Costa Rica, known primarily as a honeymoon destination, is a veritable paradise. Not only is it full of picturesque scenes featuring white sand beaches, and crystal clear waters, but you're pretty much guaranteed sunshine all year round.


VT.CO --  And boy is it atmospheric - jam packed with misty jungles, mind-boggling wildlife and active volcanoes.


However, it's not just a hotspot for newlyweds or keen surfers either, the popular travel destination has also set its sights on saving the world, via its advances with renewable energy. Back in 2015 it managed to generate 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources for 299 days, and in 2016, it ran for 271 days on everything but fossil fuels.


Now, it appears that Costa Rica has done it again. The small country has purportedly run for a whopping 300 days solely on a mixture of hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.



For a small, developing country, Costa Rica is really putting the world's powerhouses to shame with its commitment to clean energy.


According to a recent report from the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, the nation has just bested its 2015 achievement and has run for 300 days solely on renewable energy sources. And with just six weeks of 2017 left to go, it looks like that number is only going to increase.



Executive president of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, Carlos Manuel Obregón, explained that they were able to reach this impressive feat through improvements to the grid and upgrading clean energy power plants. And it comes at a good time too; the record goes hand-in-hand with the Costa Rican government's plan to be carbon neutral by the year 2021, a deadline which was set up over a decade ago.


However, we can't get too carried away by this news. As Costa Rica is a small country, it's much easier for it achieve these lofty goals, than say, countries like China and the USA, which are larger in size. And furthermore, it's aided by its natural resources, namely hydropower and geothermal sources, which many western nations don't have access to.


It's also worthwhile to note that Costa Rica was one of the few countries which had the prescience to refrain from investing in fossil fuels in the first place.


Ultimately, while it would a great accomplishment if Costa Rica was to go completely fossil free, on a broader level, the impact would be rather insignificant. For example, the country currently produced 1,2141 times less greenhouse gases than China, making its contribution to fighting global warming relatively paltry.


What Costa Rica does prove, however, is that going coal free isn't as impossible as other, more developed nations seem to believe. And their example just goes to show that clean energy works as well as the energy derived from fossil fuels.


In any case, they certainly deserve all the praise that they have been receiving.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS -- Growing consumer interest and demand for greener, more sustainable properties is driving a dialogue between Realtors® and homebuyers and sellers. Over half of Realtors® find that consumers have interest in real estate sustainability issues and practices, according to the National Association of Realtors®’ 2017 REALTORS® and Sustainability report.


The report, stemming from NAR’s new Sustainability Program, surveyed Realtors® about sustainability issues facing consumers in the real estate market and ways Realtors® are setting their own goals to reduce energy usage.


“As consumers’ interest in sustainability grows, Realtors® understand the necessity of promoting sustainability in their real estate practice, such as marketing energy efficiency in property listings to homebuyers,” said NAR President William E. Brown, a Realtor® from Alamo, California and founder of Investment Properties. “The goal of the NAR Sustainability Program is to provide leadership and strategies on topics of sustainability to benefit members, consumers and communities.”


To meet growing consumer interest, more Multiple Listing Services are incorporating data entry fields to identify a property’s green features; 43 percent of respondents report their MLS has green data fields, and only 19 percent do not. Realtors® see great value in promoting energy efficiency in listings with seven out of 10 feeling strongly about the benefits in promoting those features to clients.  


The survey asked respondents about renewable energy and its impact on the real estate market. A majority of agents and brokers (80 percent) said that solar panels are available in their market; forty-two percent said solar panels increased the perceived property value.





Twenty-four percent of brokers said that tiny homes were available in their market, compared to 61 percent that reported tiny homes were not yet available. When asked about involvement with clients and green properties, 27 percent of agents and brokers were involved with 1 to 5 properties that had green features in the last 12 months. Seventy percent of members worked with no properties that had green features, leaving a great deal of room for future growth.


