Microgrid Knowledge – Microgrid Talk: Energy politics and not poking the big bear

Energy is highly politicized. And as Jim Fonger, Canadian vice president at Ameresco, points out, that’s bad news for innovation.

Building new energy infrastructure takes a long time, much longer than the duration of political cycles. So energy technology gets caught up in a start/stop cycle as political parties change.

“When a new party gets elected, they get advised that there needs to be some new policy that’s going to change the world,” Fonger says in the latest panel discussion on Microgrid Talk.

Too often, “the information that they get comes from someone who knows very little about the electricity sector.” The result is “a hodgepodge of development that happens over a long period of time that makes it very difficult for new solutions to move forward,” he says.

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