 |
|
|
|||||
Hours before a federal law was set to take effect in January mandating that Chinese tech giant ByteDance sell TikTok’s U.S. operations, the social media app shut down. Though service was restored the next day, thousands of TikTok content creators were faced with the prospect of their source of income disappearing in an instant. The incident laid bare a common problem creators face: As social media algorithms change and platforms fold and emerge, creators need to find a way to grow their following and take it with them to different sites. That’s where LTK comes in. The 14-year-old company allows influencers to connect with brands, get commissions from products they plug, and hedge their bets by making money off any platform. The company also helps creators build a community thats not subject to the vicissitudes of social media platforms: When a creator links to a product via LTK on any social platform, consumers have the option of following that person on LTK as well. And the company helps creators carry their sponsored content deals from platform to platform as well. LTK, which raised $550 million in 2021 at a $2 billion valuation, works with more than 350,000 creators, 8,000 retailers, and a million brands. Today, LTK facilitates more than $5 billion in annual sales through its platform. The company was cofounded by Amber Venz Box, a content creator herself, who also serves as its president. Venz Box came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to discuss how LTK is navigating ever-changing social media algorithms, the increasing amount of AI-generated social content, and consumer fatigue from sponsored content. Every creator I talk with says they’re seeing less and less return on investment from their social posts. How do you handle that trend as a company? Social media has changed a lot in the last year specifically. Until 2024, social media was a place to follow creators and be part of communities. You had control over your feed. [Instagram head] Adam Mosseri came out in January and said this year the majority of what you see is going to be recommended content [that an algorithm selects]. We saw and felt that. If you had 100,000 impressions in January, you ended the year with about 25,000 impressions per post. How do you deal with those changes? We saw, as early as 2015, 2016, that their business is built on advertising. Our business is not built on that. So there are incentives that are misaligned. You have to displace a piece of creator content in order to insert an ad. That was the beginning of us thinking that we need to start planning. Snap also scaled quickly [around that time]. We were seeing the rise of a major scaled platform almost every two years, which presents fragmentation risk for our creators. We also saw consumers shift from desktop content consumption to mobile. At the end of 2016, we realized we had to create a home base for our creators because when you play this tape forward, it’s not great for our industry. So by 2017, we launched the LTK app. That is where everything lives for [our creators], where they house their community, and [where] they could start using social media as a marketing platform. Is video a big part of your business? We introduced video to our platform 2017. Over the last two years our creators have produced 300% more video. It’s quickly becoming the largest content type on LTK and it’s the most important. We know that consumers really resonate with video. There’s a higher trust with that, and as a creator, I’m actually selling trust. Ultimately, I need to be in a relationship with my followers and video is the best way to do that. We totally rebuilt the app and relaunched it this year to be video-first. When it comes to [the shutdown of] TikTok, we were the first generation to be fully disenfranchised for a minute. Our users were able to feel firsthand what it meant to have their community pulled. They need a home base to own their audience. We saw a huge uptick and people setting up their LTKs and driving their community over to the platform. These days, consumers can spot sponsored content and advertising from a mile away. What are some of the ways a creator can stay authentic and also sell things? Creators definitely don’t win by tricking people. For example, if I tell you this mascara is a tubing mascara and it’s not going to smudge on your face, and then when you try it and it smudges and it’s total crap and it’s flaky, you’re never going to trust me ever again. Creators need to be truly helpful. The environment we’re in this year is so wild when it comes to trust because there’s just a lack of it across the internet. Consumers are looking at AI creators across TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg says the