 |
|
|
|||||
An experiment is underway in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that could change how communities generate and distribute power in the future. The city, with voters strong support, is launching its own sustainable energy utility. This new utility wont replace DTE Energy, the local investor-owned power company, or even use DTEs wires. Instead, Ann Arbor will slowly build out a whole new modern power system, starting with installing rooftop solar and battery storage and reducing energy usage in individual homes and businesses whose owners opt in. The city then plans to expand by connecting homes and neighborhoods into microgrids and by using community solar and networked geothermal to allow broader access to clean energy. If it works as planned, a sustainable energy utility like this could quickly build the clean energy grid of the future by shedding outdated infrastructure while creating a reliable, clean, and resilient model. I am an environmental policy analyst at the University of Michigan and an Ann Arbor resident who has long engaged in local energy work. I believe that the lessons from Ann Arbors energy experiment will have major implications as more communities strive to control their own energy future. An explosion of interest in local power Communities frustrated with investor-owned utilities high rates and sometimes unreliable and polluting power are increasingly trying to shift to public ownership and delivery of energy services, much like municipal water systems. So far, Nebraska is the only state with fully public power. A ballot initiative in Maine that would have required all power to be publicly owned and distributed failed amid heavy industry opposition. But campaigns to localize control of energy are flourishing. However, creating new public utilities that take over all power delivery is difficult legally, politically, and financially. Hence, the idea for Ann Arbors sustainable energy utility, or SEU, which can function alongside the investor-owned utility. Subscribers to the SEU still have service from DTE if they need more power, and they can sell excess generation back to the grid. But they would generate and use their own power first while also reducing energy consumption through conservation and efficiency measures. Voters in November 2024 approved the creation of this sustainable energy utility in Ann Arbor with nearly 80% of the vote. What is a sustainable energy utility? An SEU has three distinguishing features. First, an SEU can function at almost any scale. A city like Ann Arbor can provide energy and services directly to homes and businesses that opt in and build out new distribution lines with each microgrid or community solar project. Only the residents who opt in pay for the service, allowing it to expand as more homes join. Moreover, customers do not need to leave their incumbent investor-owned utility to also use the SEU. Perhaps thats why DTE so far has not publicly opposed Ann Arbors startup. Instead, the company said after the vote that it would invest US$215 million in infrastructure improvements in the city over the next five years. How Ann Arbors SEU would interact with the local utility, DTE, to help keep power flowing. [Photo: City of Ann Arbor] Second, an SEU is created for the express purpose of providing clean energy, whether through renewable energy generation or reducing power demand. For example, Ann Arbors SEU plans to begin by providing solar installations with battery backup. In addition, it will provide energy efficiency and conservation services such as weatherization, upgraded lighting, and more efficient appliances. It later plans to create microgrids, which connect groups of homes and buildings, allowing them to share solar power and storage among themselves. In addition, community solar projects would allow residents to buy electricity from nearby homes, businesses, or public areas that generate excess solar power. And the city is planning networked geothermal power for a low-income community. All of these options would be difficult if not impossible under the current utility structure. Thats because they run counter to a business model based on centralized power distribution and maximizing short-term profit. Five ways Ann Arbors SEU would provide power. SEUs created in other parts of the U.S., including Delaware and Washington, D.C., have so far focused on energy efficiency. [Image: City of Ann Arbor] Third, SEUs provide small-scale, decentralized, more resilient infrastructure. One common problem with investor-owned utilities is that their largest profit margins come from building new power sources rather than maintaining and repairing existing wires, poles, and other infrastructure that keep power flowing. This is one key reason why public utilities, which are directly responsible to voters and taxpayers, have a better track record of keeping the power flowing. Reliability is particularly important and challenging as the impacts of climate change accelerate, with more frequent catastrophic weather events straining energy infrastructure. When power goes out in a centralized system, everyone is left in the dark if they dont have generators or battery backup. But increased solar power with battery storage and microgrids can allow groups of buildings to return to power quickly. Local communities will step up again My colleague Andrew Buchsbaum and I recently worked with a team of graduate students to compare the potential performance of various types of power governance systems. We found that an SEU had the highest potential to lower prices, increase reliability, lower pollution, and benefit underserved communities compared with fully jettisoning the private utility in favor of only public power, increasing the number of municipal public utilities, or tightening regulation on existing utilities. Ann Arbors experiment to launch the first full-scale SEU will test this. It also comes at a critical time. During the first Trump