Outrageous Optimism: Building Resilience from the Inside Out ft. Sara Bell (RIISE)

And then to start off, I would love if you could share a little bit more about the legal challenge.

And I think that's a world that many of our listeners are not familiar with.

What did that look like in practice? And then how were you able to bring the values-based work to that experience? Because I think that there is clearly a why behind what you were doing.

So if you could share a little bit the reasoning behind it and then the process itself.

So I was running an early stage clean tech company at the time, and that company was all about decarbonizing in a way that lowered energy costs for consumers.

So the way to do that is to make energy consumers as flexible as possible so they can use more power when there's lots of renewables in the grid mix and less power when those resources are more scarce.

So the UK brought in a scheme to support generation and did not make it equally accessible to customers.

So what we ended up doing was challenging under competition law.

So we brought a state aid legal challenge in the European Court, basically saying that European Commission, you are responsible for competition in Europe and you haven't followed your own rules in approving the scheme.

So that's what that legal challenge was all about.

But at the time, we were a pre-revenue, pre-investment round early stage company.

The board did not support this action.

So I had to convince the board.

We didn't have any money to pay for this legal action.

So I had to also find someone who was prepared to pay for it.

But what we did was to get a group of aligned environmental organizations around us because it was a competition law case.

No environmental charity could bring this kind of legal challenge because to bring a competition law case, you have to be individually and directly impacted by whatever competition failing there is.

So we built a coalition of interested parties around us.

And then to start off, I would love if you could share a little bit more about the legal challenge.

And I think that's a world that many of our listeners are not familiar with.

What did that look like in practice? And then how were you able to bring the values-based work to that experience? Because I think that there is clearly a why behind what you were doing.

So if you could share a little bit the reasoning behind it and then the process itself.

So I was running an early stage clean tech company at the time, and that company was all about decarbonizing in a way that lowered energy costs for consumers.

So the way to do that is to make energy consumers as flexible as possible so they can use more power when there's lots of renewables in the grid mix and less power when those resources are more scarce.

So the UK brought in a scheme to support generation and did not make it equally accessible to customers.

So what we ended up doing was challenging under competition law.

So we brought a state aid legal challenge in the European Court, basically saying that European Commission, you are responsible for competition in Europe and you haven't followed your own rules in approving the scheme.

So that's what that legal challenge was all about.

But at the time, we were a pre-revenue, pre-investment round early stage company.

The board did not support this action.

So I had to convince the board.

We didn't have any money to pay for this legal action.

So I had to also find someone who was prepared to pay for it.

But what we did was to get a group of aligned environmental organizations around us because it was a competition law case.

No environmental charity could bring this kind of legal challenge because to bring a competition law case, you have to be individually and directly impacted by whatever competition failing there is.

So we built a coalition of interested parties around us.