May 14, 2014
Green Energy Institute: Reflections from a Fellow
The Green Energy Institute (GEI) recently received a significant three year grant to continue its work at regional, state, and local levels to develop innovative policy incentives for renewable energy. Amy Schussler reflects on her first year as a fellow.
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The Green Energy Institute received a substantial grant this spring from the Oregon Community Foundation to support its work to develop innovative policy incentives for distributed renewable energy. With this money, GEI has hired two new staff attorneys, Nick Lawton and Amelia Schlusser, who were GEI’s first two Energy Fellows. GEI has also brought on two new LLM Energy Fellows, Kyra Hill (’14) and Nate Larsen (’14), for 2014-2015. GEI’s new team will continue GEI’s work while GEI’s Director and Founder, Professor Melissa Powers, researches renewable energy policies in Spain and Denmark as a Fulbright Scholar next academic year.
Amy Schussler recently reflected on her experience as a Green Energy Institute fellow:
I entered Lewis & Clark Law School with the dream of working on renewable energy and climate policy issues, and my fellowship with the Green Energy Institute has been an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience. I firmly believe that renewable energy can and will satisfy our energy needs in the future, and GEI is developing policy strategies to facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels sooner rather than later. My work with GEI is largely focused on renewable energy deployment at the utility level. As project manager for the Renewable Utilities project, I am working to identify barriers to utility-scale wind and solar energy development, and developing policy solutions to incentivize both utility investment in renewable generation and utility purchases of renewable energy and capacity from independent power producers. I am currently researching long-term risk assessment practices in utility integrated resource planning, and will soon be releasing a report on least-risk resource planning policies that promote renewable energy development.
Stay tuned as GEI continues to ramp up its policy work.
