Hispanic Chamber of Metro Orlando Focuses CEO Series on Sustainability

When the Hispanic Chamber of Metro Orlando asked its membership what it was looking for from the chamber, the leadership found a desire to have in-depth discussions on topics of interest to CEOs and other business leaders.

The result was an intimate gathering of its top investors—the CEO Series. On October 25, the chamber worked with Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy (CICE) on a sold-out event as part of the CEO Series titled “Running a Sustainable Business and its Impact on Our Community!”

The event featured the following panelists:

• Linda Ferrone, chief customer and marketing officer, Orlando Utilities Commission

• Ed Durkee, president and CEO, Goodwill Industries of Florida

• Javier Adames, vice president, JCQ Services

• Sharon Arroyo, vice president of government and community relations, Duke Energy

• Michael Fernandez, vice president of post collections, Waste Pro

Alan Byrd, CICE’s Florida outreach director, moderated the hour-long discussion.

“Our members were extremely engaged in this discussion as sustainability is a topic they care about and want to learn how to implement in their own business,” says Alejandra Escobar, vice president of the Hispanic Chamber of Metro Orlando, who led the event for the chamber. “I think everyone in the room walked out with at least one way they can increase sustainability, but also improve their bottom line.”

Throughout the event, the panel discussed how sustainable efforts from recycling to solar to energy storage depend highly on how sustainability efforts must include ways to impact and improve the bottom line.

For instance, the panelists talked about how fleet management helped their economies and reduced their carbon footprint.

“We’re looking for the overlap between economic returns and sustainable goals,” Durkee said. “We’re a small business, we need policymakers to make rules where it makes economic sense to engage in sustainable practices and we will embrace those all the time.”

The panel discussed a wide range of topics, from recycling pizza boxes to small modular nuclear reactors. Duke Energy and Orlando Utilities Commission discussed the growth of utility-scale solar and the need for new energy storage innovation.

“We are working with a lot of energy consortiums to develop all types of new energy storage systems,” Ferrone says. “Lithium-ion batteries are great because they come on instantly and take on the load, but they don’t last long and during a multi-day weather event, lithium-ion batteries aren’t going to get you there, so we are looking at all types of technology at our Innovation Center.”

Duke Energy added to that by discussing a pilot project in Orlando where it is installing 100 utility-grade Gentek batteries in homes to see how energy can be stored and how the utility and customer can use the energy storage to address demand issues.

The panel also discussed the workforce issues coming from the new technologies.

“We have all these new solar farms that are a different skill set than operating a power plant,” Arroyo said. “From a workforce standpoint, thinking ahead to what are the jobs we need in the future is something we will all need to partner on for preparation.”

The panel ended with some simple tasks that businesses can do, like getting an energy audit or reviewing their operations.

“Take a look at what opportunities you have in your business,” Fernandez said. “Are there items you can reuse and be less wasteful? In the long run, you could save money.”