In EcoNet News, Volume 25, Issue #12, Ted shares his first EV road trip experience in a Tesla from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. He salutes COP28 in Dubai, and highlights EV charging. He also highlights virtual power plant strategies, irrigation canal solar, salton sea lithium, long duration energy storage, repurposing wind turbine blades, and standardizing EV charger connectors / plugs. 

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Scott Case, Co-Founder and CEO of Recurrent EV / Auto. Recurrent is working to define the health of electric vehicle batteries by collaborating with thousands of EV drivers and introducing advanced machine learning.Ted and Scott discuss his background, born in New Jersey, based in the Pacific Northwest since high school, lived in Seattle for 17 years, and moved to Tacoma, Washington during the pandemic, where he currently lives. Scott has a B.A. from Williams College and MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Prior to founding Recurrent, Scott spent 10 years as Chief Operating Officer of EnergySavvy, an energy efficiency software company where he played a critical role in growing the company to 75 employees and $10M in annual revenue prior to being acquired in 2019. He shares with Ted that he came into auto through the electrical grid and his realization that the new technology of EVs meant new challenges and lots of unanswered questions, as used EV car buyers don't yet have the tools to shop for them. Unlike vehicles with combustion engines, where the odometer read is a key measure of the car's life, mileage is not the key indicator of an EV's value. For EVs, it’s all about battery health and understanding the available range in different conditions. So, he and his team are supporting the secondary market for EVs by helping people evaluate and buy used electric cars with confidence.By providing more transparency and confidence in pre-owned electric car transactions, Reccurent's mission is to accelerate the overall adoption of electric vehicles. This is key to reducing the 20% of U.S. carbon emissions that are currently produced by light-duty combustion engine vehicles.

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Kristian Hansen, aka "the jeans guy," Founder and CEO of Slø Jean Company, a denim power house on a mission to tackle fast fashion issues within the industry. Ted and Kristian discuss his background, born in Calgary, Canada, grew up in Dubai, UAE, moved to the states for boarding school and university, and has been bouncing around the world ever since. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, studied data analytics and minored in climate science, and attended Harvard Business School online.Kristian shares his story with Ted, when he went thrifting during the pandemic and accidentally bought a pair of women’s jeans. In the process, he went viral, with his story resonating with nearly everyone he speaks to, boasting 700K followers and 6.8M likes on TikTok. Fast forward to today, that experience kicked off a series of events that lead to the founding of Slø, which has redefined what it means to build companies through community. With a remarkable $360,000 pre-seed funding, a 100,000-strong waitlist (projected $10M revenue), and zero ad spend, he and his team are igniting the slow fashion revolution. He and Ted discuss navigating sustainability in an industry built on exploitation and waste, pioneering eco-conscious capitalism to combat the climate crisis, leveraging consumer power and data, and the importance of community building vs. traditional marketing. 

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Dan Brotman, Mayor of Glendale, CA. Dan has had a career in international finance, is an educator, and an activist. He was first sworn in as a Glendale City Council Member in April 2020 and was named Mayor in April 2023. Dan aims to apply his finance experience and environmental passion to create a vibrant and prosperous community for all Glendale residents.Ted and Dan discuss his background, growing up in Philadelphia, traveling far and wide to places like Syria and Jordan after graduating high school, which sparked his interest in international development. He then attended Brown University and studied overseas in Taiwan to study Chinese.After earning a Masters in Economics at Johns Hopkins University, Dan spent over 20 years in the field as an economist at the Federal Reserve and in various finance roles at Cisco Systems. He lived in Asia for 18 of those years, starting off in Hong Kong, then Singapore, and then in Shanghai. In 2015, Dan moved to Glendale to share his passion for economics as a professor at Glendale College. Alongside his academic endeavors, Dan co-founded the Glendale Environmental Coalition to push for a greater focus on sustainability. He and Ted discuss the Grayson Power Plant debate, and how the utility went from the initial proposal of 260 MW to less than 60 MW with engines that can only be operated 15 percent of the time, a huge accomplishment under his leadership!

In EcoNet News, Volume 25, Issue #11, Ted shares perspective on the highs and lows of climate change. In advance of COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, he highlights the largest, single-site photovoltaic plant in the world. He also highlights the first sustainably-fueled TransAtlantic flight, New York City's premier building electrification, 1,000 year-old Persian windmills, renaming natural gas, electric vehicle equity and national adoption rates, international shipping emissions, and China's high speed rail network.

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, father-daughter duo, Ted and Sierra Flanigan host the clean energy crash course focusing on campus sustainability, specifically spotlighting EcoMotion's work with the Chula Vista Elementary School District.They start high level, being that working on campuses and sustainability is a shared passion in their professional careers - Sierra more on the strategic side, and Ted more on the operations side.They jump right into the story, starting with EcoMotion's introduction to the District, and the first step of analyzing one school site to gauge potential, which resulted in a very favorable result for large-scale solar. The next step was performing a feasibility analysis for all 49 campuses, revealing the opportunity to save $60-77 million over 25 years ($60 million if financed, and $88 million if a community bond initiative passed). Ted then presented this to the school board, and they authorized EcoMotion to proceed with releasing an RFP for full-scale solar.With the passing of the bond, EcoMotion projected $88 million in savings, which has now been recalculated to over $100 million in savings with the escalation of utility rates. EcoMotion then advanced the opportunity to market, reaching out to 24 solar companies that were deemed capable of such a large job and multi-site deployment. The District ended up selecting Engie, with a cost of $4.71 cents per watt, including $7 million O&M over 25 years. With the contractor, Engie, selected, EcoMotion facilitated project oversight and quality control, maintaining owner's rep throughout construction, which took a little over 2 years. The 49 sites were in aggregate of 8.1 MW total (175-200 kW per school site), with approximately 18,000 panels, offsetting approximately 80 percent of annual consumption. Sierra asks Ted if the Chula Vista ESD experience can be emulated at other school districts, and Ted responds yes, in many cases. There are major opportunities for major energy, cash, and environmental savings.Ted concludes by sharing that it is also a lesson in smart energy management for students, staff, and teachers alike. It is something to be proud of, and a solar lesson to take home that will have a generational impact.

