Dear friends, 2022 is shaping up to be an important year for us at EER and we want to share with you a bit of what is in store.
Please join us in welcoming Katie Pickrell to the Evolved team. Katie most recently led corporate development at Pacific Gas and Electric, where she previously held roles in treasury and clean transportation strategy. She brings expertise in utility strategic planning, asset valuation, and clean energy policy and program design. Katie hopes to help clients integrate long-term decarbonization analysis into their strategic planning and external advocacy efforts. The EER team is excited by the expertise and knowledge Katie brings, and we look forward to integrating her into our work.
In addition, long-time collaborator, Jim Williams, is taking on a new role as a Senior Research Fellow at EER. Jim will be helping with efforts on the Deep Decarbonization Annual Refresh (more on this below). Jim continues to be a professor at the University of San Francisco where he directs the Energy Systems Management master’s program.
Finally, EER is starting an internship program beginning this summer. An application process will be posted in March with interns starting on a rolling basis. Each of the EER partners wouldn’t be where we are without a great deal of mentorship, and this is a debt we hope to pay forward. Good energy modelers are in short supply as we work to mitigate climate change, and we hope up and coming analysts will consider joining us on this journey.
On the project front, we are excited to announce the Deep Decarbonization Annual Refresh project for the United States. This work is being funded by Breakthrough Foundation and will be done in collaboration with the Rhodium Group and Montara Mountain Energy. The goal of the project is to create an annually updated standard set of long-term (30-year) deep decarbonization pathways for the U.S., which can serve as both a benchmark for a wide variety of technical and policy audiences, and also as a source of year-on-year comparisons that improve understanding of how pathways change with new developments in technologies, costs, policies, and other factors. The Annual Refresh aims to move pathways analysis beyond isolated proofs-of-concept and towards becoming a practical implementation tool for addressing next-stage problems. We will use the EnergyPATHWAYS and RIO modeling platforms, widely recognized as best-in-class, to produce an annual standard benchmark for use by a wide variety of analysts and stakeholders. The 2022 Annual Refresh is set to be finished in mid-summer. We’ll share more information as we get closer to launch.
EER also has forthcoming decarbonization pathways for both Europe and Australia. The work in Europe will be released next month in partnership with Third Way as part of their Carbon Free Europe initiative and the Australian modeling will be released later in the year as part of the Net-Zero Australia Project. Both of these projects showcase new modeling capabilities for us and show fascinating similarities and differences with U.S. results.