Q&A: Gretchen Schimelpfenig

In June, The Greenhouse Lighting and Systems Engineering (GLASE) consortium named Gretchen Schimelpfenig as their new executive director, succeeding Erico Mattos in the role.

Schimelpfenig’s primary focus will be on reducing the environmental impact and increasing the profitability of the CEA industry by pioneering and commercializing emerging solutions.

This fall, Schimelpfenig and GLASE will host an in-person summit in Lemington, Ontario, Canada. Scheduled for Oct. 25, the event will be an opportunity for growers to meet Schimelpfenig, network with other industry processionals and tour a local winery. Register at glase.org/2023summit.

Headshot courtesy of GLASE; photos: pressmaster | Adobestock

Produce Grower: What was your path to getting into this role?

Gretchen Schimelpfenig: I took the path of engineer — I'm an engineer academically. And the early part of my career was finding opportunities in commercial and industrial buildings of lots of different types. Living in Vermont, I’ve worked with the city of Burlington and the University of Vermont on their buildings and helped them implement energy efficiency projects. And during the cannabis legalization process in Vermont, I was able to design an energy rebate program for grow lights in the state and in Burlington. Through that process, I became intrigued with controlled environment agriculture and learned a lot more about greenhouses and the energy-consuming processes involved. So I pivoted my career at that time and lead RII (the Resource Innovation Institute) for a few years.

PG: Before this role, what kind of problems did you anticipate trying to solve in your career?

GS: I still work with commercial buildings. My position at GLASE is part-time. The other half of my time, I work with different kinds of buildings — for example, I work in buildings with refrigeration and cold storage. Currently, I’m starting a research project on an ice rink. So for me, I always thought I was going to pursue things like geothermal heat pumps, natural refrigerants, all of these sorts of emerging technologies that are going to help us mitigate climate change and reduce the environmental impact of buildings. So it’s not far from where I imagined I would be. I just didn’t realize that this was going to be the kind of building I cared a lot about.

PG: What can growers learn from a commercial building and apply to their efforts to be more energy efficient? Is there any overlap?

GS: One of the ways we compare different buildings is energy intensity. It’s basically putting a building on a scale and weighing it and saying, ‘this is how much energy you use every year, this is how big of a building you are, this is the type of building you are’ and showing how it stacks up. That helps you decide if you need to focus on energy efficiency or if you’re already doing pretty well. And so, as I learned more about greenhouses and indoor farms — indoor farms especially — I learned that they have energy intensity similar to grocery stores or data centers or hospitals, these really high intensity building types. And so, I think the thing they can learn from each other is that they all have to be intent on understanding what contributes to that energy usage. So a lot of those different industries I just named benchmark their energy use every year and they understand what energy use they have at different times of the day by using interval data and systems that monitor energy so they can understand what is running at night, what’s running at peak times when everyone is doing everything at the same time. Regardless of what you’re growing or making or doing or building, they all have energy end uses. And so we just have to know what’s going on and how to control them.

From a produce grower standpoint, you’re paying that energy bill every month. But do you know why it’s high some months or why it’s low some months? Do you know what equipment is starting to fail because maybe your energy usage is going up? It’s these sorts of things where being curious about why things are changing is helpful.

PG: What are the common questions you are getting from growers and researchers?

GS: I think the word resilience is coming up a lot right now as energy costs are rising, and as climate change continues to change the way growers can adapt to the locations they are operating in. When I was having the member meetings and talking to our industry advisory board members at Cultivate, something that kept coming up is that folks are feeling really constrained by a lot of different issues happening at the same time right now. So helping them become aware of things they can do without investing a lot of money [such as] behavioral things they can change about their operation as well as getting more supportive policies to enable growers to adopt these new technologies. It’s not cheap [to adopt new technology], so a lot of growers need to have multiple sources of support from different levels — government, utility companies, etc. — to make this happen.

So I chose to join GLASE because I want to accelerate academic research and get it out to growers in a way that they can understand while also getting more attention paid towards CEA as an industry that needs more funding from governments, grants from utility efficiency sources and things like that. Because right now, it’s very piecemeal and it’s also very foreign to most growers and they don’t have time to understand a lot of it, so it needs to be brought to them in an easy-to-understand way.