Stephen MacDonald, Smart Grid, Oregon
Stephen MacDonald is managing director of business development for TeMIX Incorporated, and he lives in Portland, Oregon.
Why is clean energy important to you? Clean energy sustainably provides a means to a high quality of life and numerous services to assist our day-to-day work-life activities. Without clean energy, the current process to create energy is too encumbered to provide the necessary infrastructure for the entire world to be electrified. Without electrification, it is extremely hard to improve people’s quality of life.
What’s your proudest accomplishment in clean energy? I’ve been very proud to design the process flow diagram, to highlight the steps and teams for utilities to use to implement Transactive Energy.
What did you do before entering clean energy? Previously, I was an undergraduate student at Oregon State University. There, I established the first student chapter for Energy with the Association of Energy Engineers. I also won the Oregon Association of Professional Energy Manager Student of the Year Award for my senior project on Electrolysis and Hydrogen capture.
How did you first get introduced to clean energy? I was first introduced to clean energy when I was in high school and studying the weather effects of El Niño and La Niña.
How does clean energy impact your community? Our state’s clean energy goals are removing large pollutant emitters, and they’re making the necessary strides to do so in the most equitable fashion they can. Going even wider, our plant is a big place, but it has many extremely small, vulnerable ecosystems, and we all need to work together to protect them. I look forward to educating my children on this fact.
What is something you wish more people knew about your job? To make a cohesive project, you must bring together a lot of independent stakeholders, and that’s a complex task.
Why should Congress invest in clean energy jobs, not fossil fuel jobs? The future is here. Not tomorrow. It’s here today.