Joshua Kaplan, Program Officer, Renewable Energy and Climate, World Wildlife Fund

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is dedicated to delivering science-based solutions to preserve the diversity and abundance of life on Earth, halt the degradation of the environment and combat climate change.   With over 5 million active members and offices in more than 100 countries, WWF is one of the largest conservation organizations in the world.  WWF’s work is organized into six areas: food, climate, fresh water, wildlife, forest and oceans.  Programs in these areas support the preservation of ecosystems, protection of endangered species, development of markets, and abating climate change.

What do you actually do all day?

I’m focused on working with companies to buy and scale up renewable energy use in the United States.  Decarbonizing the global electricity sector is essential to help the US and the world deliver on the goals of the Paris Agreement and stave off catastrophic climate change.

One of the big projects I support is facilitating the Corporate Renewable Energy Buyers’ Principles.  The Principles are a group of 78 leading companies who collaboratively made a statement about what large companies want to see when purchasing utility-scale wind and solar.  These large buyers represent 69 million MW of renewable energy demand, which is enough to power 6.5 million US homes for a year.  Collectively they have a market capitalization of $7.8 trillion, so they form an important piece of our economy, and if they’re interested in changing the way they power their operations, the market will respond.

Right now, most of the barriers to large scale solar and wind purchases are not technical, but regulatory, political, or financial.  The goal is to bring energy buyers together to communicate to utility companies, regulators, and policy makers the need to change the system to make renewable energy more accessible.  We’re doing that with our partners, including Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and the World Resources Institute (WRI) through an initiative called Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA).  REBA’s big idea is simple but fundamental:  by connecting all of the various players – suppliers, developers, utilities, regulators, and companies, we can help accelerate the clean energy transition.

One of the inspiring trends that we’re seeing is that through fora like REBA, companies are beginning to work together to purchase wind and solar projects collectively.  This summer, Apple, Akamai, Etsy and Swiss Re announced that they had worked together to develop two new wind and solar energy farms.  Together these companies were able to buy a large amount of energy at competitive prices and agreement terms, something it would have been difficult to do alone.

Day to day, I spend a lot of time talking to people, particularly when new companies join REBA or the Buyers’ Principles.  I work on learning what an organization’s goals are and helping them to understand how participation in the REBA community can help them to achieve their goals.  I also manage our partnerships with other organizations through REBA.  The people I work with are located across the country so I’m always on a call or a webinar or some other collaboration tool to bridge those geographic gaps.

What are some of the key skills for success in this role?

Some of the basic required skills are a good knowledge of electricity markets, carbon accounting, and finance.  Two really big parts of this role are relationship management and storytelling.  It’s important to be able to articulate what these companies are doing, what the impact is, why it matters, and the change we can expect to see from it.

The relationship management piece is important because I’m working with a lot of different organizations, each with their own structure and strategies.  Oftentimes even when we have several different partners whose goals align, the way that they all try to achieve them is different.  Getting people to work towards a shared goal when they’re all using a different approach can be tricky.  It’s important to be able to navigate those situations and really understand what it takes to make organizational change so that we can help our partners make sustainability a core part of their businesses.

What is your favorite part of your job?

I love the wide variety of people and organizations with whom I have the opportunity to work.  It’s incredibly interesting to see how each of our partners interact with the different parts of their company like finance, sourcing, and others.  Getting to see all that happen in so many different places is incredibly valuable, it can be hard to see the bigger picture when you’re only at one company.  It’s great to see it and connect these experiences to develop some broader lessons that can be shared with others.

What is the hardest part of your job?

The flip side is that with so many relationships and players, it can be difficult to align timelines, projects, and processes, sometimes it can feel like a monumental feat.  But at the end of the day, achieving carbon emissions reductions and seeing the impact we have transform the operations of businesses and their suppliers makes it well worth it.

What is your proudest professional achievement?

I’m really proud of how my work has helped get conversations about climate and energy into a broader public narrative.  One particular example is a report I work on called Power Forward.  It’s a collaboration between WWF, Ceres, Calvert Investments, and CDP. The report assesses climate and energy commitments in each company in the Fortune 500 index, so it showcases what the largest organizations in the US are doing to fight climate change.   It’s produced every other year and in 2017 we released the third version of this report, so we were able to see some trends for the first time.

