work together in unison and that in itself is a challenge because this is something that historically we haven't done a lot of. So again the enormity of this challenge will itself present challenges in terms of how we solve it but that in turn will provide growth and further opportunity. And then last is the uncertainty as Paul alluded to we don't know where we're going to be in 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years but we will be asked to provide solutions now that endure that period if not longer and so that represents a challenge as well to make sure that we get it as right as we possibly can with the time so we definitely have our work cut out for us. Thanks, Jon and I think the key thing there is we need to understand that what we don't know yet and we need to be flexible as we make our plans for the next coming decades to solve this that we may need to pivot and shift accordingly based on technology based on demands or whatever it may be so very great points thank you. Adele. Yeah thank you I agree with everything that's been said so far I think we're as we think about the challenges and opportunities for sustainable future I'm happy we here in New York we have set the goal post through the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act with very aggressive and exciting targets related to greenhouse gas emission reductions zero emission electricity renewables such as large-scale wind as we've heard already energy storage and I think as we think about those challenges and those targets and those opportunities as we all have know and it has been mentioned this can be an all hands on deck activity or activities. Starting with community-based organizations and not-for-profit organizations
that are in the community looking at opportunities for jobs clean energy jobs for people in those communities thinking about the manufacturers and we're going to hear from Ørsted today. Developers, the trades, the educational institutions not just the universities and colleges but the K through 12 schools and opportunities to really address this from kindergarten on up with opportunities, challenges, job opportunities, career opportunities so I think it's all about engaging stakeholders, coordinating stakeholders empowering stakeholders and making sure we bring all those stakeholders to the table as we address some of the challenges that the rest of the panel have already brought up, so thank you. Thank you and NYSERDA has done a great job of trying to bring those stakeholders together across the board from tech to market, which is what my incubator's part of, all the way through to what the governor's office is trying to accomplish so thank you for that. Nse. Yeah, thank you. So first of course I have to acknowledge everything that everyone has said and just say that all of that is absolutely critical. I'd like to bring in an additional perspective that hasn't
yet been raised. So just for context I think most people know EDC is the City of New York's economic development arm and our commitment is to creating shared prosperity across New York City by strengthening neighborhoods and growing good jobs and so we are committed to working with and for communities to provide them with the resources that they need to thrive and invest in projects that increase sustainability, support good job growth, develop talent and spark innovation to strengthen the city's competitive advantage. So with that as context when we talk about you know the challenges that the climate crisis presents itself we talk about you know the transition that needs to happen right and so you know as we try to transition our economy from one that is carbon based and extractive to a regenerative one fueled by renewables and then we're going to talk a lot about offshore wind in this conversation you know that's focused on energy efficiency and diverting waste from landfills all of that we have to also remember, and this is one of the central challenges we think a lot about, that it's also not in inevitable that this transition will happen in a way that is equitable or just. So one of the challenges we really like to think about in center when we think about the challenges that we face for a sustainable future is ensuring that this transition to sustainability this just transition happens in a way that's equitable and is just, right. And that centers communities that have been most directly impacted by the climate crisis and so that's part of what we're trying to do with our offshore wind efforts which I hope I get a chance to tell you a little bit more about as we try to develop the industry in New York City. Thank you. Yeah that's all very important and making sure that that all the right resources and renewables get to all the people and not leave some some communities out is a critical thing that we're all looking at, so thank you. Marie-Lou.
