Exclusive: DOE alums look to speed energy, climate tech deployments
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Senior officials from the Biden-era Department of Energy loan office are publicly launching a nonprofit on Wednesday that aims to speed deployment of low-carbon tech in the U.S. and abroad.
Why it matters: It's the latest example of how the federal policy U-turn on energy and climate is creating new efforts in response.
Driving the news: Months after starting work, the group Constructive is announcing itself with a goal of "reshaping how leaders and experts collaborate to scale clean energy and climate infrastructure."
- It has a model for creating "connective tissue" by weaving together stakeholder events, dialogues and strategies — and then ensuring there's follow-up.
The intrigue: The goal of the nonpartisan group's "stakeholder engagement model" is to fill a gap, not just offering more documents and meetings.
- "What's missing ... is follow-through and an understanding of how you create events and convenings and reports that are connecting the dots and building on each other towards some target outcome, and are creating clarity in doing that," Jonah Wagner, the group's president, tells Axios exclusively.
- "When we're thinking about how you put an event together, we're thinking, what happens when everybody wakes up the day after they went home?" he said in an interview.
State of play: Constructive works with governments, industry, think tanks, philanthropies and others.
- Areas of focus include demand response; "clean firm" sources like next-generation geothermal and advanced nuclear; transmission and other grid-enhancing tech; and advanced manufacturing.
"Our primary focus is going to be those energies or sources that drive energy abundance and a thriving planet, which often, but not always, excludes fossil fuel-driven [energy]," CEO Susan Kish tells Axios.
- Funding has come from "fee for service" with groups it's already working with, but Wagner expects philanthropic grants will ultimately be a significant source.
Between the lines: Kish said that if last year's election had gone differently, the "convening" function that Constructive provides would have likely remained within DOE.
- She was the executive producer of the Energy Department's Deploy23 and Deploy24 events, while Wagner was chief strategist at LPO and helped create the department's Pathways to Commercial Liftoff roadmaps.
- The team of roughly a half-dozen includes other LPO vets.
The big picture: Wagner and Kish gave a glass-half-full take on U.S.-focused work despite the federal pullbacks under Trump 2.0. They note there's now more certainty with the budget law passed, along with the need to meet rising power demand.
- Constructive would also like to work with the Trump administration on areas of alignment, Wagner said.
Catch up quick: Its work to date includes organizing an "energy and resilience" summit in Santa Barbara in May and producing the Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Task Force's upcoming summit in New York.
The bottom line: "If you can establish those relationships, get that trust going, things start to happen, right?" Kish said.