The home features that Realtors® said clients consider as very or somewhat important include a home’s efficient use of lighting (50 percent), a smart/connected home (40 percent), green community features such as bike lanes and green spaces (37 percent), landscaping for water conservation (32 percent), and renewable energy systems such as solar and geothermal (23 percent).            
                        
When it comes to the sustainable neighborhood features for which clients are looking, 60 percent of Realtors® listed parks and outdoor recreation, 37 percent listed access to local food and nine percent listed recycling.


The transportation and commuting features of a community that Realtors® listed as very or somewhat important to their clients included walkability (51 percent), public transportation (31 percent) and bike lanes/paths (39 percent).


NAR initiated the Sustainability Program as a platform for dialogue on sustainability for Realtors®, brokers, allied trade associations, and consumers. The program’s efforts focus on coordination and articulation of NAR’s existing sustainability resources, while also supporting a growing area of interest for consumers, helping members to assist home buyers and sellers.


To further position NAR as a leader in real estate sustainability topics with consumers, Realtors®, brokers and allied trade associations, the REALTOR® Sustainability Program surveyed Realtors® pertaining to sustainability issues facing consumers and the industry. NAR plans to use this report to better benchmark Realtor® understanding of sustainability.

Puerto Rico's power grid broke down again on Thursday, leaving some 800,000 customers without power, as the US Caribbean possession struggles to recover five months after Hurricane Maria slammed the island.


AFP -- Justo Gonzalez, head of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA), said that one of the island's main transmission lines was out of service. Officials said the line should be fully operational again before Friday.


The government-owned utility has 1.5 customers out of a population of 3.5 million -- not counting the 500,000 Puerto Ricans who left since Maria struck on September 20, 2017.


The head of the utility worker's labor union, Angel Figueroa Jaramillo, said that the blackout affected half of the population that had access to electricity, including customers in the capital San Juan.





Some 400,000 customers -- about 30 percent of the total -- are still waiting for service to be restored since Maria struck Puerto Rico.


The storms destroyed more than 80 percent of Puerto Rico's crops and created communications outages and fuel shortages, while damaging transportation links, New York Federal Reserve President William Dudley said in February.


Since 2006, economic growth has been down 15 percent in Puerto Rico, which also faces a severe debt crisis.


Satellite imagery also showed electrical lighting on the island -- a proxy for economic activity -- fell sharply after Maria.

Hey, congrats! You’ve been offered a promotion.


THE CUT -- Instead of working like you have been — off in your own little bubble, setting your own goals, with no direct reports — your new role will give you much greater influence throughout the company. You’ll be supervising a team, helping to motivate and direct them toward goals set by upper management.

There is, however, a teensy catch: Your new title doesn’t actually come with any more money than your current one. But think of the prestige — the power!

So. Will you take it?

No, you most likely would not, according to the findings of a study involving more than 2,000 people across three continents, published recently in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Across nine experiments, the researchers — from the University of Cologne, the University of Groningen, and Columbia University — consistently found that, although employees without a lot of power do indeed desire more of it, ultimately “gaining autonomy quenches the desire for power.” In other words: A role that grants you the freedom to do mostly what you want to do, how you want to do it, is much more appealing to most people than a role that involves bossing a lot of minions around.


In one experiment, the researchers — led by Joris Lammers at the University of Cologne — guided people through the above thought experiment. About half of the participants were asked to imagine that they already held a high-autonomy position and were being offered a high-influence position, one in which they would be managing a team of subordinates. The other half were asked to imagine the scenario the other way around: What if they already were managing a bunch of people but were offered the chance to trade that for more freedom?

Overwhelmingly, people chose autonomy. Of those who already had a position that gave them a lot of freedom, 74 percent turned down the hypothetical promotion; of those who held the current job that afforded them more influence within their company, 62 percent accepted the promotion to the higher-autonomy position. In other words: People were nearly two and a half times more likely to take a job that gave them more autonomy than they were to want a job that gave them more influence.