Now I have to say that I agree with all what has been said so far. What we all want I think is to be at the forefront of the technological innovation to support growth and for that we will do that through many different ways actually. Innovation and R&D work program, sharing data, sharing knowledge, maybe also sharing testing facilities is an option. We'll try also
to leverage knowledge and expertise and key topics for ourselves related to offshore such as data and digitalization robotics also naval architecture and yeah something quite important also, at least for us, collaborating with academics will also allow us to increase our R&D activities and scope because we'll share they're in the effort and we'll be able to access to funding opportunities that we will be able to do new things other things too and something important for us as an industrial maybe is that as industrial we could offer to give advice on what the sector needs in terms of R&D so that academics could focus on developing the right knowledge that will benefit the whole sector and I think it's at least for the industry it's really our role there. Great, thank you. I think that actually leads to the next question I have for the group which some of you touched on but to give everyone a chance to maybe expand on it a little bit is you know from your perspective what exciting opportunities do you see at the intersection of this research universities and government and industry as we work together on the mitigation and adaption of climate change? So let's do the same order that we did before we'll start with Paul. What is exciting I think it is the prospect of this change that we're talking about in New York State leading it through the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that we're going to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2050. That's just 29 years from now
and again because we burn fossil fuels to drive most of all the work that humans do on the planet that means that we will and we must completely change the way that we do everything on the planet including you know the flow of dollars, the generation of wealth and where jobs are. So that can be a scary thing. Change. People are generally change averse. I would like to say that I'm really big on positive feedbacks and I see a role for universities in managing constructive positive feedbacks. So first of all we have the ability to predict the future one of the things that scientists like to do is create crystal balls, so we can use our ability to do simulations of the entire earth system including human all human activities and run scenarios that show us that yes in fact if we go down the road in the way that we're proposing to do with the CLCPA we can do this. This problem is
solvable. It is good for people to know and to hear that there is a hopeful future. The second thing that is going to happen that will be a positive feedback is the job market. That people are afraid of change because of the fear about the impact it will have on their ability to feed their family. As companies like Ørsted are successful in developing offshore wind and there will also be onshore wind and solar. Lots of new jobs. When universities partner with those companies in doing workforce development so not only do the jobs exist but we are training young people to meet that need people will see hey maybe this is not so scary we have a bright future. Lastly I will say that one of the things that will also
be a positive feedback is if universities and our government partners can create sort of a dashboard of how are we doing with mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. We should have a website like we have for weather forecasting that shows for all communities around the world what has been happening with greenhouse gas emissions. When people see that hey look the changes that that we are implementing are actually having a positive effect. So we can do it according to models. If we do it jobs will exist and hey look it's actually happening
there's a bright future and I think if we all work together we can utilize a variety of positive feedbacks to get everyone excited about this enormous challenge. Great, thank you. Jim. Okay well I'll try to be quick, David. What I see as important opportunities are one the evolution of policy. You and I have been working on clean energy for a while now
we've known each other for a while because of clean energy, but policies are really changing as as Paul mentioned the Climate Leadership Community Protection Act has put really remarkable goals on the table. The federal government the administration, the current administration is really enthusiastic so I see a momentum developing that I hadn't quite seen before because the you know the scale of this challenge is is essentially in our faces right now. I see one of the opportunities the development of supply chain and that's one of the challenges, but it's also one of the opportunities. I'm seeing wonderful things for example in energy storage developing right here in New York State for a supply chain. We're going to need a domestic supply chain to support the offshore wind industry and then finally I want to say the other thing that I think is a wonderful opportunity and it's very encouraging the enthusiasm of the next generation. You know I teach a course in the physics department on
energy and I am just you know delighted at how enthusiastic the next generation is about working on these problems and over at Brookhaven I'm able to attract really good folks to come to the lab because they want to work on sustainable energy, they want to contribute to that. It's something that people are getting excited about that I think that's a wonderful opportunity. Agreed. Thank you. Jon. To me I think to distill it to a single word it's the challenge. The enormity of the challenge and I would ask, imagine if we can do this? So think forward 20 or 30 years with an electrified economy based on renewables, electric vehicles, storage and that fossil fuels are behind us. Think about how transformational that would be it's almost unthinkable. If we could solve that problem then I think there are then there are few other problems that we couldn't solve and that to me is what's exciting.
