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Smart Surfaces Blog

Spotlight: Paul Lanning, Founder of Lightbox Energy

This interview is part of a series of blog posts highlighting prominent members of our Smart Surfaces team and other leaders in relevant fields. Over the coming months, we will publish interviews with leaders as they talk about their work, our environment and the Smart Surfaces mission.

Paul Lanning is the founder of Lightbox Energy, a cleantech firm specializing in renewable energy and sustainability. Lightbox has provided program management and technical subject matter expertise for public and private clients across the US. Lanning has more than a decade of experience in technology, energy, and sustainability management. Prior to founding Lightbox, he served as VP and Director of Energy and Sustainability Services for Bluefin, a national facility asset management company. He also serves on the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) Solar PV O&M Advisory Working Group.  


ME: When did you first encounter the idea of climate change in your career and how did you become interested in the built environment and green infrastructure?

PL: After business school, I joined a company that was building software for facility assessment, using smartphones as field devices for collecting data and analyzing data. And as a result of the stimulus that came out of the Great Recession in 2008, there was a big focus on clean tech. We were already collecting data on the physical attributes of buildings, so we looked at what the clean tech, energy, and sustainability-related opportunities were, and we found that they were immense. So we started going deep into energy efficiency, and then that went to urban heat islands, and that went to on-site generation and stormwater management. And that's when I started Lightbox. But also I love the outdoors, so the environment was always front and center for me in a lot of ways anyway. I was and am an active climber, cyclist, and snowboarder, and just love being outdoors. 

ME: You founded Lightbox, an energy and sustainability program management firm. Can you tell me a little bit the services you provide and what clients you generally serve?

PL: I usually describe Lightbox as a program management company. We provide renewable energy and sustainability program management, which encompasses everything from program inception all the way through operations and maintenance. We work with solar PV systems, cool roofs, green roofs, stormwater best management practices, as well as landscaping, energy efficiency, and resilience. Our clients include mostly municipal governments, federal agencies, school districts, higher education institutions, as well as private developers. And we fit the custom needs of different clients in different sectors. For each, we ask, "Well, what are your needs? What are your goals? What are your assets?” And then we jointly work on the opportunities.

ME: When you work with a client how exactly do you go about customizing solutions and what factors determine what solution will best fit a client or a space?

PL: Most of the time, our clients already have sustainability goals, and sometimes these goals may be very well-defined, in which case our response is tailored to help them achieve those goals. But other times, the goals can be quite vague or they can evolve over time. But regardless, we usually start with understanding what's possible by looking at the nature of the portfolio. Our work is mostly focused on-site in the built environment, although sometimes we will do work that's off-site or remote. Let's say a school district wants to reduce its carbon footprint, introduce renewable energy or stormwater management into its educational programming, reduce heat island effects, and maximize infrastructure investments over the long term. In this example, it would depend completely on the nature of the portfolio, what local economic incentives might be available, and also the geographic location. Every time we do an engagement, it's a little bit of a custom analysis of everything that's in play.

ME: How do you quantify the climate benefits of your services?

PL: This question really gets to the varying degree to which climate benefits can be measured. And I'll start with the most straightforward one, which is understanding the greenhouse gas emissions reduction value of solar. If you know the energy mix of the grid energy that you're buying and you can reduce that with on-site renewable energy, you can understand that there is a direct benefit to the climate. And even that can be a little bit tricky because it depends on the resource stack of the grid and the treatment of renewable energy credits. 

Climate benefits become much harder to measure when looking at other systems, like cool roofs and green roofs. It's really hard to have measurement and verification because of the sensors that would be required. Take a cool roof, for example. If you're trying to reduce the heat gain of a building, you'd have to know exactly what your energy use baseline was before you put the cool roof on, and then measure it afterwards without changing any of the interior operations. It's a lot easier to do when you're doing new construction or maybe a major modernization, but a lot of times that's not the case for us.  We have to do our best to estimate using good faith, best practices. Our clients want to understand what the best practices are and they already have sustainability goals, and so there's an understanding that there's a good faith effort being taken on all sides.

ME: Can you highlight a success story that Lightbox has helped facilitate?