Other experiments recounted in the paper — involving study volunteers from the U.S., the Netherlands, and India — back this up: When people were afforded autonomy, their desire for power faded. In their final experiment, the researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 readers of the Dutch business magazine Intermediair, asking them to indicate their position within the company’s hierarchy, as well as their perceived amount of autonomy and influence within the firm. They also asked the readers whether they currently wished they had more power at their current company. Again, when people felt as if they had a lot of freedom, their desire for power diminished.

Previous research, in fact, has confirmed that people are indeed attracted to power when they think about the freedom that may come with it — but they are less interested when they remember all of the extra responsibilities and expectations and general bother that will also likely come along. And yet it’s so easy to forget this when a shiny new title and the promise that others will listen to you — because it will be their literal jobs to do so — are dangled before you.

One caveat: This new research didn’t account for the role of compensation. Maybe a substantial bump in pay would make a difference here, and people would indeed be more willing to give up some of their autonomy in exchange for some cold, hard cash. Or maybe not — or maybe they would but would later regret the decision. These are questions for future research. For now, the overall message of this paper feels very true: Maybe all anyone really wants at work is to be left the hell alone.

The Stone Edge Microgrid survived the fires. Now its owners are developing a new project, incorporating lessons learned.


The secluded spot made it an excellent site for a vineyard, but it would cost Pacific Gas & Electric a lot of money to run the 480-volt 3-phase power lines to the property to run the necessary winery equipment. In order to make it work, Mac and Leslie McQuown had to find a more economical way. 



Stone Edge isn’t the typical farm. It’s a 16-acre property that uses 10 different kinds of inverters, a fuel-cell “hive,” and seven battery systems, with another on the way. The property was recently in the news for its microgrid system that held up during the devastating fires in Northern California. In January, the microgrid project won a Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award from the state of California. 



The plan to bring power to Stone Edge’s remote vineyard has become another test case for off-grid technology: the Silver Cloud microgrid project. This time, unlike at the original Stone Edge site, there will be no grid backup.



“In the case of Silver Cloud, if the design is not robust enough, we have no failsafe,” said Craig Wooster, general contractor and project manager for the Stone Edge Microgrid Project and CEO of Wooster Energy Engineering. “We’ve got to be able to stand alone.”



Wooster took lessons from the “living laboratory” that is the Stone Edge farm and built out a design for the Silver Cloud microgrid that also incorporates learnings from the fires.



Eventually, Stone Edge and Silver Cloud will join up with future microgrids to create an “aggregation of assets” on five of seven Stone Edge properties. ​



“Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to replicate microgrids economically and quickly,” said Wooster. 



Efforts to reach that goal could benefit Californians outside of the upscale farm and winery, as fierce wildfires become increasingly common due to climate change. The Stone Edge microgrid ran islanded for 10 days while areas around it experienced power outages and thousands of homes burned to the ground. 



And though Stone Edge kept going -- its evacuated staff operated the microgrid remotely -- Wooster has also identified about “two dozen takeaways” and ways to improve resilience and functionality that will come into play at the second site.



Silver Cloud will incorporate about 300 kilowatts of solar power, eight Ideal Power converters and a SimpliPhi Power battery system to make up a 480-volt AC grid with a capacity of at least 240 kilowatts. Wooster said the system could go up to 400 kilowatts, and he often evolves his designs over time. 




“One of the prospects of working with Stone Edge -- and what I love -- is that any project, as we work through the different stages from design to execution, changes depending on the dynamic needs of the vineyard,” said Catherine Von Burg, president and CEO at SimpliPhi. 



The original Stone Edge site incorporates Ideal converters and several SimpliPhi battery units. But the set-up planned for Silver Cloud ensures that if one converter goes down, there is no single point of failure. 