Great, thank you Jon agreed. Adele. Yeah thank you. I want to give one quick real-life example to talk about. We're funding SUNY Ulster and they're partnering with a number of community stakeholders in Ulster County in the City of Kingston to expand pre-apprenticeship programs for the clean energy technology fields in the region. Under the project we're funding they're
working with YouthBuild, Ulster County sheriff's office and they're recruiting high-risk youth and incarcerated individuals to participate in green jobs training and this is an exciting opportunity as we talk about equity as we talk about just transition. They're going to be developing courses that will lay the foundation for stackable micro credentials that the students can put towards a degree leverage towards other more advanced training they'll be provided wrap around services by the Ulster County Office of Employment and Training and trainees will be able to get hands-on experience in green building techniques and repairs through the Kingston Land Bank. So this is just an example of doing things a little different new partnerships bringing in a SUNY school with community based organizations. And the exciting thing is graduates can get continuing education credits as well as BPI or building performance institute and passive house certifications that will help with job placement with local contractors. So just one example of an exciting partnership that we're hoping to leverage this model and expand it through other technologies and other regions in the state. Great, thank you. Nse. Great I'll take a cue from Adele's book and sort of share some concrete
examples too of where I think we're seeing these key opportunities kind of intersect at industry, academia, government and community partners. So as I shared really briefly you know we're super excited about the offshore wind opportunity in New York City. Today our mayor announced that we are committing to a 15-year vision plan for the offshore wind industry and almost 200 million dollars to support that vision. There's three quick prongs of the vision and two of them I think are really, really critical opportunities for this intersection that we're talking about. The first is developing best-in-class infrastructure
we could talk for days about that but I'll table that for now. But then the next two where I think that the partnerships between academia, industry, community, government are going to be so critical are in preparing local businesses and workforce for the opportunity and also in promoting innovation and in the offshore wind industry. So you know as we talk about prioritizing equity ensuring that New Yorkers, especially women, BIPOC communities, folks from environmental justice communities are ready for offshore wind jobs we have to make targeted workforce training investments right. And one of our strategies in New York City is to invest in programs at CUNY that can leverage the system's wide geographic reach in its existing range of assets and its academic programs and expertise to train New Yorkers for these jobs right. So that's
kind of to that second strategy around preparing local businesses and workforce and then when we talk about promoting innovation in the offshore wind industry our plan there is to partner with organizations, institutions, academic institutions, research institutions to support the development of offshore wind technologies and build facilities to bring research to market. You know we're eager to ensure that new technologies and approaches that advance our vision are created in New York City and we understand that part of how we do that has to be leveraging you know federal government funding and city capital but connecting with non-New York City research institutions like many of you on on this call, so including federal labs with the New York City ecosystem to advance the development of new products and services and so I think those are two really big buckets. You know workforce development advancing innovation specific to the offshore wind industry that are opportunities that i'm particularly excited about we're particularly excited about in New York City for really bringing together this confluence of partners.
Great and we'll talk, we'll touch base on that more in a little bit. Marie-Lou. Yeah of course I agree with all that have been said. I have to say that I quite like the the idea of Paul of the world dashboard with all the things that has been done for that and maybe to provide an example, and this is a reason that why i'm very happy to have joined Ørsted, their vision is that a world that's run entirely on green energy and I think that we have a very singular experience in transitioning from black to green energy and just to provide a number reduce our emission by 83 percent since 2006 so in less than 20 years. That means this is doable and we have to take action to mitigate global warming and we have to be ambitious. For example and to finish, Ørsted have the ambition to become carbon neutral by 2025. I'm talking here about generation assets and they also we set the target of achieving
carbon neutral footprint by 2040. So I think all those experiences I'm sure there are plenty in the in the industry in their academic world and yeah having a kind of dashboard that will demonstrate showcase all those experience and maybe share the experience. Sharing is a big part of it I think right now and it could be quite, quite important. Agreed, thank you. Pat I think you have some thoughts on this. Yes, thank you. Well it's really wonderful that we're having these conversations. I think the important thing to mention here is that we are building bridges amongst our different environments in our communities to make sure that we respond more holistically to these things and to the point of the challenge and the way Jon put it so well in terms of wouldn't it be great and how exciting it is. I think that taps into the excitement of potential jobs and opportunities and the transition of jobs. So at Stony Brook we had a great opportunity this summer with
