MAKING CHANGE IN THE WORLD
An interview with RMI Managing Director Lena Hansen
By Laurie Stone, Senior Writer/Editor at Rocky Mountain Institute.
Lena Hansen started at Rocky Mountain Institute as an intern and is now the managing director of RMI’s China Program, based in Beijing. She leads a team of 20 who advise and support China’s energy transition in the areas of power market reform, city carbon peaking, near-zero carbon development, and freight electrification. Prior to joining the China Program, Lena led RMI’s US Electricity Program and co-founded RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab (e⁻Lab), a unique multiyear collaboration of leading power sector decision makers who create transformational solutions. Here she talks about what drew her to RMI, the importance of working in China, and making change in the world.
You started at RMI as an intern in 2004. What first drew you to RMI?
I was in graduate school at Duke, in an environmental master’s program. Amory came to speak, and I had actually never heard of RMI or Amory. His talk was really pretty radical for me, because I never thought much about making change from a market-based perspective. I thought of environmentalism more traditionally, and although I have huge respect for environmental organizations, I had been pretty frustrated with their approach and impact. When the opportunity came up to do an internship at RMI, it was a no-brainer for me to try something totally different and find a leverage point and way to make a bigger change.
You have now been at RMI for almost 15 years. Why have you stayed all these years?
There are many reasons. For one, of all the different ways I see people in the world making change, RMI’s approach is the most resonant for me. I can understand the impact that we create, and it has always seemed like the place where I can make the highest and best contribution to solving the energy and climate problem.
Another reason is that RMI rarely gets stuck in one line of reasoning. It is always willing to learn as an organization, be responsive to what is needed in the world, and innovate our ideas. I find that really invigorating. The third reason is that I have had the opportunity at RMI to work on so many different kinds of projects and topics. It’s always interesting and I’m always learning something. I’ve never gotten bored at RMI.
And finally, it’s the people. When I started at RMI we had 30 or 40 people. Even though we’ve grown to over 200, the people at RMI are the kinds of people I want to be around. If I’m going to spend a lot of time at work, I want to be around people who push me to improve and be as impactful as I can be.
You’re now the managing director of RMI’s China Program. Why did you decide to take on that position and move to China?
For most of my career, my real passion has been the electricity sector, and I have done tons of work on process — how to get people in the electricity sector to innovate and problem solve, how do you get them to work in a different way to make transformative ideas stick? To me it seemed like an important opportunity to push that thinking further into an arena that is totally different but incredibly important. China consumes 25 percent of the world’s coal. Last year people in China bought 50 percent of the world’s electric vehicles. The scale of things in China is unimaginable.
Beijing has about 25 million people, which is larger than every single US state except for California and Texas. When I started to understand not only the scale of the impact on climate but also the scale of the opportunity to make a difference on climate, I couldn’t say no. You can’t be serious about wanting to solve the climate problem without considering China. China is also incredibly willing to take an experimental prototyping approach.
“The speed at which China can act is impressive, and it’s the speed that we need in order to tackle the global climate problem.”
Working on electricity regulation in the United States, it takes a long time to make change, because everyone wants things to be perfect before trying something new. The Chinese say, “Let’s just put something out there and try it, and as we learn more, we’ll make it better.” The speed at which China can act is impressive, and it’s the speed that we need in order to tackle the global climate problem. Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the amazing food!
What are you most excited about that you’re working on now?
The Chinese power sector produces 10 percent of the world’s carbon emissions and 35 percent of air pollution emissions. China is really investing in and building renewables. In fact, China built more solar last year than the total solar in the United States. But the problem is that China is building renewable energy systems faster than they are figuring out how to integrate that energy into the grid. Even though China produces a lot of electricity from solar and wind, the country is curtailing a lot of it — last year China curtailed maybe 20 percent of its renewable energy — because of the way the electricity system is operated. So that’s a huge problem, and China is committed to fixing it. And if it’s not fixed, it risks slowing future growth of renewables.
RMI’s power sector work in China is focused on that problem. We’re advising the national government and the people designing China’s power market reforms. We’re helping them implement wholesale power markets.* They’ve identified eight provinces that are going to implement wholesale markets as pilots. We believe if they do it well, it could eliminate the curtailment problem, and also shift generation from low-efficiency coal plants to high- efficiency coal plants. They could save 1 percent of global carbon emissions just by implementing wholesale power markets with no added cost, and actually with saving $10 to $14 billion a year in fuel costs. That is so exciting because it’s a perfect example of a leverage point. You can make one change — shifting how power is dispatched — and set the foundation for renewables to be the future.
What project/impact from the past are you most proud of?
I’ve worked on so many different projects over the years that I’m honored to have been a part of, but e⁻Lab is probably the one I’m most proud of because it was such a bold step for RMI and for the industry, and it has had so much impact. Right after we released our book Reinventing Fire, our power team took a step back and asked, What does the Reinventing Fire analysis imply for what RMI should be doing in the power sector to make the biggest difference? We came up with the e⁻Lab concept, to create a space where decision makers and change agents in the industry could actually come together to figure how to collaborate together, innovate, and problem solve in a different way that can create big, lasting change. We were looking at the dimension of change through people and institutions. It was a radical departure of what RMI had done in the past, and a lot of people both in and out of RMI were very skeptical at first.
Now it has grown into a program that’s highly respected and known around the country, is a core thing that we do, and is making a material difference. We have had dozens of teams come through our e⁻Lab change labs, and e⁻Lab has helped them implement and accelerate the changes they’re trying to make.
RMI only has 200 people, and we obviously cannot solve the world’s problems on our own. Things like e⁻Lab allow us to empower other change agents in the world — that’s scaling. That’s how we can respond to the urgency and scale of climate change.
What is one thing readers can do to help create a low-carbon future?
I know you expect me to say something like install LED lightbulbs, or purchase an EV, or donate to RMI. And you should do those things. But what I actually want to say is just to be conscious of your choices. So many times, people think their choices don’t matter, and they don’t notice they’re using so much energy because as a society we’ve gotten so used to our energy-intensive lifestyles. We’ve forgotten that we can actually be just as happy (or happier) while using less energy. So, I’d ask people to just notice, and to question what they can do easily to significantly reduce their energy consumption. Turn off the lights when you leave a room; try out Meatless Mondays.
For me in China, I bike everywhere I go. I started biking because as a foreigner I can’t drive here, and shared bikes were everywhere. But it’s been really wonderful to realize that I can actually get to work significantly faster on a bike than in a taxi or on the subway. It’s better for me, it gives me a few minutes to take a breath and think about my day. But it took me moving to Beijing where I’m not allowed to drive to really build that into my day to day.
What is your most memorable RMI moment?
One thing I will never forget was at RMI’s 25th anniversary party. I had only been at RMI a couple of years, and Amory gave a speech called “Imagine a World.” To me, RMI had always been about technology and economics and facts. Listening to our founder give a talk about what our work meant to him and his vision for the future was eye opening to me. He asked people to imagine a world that is peaceful, prosperous, just, and life sustaining, and that working together we can make it happen. I will never forget it because it reminds me how important the work is that we do, that it is not just about facts and figures but about bringing our whole selves and hearts and passions to our work. And it has shaped how I think about my role both at RMI and in the world.
[You can read Amory’s speech at rmi.org/insight/imagine-a-world/].
*Currently the Chinese government allocates an entitlement of annual hours of production to each coal generator, on a more-or-less equal basis. In a wholesale market, electricity produced by different generators is bought at the wholesale market price by an entity — usually a utility — that resells that power to the end user.