“There’s a level of redundancy there that you can’t get with other brands of converters,” said John Merritt, director of applications engineering at Ideal Power. “It’s a cleaner-running system, it’s a simpler system, and it’s a more robust and redundant system.”



The lithium-ferro-phosphate SimpliPhi batteries can’t catch on fire like other lithium-ion batteries. And here, as Von Burg put it, “chemistry matters.”



Wooster said selecting the SimpliPhi battery for the new site was a “no-brainer.”



“What we learned in the fire is you don’t want to put something out there that could either be ignited by a wildfire or be the source of a wildfire,” he said. 

And according to Wooster, though the farm has been diligent in tree-trimming, it also learned it has to be “a lot more aggressive” in land management. Silver Cloud will grind woody debris into chips and use that as fuel to produce electricity. 



During the fires, Wooster also noted that the solar array remained at 50 percent of normal production, in spite of the smoke and ash. The farm had to take out some of its solar, because it usually uses excess production to create hydrogen -- which is highly flammable -- to power the farm’s cars. Now, the farm is working with Enphase Energy to engineer a system that offers more control on individual panels. 



“Like the knob on your radio that you increase the volume with, we’ll be able to turn it up or down,” said Wooster. “That's a huge, huge breakthrough for the world of microgrids. [...] Before the fire we had never considered curtailing solar.”



The Silver Cloud project should be up and running by July, Wooster said. Farm staff is also pondering how these innovations can provide examples beyond the seven properties.



Wooster said he and Mac McQuown have discussed the possibilities of bringing back areas like Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, which the Tubbs fire razed, with low-energy and resilient buildings. On Friday, Wooster will speak in Santa Rosa at the Rebuild Green Expo, an event focused on sustainable rebuilding construction for the areas impacted by fire.  



“I’m being sent to talk about microgrids,” he said. “But the reality is, let’s think of something far bigger: A community that is destroyed that could be rebuilt with an autonomous power system. It could actually have its own fueling stations for hydrogen-powered cars, electric vehicles -- what does the future look like?”

The largest industrial company in the U.S. expects to have electric passenger drones on the market within a decade.


BLOOMBERG -- The dream of flying cars has been around longer than Boeing Co. has been making airplanes. Now a vision from the pages of Jules Verne is near enough to occupy the present-day plans of Boeing’s leadership.



“I think it will happen faster than any of us understand,” CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in an interview. “Real prototype vehicles are being built right now. So the technology is very doable.” The new era of flying urban vehicles is close enough for the man overseeing jetliners and spacecraft to begin plotting what he calls the “rules of the road” for three-dimensional highways.​


Autonomous air taxis and parcel-hauling drones have the potential to be the next disruption to sweep the aerospace industry, with Boeing and arch-rival Airbus SE among the manufacturers racing to stake a claim. Muilenburg sees it as a a rare opening to shape a new transportation ecosystem. Fleets of self-piloted craft could be hovering above city streets and dodging skyscrapers within a decade, he said. Propelling these advances are a flood of investment, rapid gains in autonomy, and growing consumer frustration with bumper-to-bumper traffic.

Other observers share his aggressive timeline. Electric passenger drones, seating two to five travelers and looking like distant cousins of today's helicopters, could come on the market within the next two years, according to a new study by Deloitte. By the early 2020s, the study said, flying cars could drive to the airport by roadways and then accelerate down runways into the sky. Even NASA is now studying the feasibility of what the government space agency calls “Urban Air Mobility.”  But if any of these technologies are to take root, regulators must first figure out a host of critical safety issues, starting with how to manage both conventional traffic and new flying machines.



“It won't be all turned on in one day,” Muilenburg said.


Boeing bolstered its portfolio of unconventional pilotless aircraft last year by buying Aurora Flight Sciences, whose projects include a new flying taxi it is developing with Uber Technologies Inc. Other partners for Uber's futuristic Elevate service include Textron Inc.'s Bell Helicopter and Embraer SA, a Brazilian planemaker currently in tie-up talks with Boeing.



