I’m honored to have joined the Pace Energy and Climate Center in January as its Interim Executive Director as we transition to the next permanent Executive Director. For four decades, under the leadership, vision, and wisdom of founder Dean Emeritus Richard Ottinger and successive Executive Directors, the Center has been a powerful voice on decarbonizing the energy sector, utility rate regulation to advance renewable energy and energy efficiency, solar markets, distributed energy resources, microgrids, energy justice, international energy policy, and other strategies to address climate change.
The Center has made advances in these areas by establishing and leading coalitions of organizations that share a common regulatory and policy agenda, participating in utility rate cases, issuing cutting-edge reports, partnering with government agencies and non-profits, and advising renewable energy companies and municipalities. Perhaps most importantly, through the Center’s innovative work, it has trained generations of law students who are now leaders in the field, as they transform the energy sector and tackle the climate crisis.
In the last several years, and continuing into 2025, the Center has maintained its leadership role through its innovative work on geothermal energy. The Center has been working with government partners to engage communities on district geothermal (also known as thermal energy networks), and is developing curriculum with its non-profit partners to train communities on regulatory options for geothermal energy development. The Center has also advised district-scale thermal energy developers and municipalities on regulatory requirements for geothermal energy.
In addition, the Center continues its long tradition of serving as a convenor in the field of renewable energy and energy efficiency, for example, by co-convening a coalition of clean energy organizations, and leading a network of clean energy and utility rate design experts. The Center also continues its work on community-scale solar, community choice aggregation and community distributed generation, with a particular focus on underserved communities.
Consistent with its long history of publishing groundbreaking reports in the clean energy field, the Center is poised to issue several reports on geothermal energy in the coming weeks and months. With the help of the Center’s Haub School of Law interns, we will profile some of these reports on this blog in the near future.