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Leading a conference wasn’t exactly what he had in mind.
“I was asked to lead the Asia Clean Energy Forum (ACEF), which was a well- respected, well-attended event, attended by over 1,000 people, but it wasn’t exactly the on-the-ground work in development that I was hoping for,” he recalls. “But then, I re ected on the energy sector, and how over the past 2 decades, we’d seen some incredible developments. Renewable energy prices have come down by an order of magnitude, for example. At the same time, here in Asia we still have hundreds of millions of people without access to electricity and over a billion people without access to clean cooking. And I thought, how can I do something with impact at ACEF?”
Elzinga started by reaching out to colleagues in other sectors, such as urban development, agriculture, transport, water, and the environment, and asked them to come alongside the energy sector and help improve the conference. This made perfect sense to him: a waste- to-energy project, for example, can be stymied by failure to navigate municipal regulations; a wind energy project requires data on bird migration patterns to mitigate its environmental impact;
and a successful hydro project needs to ensure irrigation issues are solved.
“These partners from other departments brought real substance, and they also helped us nd ways to tell ADB’s story better, within the conference itself,” says Elzinga.
At the conference, Elzinga brought in clean energy entrepreneurs to come
and tell ADB what they’re doing. But to ensure everyone met as many people as possible, the meetings were limited to only 6 minutes each, just enough time for both sides to gure out if they wanted to have a more in-depth conversation at a later date. This event, named Dim Sum with Clean Energy Entrepreneurs, was highly attended, had lively and animated discussion, and avoided the scourge of death by PowerPoint.
“This part of the forum enabled people to really learn about di erent approaches and di erent ways of doing things. Over 400 people came to this event and real deals came out of it for entrepreneurs and for our developing member countries,” says Elzinga.
The conference organizers made a point of actively engaging with women, as speakers and attendees. There were no men-only panels, 50% of the keynote speakers and panelists were women, and overall attendance by women was 40%, up from 18% the year before.
Elzinga’s already thinking about the
2020 event and how to build on past success and make it even better than last year’s. “We want to have some fun, do something di erent, take a risk. And the things that went well? We just need to do them again.”
Watch David Elzinga’s talk at the 2020 ADB Innovation Fair
Trailer / Full talk
Find out more:
https://www.asiacleanenergyforum.org/
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