Sightings | Alumni Profile
Meredith Wingate is All About Energy
1998 Alumn Helps Facilitate Markets for Renewables Like Wind, Biomass and Solar
by Lisa Dellwo
Talk to Meredith Wingate’s colleagues, and they’ll tell you that she’s smart. Creative. A quick thinker. Diplomatic. Enthusiastic. And, almost inevitably, they’ll say that she’s got energy. Inevitably, because the 1998 MEM works in the energy field.
Specifically, Wingate works in renewable energy policy as director of clean energy design and implementation at the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS), a San Francisco nonprofit. Established in 1997, CRS operates across the United States and in countries like China, assisting local and regional governments, other nonprofits, and corporations (including utilities) as they adopt programs for using renewable energy.
Wingate is involved in activities ranging from writing “best practice” handbooks for regulators to advising government officials who might be inadvertently writing rules that hinder progress on the renewables front. But her main focus these days is facilitating the creation of renewable trading markets across the country.
“Traditionally, there have been physical barriers to renewables entering the market,” Wingate says. “If the wind is here, but the load is over there, what do you do? If you can generate wind power at night but the demand for power is in the daytime, how do you deal with this?”
How you deal with it is to create a market—somewhat like a stock exchange—in which companies who create renewable energy can sell certificates to other companies or individuals who want to offset their use of traditionally generated power.
Such trading of renewables has existed for at least a half-dozen years, assisted by the Center for Resource Solutions’ Green-e program, a voluntary certification program that verifies that energy was created using renewable resources such as wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, or small hydro. Green-e, which Wingate directed from 1999 to 2002, is the standard the federal government uses in its renewable energy procurement and was the standard used when Pacific Gas and Electric purchased enough renewable energy certificates to offset all of San Francisco’s electricity use on United Nations World Environment Day on June 3.
What Wingate is doing now is helping regional renewable markets develop an infrastructure for third-party authentication of trades. “It’s like the New York Stock Exchange,” says Brad Crabtree, director of the Powering the Plains Project, an energy and agriculture policy program of the Great Plains Institute in Minneapolis, Minn. “If you buy 100 shares of IBM, you never doubt those shares exist. This implicit trust allows the market to flourish. We are trying to create this trust so that our renewable market can flourish.”