Areef Abraham Email & Phone Number

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Community Power specializes in the planning, development, implementation and management of energy efficiency programs. We work collaboratively with governments and utilities to create greener communities for tomorrow.

A former subsidiary of Terasen had launched a for-profit residential energy efficiency program delivered through a network of independent contractors in 1997 which was competing with a similar program by BC Hydro. Publicly funded BC Hydro had a major advantage in being able to offer financing at below market rates compared with Homeworks’ market rates. Areef put together a turn around plan for Homeworks and negotiated a win-win financing arrangement with a Vancity subsidiary. In 2 years Areef grew the business nationally from its BC base and tripled the volume with an equivalent increase in profits. In 2003 Areef facilitated the sale of Homeworks enabling Terasen to achieve an acceptable recovery of its investments over the years.

A consortium of Canadian utilities had launched a product labeling program to promote energy efficient products. The program was faltering through lack of support by sponsoring utilities in their jurisdictions and manufacturers’ reluctance to label their products Power Smart. On joining he quickly identified that the key barriers to the program’s success were that the program criteria lacked credibility resulting in lukewarm support by utilities and without this support manufacturers were unable to perceive value in the program and the energy efficiency label. He developed a consensus based criteria process amongst the utilities so that they identified with the program and saw value in its success in their individual jurisdictions. With this support and with solid market based information Areef was able to demonstrate the commercial value of Power Smart to manufacturers and retailers. The result was to turn the program into a highly successful business unit and brought onboard major North American manufacturers including household names such as Dow, Maytag, GE and Phillips Lighting.

Administered the UK government’s $200m residential energy efficiency program. The organization had serious quality and fraud issues relating to its delivery network of 150 independent contractors. Adversarial relationships with the contractors prevented implementation of changes and there was a potential for the organization to lose its franchise with a loss of $200m in revenues together with serious liability risks associated with substandard work. Very quickly after joining the organization Areef focused on building positive relationships with key contractors which enabled the previously adversarial relationships to be turned to a cooperative business partnership. The new relationship allowed him to jointly define work and quality requirements with the contractors delivering good quality on a consistent and national basis. Within 3 months his efforts resulted in a 20% improvement in the quality of work and he underpinned the effort through the development of the UK’s first national standard for home energy efficiency which met the needs of the organization’s ISO 9000 accreditation.