Name: Bryan Garcia
Title: President and CEO, Connecticut Green Bank
Age: 44
Experience: 16 years in clean energy
Bryan Garcia first developed a passion for protecting the environment during his childhood in Southern California, on family summer vacations spent fishing and hiking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. After a dislocated shoulder ended his college athletic career, he felt a call to public service. Garcia’s career has since taken him to Kazakhstan via the Peace Corps, through graduate programs at NYU and Yale, and finally back to public service in the state of Connecticut. Five years ago, he was tasked with heading up the Connecticut Green Bank. Recently, he talked to the Commercial Record and reflected on the Green Bank’s progress so far and its progress still to come.
Q: What about the Connecticut Green Bank’s mission appealed to you?
A: What’s exciting about what the Green Bank is doing is that we’re focused on attracting more private investment into Connecticut’s clean energy economy. We just recently celebrated our five-year anniversary. We’ve mobilized $1 billion of investment into the state’s economy, we’ve helped 20,000 households and businesses reduce their energy burden by deploying more than 200 megawatts of renewable energy and we’ve created over 12,500 jobs in our communities, all the while reducing 2.5 million tons of CO2 emissions that are contributing to global climate change.
Why wouldn’t that motivate you to get up every day 24/7 to deliver on helping people in the state of Connecticut while helping the global environment?
Connecticut has been a very strong advocate for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The government has a target through the global warming solutions act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by the year 2050. So we are doing our part to help drive more investment into the state’s economy, create more green jobs, while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Q: What were some of the initial challenges the Green Bank faced during its the first year of operation?
A: I think the challenge in our first couple of years was really around, how do you transition an agency that was focused on providing grants and subsidies to the market to an agency that’s focused on attracting private investment in the state economy. There are two very different ways of going about managing public resources. So you can imagine the restructuring we had to go through, the retraining we had to go through, the re-strategizing and refocusing that we had to go through. That took about a year. We had to establish a governance structure, we had to identify a strategy that made sense in supporting the clean energy policy goals of the state, and then we had to roll out a few products and programs that would demonstrate to the market that we’re here and this is what we do.
I think our first couple of projects were a $65 million fuel cell project in Bridgeport, using a Connecticut-manufactured fuel cell located on a brownfield. We then had a $75 million public-private partnership with a number of investors to provide to households and businesses to deploy solar on their roofs. So we rolled those two products out and demonstrated to the market that with limited public fund we can mobilize more private investment into our economy while at the same time helping households and businesses lower their energy burden.
Q: The Green Bank just celebrated its fifth anniversary; what are you hoping to achieve by the time your 10th rolls around?
A: We definitely are leading a green bank movement. With the results that we’re demonstrating here in Connecticut, we’re seeing a number of other states – New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island – as well as counties and we’re seeing countries – Chile, China, India, South Africa – who are all now pursuing this green bank model. We’re excited to continue to demonstrate how we can be smart with managing public resources to mobilize private investment in the state’s economy.
If you look at the challenge of global sustainable development or confronting climate change, there was a recent [United Nations] report that came out that said that $90 trillion of public-private investment will be required to address climate change over the course of the next 15 years.
Before we began the green bank in Connecticut, we were at about $8 per person per year of investment. That UN target is equivalent to $800 per person per year. Now with the Green Bank, we’re at $80 per person per year, so we’ve been able to increase by an order of magnitude the investment in Connecticut, but we have to do that again. My hope would be in five more years we could demonstrate that we can achieve the UN target, which is effectively billions of dollars in the state economy every year.
Q: What’s on your agenda for 2017?
A: We’ve got a couple of interesting things. One that we’re really working hard on right now is ensuring that solar PV and energy efficiency is made more access and affordable to low- to moderate-income households. We’ve got a partnership with a company called Posigen that is providing solar lease financing and energy efficient financing to low- to moderate-income households. We just kicked that off a little under a year ago and that product’s doing very well.
We’re also seeing the opportunity for thinking about to help the state expand its alternative fuel vehicle infrastructure, so you could think of [electric vehicle] recharging stations. The state is committed to deploying more zero emission vehicles, and it has a great incentive program, so if you’re buying an electric vehicle, you can get a state incentive.
We’re also looking at the thermal heating of households. When you look at our greenhouse gas emissions, just behind transportation, the other largest greenhouse gas sector in Connecticut is how we heat our residential and commercial buildings. That’s really the use of fossil fuels and heating oil. We’re trying to find ways to provide consumers with access to funding to help finance renewable thermal technologies, so we’re looking at ways we can apply the green bank model to this new area.
Bryan Garcia’s Top Five Favorite Movies
- “Good Will Hunting”
- “Silence of the Lambs”
- “Avatar”
- “The Color Purple”
- “Weird Science”
