David Labrador is a Senior Writer/Editor at RMI.
David’s background is in journalism, marketing, and foreign aid. He worked as a writer and researcher at Scientific American magazine and as a copy editor at a scholarly press. He helped to found an English-language newspaper in Kosovo. In addition to his editorial work, he worked for a marketing firm representing corporate clients and raised funds for several nonprofits in the United States and abroad.
David served in the Peace Corps in Paraguay and assisted development efforts in Kosovo and in Afghanistan, where he managed a large-scale infrastructure program with the United Nations. He came to RMI from Vermont CARES, an HIV/AIDS service organization, where he served as development director.
BA, Classical Studies, Dartmouth College
Boulder, CO
@DaveLabTweets
“I love being at the cutting edge of so many fields of energy innovation.”
This is the first blog in a four-part series. One of the central challenges in effectively managing the transition of the energy grid toward a more distributed and decarbonized orientation is ensuring that utilities actively engage and lead by example and innovation, rather than remain on the sidelines or resist…
Cummins, a global industrial manufacturer in the Fortune 200, signed its first virtual power purchase agreement (VPPA) with EDP Renewables (EDPR) North America in August 2017 for 75 megawatts (MW) of wind capacity over 15 years. Heavy industry has been slow in signing off-site renewables deals.
This is the third blog in a three-part series. The first and second blogs are available here and here. One of the main themes at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Institute Electricity Innovation Lab (e–Lab) Accelerator event, held in Sundance, Utah, in May, was distributed grid infrastructure—the use of…
This is the second blog in a three-part series. The first blog is available here. One of the main themes at the 2018 Rocky Mountain Institute Electricity Innovation Lab (e–Lab) Accelerator event, held in Sundance, Utah, in May, was distributed grid infrastructure—the use of least-cost portfolios of distributed energy…
This is the first blog in a three-part series. The second blog in this series is available here, and the third here. One of the main themes at the 2018 RMI Electricity Innovation Lab (e–Lab) Accelerator event, held in Sundance, Utah, in May, was…
Manufacturing powerhouse Taiwan has created a renewable energy credit (Taiwan-REC or T-REC) scheme that allows companies, including foreign companies, to procure directly from renewable energy projects. This is part of an emerging trend among countries vital to the global supply chain that will simplify corporate sustainability and stimulate the addition…
Rocky Mountain Institute has teamed up with the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) to supply the nation’s TV newscasters with materials about home energy upgrades that they can use in their broadcasts, blogs, and websites when they are most relevant. Drafty, energy-inefficient homes can seem perfectly fine when conditions…
Platte River Power Authority (PRPA), the generating authority that serves Fort Collins—a community Rocky Mountain Institute has been working with for a long time—and three other Colorado cities recently got the results of a study it commissioned on the relative costs of transitioning to net-zero carbon generation by 2030.
On December 1, 2017, RMI CEO Jules Kortenhorst and RMI Managing Director Miranda Ballentine held a live video discussion about RMI’s efforts to think bigger, act boldly, and scale globally to support our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change and create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future.
Among the 135 stakeholders of RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab (e–Lab) who gathered for the first e–Lab Summit at the end of 2016, many are involved with Leap, an ongoing RMI initiative dedicated to empowering and improving the lives of low-income communities and households in a clean energy future.