Sightings | Alumni Profile
Meredith Wingate is All About Energy
1998 Alumn Helps Facilitate Markets for Renewables Like Wind, Biomass and Solar p.2
Wingate is providing technical expertise as Powering the Plains works with regional utilities to create the Midwest Renewable Energy Tracking System (MRETS). Currently, a working group of stakeholders is creating the rules for tracking and authenticating renewable certificate transactions. Wingate advises the group on issues from the large and complex—how do you account for certificates when you have a company that generates both renewable and fossil fuel energy—to the nitty gritty, like how you generate the serial numbers for renewable certificates.
Wingate brings to the project a deep knowledge of what other regions have done in similar situations, and Crabtree says that the MRETS project is ahead of schedule in part because she has prevented them from reinventing the wheel, making mistakes that others had already made and solved.
“Only a handful of people in the country know as much as she does about renewable energy markets,” says Crabtree.
For two years, Wingate took this knowledge to China, where she worked on a program for the Center for Resource Solutions that assisted the Chinese equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency in the development of renewable energy policies. She traveled to the country five times, staying for several weeks at a time, advising the Chinese on policies that support new renewable development and informing them of renewable successes and failures in other countries. It was “fascinating, interesting and also grueling,” Wingate says, recalling daily meetings that would start at 8:30 a.m. and end with a formal banquet at 9 p.m. Although it was a challenge dealing with people who had little experience with markets and pricing—because the Chinese government has historically set the price for everything—Wingate is cautiously optimistic on the subject of China and renewables, particularly in light of its recent passage of the landmark Chinese Renewable Energy Promotion Law.
The arrival of daughter Madeline in 2004 brought Wingate back to the domestic renewable energy arena. She is married to Brad Drda, an expert with a San Francisco solid waste and recycling company, whom she met when she was in the same field. “Love at the dump,” she says jokingly.
She came to Duke after receiving her bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado and spending five years in the waste industry in San Francisco. Wingate reports that Duke supplied her with key knowledge in international policy and climate change, and that the ability to distill a lot of information into a three-page paper is a Duke-taught skill that she uses continually.
One classmate who has stayed in touch remembers her as a “diplomatic and forceful” person who “doesn’t apologize for what she believes in.” Duke Forest Program Coordinator Richard Broadwell MEM’00 says, “She is fully invested in her beliefs as an environmentalist. She biked to school, she recycled and she composted.”