Colorado company developing smart-grid project in Haiti.

• Author: Johnston, Marsha W.
• Position: ENERGY

Denver-based Green Energy Corp. has launched an international effort to build a visionary 21st-century smart grid model for sustainable clean energy deployment in emerging nations, starting with a pilot project in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

About a week after Haiti's disaster, a nongovernmental organization named AIDG, based in Cap Haitien, in coordination with the United Nations, invited Green Energy CEO Dan Gregory to participate on a 10-person structural engineering team to assess the damage to critical buildings.

"Our initial team arrived in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 20 (2010), and we inspected 115 hospitals, UN facilities, schools, orphanages and food warehouses," Gregory said.

The team established the UN Emergency Engineering Services Unit, which has inspected more than 50,000 structures to date.

Gregory's efforts in Haiti brought GEC to the attention of the Clinton Global Initiative, which invited it to become a member. GEC's "commitment" to CGI is to establish a pilot implementation of Gregory's Global Energy Model, which is a road map to integrating all elements of a nation's energy infrastructure--environment, economy, agriculture, security, technology, education and jobs.

"GEM is a model that will evolve over decades as it is applied, tested and adjusted by the (CGI) GEM Working Group," Gregory said in late October, when the project debuted. "The pilot in Haiti helps form and stress-test the GEM Model. We expect other GEM pilot projects in other developing nations to begin during 2011.

"Pilot projects like Haiti will produce measurable results against milestones, but the true impact of GEM on any nation will take a decade or more to be realized," he said. "The point of GEM is to provide a coordinated roadmap for energizing developing nations."

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Green Energy Corp. gained its experience in smart grid technology...