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Feliz Ventura, Resilience Programs Manager for Ava Community Energy (formerly East Bay Community Energy), an innovative Community Choice Aggregator in California providing more renewable energy at competitive rates to its customers. Feliz brings nearly two decades of experience in making the case for investments that ensure communities thrive in the context of the rapid technological and climatic changes of the 21st century.Ted and Feliz discuss her background, born and raised in Denver, Colorado. She mentions her connection to the natural world since she was a child, sharing that her parents taught her to have a strong awareness of being a part of a greater system, and determining where she fits into that picture. She also shares that both of her parents engaged with the natural world in their own ways. Her mother is still a practicing attorney, focused on water law, so she's always thought about things from systems and trade off perspectives. She is an alumna of Pomona College, first studying Biology and then International Relations. While at Pomona College, she studied abroad in Chile as an exchange student, both at the Catholic University and University of Chile, studying political and forestry-related issues in Chile.She then went on to the University of California San Diego for Quantitative Policy Analysis, geared towards climate-related issues and how decisions made from a management perspective influence the results. This could be from a livelihood perspective for those that rely on the resource, a carbon perspective using a broader environmental lens, or fiscal and economic development impacts that should be known, understood, and broadcast as decisions are made about how the resources are managed.Prior to Ava, Feliz worked to integrate climate resilience into infrastructure, urban and real estate development at two global planning, design, and engineering firms, led the State of Washington's cleantech economic and market development program, and worked with global startups to measure and improve their ESG performance at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C.At Ava, Feliz leads the Resilience Programs, focused on developing and implementing energy resilience solutions for municipal, residential, and medical customers that result in wide-ranging benefits across Ava’s service area.

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Andrew Jones, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Climate Interactive, and a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan. Climate Interactive is rooted in the fields of system dynamics modelling and systems thinking. His team creates and share tools that help people see connections and drive effective and equitable climate action.He and Ted discuss how climate modelling is an important step towards mitigating carbon emissions and making the right policy and personal choices to drive down emissionsAndrew was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, and trained in environmental engineering and system dynamics modelling through a B.A. at Dartmouth College and a M.S. in Technology and Policy at MIT. At Dartmouth College, he became a student of Dana Meadows, who introduced him to the world of both systems thinking and global models as ways for citizens and top decision makers to test their thinking about what it is really going to take to create a sustainable world.He then worked with Ted at Rocky Mountain Institute in the 1990s and in the 2000s with Dana Meadows at Sustainability Institute. At Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan, he and his team developed C-ROADS and En-ROADS, two user-friendly climate simulations in use by analysts around the world. His interviews have appeared in multiple media, including The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, and NPR’s Morning Edition. Andrew has also written two op-eds in the Sunday New York Times — one on building grounded hope and another in the form of an interactive simulation.He co-accepted the ASysT Applied Systems Thinking Prize for “a significant accomplishment achieved through the application of systems thinking to a problem of U.S. national significance” and the System Dynamics Society’s Applications Award for the best real-world application of modelling. He is the 1990 recipient of Dartmouth College’s Ray W. Smith Award for the most significant contribution to the status of the College.Andrew is based in Asheville, North Carolina, and teaches system dynamics at MIT Sloan and the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In EcoNet News, Volume 25, Issue #10, Ted shares perspective on tackling the car bloat and transforming social expectations. He also highlights Green Mountain Power's plan for zero outages by 2030, heat pumps, filling the tree equity gap, rural electrification in the Maldives, Ireland rejecting a new fossil fuel import facility, and wind power being harvested in the ocean waters off the Northeast of America. 

In this episode of Flanigan’s Eco-Logic, Ted speaks with Mike Robinson, an Industry Vertical Advisor for the Retail and Consumer Goods practice. He provides expert advice regarding digital retailing, and brings over 30 years of experience from both management consulting and executive operator perspectives. He and Ted discuss his background, growing up in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a small, rural town. He is a proud alumni of Penn State University, and shares that he has had a varied career, starting in the pharmaceutical industry in Philadelphia, which brought him out to Southern California, and later jumped into consulting, which led him to digital retail, now the focus of his career. Previously, Mike was the EVP/Digital Business Leader for Macy’s, where he and his team were responsible for 10x revenue growth over 8 years, and firmly established Macys.com as the #5 Digital Retailer in the U.S. Currently, Mike is acting as both an angel investor and strategic advisor for numerous early stage AI-enabled startups, specifically focused on critical components of the ever-evolving retail customer journey. In addition, he is the Head of Retail Operations and a Founding Member for The Eighth Notch (aka T8N), an early stage startup in the Logistics-tech space.Mike discusses the how and why behind an urgent need for the retail industry to adopt more sustainable solutions and critical insights into how both small and large-scale retail brands are beginning to align with demand from investors and consumers for eco-conscious alternatives and operations. He shares the mission of Eighth Notch, which is to reduce the number of deliveries and create a more sustainable supply chain by ensuring the most sustainable mile is the one never driven. The Eighth Notch is working with retailers and carriers to reduce the number of deliveries and optimize routes. This not only results in significant operational savings for retailers but also contributes to a more sustainable environment by cutting down on carbon emissions. Mike emphasized that the avoidance of emissions, rather than offsetting, is a crucial part of their approach.