Aurora has been inventing autonomous vehicles since the late 1980s, and its portfolio of novel flying machines includes a two-seat robotic copter known as an eVTOL (an abbreviation for electric vertical take-off and landing). For its rideshare of the not-too-distant future, Aurora plans to whisk passengers between rooftop “vertiports.” Test flights could begin as soon as 2020 in Dallas and Dubai, according to the company.



Others are also rushing rotorcraft concepts to market. Vahana, the self-piloting air taxi developed by A3, Airbus's tech-centric Silicon Valley outpost, completed its first test flight on Jan. 31. Intel Corp. and EHang Inc. are also testing their flying vehicles.



But the next generation of Uber and Lyft Inc. vehicles can’t arrive by air until manufacturers and regulators figure out how to keep them from bumping into buildings, commercial planes, personal drones and each other. That requires leaps in artificial intelligence and sensor technology from today's personal drones, which mostly fly within sight of operators. “Right now, what we’re transitioning from is a hobbyist industry to a commercial industry,” said Darryl Jenkins, an aerospace consultant specializing in autonomous vehicles.



Jenkins think drones will first be adopted to haul packages, like the three billion pizzas delivered annually in the U.S. Flying humans is far more complicated, and a host of issues still needs to be resolved. Without human pilots or air crew, who would ensure passengers are protected from the uncovered rotor blades that would power most air taxi designs? 




Commuters aren’t going to embrace flying craft unless their safety is assured, but getting approval from aviation regulators for people-carrying drones will take millions of dollars and several years—and that's once agencies such as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration decide what the standards should be. No such standards currently exist.



“Nothing like that has been certified,” said John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the issue. “People at the FAA are worrying about how to do it, but nobody knows how to do it yet.”



One of the key underpinnings to the airline industry's unprecedented string of years without fatalities in the U.S. is the rigorous process of certifying aircraft. But it is these high standards that will also make it tough to approve the revolutionary new designs for robotic vehicles.



“I think it will happen faster than any of us understand.”



U.S. and equivalent regulations around the world hold that manufacturers must demonstrate that catastrophic failures are so remote that they won't happen in a billion flights. That means wings won't fall off or the autopilot won't suddenly veer into the ground during a model's entire lifespan. Unless Congress or the FAA eases the standards for autonomous vehicles, Boeing and other manufacturers would have to prove to regulators that their computerized sensors and robotic guidance systems are equally reliable.



“It's extremely costly to certify new aircraft, even when you're certifying it for a well-established use and with well-established rules,” said Steve Wallace, a former FAA official who oversaw accident investigations and also worked in the agency’s certification branch. “Here we're trying to open up a whole new use where there aren't any rules. That's an enormous task.”



Muilenburg, 54, is aerospace engineer by training and enjoys the challenge of thinking through the sense-and-avoid systems and other technologies to prevent airborne mayhem. “We are making investments there,” he said. “The autonomous car ecosystem is making investments there.”



Given Boeing’s traditional retirement age of 65, he will more than likely be around to deal with the aftermath of product strategy plotted today—from an all-new jetliner family nicknamed the '797' by analysts to the autonomous vehicles he expects to reach the market in large numbers by the mid-2020s.



Since Muilenburg took over as CEO in mid-2015, Boeing has expanded its line-up of futuristic planes and created a venture capital arm called HorizonX to foster promising technologies such as hybrid-electric propulsion. The largest U.S. industrial company is also investing in digital design tools and three-dimensional printers that can quickly turn aircraft concepts into working models.



Take the battery-powered flying platform that Boeing unveiled in January, a prototype cargo drone with the muscle to haul 500-pound loads over 20 miles. It was developed in just three months by the planemaker’s Phantomworks unit, but the multi-copter vehicle could evolve into the airborne equivalent of a pick-up truck.



