Nick Occhipinti, RE-AMP member and Director of Policy and Community Activism at West Michigan Environmental Action Council.
Since 1968, West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC) has been offering on-the-ground environmental education and advocacy to communities across West Michigan. Nick Occhipinti, WMEAC’s Director of Policy and Community Activism, pursued membership with the RE-AMP Network five years ago to bolster this work and now, after years of collaboration, fondly describes RE-AMP as a “comfort blanket”—a deep well of knowledge he can draw on at any moment. You can read our interview below to find out how Nick’s participation in Network activities—from working group meetings to ad hoc committees—helps him advance WMEAC’s mission; to hear his creative ideas on how marrying “slow money” and crowd-funding to support distributed renewable energy projects could “change communities and clean our energy portfolio with unimaginable velocity”; to learn about his unique motivations for doing this work; and more.
Jessica Conrad: What is West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC) currently focused on?
Nick Occhipinti: WMEAC is a 45+ year-old organization, and while we’re mostly focused on energy and water issues, we’re now looking at everything we do through the lens of climate resiliency and inclusion. We offer on-the-ground environmental education for classrooms of young people, with the idea of moving them up a chain of engagement, if you will, to eventually become WMEAC members, volunteers, interns, donors, and then serious environmental advocates. WMEAC’s work runs the gamut from education to advocacy, and we implement our model of change across the West Michigan: exposing children and families to environmental issues, teaching them, and helping them engage throughout their lives.
In terms of the issues, like many organizations we have to choose when to be proactive and when to be reactive, especially on the policy front given the fact that our current legislature isn’t terribly friendly to environmental issues.
Jessica Conrad: WMEAC is a longtime member of the RE-AMP Network. When did you personally get involved?
Nick Occhipinti: WMEAC is now into its fifth year of membership thanks to a great tip I got from Ryan Werder when he was with Michigan League of Conservation Voters. It was evident at the time that energy would be a big, multi-year conversation at the state level, and Ryan said to me, Hey, I know you guys are interested in energy issues. You should get involved in this network. I checked RE-AMP out, and was intrigued by the concept of funders and advocates from across the Midwest getting together to coordinate strategy, expertise, and resources. It clicked. I immediately knew I wanted to pursue membership. I did, and the rest is history.
Jessica Conrad: What are some of the highlights from your experience with the Network?
Nick Occhipinti: There have been so many, both professional and personal. Let’s start with personal highlights because they’re fun. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at an annual meeting talking about wonky policy at a cocktail hour with friends, and I’ve thought I found my people! This is one of the things I love most about the Network. There just aren’t a lot of people engaging on energy and climate work in the same way— from a deep policy and advocacy perspective—in Grand Rapids. I know a few people who engage on similar issues, but not very many of them get as deep on energy and climate, and when they do it’s usually from a business or corporate perspective. I have to go to Lansing or Ann Arbor to find a handful of similar advocates, and when I do it’s usually around a specific issue or grant item or conference and we have work to do post haste. Very rarely do I find myself in situations like the ones RE-AMP provides for simply connecting with like-trained—usually better trained!—folks in such a friendly and casual setting. And often the settings are beautiful. Last year I attended a joint meeting of our Energy Efficiency and Global Warming Solutions Working Groups, along with NRDC and Energy Foundation. There was a reception at a really classy Chicago bar, and I had an hour-long conversation with Doug Jester, a former chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission. It’s not terribly often that we have that kind of space to just connect. Personally, I love those moments.
Professionally, the straight content delivery at RE-AMP meetings has been important to me. I take pages and pages of notes about specific tactics and strategies from projects like mine across the region.
The famous Donald Rumsfeld quote also comes to mind, “There are known knowns and known unknowns…but there are also unknown unknowns.” That occasionally hits me at Network meetings, and I love that. Here’s a classic example: RE-AMP asked Steve Kihm, an expert in finance with the Seventhwave, to talk about the stated versus revealed return on equity for corporate investor-owned utilities. His presentation was an eye opener for me. I am trained in economics and thought that would have prepared me Steve’s presentation, but I realized that I don’t understand corporate finance at all! What I learned from Kihm, I still use in meetings to this day—sometimes directly with utilities. I used the term “return on equity” with Consumers Energy when discussing how they wouldn’t want to take on administrative work around PACE financing, and people around the table were shocked and impressed that I could put together the idea of internal rates of return, return on equity, and their interest in pursuing a line of programming or not. It came straight from a RE-AMP meeting.
The download of content, knowledge, and tactics is a huge benefit of participating in the Network. And that’s not to mention all sorts of tools the Network hands over free of charge, usually providing support for how to use them. RE-AMP has been an excellent resource.
