Community
Power initiated an innovative idea of partnering with the Theater of Public
Policy’s improv comedians for a public event similar to Sierra Club’s Path to
Power. We saw it as a way to add entertainment value and attract attendance to
an event about Xcel Energy’s long-term utility planning.
In addition, comedy is considered neutral, and with
the inclusion of intelligent humor, people do not build up the same walls of
defensiveness that they would in events of a serious character.
We figured media sources who would not otherwise not
be interested in covering a utility resource planning event would be intrigued
to come to a comedy event of that sort and would note the number of attendees
who showed up and make a story about how we as the organizers were excited
enough about utility resource planning to do this.
The event
was an overall success, particularly in attracting robust public attendance and
voluntary donations to cover its costs.
The way how the Theater of Public Policy operates is
that they have their cast of improv comedians that remains the same and a different
set of panelists for each event that they interview before the actual
performance. In addition, members of the audience can ask questions of the panelist,
which is a good quality for public engagement.
This way you can hear insightful information about
public policy matters “straight from the horse’s mouth”.
The panelists for this event were Ellen Anderson of
the UMN Energy Transition Lab, Annie Levinson Faulk of Citizens Utility Board,
and City Councilmember Jeremy Schroeder of the Minneapolis Clean Energy
Partnership.
When
someone from the mainstream media interviews powerful or influential people
involved with public policy, they have a tendency to say “whelp, I have done my
job” without asking to many incisive follow-up questions. But the interviewer with
the Theater of Public Policy goes a bit deeper in interviewing panelists. They
are less apt to let interviewed panelists get away with “wiggling out” because
going deeper is what creates opportunity and hooks and metaphors for the cast
of improv comedians. This improv group will just go to town the more metaphors an
interview gives them.
BIG INSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS REGARDING ENERGY WE DIRECTED ATTENTION TOWARD
As
Community Power, we have more interest institutional changes regarding energy, thinking
beyond the scope of individual lifestyle behavior changes with energy.
We had some
crucial higher-level questions about energy that we felt it was crucial to direct
audience attention toward at the Theater of Public Policy event.
The first
is how utilities sinking capital into baseload plants in order to keep them
going for more years actually comes at the expense of potential for clean,
renewable energy. The other area is the manner in which we (as utility customers)
are on the hook to pay the costs if utility management makes a bad decision…given
how shareholders eat the costs in most other industries.
One emphasis is to take a pause in new natural gas
plant infrastructure given that it is a huge risk to put electric customers on
the hook for this.
Pretty soon there will be an inflection point where
all this old energy utility infrastructure no longer pays off while the incumbent
utility management does not imagine or plan for any system more evolved beyond
that point. And we need to be prepared to call the question when intervening in
the IRP.
No comments:
Post a Comment