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New GRC Executive Director sharing his view on the future of the association

New GRC Executive Director sharing his view on the future of the association GRC's Executive Director Will Pettitt, October 2018
Alexander Richter 8 Oct 2018

In this interview with ThinkGeoEnergy, the new Executive Director of the Geothermal Resources Council (GRC) shares his view on the future of his organisation and the upcoming GRC Annual Meeting in Reno/ Nevada.

In a recent article shared on the blog site of the Geothermal Resources Council (GRC), the associations new Executive Director Will Pettitt, PhD, share his view on the future of GRC and its activities. Based on this we wanted to check in and dig a bit deeper into his thoughts for GRC and its activities.

What do you see as the biggest assets and role of the Geothermal Resources Council? 

The GRC is a professional association that supports the geothermal industry and promotes geothermal energy. Our biggest assets are our people and our activities. The people include our members, volunteers, Board and staff, who collectively form a large part of the geothermal community, both in the USA and internationally, and are highly motivated and committed. I like to think of the GRC activities as being split into the three parts described in the article: Advocate, Facilitate, and Educate. Advocate is promoting geothermal energy across the spectrum of society. Facilitate is bringing people together to help develop geothermal energy. Educate is providing resources that help people learn about geothermal energy.

What do you see as the biggest challenges faced by GRC in reaching its goals?

The GRC truly reflects the geothermal community, so the biggest challenges faced by the GRC are those by the community. My view on the biggest challenge is “speaking with one global voice”. This is the community engaging and communicating within itself to produce a common message for wider society that effectively explains its benefits and technologies, and why geothermal energy should be considered as great a potential as other renewable energies. That’s going to take a lot of collaboration between
stakeholders, both within nations and internationally, around the globe. Now is the perfect timing to get all this worked out as advanced technologies with Engineered/Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) coming online over the next few years will really trigger geothermal energy to shift gears.

With the merger of GRC with the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), GRC founded a Policy Committee to work as an advocacy group in the U.S.   Could you maybe briefly highlight its key role and activities for the industry in the U.S.? 

The reunification of the GRC and GEA is, I think, part of that desire of the community in the USA to speak with one voice, and this is its greatest strength. The consolidation of the two associations also means greater efficiency and effectiveness for our members, and probably reflects the corporate consolidation that is currently going on in the industry as it matures further. The Policy Committee (PC) has been set up to advocate on behalf of the geothermal industry to policy makers at State, Federal and
International levels. It is a separate entity within the GRC with its own funding and accounting, so as to firewall some of our general membership from lobbying activities they cannot be involved in due to their places of work.

Policy improvements can make a huge impact on the ground and I was encouraged to see this personally when I recently met in Washington DC with staffers from Senate and House committees responsible for geothermal energy, amongst others. Studies by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have shown the $$ improvements that can be made through
changing policies in the US at both State and Federal levels. I’m really enthusiastic that, with the support of the PC, the community can make some significant gains.

GRC installed an interesting Ambassador Program, how does this work and has it been successful? How could people engage to become a member of the program?

The Ambassador Program embodies the desire to speak with one voice. The idea is to produce materials that can be used by anybody in the community to get across the messages about geothermal, and to build a group of Ambassadors that help assemble those messages and are then specifically supported by the GRC to help get them out. At the Annual Meeting we’ll be
holding a short workshop to help people connect with the program some more.

There will be presentations by: Kate Young on the key messages; Patrick Hanson on using social media effectively, and; Paul Thomsen on the benefits of geothermal to the power grid. We want to connect as many people to the program as possible so there will be much more from the GRC in the future.

The upcoming GRC Annual Meeting & Expo will now be held in Reno/ Nevada. How important is the event for GRC and how many companies and participants are you expecting?

The GRC Annual Meeting and Expo is very important to us, and by extension to the whole community. In different ways it hits all three parts of what we do: connecting with policy makers and society; networking people in R&D and industry, and; educating people on geothermal through the technical program, Expo, workshops, and field trips. On the financial side the annual meeting provides the biggest revenue stream for the GRC, although supplemented by membership dues, advertising, donations, and other activities. At the meeting, we will have 220 technical papers presented over three days covering everything from policy to EGS, likely over 900 people registered to attend, and over 70 companies in the Expo. My article in the next GRC
Bulletin, that will be released in the next week for members, describes the meeting some more.

The Annual Meeting is a huge effort and only happens thanks to all the volunteers and staff that are involved. The conference is also an important opportunity for the eclectic mix of our community to gather and discuss the latest issues, some of which I’ve touched on here, and an opportunity to help steer the GRC through informed feedback. I therefore challenge everybody to ask themselves: “how can their association best help the geothermal community it serves”.

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