Viability’s Dan Kuipers a Thought Leader In Energy

on Jun 18 in Viability in the News

Thought Leader in Energy Dan Kuipers: Demonstrating what works
By Mark Sanchez
Business Review West Michigan, May 12, 2010

Dan Kuipers started at Viability as an intern three years ago — a position he parlayed into a permanent job with the Holland company, where he works with clients on biomass energy projects.

“How do we find a way to actually effect change?” Kuipers said. “The way we do that is to demonstrate the technology actually works.”

What sparked your interest in alternative energy?

My background is in natural resources management. I view the world through an ecological lens with a keen understanding of the many interwoven complexities between energy, resources, people, the environment, and economic equality.

Working on the very simple pretense that more people equates to more resource consumption, and that more resource consumption typically leads to increased environmental degradation, financial incentives must be leveraged in order to generate new approaches to solving old problems, jump start promising technologies and projects, and to “level the playing field” for technologies that currently are not as financially attractive as traditional energy-generation technologies.

What is your greatest accomplishment in alternative energy?

Authoring the first project-design document in the United States validated under the Voluntary Carbon Standard utilizing AMS I.C. — “Thermal energy without electricity production” — for a large greenhouse production facility.

This project will create carbon credits annually for 10 years that the greenhouse will be able to use as an additional revenue stream to make the installation and implementation of a large biomass boiler system a financially feasible option.

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