About Team DALE

How Does All This Happen? 


Let's find out! We are starting as an all-volunteer effort, including founder Eric Martinot himself. We can start to rely upon:


  • Members participating voluntarily because of the benefits of professional experience, networking, learning, perks, and satisfaction of contributing to something positive.


  • Members getting their own funding, whether one-time grants or income streams, to do work in connection with Team DALE and in furtherance of Team DALE's mission.


  • Members engaging in providing facilitation services to outside working groups or other convenor processes, using Team DALE online tools and knowledge, and perhaps getting compensated for such facilitation.


And start to consider;


  • "Partner organizations" contributing in-kind by funding their own staff to participate in ways that advance their own goals


  • Outside funding from yet-to-be-developed sources and/or yet-to-be-specified business models. Eventual outside funds might help first with internships, travel grants, and fixed expenses.


Regardless, we should remain ad-free and non-commercial. Eric Martinot is founding Team DALE on the principle that we do not endorse or recommend specific commercial services or products, we do not add paid referral links, and nor do we directly employ ad-supported content or allow advertising on the website. (Many linked videos and other content in our Knowledge Base will of course employ advertising in accordance with content creators business models, which we will have to accept if we want the best web resources.)


This is just the start of a 25-year journey for Team DALE, so patience is also required! Let's get started. And let's be connected, inspired, inquisitive, and practical. Let's work together not only with our brains, but with our hearts and our spirit.

Some Big Issues for Us to Consider


Connection to Advocacy -- the idea for our strategy around advocacy is to assist those already advocating for local energy or wanting to start advocating. And our members can engage in advocacy themselves side-by-side with other advocates. But Team DALE itself would not undertake specific campaigns or advocacy projects. How can we best assist advocates? How to connect with them and convince them our assistance could be helpful? Often campaigns have a goal and great motivation and commitment, but may lack understanding of what more specifically to advocate for, what will make the most difference for the future of local energy, or don't have the time or capability to learn about what has been done elsewhere. That is where our 'stories of local energy" can help, bringing an entire universe of stories to advocates and helping them learn from those stories. We need people to help with all of this!


Electric Power Utilities and Regulators -- much of the local energy story revolves around distributed energy resources on power grids -- how they are owned, connected, regulated, operated, managed, incentivized, and advocated for. The business models associated with different grid-connected use cases are very diverse, and can be as simple as "reduce my monthly energy bill." Or as complex as special revenue streams from supporting grid reliability, long-term grid capacity, "demand response" to enable reduced demand at critical times, avoided local distribution network upgrade costs, local choice of power suppliers, helping to reduce the cost of integrating centralized renewables into the grid, and many more. Many established policies and profitability models are changing in recent years in many parts of the world. But much faces regulatory challenges and long time-lags before regulatory development catches up with technology and business development. How can make a difference here? One idea is to map out regulatory proceedings and working groups in different jurisdictions and assist stakeholders in those jurisdictions to come to the table informed and ready. There might come a day when


Solar Plus Local Battery Storage -- is becoming more common. Although still not cost-effective in many use cases, growing desire for more self-sufficiency by households and businesses alike, plus growing unreliability of the grid in many places, mean there is great interest and expectation. How to help others understand and implement the best opportunities in this new space? What is really going to open up this space and how can we help with that?


Microgrids -- is also an emerging trend with vast possibilities for changing the way electric power systems are configured. China is actually leading the world in microgrid development. There are small numbers of examples in other countries. How can we contribute best to the emerging story of microgrid development?


Vehicle-Grid Integration (VGI). The influx of electric vehicle changing onto the grid has major implications for the future. Electric vehicles and their batteries can be considered a "distributed resource' to the extent that changing can be controlled in ways that benefit the owner and/or the power grid, and with bidirectional charging an EV can look like any other battery connected to the grid, and provide grid support -- reliability, capacity, demand flexibility, as well as local backup power and local peer-to-peer market exchanges.


Off-Grid Substitution for Diesel Generators. All around the world, in both developed and developing countries alike, local off-grid energy comes from diesel generators. With increased costs of diesel fuel, substituting some or all diesel power with other forms of local energy can be highly economic and profitable. The use cases are endless, from hybrid village and community power systems to emergency backup, from job-sites and remote working to "van life" and recreational power, and from local food production and processing to mobile medical and emergency centers. This can be a whole sphere of Team DALE, focused on the end-use applications and ways to increase visibility and facilitate decision-making and adoption.

About Founder Eric Martinot


Eric Martinot is a UC Berkeley-trained clean energy economics and policy professional and an MIT-trained electric power engineer. During his 30-year career in clean energy he has worked as author, researcher, public speaker, professor, consultant, foundation grants officer, and working group facilitator. He became well known internationally as the original creator and author of the REN21 Renewables Global Status Report, widely read by millions around the world and published annually since 2005 with the crowd-sourced participation of hundreds of contributors. In 2013 he also created and authored the REN21 Renewables Global Futures Report, a concise crowd-sourced view of the future based on interviews with 150 experts, business leaders, and visionaries.


As grants officer for the the World Bank's Global Environment Facility he managed the renewable energy program which awarded grants of $80 million annually for market, finance and policy projects in developing countries, many of which targeted local energy. As staff of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Tokyo, he assisted local governments to target policies for renewable energy, and mapped the global picture of municipal-level clean energy. As fellow with the World Resources Institute in China, he researched the status and evolution of distributed energy throughout China. And in recent years for the State of California he facilitated and led multi-stakeholder working groups as fellow of the non-profit organization Gridworks. Those working groups developed and recommended the next generation of regulation and policy for interconnecting distributed renewables and energy storage with the grid, as well as integrating electric vehicles into the grid. Those working group recommendations, representing both consensus and non-consensus views of industry, utilities, advocates, and public agencies, in large measure became adopted into California law.


Eric has also created and taught clean energy courses at leading universities in the United States, China, Japan, and New Zealand. As adjunct professor of public policy with the University of Maryland, he provided graduate students with interdisciplinary approaches to clean energy. As full professor of economics and management at the Beijing Institute of Technology, he taught clean energy business and was awarded MBA teacher of the year. As visiting professor with Tsinghua University in Beijing, he exposed students to international experience and approaches. He was a Fulbright Fellow for his 1995 PhD on international cooperation and business for clean energy.


During his career, Eric has authored 70 publications on renewable and clean energy, worked for 20 different non-profit, public, and academic organizations, given 150 public lectures and radio interviews across the world including a TEDx Tokyo talk, lived in 6 countries, and visited professionally in 40 countries. In his downtime he is an avid long-distance hiker, and has twice hiked the entire 2600-mile Pacific Crest Trail, section-by-section, over the past 25 years. He also hiked the 1600-mile Te Araroa trail in New Zealand, which spans the entire length of the county.

About Our Origins


Team DALE has its origins in the long career experience of founder Eric Martinot, as well as the Global Initiative for Distributed and Local Energy that he convened during 2017-2018. About a hundred people participated in that early work, which generated many ideas for ways to support local energy and piloted a few of those ideas. Even with modest effort there were some notable results. Team DALE is being launched in 2022 on the shoulders of that early work, with great appreciation to those who participated then. The original 2017 development and brainstorming documents are available as background for future strategy, leadership, and community-building discussions.