Jessica Conrad: You’ve already answered my next question, but I’ll still ask in case there’s anything you’d like to add. How has your participation in Network activities—from the Energy Efficiency Working Group to the 2016 Annual Meeting Planning Committee to the Michigan State Table—impacted your work at WMEAC?
Nick Occhipinti: Another way I think of the Network is as a “comfort blanket.” I know I have this enormous, comprehensive team of experts standing behind me that I can engage at any moment. I think that’s a decent way of describing it. If I get over my head on anything technical, or if I need new ideas for a campaign that’s not going well, I know that there’s this deep well of knowledge that I can access at any moment.
Jessica Conrad: What do you see as Michigan’s most promising opportunity to make progress on our climate and clean energy goals right now?
Nick Occhipinti: I still think it’s the obvious answer: the state’s Energy Efficiency Resource Standards (EERS) and the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Due to various technical opportunities and the alignment of a few odd bedfellows, we still have an opportunity to at a minimum defend the standards we have. This is very, very strange, given how much opposition there is from Michigan’s Republican legislature and how lethargic the governor’s support has become on clean energy and energy efficiency policy.
I am also very excited about the prospect of marrying “slow money” and crowd-funding to distributed renewable energy projects like community solar and energy efficiency. There are so many projects out there that will move forward when we figure this out, and it will change communities and clean our energy portfolio with unimaginable velocity. Every day Americans receive little to no interest on their meager savings, and even better off Americans’ savings are getting hammered by standard Wall Street fees—and that’s in a bull market. If the average American could invest a few hundred, thousand, or a portion of their retirement savings in neighborhood clean energy projects and safely make 2-4% on that investment, they would be ecstatic. Most capital investors won’t go near those modest returns.
On a related note, I also see an opportunity for nonprofit energy advocates to connect more intentionally with the technology sector. I don’t know what that would look like, and every time I bring it up, people say Oh yeah!, but the conversation stops there. No one is really doing it on the state and local level, and no one really knows where that alignment or synergy could be. But Tesla recently opened a new facility in Michigan, and there’s been an explosion of battery storage in the state. Maybe it’s simple? For example, maybe the relationship is as simple as one of our in-state groups somehow managing to build a relationship with Elon Musk’s lobby team, and we show up at targeted state capitol buildings together lobbying for cleaner energy policies. Because, guess what? Teslas pull electricity from the grid, and as the grid cleans, the electric vehicles get greener and their emissions go down. That’s one of the arguments for electric cars. We both have a stake in a cleaner, smarter grid. Who knows if something like this would be worth Tesla’s time, but it’s just an example.
All this said, the development of the “Internet of things” and the evolution of the sharing economy seem like a great carbon reduction opportunity, and I just wonder if there would be a way to capitalize on that where most REAMP groups do their work.
Jessica Conrad: What motivates you to do this work?
Nick Occhipinti: I actually come to this work from two directions. In my young adult life the strongest pull was The first Gulf War. As an adolescent naively thinking through war and peace issues, U.S. national security, and the motives of nation-states, the whole contest over oil didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The idea that Saudi Arabia and the Middle East were so strategically important to the United States was baffling. I wondered Why can’t we just invent our way out of this in America, why are we spending so much money on war and creating so much hardship, when we could spend those very same dollars on a real, permanent solution in the United States? It isn’t hard to find examples in our history when the country got together, made investments, came up with ideas, and solved our problems that way. Even in the 90s a kid could intuit the opportunity presented by solar and efficiency. The ideas were all there—they just hadn’t been fully developed and weren’t competitive at the time. Innovation made so much more sense to me than war, so I followed my curiosity and studied international relations in undergrad, and in grad school I focused on international security, environmental policy and energy.
The second angle is that I’m also an outdoors guy. I kiteboard. I snowboard. I mountainbike. I camp. I love the Great Lakes, and I love being outside. My parents instilled a strong love for the natural world in me.
Jessica Conrad: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Nick Occhipinti: Well, I’m curious about where a network like RE-AMP goes. We’re constantly evolving, and we will be ever-evolving. I wonder what the Network will look like in 10 to 15 years? Does the Network get tighter and tighter and tighter and eventually become its own force? Does it someday have a regional or national brand and directly engage political and advocacy processes? Some have softly floated these questions at previous annual meetings. I don’t know, and I’m excited and curious.
I also wonder how intentional versus organic the network’s evolution process should be. Is it better to let the prevailing forces of civic life, technology, climate science, and climate change shape the network, or should it be intentionally shaped by a shared vision, or even a clear and strong leadership vision? I don’t have any of the answers, yet, but I am curious enough to watch and observe and occasionally ask questions.