One of HorizonX's investments is in a Pittsburgh company called Near Earth Autonomy. The spinoff from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute has developed sensing technology that makes driverless aircraft a lot smarter. A company YouTube video shows a drone zipping over a country lane dodging trees and adjusting its course, on its own, without the aid of a global positioning system.



The possibilities of using the technology to improve safety are intriguing, said Steve Nordlund, a Boeing vice president in charge of HorizonX. “We’ll leverage their technology potentially inside the company,” he said. “It’s early but that’s plan.”

Corporate America is wading into controversial policy debate. ’We have to do it ourselves. The cavalry isn’t coming.’

BLOOMBERG -- In the weeks since the Parkland school shooting, big U.S. companies have found themselves in a familiar position: pressured to act on controversial social and political issues where government won’t.

​

It’s a trend currently manifested by firms cutting ties to the National Rifle Association and efforts by large investors to reduce exposure to gun-makers. But with U.S. politics more polarized than ever, moving forward on issues that Washington has failed to tackle is increasingly routine for corporate America, from coastal tech giants like Alphabet Inc. to heartland icons including Walmart Inc.

​

Whether that means more generous benefits for working mothers, support for politically vulnerable groups, or intensifying efforts to fight climate change, companies are stepping into a void once filled by political rhetoric and leadership. “We have to do it ourselves,” said Jeff McDermott, managing director of Greentech Capital Advisors, a New York investment bank that focuses on sustainable businesses. “The cavalry isn’t coming.”

​

There are a variety of reasons companies are taking on the additional costs -- including the bottom line. Consumers, employees, and to some extent even shareholders are newly insistent that companies adopt progressive policies. Some 60 percent of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. say their decisions have been influenced by a company’s politics, according to research by public relations firm Weber Shandwick; among them, buying products to show their support is an increasingly popular response.

​

Millennials Care

"Millennials care, and there’s more of them now,” Rick Goings, chief executive officer of Tupperware Brands Corp., said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January. “There’s going to be a number of CEOs who really want a double bottom line, so profits are one line and the other is the good you do.”



The aftermath of the Feb. 14 attack in Parkland, Florida, in which a teenager armed with an AR-15 assault rifle shot and killed 17 people, has illustrated how swiftly public pressure can push companies to act. Even as Washington debates policy responses, including arming teachers, companies including Delta Air Lines Inc. and Hertz Global Holdings Inc.ended discounts for NRA members, and both Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc. and Walmart, two of the nation’s largest gun retailers, have adopted restrictions on the kinds of guns they will sell and to whom.



The world’s most powerful investors are also getting on board. Blackstone Group LP has asked outside fund managers for information on their exposure to the firearms industry. BlackRock Inc. said it’s exploring ways to remove gun-related investments from portfolios if clients request it.



BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has been in the vanguard of pushing companies for better behavior. In January, Chairman Larry Fink wrote an open letter to CEOs urging them to consider that “a company’s ability to manage environmental, social, and governance matters demonstrates the leadership and good governance that is so essential to sustainable growth.”



The notion that a company could have a social agenda alongside a corporate strategy isn’t new, but it’s taken on new urgency. What’s different now, executives say, is the potent combination of social media and younger consumers who are reluctant to purchase products from, or work for, companies that don’t align with their values.



Environmental Issues

Polling data suggest that millennials, who will make up 50 percent of the global workforce by 2020, are more attuned to social and environmental issues than their elders. A 2016 study of young employees by Boston-based Cone Communications found that 76 percent consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work, compared with 58 percent of the workforce as a whole.



To attract millennials, “you have to articulate who you are, what you stand for, what’s your purpose, what do you care about,” Bill Thomas, the global chairman of KPMG International, said on a panel in Davos.



“If it’s not greater and broader than simply the bottom line,” he added, “then you are going to leave yourself at [their] mercy.”