administration, as the federal government prioritized fossil fuels, cities and states stepped up their expansion of clean energy. The second Trump administration is again promoting polluting power sources while pulling back support for renewable energy development. Yet, wind, solar, and energy efficiency are the cheapest sources of electricity. Given the increasing urgency to reduce climate pollution and the clear financial and reliability benefits of clean energy, I expect the trend of increasing focus on clean energy at the local level to not just continue but accelerate. Mike Shriberg is a professor of practice & engagement at the School for Environment & Sustainability at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Consider a self-employed entrepreneur who racked up thousands of dollars in medical bills after a visit to the emergency department due to lack of employer-sponsored health insurance. Or the entrepreneur whose business never got off the groundnot because they lacked skill or demand, but because the burden of complicated taxes or owing money they didn’t expect made them walk away before they could even get started. This sentiment underscores how current policies can deter potential entrepreneurs from leaving traditional employment. Despite all of this, in recent years, solopreneurshipthe practice of running a business without a team or employeeshas grown drastically, alongside general entrepreneurship. The U.S. averaged 430,000 business applications per month in 2024. Thats 50% more than in 2019. And according to the Small Business Administration, the number of non-employer businesses has grown 84% since 1997. There are 28.5 million non-employer businesses in the U.S., representing roughly 82% of all small businesses in the country. This includes freelance writers, designers, consultants, e-commerce entrepreneurs, influencers, virtual assistants, and photographers. Despite having no employees, solopreneurs face many of the same challenges as small business owners: funding, healthcare, taxes, and compliance. Here are three policy areas and practices they can put into place to ensure their long-term success. 1. Access to capital Solopreneurs are more likely to use personal capital to start and sustain their business. Unlike larger companies that can attract investors, solopreneurs often struggle to secure significant external funding due to their smaller scale. And in many cases, they are simply unaware of the resources available to them. There are a few possible solutions to addressing this challenge. First, government can increase the support for and awareness of tax-deductible business loans, which allow solopreneurs to deduct interest on personal loans used for business expenses. This includes traditional business loans like SBA loans, equipment financing, and business lines of credit. It also includes personal loans and home equity loans used for business, such as a solopreneur taking out a $20,000 personal loan to buy equipment and cover marketing costs. If the annual interest paid on the loan is $2,000 and the entire loan is used for business, the full interest payment can be deducted from taxable income, reducing overall taxes owed. Another option is a phased reduction of the self-employment tax. One of the biggest financial burdens for new solopreneurs is the self-employment tax, which is 15.3% (covering Social Security and Medicare) on net earnings. The government could implement a phased reduction of self-employment taxes for new solopreneurs, gradually lowering the self-employment tax burden for individuals just starting their own business. This approach could provide financial relief and additional capital during the crucial early stages of business growth. It also gives solopreneurs time to establish consistent earnings before facing full tax liability. 2. Healthcare and social safety net security Healthcare, retirement savings, parental leavethese are all benefits currently tied to a persons job. This has been described as job lock as it suppresses entrepreneurship, innovation, and ultimately economic growth. Despite this, we are still seeing a massive rise in solopreneurship meaning there is a large segment of the workforce that has to navigate these critical social safety net programs on their own. The first solution is to reform the current health reimbursement arrangement (HRA), including an individual coverage HRA (ICHRA) and a qualified small employer HRA (QSEHRA). While they were designed as a flexible way for small businesses to help employees access health insurance, the system has major flawsone is that they are not currently available for self-employed individuals. These individuals struggle to deduct healthcare costs because they lack employer-sponsored insurance. HRA reform could allow them to use pre-tax dollars for health expenses, reducing their taxable income. HRA reform could be a game-changer for solopreneurs and S-corps, making healthcare more accessible, affordable, and tax efficient. Another potential solution is to exempt health insurance premiums and retirement savings contributions from self-employment tax calculations. Right now, solopreneurs pay self-employment tax on all earnings, including money used for health insurance and retirement. Creating this exemption would lower the overall tax burdens on these individuals without reducing the benefits. 