BIG PIVOTS: The ‘Switch’ Religious Revival

This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on December 23, 2024.

Switch is like candy for people engaged in finding solutions for the climate fix that we’re in. That alone explains why the 220 seats in Boulder’s eTown Hall had been sold several days in advance of the November 14 event.

And it helps that Boulder in particular, but Colorado altogether, brims with people engaged in figuring out how to revamp our economy in ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The twice-annual Switch events – one each in Boulder and Denver — are a mix of a religious revival, a technology conference and the opening monologue of a late-night TV comedian.

After an hour of pizza and chit-chat among like-minded professionals downstairs, Bill LeBlanc, the emcee, takes the stage of the auditorium to warm up the audience. He is witty in an esoteric way, cracking jokes that likely would be lost on most crowds. He describes the format as being like a box of chocolates. Every presentation is a little different — short and sweet.

Volunteer speakers provide the meat of the gatherings. Many of the nine chosen to present at the November event mimicked LeBlanc in his light-hearted approach. Phil Clark, of Omitz, a hydrogen company based in Louisville, was the lead-off speaker. Not surprisingly, he talked about hydrogen, which he called a “really cool, versatile gas.”

“My fellow Americans, we need to rally around things upon which we can agree,” he said. “I think that it is that regulations suck, but we need them.”

He made the case for simplifying and improving the regulations governing hydrogen. “We have to innovate by enhancing the clarity and reducing the review time.”

To buttress his case, Clark cited a cardinal commandment of that famous book by Strunk and White called On Writing Well. “Omit needless words,” they counseled.

The second speaker, Daniel Rubin, an attorney with Dietze and Davis, a law firm in Boulder, explained the Public Utilities Commission and some of its conventions and procedures. Upon the completion of Rubin’s five-minute primer about the PUC, LeBlanc quipped: “I understood everything that you said, which worries me.”

The last speaker before intermission, Claire Wayner, who is in RMI’s Carbon-Free Electricity Program, spoke about transmission planning, paying and permitting. She wrapped up her five minutes with this: “I hope that I left you all with an understanding of how critical transmission is to the clean energy transition. Or, if you want a catchy phrase, no transmission, no transition.”

Switch was conceived in 2011 by James Barry along with Robin Maslowski and Chuck Ray with the goal of bringing together people with a common interest in sustainability in the Boulder area. He and the others wanted something less formal than found at most conferences, yet meaningful.

The model for the format they chose is called PechaKucha, a format that limits presentations to 20 slides that advance every 20 seconds, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

They trimmed it down to every 15 seconds and a cap of 5 minutes.

“We had all been through long, boring PowerPoint presentations at conferences, and we wanted to offer something distinctly different,” says Barry, the general counsel for Gravity Renewables. Ray is now at Boulder-based Microgrid Labs. Maslowski, who calls herself an energy transition collaborator on her LinkedIn profile, is in Portland, Ore., and is a principle in Trillium Energy Consulting.

The collaborators chose Boulder for the launch because of its concentration of consultants, academics, and others trying to solve the complex equations demanded by the exigency of climate change.

The first session was held at what was then the Absinthe House (now Rosetta Hall). It was full — as has been nearly every and possibly every Switch since then. The event in Denver has a lesser capacity of 130, but it also sells out.

The Switch website invites applications for presentations, although sometimes the organizers reach out to individuals to inquire about potential interest. Many come from Boulder, but over the years people from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins and even the mountains have presented. In the early days, at least a few people flew in from elsewhere for their five-minutes on stage.

Also in the early days, the organizers sometimes let presenters take the stage without first being vetted. Now, all those giving presentations must have a dress rehearsal. And all know the rules.

If education sessions are on the marquee for Switch, the evenings are structured in ways to encourage networking. The pre-meeting pizza fest and lengthy intermissions together provide generous time for sharing ideas — and often lining up jobs.

My own experience can testify to this. In November, I said hello to a subscriber of Big Pivots who later provided a handsome donation. Then I talked with others, who suggested I might want to talk about water at one of their monthly forums.

Puneet Pasrich is representative of those from Boulder engaged in the energy transition. A graduate of the University of Colorado, with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, he is now a principal at Buckyball Systems, a consultancy focusing on long-term power planning for utilities and states in the western United States. He has expertise in power planning, economic dispatch, integration of renewables and distributed generation, and energy storage.

All are prime topics for Switch talks. Speakers have addressed soil health and agriculture, even water. But the energy transition remains center stage.

In his spare time, Pasrich helps put together the Switch events. It takes quite a bit of effort, he says, with the work beginning about two months in advance.

Both those on stage and in the audience tend to be younger, but not always. For example, Eric Blank gave a presentation prior to his appointment to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission four years ago. He was already several decades deep into the energy transition in Colorado. Some speakers have been in or on the brink of their 60s.

In the vetting process, Switch organizers also insist that presentations cannot be straightforward sales pitches. Education must be at the core.

“ A large part of our process is to make sure that they’re showing up to educate the public and not (sell) their own company’s ideas or products,” says Pasrich. “We don’t let them deviate from our mission of education and innovation. The presenters, by the time we have vetted them, are very much on board.”

In the reviews, Pasrich and others help speakers create take-home messages.

“We try to get everybody to show an actionable message that they can leave the audience with.”

There is also tone. Le Blanc sets the stage with his humor. Messages delivered in a light-hearted way are typically received by audience members better.

“Humor is basically taking people down a path and then changing directions at a certain moment and then letting that be the new path. It really helps people engage in the presentations, so they don’t just fade in and out as they see pictures go by.”

The format spawned at Boulder for energy transition folks has become the model for similar events in Madison, Wisconsin; San Francisco; and possibly other places.

Following a lengthy intermission — the networking is crucial — came the four final speakers of the November 14 event.

Kirsten Millar, the Boulder-based director of policy and partnerships at Virtual Peaker, a company based in Kentucky, explained virtual power plants, or VPP’s. She explained that the technology brings together electricity dependent devices at homes (including EVs) to control the energy that they consume “and make sure they’re being operated in a really efficient way. You can make them align with renewable energy, use up more renewable energy when it’s prolific on the gird, or you can have it reduce demand so that it’s not (using electricity from) a gas peaker plant.”

In short, VPPs do wonderful things. But as for the term itself, “It really sucks,” she said before making the case for using a trio of words to understand VPPs not as virtual power plants but in terms of the characteristics of the technology: visible, predictable and precise.

Then Kate Weigel from the Colorado Green Building Guild talked about home insulation, Grant Watson on net-metering in California, and Kate Vann of New Leaf Energy, a national renewable energy developer, reported on the politics of the investment tax credit.

What will happen with the ITC during the Trump presidency? “Only time will tell,” she said.

If the subject matters at Switch events trend toward wonky, the energy has people sometimes laughing in their seats and applauding with glee.

You would have to be very, very sleepy to nod-off at a Switch gathering.