funding from the governor's office to work with NYSERDA and other partners in the fundamentals of offshore wind and what we saw in that are the seeds for additional training and development that we need to keep doing in partnership with our community colleges and our community based organizations because these jobs will be very diverse, they will come at different times in the economy, the labor market intelligence that we gather around the timing of real jobs and the planning of seeds for knowledge and literacy and experiences is a big lift and I think we're up to it I think we've had some incredible strategies that we've worked on in the past and going forward I'm very excited that we're working on this offshore wind as a centerpiece but all the other pieces around climate and renewables that were articulated in our program are resonating. We had over 20 individuals from utilities to your point Adele, about talking about the changes of jobs and the power grid, Jim we had multiple people and they are looking to transition the skill sets and the abilities of people working with fossil fuels to be incompetent in leading the charge as we move towards renewable energy so the role of the university and translating the research and making the application of academic expertise and real-time labor market work is a big lift, but we we're really very privileged to be working with so many people that are part of this. Great, thanks Pat. And I want to dive into R&D for one second but then we'll get to the some of the workforce so we can talk more about some of those things that you were talking about. So focusing on R&D for a second, Jon what role do you see engineering playing as climate change and climate solutions become more prevalent in the future? It's a great question I think engineering will be part of the fabric of the canvas that represents the solution there's no question. So kind of four aspects I think of engineering. First it'll be extensive
engineering will touch all aspects of this everything from the sensors used for measurements, to the data processing collection, to new materials, to renewables, to storage etc. It will be everywhere. But with that thinking there will be some new challenges that we historically have not had to deal with. I mentioned one and that's the forward thinking nature of things. Again, we will have to put solutions in play that may need to last for 20 or 30 or 40 years. In a situation that itself is changing in other words the climate expectations 20 years may be very different than what we expect that's a challenge. The team that works on this will have to be agile and versatile, so again, each disaster, each site, each application will probably require a very unique solution that's different than making cell phones a million or a billion at a time. Interestingly by the way I think COVID helps us in that regard because we've been forced to be resilient. Lastly, we are going to have to be more cooperative so
the idea of siloed groups doing their own thing is going to be a thing of the past for this solution. We have to have technical people engineers speaking with the climate scientists speaking with economists and financial people social scientists addressing the impact on society and public planners and policy people that oversee all of this. So it's going to be a fascinating journey to be sure and we're going to learn a lot in the process. Great, thanks Jon. I want to shift towards jobs. Pat brought it up a little bit. Adele what roles
do you see that colleges and universities can play in developing career pathway training for individuals with barriers let's say so they can have employment in the clean energy jobs? Yeah we've recently had quite a few meetings with community-based organizations and not-for-profits as we try to figure out how best to address just transition and equity issues and we're hearing a lot from those stakeholders and training organizations that they're really good at recruiting, screening, providing soft skills training, technical skills training I'm sorry. Soft skills training professional skills training but they really need partners for the technical skills training. A lot of those organizations have great models to really prepare people for a variety of clean technology jobs but they're learning that they need to really develop new relationships with colleges and universities as well as the trades to really develop that technical training piece so I think as I mentioned with the SUNY Ulster example there are a lot of opportunities for technical institutions training institutions such as Stony Brook and others to partner with these organizations to develop the career pathway training and again all of those are driven by business needs. So there will be business partners and the universities have great relationships with local businesses so we think that's a great marriage with the community-based organizations and local colleges and universities. Great, thank you. On a similar vein, Nse how is New York City echo dev advanced workforce development and innovation related to green jobs and industries and what role are universities playing in these efforts? Yeah so this is something that you know we we take seriously so I'll give one innovation example and kind of one more workforce example. In 2014, and of
course there's all that we look to do but i'll share some of what we're currently doing or what we've done in the past. In 2014 EDC partnered with NYU School of Engineering on the opening of what is now called the Urban Future Lab it's a business incubator that supports startup companies showcases innovation and provides education and some workforce training focused on clean tech startups. That's you know one example where it's just an example of how strong amongst the city academia and the private sector can really promote entrepreneurship and facilitate both cutting-edge research and education and also jobs right. They provide some workforce development programs and they've created over, since the establishment, have created over 600 jobs, supported 63 companies nearly a billion dollars in capitalization so we're pretty excited about that example. Another sort of more squarely in the workforce development
space but still on the theme of incubators another kind of innovation space that we partner with as the New York City Economic Development Corporation is Company Ventures. They partner specifically with the workforce team within CUNY the tech talent pipeline program to recruit train and support students through a 10-week internship program right and we know that this is critical for CUNY students, many of which do not have like this kind of typical internship experience and find it to be pretty transformative in terms of setting them up for a career in clean tech or Korean tech more generally, so CUNY supports with the provision and vetting of candidates and oftentimes payroll for the students while company ventures as startups provide interns with a robust internship experience and the really critical wrap-around support, right, so the mentorship, the coaching, the professional development that really ensures that these opportunities can be long-term transformative. So those are just a couple of examples of kind of investments we've made partnerships we've built with these different types of partners to really advance the green economy. (David Hamilton) Great thank you very much so now i'm trying to be cognizant of the time.