3. Compliance and tax support Running a business as a solopreneur is extremely rewarding when it comes to flexibility, being your own boss, and doing what you love. But it also comes with its own set of compliance and tax challenges. And while there are some tax advantages to working for yourself that are not available to those who work for others, it can get complex. Business owners need to be aware of different tax deadlines, eligible deductions, and how to efficiently structure their finances to benefit from lower tax rates. This will always be important, but there are proposals making their way through Washington to make it easier on solopreneurs. Right now, anyone who works for themselves faces the burden of directly paying their estimated taxes on a quarterly basis and managing a lot of the calculations on their own. There are also long-term economic security implications of not remitting payroll taxes, which reduces the Social Security benefit, plus Medicare, to a certain extent. Because of this, many self-employed workerssolopreneurs, freelancers, etc.would prefer to have taxes withheld from their earnings instead. This would reduce the risk of calculation errors and help them avoid penalties. Businesses that pay self-employed individuals for their work could withhold the taxes by adding their withholding to the taxes they already pay for their employees. This would allow solopreneurs to better manage their cash flow and alleviate the frustration of having to estimate withholdings, save for future tax payments, and navigate those payments four times a year. The rise in solopreneurship and self-employment isn’t just a trend; it’s a fundamental shift in how people choose to work these days. Supporting entrepreneurs in their business endeavors and reducing complexities for them would encourage more small business creation, which ultimately strengthens and lifts the overall economy. Tomer London is cofounder and chief product officer of Gusto. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
Category:
E-Commerce
The AI industry is growing up fast. New model releases are now a regular event and premium AI features are quickly overtaken by free or freemium alternatives. Exhibit A: OpenAI unveiled its Deep Research tool, which can write reports on complex topics in minutes, as part of its $200-a-month Pro package, but rival Perplexity gives non-subscribers some access to its Deep Research assistant free of charge. (Yes, Google Geminis agentic research assistant is also called Deep Research.) With fewer fundamental breakthroughs, the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are slugging it out over incremental improvements in search and reasoning performance. As AI pricing falls and performance gaps close, the focus has shifted from novelty applications to finding real business value. Its a new era for AI Agentic AI is the game-changer. Gartner forecasts that 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI by 2028, a drastic increase from less than 1% in 2024. Some 15% of day-to-day work decisions could be made autonomously by AI agents, hiking business productivity and freeing up workers for more strategic tasks. Its probably no surprise, then, that OpenAIwhich famously took 4.5 years to launch ChatGPT without any idea of who our customer was going to be, according to CEO Sam Altmanis releasing its first-ever product roadmap. Nothing says maturing market like a product roadmap. As Finn Murphy, a founder and venture capitalist, posted on X from the AI Action Summit in Paris, where the EU said it would mobilize 200 billion for AI investment: It really feels like the era of interesting technical breakthroughs being announced is over and the era of policy, partnerships, and money announcements is here. Security matters Growing up brings responsibilities, of course, especially at the enterprise level. Among the 1,803 C-suite executives surveyed for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) AI Radar, published in January, 76% recognized that their AI cybersecurity measures need further improvement. If anything, that number should be closer to 100%. Execs ranked data privacy and security as the top AI risk. Regulatory challenges and compliance also featured strongly. Their fears are not unfounded: AI applications open up a new attack surface for threat actors and security researchers have already succeeded in breaking all of the world-class AI models to some extent. Still, it took the shock arrival of Chinas DeepSeek to properly push AI security into the mainstream. It is notable that consumers and corporates have concerns about a Chinese entity having their data but seem content that U.S. and Europe-based entitieswhich impose almost identical terms and conditionswill keep it secure. Security must be a key consideration for all AI models, not just those built (or hosted) outside the US. History shows us that bad actors are often the earliest adopters of new technology, from wire fraud to phone, text and email phishing scams. In an agentic world, where AI agents have been given access to critical business information and in-house applications, the blast radius from any attack may be exponential. Think like an attacker Its often said that the best defense is to think like an attacker. Today, that means using Agentic Warfare to comprehensively test AI-driven systems for vulnerabilities long before they see the light of day. Automated red-teaming is the new standard in testing AI with speed, complexity, and scale. At every step, security has to sit alongside performance in choosing AI, rather than coming as an afterthought when something goes wrong. As much as cost, security-to-performance will be a key metric in model and app selection; this is a one-way-door decision for safe and successful AI implementations. Interestingly, the BCG survey reports that the intuitive, friendly feel of GenAI masks the discipline, commitment, and hard work required to introduce AI in the workplace. It is hard work but the rewards should be significant. Just as software led to era-defining leaps in innovation and productivity, agentic AI promises great advances in all sectorsas long as security is baked in from the beginning. Donnchadh Casey is CEO of CalypsoAI. The Fast Company Impact Council is a private membership community of influential leaders, experts, executives, and entrepreneurs who share their insights with our audience. Members pay annual membership dues for access to peer learning and thought leadership opportunities, events and more.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||