vast majority of content you’re going to see on his platform is going to be machine created. Those are super low-trust things. Being a human creator is a differentiator. How does LTK make money? When you look at the monetization structure, our incentives are aligned with the whole ecosystem. The creator wants to create content that resonates with consumers. When that content resonates, the consumer makes a purchase. In that case, the brand pays a commission or transaction fee to that creator. If you go to Sephora, maybe somebody’s getting a commission. If you go to me online and buy the lip gloss from me, I’m going to get a commission. That’s one piece of the business. The other half is when brands come into our brand platform and say, Hey, I actually am launching that new lip gloss and I want to make sure everyone talks about it. They can find creators and have them do paid collaborations. The creator can accept offers through the platform or not. They’re being paid a flat fee to talk about the product. LTK has tons of other [revenue-generating] products, but if you want to think of it in two core ways, it’s really the transaction revenue and then the campaigns or the collaborations. Some of your competitors make money from affiliate links. What differentiates your business? We’ve created a whole platform where creators set up and run their business. [We help with] everything from content creation and distribution to partnerships. There’s a really rich technology stack that doesn’t meet the consumer eye. And when it comes to consumer distribution, we have 40 million consumers. Thats about 38% of millennial and Gen Z women who are using LTK right now. LTK is in a category of its own pursuing a vision to be the creator app in the same way that LinkedIn is the professional app orStrava is the running app. As a marketer, you want to leverage a creator who’s able to reach their audience. In January of this year, Adam Mosseri came out and said that stories are not a distribution point. They’re for friends who are friends in real life and know each other well. Everything he says comes true, so we should expect for the degradation of story reach even further than it already is. If you’re a brand marketer, it’s not great news. If you are working with a platform that is just providing affiliate links, then you may not have a place to use those links [when the algorithm changes]. Were providing a home base to creators that’s separate from the influencer marketing platforms and storefront affiliate type of platform. LTK raised $300 million from SoftBank in 2021. Is the company profitable? Yes. We’re really unique for a SoftBank investment. My husband and I started the business and self-funded it. It has remained within our family and we still both operate it. I’m the president and he’s the CEO of the company. Ten years in, we decided to give some relief to some of our shareholders. We were already a profitable business. What SoftBank allowed us to do is give some reward to people who had been with us for about 10 years and run our road map forward. Since that time, we’ve more than doubled the business. And we remain EBITDA positive. Are you incorporating AI and machine learning into LTK? Our team uses a suite of 20 different AI companies and products to be more efficient, whether it’s from legal to design to everything else. At LTK we think that our creators being human is their superpower, but we can make them more efficient. AI is being used across all of our services. We’ll be releasing AI music, which is music that’s custom-created for the videos and content that our creators have made. We also use AI to pre-tag their content. The CRM for our creators is also totally automated. Were also using it to send the right message to the right customer at the right time [to get them to buy something]. We sent over a billion notifications last year on behalf of our creators to their customers. On the brand side, we’re building campaigns for them in partnership with the right creators. The vast majority of creators we are recommending to brands are based on AI insights. Will you ever let AI influencers on the platform? We will not. The human promise is so important. There’s been a lot of articles that have come out actually about AI creators. They can gain a following and they look so real, but ultimately we think there’s a lack of trust. They’re not going to know that something ships faster, how it fits you. Again, it becomes like an ad, right? Because anything they’re going to be doing in that context is going to be because they were paid or told to by someone. So we will remain a human app, but it’ll be powered by AI. And the music might be created by AI, but the person that you’re chatting with and all that is real.
