The Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) wishes everyone a happy, healthy, and safe start to 2023! As the new year begins, it is the perfect time to reflect on all that happened at EFI in 2022.
We celebrated our fifth anniversary in September with more than 300 people from our expansive network. When EFI was established in 2017, our founders Ernest J. Moniz, Melanie Kenderdine, and Joseph Hezir envisioned a small organization dedicated to accelerating the clean energy transition, but we have already far surpassed this goal in our short history. We have grown to a team of more than 20 professionals. We have published more than 40 reports. And we have strong partnerships with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (through the Labor Energy Partnership) and National Association of State Energy Officials.
In addition to celebrating our fifth anniversary, we launched a new website to amplify our work more dynamically and accessibly. Our home page displays key events and topics, report landing pages showcase our portfolio of work, and “In the News” highlights our most notable media features. The website also features our impressive staff, noting project contributions of individual staff members to recognize how their work supports energy innovation.
In another exciting development for employee contributions, we reopened our office after two years of working remotely during the pandemic. This has energized our efforts (pun intended!) to facilitate the low-carbon energy transition. Over the past few months, we engaged with stakeholders in person and virtually to advance energy technologies and policies. In December alone, we hosted two live events focused on regional decarbonization and carbon dioxide removal.
2022 Highlights
—EFI’s President and CEO Ernest Moniz was interviewed on several major national television shows about energy security, the climate crisis, and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including conversations with Stephen Colbert on CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, and Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher.
—Influencers in EFI’s network published opinion articles in prestigious national and international outlets, including The Economist, Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs. Moniz authored two additional opinion pieces—“A way forward on the climate crisis and energy security” and “What the fusion breakthrough means for our energy future”—for The Boston Globe. The EFI CEO joined John M. Deutch in writing “How America can make industrial policy work,” in Foreign Affairs. Moniz’s and Steven Chu’s 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed (“California needs to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant open to meet its climate goals”) helped create a policy discussion that culminated in the August 2022 decision by California lawmakers to keep the plant open for an additional five years. And in November 2022, EFI Advisory Board Chairman Lord John Browne published a Financial Times piece about the shortcomings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Parties entitled, “When it comes to climate, we need to start thinking about Plan C.”
—EFI garnered additional media coverage in Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg News, The Associated Press, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and more, with interviews and quotations from EFI staff including Moniz, Principals Melanie Kenderdine and Joe Hezir, and EFI Vice President of Research Alex Kizer.
—We published six new reports, focusing on the topics of regional clean hydrogen market development (in the Gulf Coast and the Carolinas), carbon dioxide removal (a federal carbon purchasing program, as well as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage), offshore wind, and natural gas and energy security in the U.S.-Asia relationship.
—We hosted three live events and five virtual workshops on topics including carbon dioxide removal, hydrogen and clean fuels, energy finance, and offshore wind. The three of these events that were public are archives on our YouTube channel.
—EFI worked with the Labor Energy Partnership to produce an analysis of how the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) would reduce greenhouse gas emissions, support the clean energy transition, and foster job creation.
—EFI’s social media content received 1.2 million impressions. Our posts with the most far-reaching impact were about the IRA, Moniz’s interview with Stephen Colbert, and Moniz’s appearance with Bill Maher.
—EFI principals Ernest Moniz and Melanie Kenderdine testified in two congressional hearings. Moniz’s testimony was before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the topic of Russia’s waning global influence, and Kenderdine’s testimony was before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee about the topic of energy as a weapon and a tool.
—We also grew as an organization and welcomed 12 new employees.
–Georgia Lyon, Communications Associate
(Share this post with others.)