The report includes answers to questions such as ‘How is the frequency of target setting among these large companies increasing?’ or ‘How many of the targets being set today are aligned with climate science?’ It’s the type of report you assume is mostly read only by people who work in this space, but a few weeks after the report launched I was watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and there it was!  He used our report as a proof point in his response to President Trump announcing the US would pull out of the Paris Agreement.  Seeing the cover of our report show up on national television and seeing it used as something to inform the broader public was exciting.

What are the game changers in your world?

The biggest game changer would be some form of standardized market instrument from utilities or other providers of retail electricity that could make buying renewable energy as easy as buying something like pens and paper.  Standardized contracts would reduce the need for specialized teams and would remove a huge barrier for large and small organizations alike.

In a broader sense, general grid transformation is starting to change things a lot as we see things like storage, smart technology, smart meters and electric vehicles all start to play a role in helping us to get our energy where we need it, when we need it in an efficient fashion.

Some people think intermittency is one of the current barriers for renewables, but that’s actually a problem we’ve largely addressed.  Storage is one of the factors making it easier, but also as the grid mix increases to include more wind and solar we’re able to balance them better (the wind blows hardest at night and the sun shines brightest at day) and as we’re expanding some of our energy markets there are more places for excess energy to go.

What was your path to this role?

My undergraduate degree was in environmental science at American University.  While I was a student they formed a new sustainability office, and I was the first student intern.  That became a full-time role after graduation and was a wonderful opportunity to learn about what sustainability means at a large organization and what organizational change requires.  AU had set a goal of carbon neutrality by 2020 (which they achieved this year) and 50% of their emissions was from electricity use, so finding a way to source zero carbon energy was a great way to get most of the way towards that goal.  We partnered with George Washington University (GWU) and GWU Hospital to do a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to procure enough solar energy to cover 50% of the school’s electricity use.  That project was so much more complicated than I had imagined; it took several years and very many people were involved, but it was incredibly interesting.  It got me thinking about how large organizations buy wind and solar, why it can be so difficult to do so, and what that means for the broader market.  I then briefly worked for the US Department of Energy working on general sustainability reporting and analytics, but when a position opened up at WWF focused on renewables, it was a perfect fit.

What’s your advice to someone interested in a role like this?

Of course, you should learn as much as possible about things like the drivers of climate change and how we account for carbon both from a scientific and policy standpoint, but what we really need is people who can tell a story.  We need people who can take that technical knowledge and be able to tell that story to the broader public, accounting managers, the CFO, anyone.  We need people who understand that others approach climate change in different ways, and being able to make it meaningful to people who don’t think about this day to day is essential.

When sustainability practitioners all get in a room together, everyone gets it.  But talking about buying renewable energy may be hard to grasp at first for someone who is not deep in the weeds on this issue on a day to day basis. We need to help them understand why reducing water use or recycling or reducing carbon emissions matter to how they do their job and why they should care.

I’d also say you should focus on building up your network, and don’t think that you can stop doing that as soon as you get into the space.  Many of the people I worked with at the start of my career still actively support me, which is why I pay it forward as often as I can.  I was very lucky and had a lot of talented, smart people willing to sit down and talk with me when I was in school, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

What are your favorite resources?

Triplepundit and GreenBiz do a good job of covering the private sector’s sustainability progress.  I also like to read US Energy News, Utility Dive, and Smart Energy Decisions for updates specifically on the energy sector.

I like that the Atlantic and Vox do deep-dive articles that are accessible.

I read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things when I was in college and it really helped me rethink the concept of design and why we make the products the way we make them.  It’s great because the book itself is printed on recycled plastic, it really drives home the point the book is trying to make.

One of the first books my manager gave me on this job was a book called Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities, it’s a great primer on the electricity markets and the future of electric utilities.  I’d recommend it to anyone.

The two certifications I tend to see most often in terms of professional credentials are LEED (the Green Associate is focused on the general principles of sustainability as they relate to the built environment) and the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP).  In addition to training, ISSP also hosts some really great networking events.

Who (or what) is your sustainability hero?

I have a lot of heroes that have influenced me, but I’m not sure most people would know them.  I’ll share with you a quotation I keep on my desk from architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  It’s not specifically a quote about sustainability, but it speaks to how we should approach sustainability through broader systemic change.  It reminds me to always be thinking “How do I completely change this system?”

 

The opinions expressed in this interview are Joshua’s own. He is not a spokesperson for World Wildlife Fund.