Summary: My guest is Karl Rábago, Executive Director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center at Pace Law School in New York.<br> By the time the year 2000 came around I was more comfortable in my career and in that year 2000 my granddaughter was born. My first so far and only, but I actually remember realizing that with a little bit of luck and decent health care she would see the year 2100 and I knew I never would. And it gave me pause to think that everything I do will impact what her life is like a hundred years from now. ~Karl Rábago<br> <br> Karl has had a pretty interesting career so far. He’s served as the Texas Public Utility Commissioner and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Utility Technologies at DOE. He’s also worked at the Environmental Defense Fund and the Rocky Mountain Institute. And he was a U.S. Army Airborne Ranger.<br> KR: I’m Karl Rábago, executive director of the <a href="http://energy.pace.edu/" target="_blank">Pace Energy and Climate Center</a>. It’s a project of PACE Law School in White Plains, New York. I’m also the co-director of the Northeast Solar Market Coalition or the solar coalition as we call it, an association of solar businesses seeking to harmonize market policy in the northeast United States.<br> DB: Can you give me a little detail on how you work with those solar businesses and what you can offer to them?<br> KR: Well I guess the first thing I should do is talk about the basic construct because this is unusual and I have nothing but great things to say about the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sunshot Initiative because they’re giving us support for this and they bought into our idea. At least enough to execute this cooperative agreement with us. Our premise, our proposition was that the nine northeast states collectively are as big a potential solar market as the state of California. We’ve all heard about how much solar is going on in California. But those nine northeast states, each is an independent unique market with a separate set of rules, conditions, permitting requirements and everything, policies, everything else. And our business associations in that region sat down together and said you know we have a common interest in a common policy. We shouldn’t have to stop driving our truck just because we get to a state line. We should be able to do business in these small states from one state to another. In fact you can be in five states in five hours in that region. So, they went to the Department of Energy and said we want your help in getting the business associations together in a coalition to identify the best possible policies for advancing the solar market and then we’ll reach out to all the other stakeholders. So instead of pre-diluting our position with traditional “one from column A, one from column B” stakeholder collaboratives, the business associations are going to bridge the gap. First identify the best policies and move forward from there. And then we’ll go forth and say this is what we think the best thing for the region would be. We’re finding out there’s a lot of regional cooperative efforts going on in our region and several other regions in the country. And I personally believe that that kind of regional cooperation is really going to push solar markets to their next level.<br> DB: So what are some of the policies that are at the top of your list so far?<br> KR: Okay. We actually have a list of eight but I won’t take you through all of them. They include things like, we ought to have common permitting platforms, the same issues are raised and the same processes are adopted, wherever we can.<br> Full Value of Solar Energy for Customers Who Install It<br> We should have similar policies relating to the qualifications required for solar firms and solar installers. You shouldn’t have to get a different license in every place you go or at least you should be able to work cooperatively under other people’s license for example. In terms of customer installed solar,
