Colleen Woodson, Chief of Staff, Bright Power
Bright Power is an energy and water management partner for real estate companies, primarily owners of large multifamily portfolios, property managers, and commercial properties.
Their energy management services include assisting clients with their energy efficiency efforts, analyzing data, engineering, energy audits, and design. They also have a construction team so they can implement retrofits and installation of on-site projects such as solar generation, battery storage, or cogeneration.
Bright Power’s goal is to enable real estate companies to focus on running their properties instead of energy management. They use a Find-Fix-Follow approach of identifying opportunities, providing recommendations to address them, and tracking results to ensure performance.
What do you actually do all day?
The primary goal of my role is to create alignment across the company and to keep the organization moving together in the same direction. There were about 30 people at the company when I started, and now we’ve grown to over 100, so it’s important that we’re working together effectively to achieve the same goals. Because we’re a holistic energy partner, there are many stakeholders focusing on different parts of a client’s energy roadmap. That means I spend a lot of time in meetings, interfacing with our executives, finance teams, and internal project teams, and making sure that people have what they need to work together well.
For example, a lot of folks don’t love completing their timecards. It’s necessary for a bunch of reasons, but it can be a pain for project managers and engineers. But in order to understand our project costs, we need the whole company to get on the same page. I’m able to work with each group, taking each division into account in a company-wide process.
We have a lot of different business lines, but we want to be supportive of each other and tap into the right skill sets for the right things. This sort of situation has emerged largely because we’ve grown so quickly. Processes that worked well a year ago might not be as effective as we’ve scaled up. We’re intentional about revising our processes to ensure we continue to be effective across the company. This makes for a smooth experience internally and externally.
What are some of the key skills for success in this role?
Communication! Being able to communicate clearly while also being able to listen and empathize is critical. You have to sit down with people from all levels of the organization, understand their pain points, consider their frustrations and points of confusion, and find a way to realign their roles or processes with our strategy. It’s important to be able to really dig and get to the root cause of an issue, not just alleviate the symptoms.
What is your favorite part of your job?
The people. The people at Bright Power are smart, dedicated, and really passionate about our mission. I like to think of us as saving the world in a way; it’s what makes me excited to come to work each day. We also have incredible clients. In some of my former roles at Bright Power I had the opportunity to work with several affordable housing clients. It brought me closer to our impact and I saw how our work helped increase the quality of housing for low income individuals and families. That was really meaningful. It drove home the point that our work impacts people’s comfort in their own homes. That’s not a responsibility we take lightly.
What is the hardest part of your job?
Having to make decisions when there’s no “right” decision. When you need to choose A or B and there are pros and cons on both sides, you just have to make a decision in order to keep things moving. That’s tough, because I always want to do the very best thing for the company and my colleagues. Prioritizing is also challenging. There is always a multitude of high priority needs and picking out the most urgent item can be difficult.
What is your proudest professional achievement?
When I was a senior energy analyst a few years ago, I worked on a project called EnergyScoreCards Minnesota. It was a research project with 500 properties with the goal of proving that hands-on benchmarking and support generates energy and water savings in multifamily settings. This was the first research project of its kind done in a multifamily setting. For the experimental group, we worked directly with property managers. They were each assigned an Energy Analyst partner, who would analyze their energy and water data, make recommendations about which buildings to focus on improving, and connect them to utilities in their area who offered efficiency incentive programs. The partners would also check in regularly with the property managers to give them feedback on how the buildings were performing. The control group did not receive any of these services. We simply tracked their usage data but only gave them access to it after the study. The study had some really positive results: energy savings was around 5% and water savings was around 30%! This study was based on our EnergyScoreCard service and it was exciting and validating to have definitive proof that our services make an impact.
What are the game changers in your world?
I’m interested to see how utilities keep evolving and changing as they have a huge impact on what building owners do. Building owners are used to getting financial incentives for efficiency work, and many won’t do projects without them. There’s a growing trend of utilities requiring measured savings as part of an incentive program instead of simply providing rebates for efficiency work. That’s great for us as it aligns perfectly with our Find-Fix-Follow approach.
There’s also a lot happening in New York state with Governor Cuomo’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) strategy. The state is asking a lot of questions about the long-term role of the utility – are they just poles and wires? What is their role in reducing energy usage?
One of the specific New York state initiatives is VDER (pronounced “Vader”), which is a mechanism that came out of REV to replace net metering and will significantly change how solar works. With net metering, there was a heavier cost burden that fell on people who don’t have solar and VDER accounts for that. With the utility business model changing, they’ll have to figure out how to charge as more distributed energy comes online.
What was your path to this role?
I graduated college with a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering, and by then I’d already identified the energy and sustainability sector as an area of interest. My first job was doing design of large-scale wind farms. I then started working for TRC helping them manage New Jersey’s clean energy programs. (NJ Board of Public Utilities hired TRC to administer efficiency incentive programs.) Bright Power worked with some of those programs, so I was introduced to the organization by colleagues at TRC. I was impressed by the people I met at Bright Power, and I soon joined them as an energy analyst. Over the next 6 years, I became a Senior Energy Analyst, then Director of the group, and now I’m the Chief of Staff.
What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?
The biggest thing for me was that I’ve always been interested in context and always kept my head up. I was also interested in how my work as an energy analyst connected with the rest of the company and how I was contributing to the company vision. I took advantage of every opportunity to work cross functionally. I also tried to get a sense of what kinds of problems my manager was struggling with; the more awareness you can have of those higher-level challenges, the more you can start to plug yourself in. My drive has been about being useful – where do I fit in, where does this make sense. Be curious, interested, and aware, and be useful with information and offering help. Not only does it expose you to people who wouldn’t have otherwise known you, but it also starts to stretch you and that’s how you grow. Always think about “How can I offer what I have” in different areas.
What are your favorite resources?
Lots of people at Bright Power listen to The Energy Gang, read Greentech Media, and Renewable Energy World.
There’s a great network in New York called the Building Energy Exchange which hosts an event series called Women in Sustainability and Energy (WISE) which highlights women as speakers and leaders.
A lot of people at Bright Power (myself included!) have done the Multifamily Building Analyst training from the Building Performance Institute. They offer are a lot of great training opportunities for more hands-on building efficiency jobs.
A couple of books that have been useful to me include Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which is a great book about women and leadership. I’m currently reading Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It and Why the Rest Don’t (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) which is a great management book on growing companies.
Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?
I don’t think I have one sustainability hero, but I really enjoy hearing the stories about people who are radical and doing crazy out-there things that would never occur to you. I heard a Ted Radio Hour segment with Bunker Roy, who founded Barefoot College in India. He recruits women from rural and poverty-stricken communities around the world to come to the college and learn how to be solar engineers. They then go back home and solar electrify their villages. It’s radical on so many levels – taking women in their 30’s from rural Africa, teaching them about solar, electricity and how to be an electrician, and then giving their entire village something life changing, like electricity. It just blows up the social expectations for women in their villages and totally changes the gender equation, all while bringing electricity to parts of the world that didn’t have it before. It’s just incredible. I’m in constant admiration of people who are able to have such incredible impact.
