This is a community for those advancing, local, clean distributed energy and the decentralized grid.
What you do isn’t easy. Our electric grid is designed for another century, governed by rules that no longer make sense, and dominated by economic models created to encourage big power plants and long transmission lines — not the energy of the future, which is nimble, local, clean distributed energy.
So how do we change that?
As business guru Ken Blanchard says, “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
That’s the idea behind Energy Changemakers, a unique community based on participatory journalism (also called democratic journalism or collaborative media.)
We have both a public and a private interface.
Decentralized Grid Magazine: This is the public-facing side of the site where we amplify the work of our members. Here, you’ll find original articles and videos examining news, issues, and trends. The magazine also offers how-to content. We focus on distributed generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, virtual power plants, energy efficiency, and related policy and regulatory issues.* Anyone on the web can read the magazine’s content.
Energy Changemakers Community: For premium members, the community is a private platform to network, collaborate, find partners, gain insight, participate in live stream forums, read exclusive content, put forward your ideas and projects, and strategize. We provide these tools to help you build your business and build the industry.
The community is more (and better) than a list-serve or social media platform.
- We spent a lot of time creating a highly focused, organized private platform that’s easy to use and free of the noise and confusion of other, more generic platforms. (No pop-up ads or pings!) You can drop in anytime. It’s like a conference available 24/7/365, and you don’t have to bother with planes, trains, or automobiles.
- We’ve taken the idea of online energy journalism and communities a step further, converging them into a participatory journalism platform. Ideas emanating from the community will serve as fodder for articles in Decentralized Grid Magazine. We are working on bringing together the most interesting, brainiest people in DERs to watch their thinking evolve. And then, through the magazine, our journalists will help the rest of the world understand where they are leading us and why it will create a better electric system.
I’ve been writing about energy for more than three decades, most recently as co-founder and editor-in-chief of Microgrid Knowledge and before that, as a correspondent for S&P Global Platts. I find it frustrating that journalism is often a one-way conversation. Readers are treated mostly as consumers of information. Allowing readers to also be participants makes a lot of sense to me, especially in the distributed energy arena where there is so much creative thought and innovation. Unfortunately, the rest of the world (including many in the other segments of the energy industry) don’t understand the vanguard thinking emerging from the distributed energy space. Decentralized Grid Magazine, written by veteran energy journalists, will help translate.
So please join me in this unique endeavor with a 30-day free trial. Check it out here!
Your paid subscription helps support our journalism. Thank you! — Elisa Wood, Founder and Editor, Energy Changemakers
*For content about microgrids, go to Microgrid Knowledge, now owned by Endeavor Business Media