Beyond recent moves on guns, more corporations are adopting practices that a decade ago would have been associated with crunchy, socially-oriented companies like Patagonia Inc. Earlier this year T-Mobile US Inc. announced a 160-megawatt wind-power contract that will bring the proportion of electricity the wireless provider receives from renewable sources to 60 percent, moving to 100 percent in 2021. It joins the likes of Mars Inc. and Nike Inc. in RE100, a group of global companies with similar goals. 



“The reason that you see more companies acting like Patagonia did a long time ago is because they’ve realized the value,” said Natasha Lamb, managing partner of Boston-based sustainable investment firm Arjuna Capital. “Companies rarely move on an ethical mandate alone. There’s a business case for change.”




LGBT Progress

One of the most dramatic areas of progress has been in encouraging acceptance of lesbian, gay and transgender employees. In the most recent Corporate Equality Index, a survey by the Human Rights Campaign that measures the workplace inclusion of LGBT staff, 14 of the 20 largest companies, including Ford Motor Co., General Electric Co. and Apple Inc., received 100 percent ratings. 



Last March the North Carolina legislature repealed parts of the state’s “bathroom bill,” which would have restricted the use of public restrooms by transgender people, after PayPal Holdings Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG canceled planned investments in protest.



American companies haven’t, of course, experienced a mass conversion to altruism: Many corporate pledges are as much marketing as substance, and few believe that voluntary actions taken by businesses can substitute for meaningful government action. “Sustainability efforts are oftentimes really happening on the sidelines,” said Marjella Alma, CEO of Datamaran, a London-based firm that provides information on sustainability.



Take diversity, especially in the top ranks of large companies. With the retirement last month of Ken Chenault, the longtime CEO of American Express Co., there are just three African-Americans leading companies in the Fortune 500. Despite high-profile ascensions like those of Mary Barra, at General Motors Co., women run fewer than 30.



Replacing government policy with individual corporate initiatives also presents problems of inconsistency. When standards are voluntary, many companies will inevitably decline to adopt them, leaving workers -- particularly those with fewer skills and less ability to take their services elsewhere -- vulnerable to lowest-common-denominator policies.



For example, law firms and financial services companies make up one-third of the 609 companies that received a perfect score on LGBT protections from HRC. The list included just two firms in mining and metals and one in tobacco. “The lack of consistent, explicit federal protections,” the organization said, creates “major barriers to full equality.”



Hearts, Minds

The risk is also that corporate efforts remain marginal, focused on winning hearts and minds, or that they’re temporary. Walmart and Starbucks Corp. recently announced more generous parental-leave policies and higher wages, a cost increase that’s easier to justify when economies are growing briskly, as in Europe and the U.S.



The gun debate illustrates the limits of corporate action. Even if Wall Street begins to shun manufacturers, firearms will remain widely available until government action makes them harder to buy.



That effectively outsources the political process, said Adil Najam, dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, with a perverse effect on national policy and the fundamentals of democracy: “When a company makes the decision, those first three words of the Constitution, ‘We the People,’ are replaced by ‘We the Customer.”

The Stone Edge Microgrid survived the fires. Now its owners are developing a new project, incorporating lessons learned.


GREENTECH MEDIA -- When Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards & Winery looked to build out a new property in the Mayacamas Mountains straddling Napa and Sonoma counties, the owners found themselves in a multimillion-dollar quandary. 



The secluded spot made it an excellent site for a vineyard, but it would cost Pacific Gas & Electric a lot of money to run the 480-volt 3-phase power lines to the property to run the necessary winery equipment. In order to make it work, Mac and Leslie McQuown had to find a more economical way. 



Stone Edge isn’t the typical farm. It’s a 16-acre property that uses 10 different kinds of inverters, a fuel-cell “hive,” and seven battery systems, with another on the way. The property was recently in the news for its microgrid system that held up during the devastating fires in Northern California. In January, the microgrid project won a Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award from the state of California. 



