Sightings | Alumni Profile
Meredith Wingate is All About Energy
1998 Alumn Helps Facilitate Markets for Renewables Like Wind, Biomass and Solar p.3
After receiving her Master of Environmental Management degree, she returned to the Bay Area and a job at San Francisco Recycling and Disposal, then worked in air quality compliance for the Port of Oakland before hiring on at the newly created Center for Resource Solutions. Jan Hamrin, the president and founder of CRS, liked Wingate’s enthusiasm and her policy background, and believed that those qualities would serve her well as she learned about the energy field on the job. Hamrin says, “She has an innate policy sense that guides her, an ability to analyze issues and negotiate between different interest groups.”
For Wingate, it has been a revelation and a pleasure working for an organization in which the entire workforce has a vested interest in the outcome of their projects and a shared set of values. She bikes to work most days and loves the beauty, progressiveness and cultural diversity of San Francisco, although “the cost of living is a challenge and public schools will be an issue.”
Now, Wingate plans to stay with energy. “It’s a fascinating field. It couldn’t be more timely. Renewable energy is such an important element of our environmental future.”
Lately, Wingate has been thinking a lot about the intersection of the markets in renewable energy and in carbon. As large electricity users look to reduce their carbon footprint, many of them are interested in buying renewable energy certificates in part because of their carbon reduction value.
But, Wingate says, some rules are hampering this extension of the renewable market; for instance, in traditional cap-and-trade regimes, allowances are given to polluters. “If you’re a wind developer that brings 1,000 megawatts of new wind power online,” she says, “that’s 1,000 megawatts less that is needed from existing electricity generators. Cap-and-trade programs are designed to reward polluters when emissions are reduced under the cap. This seems like a reasonable starting point, but in practice it rewards the polluters for the emission reduction activities of clean energy generators—the coal plant gets surplus allowances it can sell but the wind plant gets nothing because it didn’t have allowances in the first place.” The federal sulfur dioxide trading program is set up this way, and, Wingate says, “it’s an unfortunate precedent. We’re trying to get it right for carbon.”
There’s no reason to believe that they won’t “get it right” if Wingate is involved. After all, as her colleagues say, she’s smart. Creative. A quick thinker. Diplomatic. Enthusiastic. And she’s got the energy.
Lisa M. Dellwo is a freelance writer in Durham.