I have a million other questions but i want to shift for one more question uh and then um then we'll go see what the audience is is looking for so this is for. So this is for Paul, Nse and Adele... Focusing on just New York City, are there unique ways that you can see that the greater New York City area can lead in the global response to climate change? Let's start with Adele from the state's perspective then we'll shift to Nse from the city's perspective then we'll wrap up Paul from the academic university perspective. Yeah, thank you, when we think about energy savings potential and greenhouse gas emissions reductions we think about buildings, right? And where do we see a lot of buildings – a lot of opportunity for retrofit work – making impacts and new construction in New York City. We see a great opportunity to leverage with organizations in New York City that are doing some great work. One good example is block power. As you may know they're working in the multi-family building sector to install heat pumps and a lot of multi-family buildings they are partnering with organizations across the state and in New York City to train those individuals that they need to hire -- I think they're going to hire a thousand people. These are great opportunities
to do things at scale and in a way that could be replicable at even an even greater scale as we think about opportunities across New York State. So I think New York City is a great ecosystem for us to all figure this out, working with the various organizations, leveraging the different resources and, as we've mentioned before, to really address equity issues as we move this economy forward. Great, thank you. Nse? Yeah, I absolutely 100% agree with everything Adele just said. You know we
think New York City is super well positioned to respond to this crisis and opportunity moment because of so many reasons... you know, a large market size and consumer base, the expansive building stock, as Adele was referencing, our leading academic institutions and our capacity to partner with academic institutions outside of New York City, our reputation as a global innovation hub and then the strong policy drivers and our infrastructure - our high infrastructure demands and needs...right and so I think the opportunities really around coordinating between evolving policy priorities around climate change and then new market opportunities around resiliency, sparking innovation by investing in the green tech ecosystem, steering the real estate industry towards greenhouse gas emission reductions, developing workforce strategies, right, it's like how do we bring those those pieces together that's really where we we kind of make the opportunity that New York City kind of uniquely presents. Great, thank you. And, Paul, your thoughts? Yeah I just think there's a fantastic opportunity for New York City to lead by example. It is positioned perfectly to do so with demonstration projects. So just one example we could engage the local communities with startup companies that are involved in creation of microgrids and distributed energy production companies could invest in front-line communities that produce their own power at the community level and demonstrate that you can have reliable heating and cooling produced from power generated locally. So I think it's
there's an opportunity to engage disadvantaged communities with projects that that demonstrate the feasibility of new technologies. So we achieve multiple goals at the same time. Great, that's what makes New York City so exciting. We have so many opportunities for so many different technologies and so many different interactions with everybody. It's... it's wonderful. So like I said I can ask questions forever with this audience, but I want to give the audience a chance. So I'm going to introduce Derek O'Connor, part of our team.