Category:
E-Commerce
Youve just graduated, and it’s time to get ready for your first adult job. This feels different from your summer jobs and internshipsyet its not. Take a pause, two deep breaths, and realize: you are not flying solo. Remember: in the workplace and throughout your career, a we, not me mentality makes all the difference. None of us gets anywhere alone. Not even fiercely independent believers in rugged individualism. Many graduates think they dont have a personal board of directors and that theyre starting their careers with an empty table. But Im here to tell you that nobody starts from zero. It can be hard to recognize at first, but you already have a group of people invested in you and your professional journey. These are your go-to people: those you trust, respect, and who have demonstrated their commitment to your professional growth and success. Think of the “board” as a figurative way to describe the individuals you turn to for guidance, support, input, radical honesty, and feedback. How to establish your board of directors First, start by setting some ground rules for your board: there are always open seats, and there are no term limits. Some people may only be on your board briefly; others may stay for a lifetime. These relationships shouldnt be transactional or one-way. They are respectful, thoughtful connections that you must nurture. Here are three actions you can take to strengthen your relationship with your current board members. 1. Start with an audit Ask yourself, whos already sitting at your table? Think about the people you call when youre in a personal or professional crisis, the ones who make you feel better just by talking. Think about the friends you trust to discuss school, career decisions, fashion dilemmas, or family stresses. Dont forget about teammates, club members, or organization peers whose advice you value. Reflect on those who have once sat you down to walk you through a critical decision. Even family members who offer solicited (and sometimes unsolicited) advice can be part of your board if you trust their input. These are the people who are already serving. 2. Be open to changing your board members Second, roll people off when necessary. Not everyone is meant to stay forever. As you grow and evolve, its natural for board membership to change. Sometimes its them, they might have life commitments that shift, which decreases availability. Sometimes its you. You develop new priorities or outgrow the relationship. Sometimes, a person might break your trust, and a once-valued board member no longer feels like a safe person. Whatever the reason, honor the evolution. The right board changes over time to meet the needs of the person you are becoming. 3. Show gratitude Third, show gratitude. Ask yourself if youve truly done the work to nurture these relationships. Once you finish reading this, reach out to a few board members to say thank you. Whether you send a handwritten note, a text, an email, or make a phone call, be intentional. Share an updatelet them know youve graduated and are starting your next chapter. Express your gratitude with a specific example of how their support helped you reach this milestone. And tell them that youd like to stay in touch, if theyre open to continued communication. This isnt a transactionits the ongoing work of maintaining and valuing real relationships. As you begin your new job, remember that there are always open seats at your boardroom table. Think about who youd like to join next. What areas of growth could benefit from more support? For example, when I graduated from medical school, I wished I had someone to help me with financial literacysomeone who could have guided me through paying off debt and making smart financial decisions. Books, podcasts, and newsletters are helpful, but nothing replaces having a real person to call or email when questions arise. The most successful professionals dont achieve everything at once. They build careers by learning and applying micro skillssmall, intentional behaviors that compound over time and can be implemented in real time. Congratulations, graduate. You already have a board. People are serving on it. Now its time to reinforce, grow, and celebrate the support.
Category:
E-Commerce
On February 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive states efforts to combat climate change. As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy. Oregon, Kotek said, had been leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change. Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades. Its going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis, the governor said, and we are not turning back. But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power. Whats held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to peoples homes, and little has been done to change that. Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid thats nearly a century old in places. Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the regions sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business. The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonnevilles grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers. Efforts to bypass Bonneville didnt start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the regions high-voltage network. Both bills died. The grids severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high. Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outagesnot to mention dashing the Northwests hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change. The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball, said Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba, a Democrat who sponsored this years failed legislation aimed at creating a state grid improvement authority. We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production. Kotek declined an interview request. Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica said in a statement that the governor is open to innovative ideas to increase transmission capacity and labeled it key to achieving the states energy goals. She offered no direct response to questions about Oregons lack of progress in boosting renewables. Reuven Carlyle, the former state senator who crafted Washingtons 2019 decarbonization bill, said he was deeply cognizant of the regions transmission challenges at the time but that plans to address the problem simply slipped. Its certainly nothing to be proud of that it didnt get resolved, said Carlyle, who founded a consulting firm for climate-focused investments after leaving the Legislature. And its embarrassing that Oregon and Washington, which are such good-looking states, simply cant practically build anything in terms of energy. In the final months of the Biden administration, Bonneville announced a plan to do some grid upgrades, and agency Administrator John Hairston has said the self-funded federal agency is investing in transmission as much as it can without taking on too much debt. Bonneville responded to written questions from OPB and ProPublica by citing recent improvements to its process for connecting energy projects and noting that its not the only player responsible for growing the grid. The agency added that it remains committed to its critical mission of supporting the region with affordable, reliable and secure power. But Bonnevilles latest plans for the grid are in jeopardy. In addition to suspending all new federal wind permits, the Trump White House has added Bonneville to the long list of agencies cutting federal jobs. Three Bonneville employees, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution, said the cuts will make building out the transmission system even harder. With four years of Joe Bidens climate activism in the rearview mirror, the Pacific Northwest appears to have blown its best chance to realize its ambitions for renewable power. Projects in Limbo David Brown is a case study in the long and agonizing path to breaking ground on a Northwest solar farm. The Portland energy developer has been in the renewables business since 2003, and his firm, Obsidian Renewables, has a plan to put a vast array of solar panels on a piece of southern Oregon high desert thats the size of 3,000 football fields. Brown said its expected to produce enough energy for about 110,000 homes. Obsidian will handle everything from acquiring the land to getting permits approved, then look to sell the solar farm to an investor or utility once its ready for construction. But any power plant, whether fueled by coal, wind or sunshine, has to be wired into the electrical grid: a system of transmission lines and transformers that pools electricity and channels it to customers. While power lines crisscross the nation, power mainly gets used within the region that generates it. As in most parts of the Northwest, the nearest transmission lines Brown could plug into belong to Bonneville. He asked the agency for permision to connect his solar farm to its system in 2020. He doesnt expect approval until at least 2028. I dont know a single place in Oregon or Washington where I can connect a new solar project and get transmission. Not one, he said. One part of the holdup is that Bonneville needs to finish studying what kind of substation it will need to safely let a big new power source into the grid. Browns 400-megawatt solar farm has been through three such interconnection studies so far. The first time, Bonneville estimated Browns business would need to pay $23 million to build a substation, which Bonneville would own. The second study bumped the price to $70 million. By the third, Brown said, it was $212 million. He said the agency blamed supply chain and labor issues, in part, for the near-tripling in cost over four years. There are hundreds of projects like Browns: more than 200,000 megawatts worth of renewable energy awaiting Bonnevilles signoff, or enough to power the Northwest nearly 10 times over. One proposed wind farm has been in Bonnevilles queue for more than 16 years. Among projects 20 megawatts or bigger that were proposed in the past decade, the only one that made it through Bonnevilles waitlist was an add-on to an existing Portland General Electric wind farm that didnt require any major transmission upgrades. It won approval in 2022. The Northwest is not the only region with a backlog of projects waiting to plug in. Grid operators across the country have navigated a deluge of new wind, solar and mass-storage battery requests in recent years. Many applicants proved to be merely testing the waters, with nearly 3 in 4 ultimately pulling their plans, according to Joseph Rand, an energy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. But other regions managed to sort out problems better than the Northwest, OPB and ProPublica found. The news organizations used data from Bonneville and from a national database compiled by researchers at the Berkeley Lab to analyze how many large renewable energy projects waiting for grid connections made it to the finish line. The data showed that for large projects proposed since 2015, Bonnevilles one approval translates to a success rate of 0.2%, the lowest rate of any region. By contrast, about 10% of new applications for major projects in the Midwest and 28% in Texas made it through. Bonneville has said one reason for the slow progress is that its waitlist is jammed up with too many speculative projectsmore dream than financial reality. (Theres no evidence that Bonneville has it worse, though; data shows that the share of developers who back out after seeking Bonnevilles approval, 76%, is close to the national average.) Renewable advocates and energy developers say Bonneville struggles to hire and retain people to process connection requests because the agency pays less than the private sector. In January, Washington U.S. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, and Dan Newhouse, a Republican, introduced a bill to make Bonnevilles compensation more competitive, but it hasnt moved since. To speed things up, Bonneville has halted new requests for grid connections and changed its approach to reviewing applications. Where specialists used to review proposals one at a time, in the order received, they now plan to prioritize projects that are closest to ready. The agency said the new approach will increase the number of projects that get connected while cutting processing time in half, from an expected 15 years. Bonneville said in a statement that it is confident the interconnection reforms we adopted will prove sufficient to meet our customers needs. The changes have not yet helped Brown, who has been awaiting Bonnevilles approval to start work in southern Oregon since 2020. For now, the planned solar project remains in limbo. Its gonna take me years and a couple million dollars to get land use approval, Brown said, and why do I want to get land use approval if I dont know whether or not I have transmission? Theres No Room for Your Project The predicament Brown and dozens of other wind and solar developers face is a product of the Northwests unusual history with electric power. Oregon and Washington were blessed with powerful rivers fed by abundant snow and rainfall. Beginning in the New Deal era, the federal government built dozens of hydroelectric dams and a sprawling transmission system to electrify the rural West. The regions energy supply was cheaper and emitted less carbon than the rest of the nations. Bonneville was at the helm. Even today, hydropower supplies almost 35% of Oregons electricity and more than 50% of Washingtons, according to the most recent data available. But hydroelectric dams are a finite and increasingly shaky power source. Output from existing dams dips whenever droughts sap water from the Columbia River basin. New dams are a nonstarter because dams have decimated the regions salmon populations. That leaves wind, solar and battery storage as the most promising places for the Northwest to turn as it approaches self-imposed deadlines to fully wean utilities off electricity that comes from oil, coal or gas. Bonneville has now become a barrier to accommodating the new power sources, six green energy developers told OPB and ProPublica. An agency that erected more than 4,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from 1960 to 1990 built fewer than 500 miles from 1990 to 2020. In the past five years, it built 1. Bonneville has the ability to borrow money, at low interest rates, for projects that would enable the grid to carry more power. Congress pushed the agency to do so in 2021, more than doubling Bonnevilles debt limit specifically to finance transmission upgrades. The chairs of the Oregon and Washington public utility commissions, in a joint 2022 letter, urged Bonneville to spend the money: The region needs BPA to be a leader in delivering a transmission system that serves the entire region. Bonneville, however, has been reluctant to take on debt. It is still paying off billions of dollars in bonds from failed nuclear plants in the 1970s. As recently as 2019, the agencys finances were so poor that some economists expected it to become insolvent. Bonnevilles transmission planners, for their part, have told OPB and ProPublica in previous interviews that they want to avoid building expensive transmission lines that no one ends up using. We cant speculate and build a transmission line to nowhere, Jeff Cook, the agencys vice president for transmission planning, said in May 2024. When Bonneville announced in the fall it would tap some of its expanded debt limit to help pay for $5 billion in transmission upgrades over a decade, renewable energy advocates characterized the work as long overdue maintenance that wouldnt provide the expansion the grid needs. Most of the work Bonneville announced was the equivalent of fixing potholes, installing some new round-abouts, doing some repaving, Spencer Gray, executive director of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition, said in an email. A frther frustration for wind and solar developers that is unique to Bonneville: The grid operator makes them absorb an outsize share of the cost for projects that help the transmission network accommodate their electricityand it requires a big deposit up front. Thats true even if the new power lines benefit a wide network and will be around for many generations of customers. Lately, the answer to these individual developers has been, Theres no room for your project. If you want to put this project on our system, its going to cost you this many millions of dollars to help us upgrade the system, said Sarah Edmonds, president of a coalition of utilities known as the Western Power Pool. The approach, Edmonds said, has had a chilling effect on the ability of developers to get their projects online. Michelle Manary, Bonnevilles vice president of transmission marketing and sales, said