PL: The example that I'm closest to and most proud of is in Washington, D.C. The government of the District of Columbia started a program that had the broad goal of improving the environmental performance of its portfolio. It was a pretty open-ended problem, which made for an exciting challenge. The first thing we did was look at the roofing portfolio and implemented a cool roof specification for all new roofs. This roof spec was implemented in 2010 and today, the smart roof percentage — so that’s cool roofs, green roofs, and solar PV — has grown to almost 75% of the whole portfolio. And in addition, because there are strong incentives for solar, these roofs are not only saving on greenhouse gas emissions, but also saving immensely on electricity expenditure. 

The District of Columbia also owned some unused brownfield land that couldn’t be developed because there were environmental hazards which would require huge remediation. Instead, we repurposed the land for a ground-mount solar PV system. It ended up blending nicely with the city's goals, combining the city government with the Department of Energy and Environment's goals of deploying solar for low-income housing. We put together a program and put it out to bid and are just now finishing a very large community solar field on a brownfield.

And then the last thing I'd say is the District of Columbia has a really big issue with river pollution as a result of stormwater runoff. The best way to combat that is with systems that can reduce stormwater runoff: green roofs, as well as ground-based best management practices, or BMPs. We deployed hundreds of thousands of square feet of green roofs, as well as other BMPs, and the benefits were focused around stormwater management. Green roofs also play a huge role in terms of reducing urban heat islands as well as energy efficiency. We were successful with D.C. because they've had the local policy in place, as well as the assets and the will to do it all.

ME: What are the most significant obstacles that clients might face to reaching their sustainability goals, and how would you go about overcoming these?

PL: One is inertia. There's a business-as-usual inertia that can be hard to overcome. Oftentimes, for people in facility management, there's a fear of being fired or reprimanded for taking a risk on something that's new and different. We can make the case that Smart Surfaces and investing in resilient infrastructure can save money and reduce lifecycle costs, but it can require more capital upfront. We can work around that challenge in the form of grants or other incentives to reduce that risk.

Also economics. There aren't always policies or funding. Sometimes budgets are fixed and have been fixed for a long time, and there's just no way to work around that. This is a place where government policies can really help. Smart Surfaces and other resilient infrastructure have immense benefits in terms of employment, climate change, and health, but sometimes those benefits don't accrue to the person or entity who owns a given asset. So that’s a position for the government to implement policy to encourage deployment in a widespread fashion.

ME: What role do you think there is for a coalition like Smart Surfaces in the environmental space, having been in that space yourself? 

PL: I'll answer that with a little bit of history on where there have been challenges. For example, the roofing industry was slow to embrace cool roofs, green roofs, and rooftop solar. But even though it took longer to embrace these new technologies, the industry now fully has, and there's increased opportunity for coordination. It used to be that the solar folks knew nothing about roofing and the roofing folks knew nothing about solar, and they didn't talk to each other, and it created tension and inefficiency. There are entrenched interests in pavements, roofing, landscaping and other services, so we have to make sure that we're all on the same page and rowing in the same direction. A coalition can help us coordinate and work together, and gather all those entrenched interests around one goal. A push for Smart Surfaces should be good for everyone in the space, as long as those in the spaces are willing to innovate and adapt. But there needs to be coordination.

ME: What would you like cities and policymakers to know about green infrastructure and the built environment? What are the easiest, most cost-effective solutions that we can implement now?

Policymakers should consider lifecycle cost benefits, which is to say taking the long view and understanding the benefits of investing a little bit more on day one for a system that will perform over the long term. And to ensure the lifecycle cost benefits are in fact realized requires maintaining systems throughout their entire lifecycle. Combining approaches also goes overlooked or not considered, so for example the combination of a cool roof plus a green roof, or solar PV plus a green roof. When able to incorporate different systems, you can, in some cases, maximize the benefit.

ME: More generally, what do you think are the most important steps to take now to combat climate change? 

I tend to think “Oh, electrify everything.” I’m a big proponent of building up renewables to be a higher and higher percentage of our electricity generation stack, and then electrifying our buildings and our automobiles. I think that electrifying vehicles combined with deploying Smart Surfaces can really transform our built environment and make our cities more livable and more sustainable. 

ME: Where do you fall on a scale from hopeful to terrified when it comes to possible efforts to slow climate change and our prospects for doing that?

Is it possible to be both terrified and hopeful? I'm hopeful that we can do better than we have done, and I'm hopeful that we can mitigate the absolute worst case scenario. But I'm also terrified about what that worst case scenario or even a moderately bad scenario could look like. But at the end of the day, I hope that being a little bit terrified will push us all to deliver the solutions that will create a better future. 

Maliya Ellis