Derek has been looking at the the questions and I think he has one or two that ... for the audience.. for the panel. So Derek? Thanks, David. This one was asked. It was how can non-utility commercial operations, for example manufacturing, best help? In other words, how should their operations evolve to best support addressing the overall climate challenges? And I think Pat had indicated that she had wanted to start with that one. That's a... that's a really great question we have a supply chain network here of a whole number of manufacturers that are working very closely with us in the offshore wind effort and we also have a manufacturing consortium group that consists of all the funders, providers, public-private institutions where we look at emerging opportunities. I think the important thing is to have the manufacturing community at the table when we involve our stakeholder meetings which is going to come up pretty soon.
I see Nse is shaking her head... we are going to be convening groups around short, long term and very near-term jobs, in terms of emerging jobs and transitional jobs and opportunities. And I think the conversation to make the point that we've had today in this discussion is all the different stakeholders involved in the process need to be at the table when we take a look at how people will become involved and what the strategies are to get them more involved, but on the manufacturing end I think there's going to be tremendous opportunities and in our work with Orsted and Eversource and some of the other developers and the research centers, we're going to start to see clearer how they can pivot a bit and change some of their technologies and work in implementing ways to weed themselves in. We did this many years ago in moving from the defense
industry to biotech and medical in the Long Island region and beyond. I know it was very similar in San Diego and we can do it again with clean energy technologies. And as Jon mentioned, I think the backbone will be engineering and the ability to integrate multiple engineering technologies and that's a hot spot for manufacturers in many ways. Great, thanks Pat. Actually I'm curious uh
Marie-Lou, do you have uh some thoughts on this question before we go to the next question? Only I can agree with what has been said something very, very important and uh yeah having everyone at the table is something that is absolutely necessary if we want to ...make progress. That's all I have to say. All right, great, thank you. Derek, do we I think we have time probably for one more before we start the wrap up. Sure, this one was asked, "Are there any focused trainings available on battery storage technologies?" It looks like Pat may be the leader of the the question and answer period here, but Pat I'm assuming you can answer that and and maybe Jim as well. I would defer to Jim to start and then I can piggyback on what we're thinking of doing. Jim? Well, let me just briefly state a great place to look for that is the New York Best website. This is the New York battery and
energy storage technology consortium... it's uh newyorkbest.gov or org or com... I can't quite remember the url but just google New York Best and you'll you'll find it. And New York Best offers a number of different resources. They also offer a series of webinars and meetings where you could learn a lot more about it. But then you could look it depends you know this
this question has many levels... for students that are looking to work in energy storage, there are some fantastic leaders in that technology in New York State. At Stony Brook, I think we have a really outstanding national leader uh in the programs that are in both material science and chemistry, at uh in at the Stony Book University, where we have battery leaders that are doing fascinating work on energy storage technology. SUNY Binghamton has great programs, there are great efforts at Columbia University as well, so at a higher level, if you're a student that are looking ...who's looking to get into these programs at either a graduate or undergraduate level there are great resources and great groups in New York State. For more generally... for the more general audience that is looking, start with New York Best.They have fantastic resources. Grea,t thanks. Pat, anything real quick on your end from a training perspective before we... I think this
raises a really important question. There is going to be an opportunity for us collectively to work on creating new transitional micro credentials and certificate programs that are a little bit out of the realm of, you know, traditional academic programs, and we will see more and more of a deeper dive in the dimensions around climate change, offshore wind, renewable energy, battery storage and numerous other areas where people in my role, along with others...community college partners -- I have several, I think on the call today -- will be looking at the different levels of education that are within the area of communities we serve, and coming up with ways that there's an articulated pathway and new certificates and credentials that people can cap off knowledge when they need to and do a deeper dive in academic programs when they need to. So I see it's a very rich environment
for us moving forward in that space. Great, thanks, Pat. And you're instrumental in a lot of this training uh that we're doing throughout the state, so thank you. All right so we are running low on time... it's amazing how quickly 60 minutes goes. So to wrap things up, I wanted to toss it back to all the panelists for some brief closing thoughts -- 30 seconds or so, just so we don't run over.