The plan to bring power to Stone Edge’s remote vineyard has become another test case for off-grid technology: the Silver Cloud microgrid project. This time, unlike at the original Stone Edge site, there will be no grid backup.



“In the case of Silver Cloud, if the design is not robust enough, we have no failsafe,” said Craig Wooster, general contractor and project manager for the Stone Edge Microgrid Project and CEO of Wooster Energy Engineering. “We’ve got to be able to stand alone.”



Wooster took lessons from the “living laboratory” that is the Stone Edge farm and built out a design for the Silver Cloud microgrid that also incorporates learnings from the fires.



Eventually, Stone Edge and Silver Cloud will join up with future microgrids to create an “aggregation of assets” on five of seven Stone Edge properties. ​



“Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to replicate microgrids economically and quickly,” said Wooster. 



Efforts to reach that goal could benefit Californians outside of the upscale farm and winery, as fierce wildfires become increasingly common due to climate change. The Stone Edge microgrid ran islanded for 10 days while areas around it experienced power outages and thousands of homes burned to the ground. 



And though Stone Edge kept going -- its evacuated staff operated the microgrid remotely -- Wooster has also identified about “two dozen takeaways” and ways to improve resilience and functionality that will come into play at the second site.



Silver Cloud will incorporate about 300 kilowatts of solar power, eight Ideal Power converters and a SimpliPhi Power battery system to make up a 480-volt AC grid with a capacity of at least 240 kilowatts. Wooster said the system could go up to 400 kilowatts, and he often evolves his designs over time. 




“One of the prospects of working with Stone Edge -- and what I love -- is that any project, as we work through the different stages from design to execution, changes depending on the dynamic needs of the vineyard,” said Catherine Von Burg, president and CEO at SimpliPhi. 



The original Stone Edge site incorporates Ideal converters and several SimpliPhi battery units. But the set-up planned for Silver Cloud ensures that if one converter goes down, there is no single point of failure. 



“There’s a level of redundancy there that you can’t get with other brands of converters,” said John Merritt, director of applications engineering at Ideal Power. “It’s a cleaner-running system, it’s a simpler system, and it’s a more robust and redundant system.”



The lithium-ferro-phosphate SimpliPhi batteries can’t catch on fire like other lithium-ion batteries. And here, as Von Burg put it, “chemistry matters.”



Wooster said selecting the SimpliPhi battery for the new site was a “no-brainer.”



“What we learned in the fire is you don’t want to put something out there that could either be ignited by a wildfire or be the source of a wildfire,” he said. 

And according to Wooster, though the farm has been diligent in tree-trimming, it also learned it has to be “a lot more aggressive” in land management. Silver Cloud will grind woody debris into chips and use that as fuel to produce electricity. 



During the fires, Wooster also noted that the solar array remained at 50 percent of normal production, in spite of the smoke and ash. The farm had to take out some of its solar, because it usually uses excess production to create hydrogen -- which is highly flammable -- to power the farm’s cars. Now, the farm is working with Enphase Energy to engineer a system that offers more control on individual panels. 



“Like the knob on your radio that you increase the volume with, we’ll be able to turn it up or down,” said Wooster. “That's a huge, huge breakthrough for the world of microgrids. [...] Before the fire we had never considered curtailing solar.”



The Silver Cloud project should be up and running by July, Wooster said. Farm staff is also pondering how these innovations can provide examples beyond the seven properties.



Wooster said he and Mac McQuown have discussed the possibilities of bringing back areas like Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, California, which the Tubbs fire razed, with low-energy and resilient buildings. On Friday, Wooster will speak in Santa Rosa at the Rebuild Green Expo, an event focused on sustainable rebuilding construction for the areas impacted by fire.  



“I’m being sent to talk about microgrids,” he said. “But the reality is, let’s think of something far bigger: A community that is destroyed that could be rebuilt with an autonomous power system. It could actually have its own fueling stations for hydrogen-powered cars, electric vehicles -- what does the future look like?”