requiring up-front deposits keeps existing ratepayers from getting stuck with the tab if a developer backs out and that Bonneville has begun work on a transmission upgrade. She said other regions have more control over who pays these costs because their entire distribution networks are under one operator. Bonnevilles transmission lines are more like highways, from which electric utilities serve as exit ramps that deliver power the last mile to Northwest neighborhoods. Manary denied that Bonnevilles current way of allocating costs has stifled green energy projects. But she acknowledged the agency needs to reevaluate its policy amid the flood of applications for new projects, and she said that process is underway. Texas Is Kicking Our Ass The rest of the nation has taken a different approach to bringing green power onlinewith better outcomes. In most parts of the country, each grid has a central, independent operator, known as a regional transmission organization, typically run by a board that represents customers, electric utilities and other groups. Bonneville recently rejected joining a California-based energy market that advocates described as the Northwests best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables. In Texas, which runs its own grid, large renewable projects applying to connect in the past decade took a median of 19 months to get the green light, or nearly two years less than the one project Bonneville approved in that time frame. California and the Midwest were also faster than Bonneville. Texas doesnt require project-by-project grid upgrades the way other grid operators do. It essentially tells developers it will connect their project, and then it figures out how to balance the added electricity after the fact. Texas and other regional grid operators spend billions more than Bonneville on transmission upgrades annually, and they spread the costs across a wider swath of customers than Bonneville does. (Bonneville says the federal agency differs so much from regional operators that theyre not a fair comparison group.) Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region. Thats helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the countrys biggest producer of wind and solar energy. Last year alone it added more than enough renewable energy to power the entire Northwest. Texas is kicking our ass, said Gamba, the Oregon state representative. Northwest lawmakers were told that theyd need to find effective ways of confronting their regions aging transmission system if they wished to phase out coal and natural gas. As Washington lawmakers debated a mandate for renewable power in 2019, Nicholas Garcia of the Washington Public Utility Districts Association testified that replacing coal plants with wind and solar would require more transmission, significantly more transmission. In 2021, when Oregon lawmakers debated their own mandate for carbon-free energy, Republicans also raised concerns that the states transmission lines were maxed out. It became one more GOP argument against the bill, in addition to saying more should be done to ensure green energy projects were built in Oregon. Numerous reportsfrom the Oregon and U.S. departments of energy, for examplesupported the assertion that heftier transmission lines were needed. Bonneville would be key to meeting that need, with one utilities lobbyist calling Bonnevilles grid the backbone for decarbonization in testimony to Oregon lawmakers. But Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, who led the 2021 effort, said in a recent interview she was focused on getting utilities to cut their carbon emissions and that green energy advocates werent demanding transmission improvements at the time. I was not thinking personally about the role that Bonneville might play in this, said Marsh, a Democrat representing southern Oregon. Washingtons Legislature took some action on the need for better transmission: It required the state to study the issue. The resulting 2022 report concluded that the grid was indeed inadequate but led to little in the way of solutions. Instead, lawmakers decided to require utilities to plan out transmission needs 20 years ahead rather than 10, and they created a statewide environmental review in hopes of streamlining the states approval process for transmission. It did nothing about impediments posed by Bonneville. The Legislature was a little complacent about relying on Bonneville to upgrade the grid, said Sen. Sharon Shewmake, a freshman lawmaker in 2019 when Washington enacted its energy mandate. Shewmake and Gamba both introduced legislation this year following states like Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming in creating independent authorities to finance transmission infrastructure. Gamba said he led an 80-person group of interested parties through 18 months of drafting. Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson labeled Shewmakes bill a priority. The legislation didnt make it through either states Democrat-controlled legislatures, however. Brown, the energy developer whos been awaiting Bonnevilles solar approval since 2020, said the future of the Northwests energy dreams looks dim. We dont have a prayer of meeting our heralded, flag-waving renewable energy goals, he said. The dialogue will be to blame Trump; it wont be to blame ourselves for poor planning and extremely low expectations. Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting Ellis Simani assisted with data analysis. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. This article was produced for ProPublicas Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||