I am gonna switch things up to make our brains fire differently, let's start with Marie-Lou and then we'll work our way backwards to Paul. So um, Marie-Lou, final thoughts? Yeah, the only thing is... for what i really think, is that it's really important that we work all together to to achieve this and uh as others said we already did a lot on this we're very happy to to be able to share our experience on this, explaining how we transition ...with our transition from the black energy to the green ones and also on the recruitment part, I have to say that yeah working with with academics is very, very important for us because they also allow us to be known by the students and to identify and attract talent and highly skilled candidates for employment. And maybe to conclude because it's also an important message, i don't know if there is a student in attendance, but Orsted is growing its platform in the U.S and is currently a recruiting for many positions, and, yeah, we will need to have many, many different people with very different skills to achieve all this. Right, thank you. We look forward to working with you to help
you fill out your roster there. Nse? I mean there's so much to be said, I feel like we've had a really incredible, wide-ranging conversation.I'm so delighted to have been a part of it. I'm going to conclude my remarks in a way that also tries to address one of the questions I think Ross Meyers proposed... I think one of the big themes we've talked so much about on this... in this conversation is just the importance of partnerships, you know -- across academia, across government, across industry -- and I think that those types of partnerships can also be really critical for helping us to implement transparency from public accountability and scrutiny around our diversity and inclusion practices, right, so you know as we commit to making, you know, this transition -- this clean energy transition, this green economy opportunity really open to communities that have been left out, I think we got to hold ourselves accountable and we hold ourselves accountable through these partnerships as well, so really excited about what it can look like to do that in New York City, we're standing up in offshore with advisory council for example that we hope will be an example of what it looks like to get those various stakeholders to hold us accountable to those commitments. So, thank you again for such a wide-ranging, great conversation. Thank you, absolutely. Adele? Yes, thank you very much for the invitation to participate. This has been a
great panel. I just want to say that I've been so proud of what New York State NYSERDA has done for clean energy workforce development and training, but we've barely scratched the surface. A lot more work to do and much bigger scale and with a much wider reach. So I look forward to new partnerships, and new training models, and looking forward to working with everyone in the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Adele. John? I wanted to point out ... the start of Ross's question that we didn't get a chance to answer but he said awareness is a critical first step. And I think one encouraging bit of news is the awareness that we're now seeing about this problem. And if you think 10 years ago these kinds of conversations weren't being held and now we have an entire week of this, this is a conversation that's happening on a daily basis and that to me is encouraging -- the rate at which this is gaining attention. And I think that's
important and urgent for solving the problem so I enthusiastically look forward as we continue to embrace this at breakneck speed which we need to do.Thank you for the chance to speak to you today . Got it. Thank you, John. Jim? I'll just pile on with the partnership message. I think partnership is absolutely critical and I'm excited about the momentum.
As John mentioned, things are changing and there's a lot of momentum, there's a lot of enthusiasm for clean energy, and I think we can get there. Thanks. Yeah, you got it. I'll just say this you're absolutely right... the end, Jon. the changes in the way I've even seen the Stony Brook ecosystem working and communicating and trying to move forward on these technologies... I've been
here since 2011... it's completely different now and it's very exciting. So, Paul, the last the last words. Succinctly! So...what an exciting opportunity we have here in New York State to lead the world in ushering in the new green economy and we can accelerate this process by developing good action-oriented partnerships between universities, private industry and governments that can give us access to demonstration projects in places like New York City. What a time we're going to have! Yes, it's going to be fun! So with that, um, wow, a great panel. As you all said a lot of thought-provoking ideas--a lot more that we can touch on. So all the panelists, again, from you know made my life easy, you made it..this is a simple, simple effort here, so thank you very
much for all your time. I appreciate that for our virtual attendees, one day we'll get together again and we'll do this in person and we'll really really really dive into this, so thank you all everybody. Be safe and have a great rest of the week. Thank you very much.Thank you. Thank you. (Outro music)
2021-10-07 06:09
