Business View Magazine - Nov 2023

94 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 11 technology piloting, and various initiatives to advance decentralized energy in Canada. “One area we’ve succeeded in is being an accelerator for projects,” Kendall portrays. “We had a company that was trading carbon credits, and they joined us and said, ‘We don’t have any customers, we’ve just started this, and we want to test out our software on someone’. Their first 12 customers came from us. One was a utility at a traditional utility, one was a member-owned utility, and another was an electric vehicle charging company. All of these companies went to this new entrepreneur willing to pilot their software.” The Structure of DEC DEC operates with a highly adaptable team, with an average of five full-time members. Kendall relays, “We are a team that varies in size. Talking about resiliency, we’re an industry association that lives by that as our key rule because it’s been a long journey. There’s been varying levels of support, so we have a resilient business model.” She says the core team consists of herself (the president), an operations manager, an events manager, and a financial services manager, who collectively handle the majority of the organization’s work. The team augments its expertise with subject matter experts on various aspects of the energy industry, utilizing a flexible and contracted staff model that allows them to bring in specialized talent as needed. “We have a phenomenal board of directors, that is an advisory board. They’re not a working board, but they are there when things get challenging,” Kendall acknowledges. The Annual Decentralized Energy Forum The association’s annual conference, the Decentralized Energy Forum, plays a pivotal role in their activities. “These forums are our annual gems. They are not like any other conference,” boasts Kendall. “The program is built around the narrative of what’s happening in the energy transition, and in every forum that we have, I try to figure out what the emergency or urgent transition is that needs to be addressed. Last year it was sustainability how codes and standards lead to policy and regulations. This year, it’s going to be more around natural disasters and extreme weather, but from a very academic and educational side of things.” Kendal explains that the conference aims to