Jesse Jenkins
A recent Wall Street Journal article by Scott Paterson highlights the work of Jesse Jenkins, an expert on energy and climate.
Jenkins, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, leads the ZERO Lab, which focuses on improving and applying optimization-based energy systems models to evaluate and optimize low-carbon energy technologies, guide investment and research in innovative energy technologies, and generate insights to improve energy and climate policy and planning decisions.
The article describes the role that Jenkins and his Lab group have played in the Inflation Reduction Act and other recent policy discussions about climate change:
When Jenkins’s team determined that the Inflation Reduction Act would be a failure unless huge changes were made to the electric grid, John Podesta, the White House’s clean energy adviser, called him out by name. “Jesse Jenkins at Princeton, I think maybe a little overstated, said we’ll get 20% of the benefits of the IRA if we can’t fix particularly this transmission problem,” Podesta said in May during a talk at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C. A spokesman for the White House declined to comment.
There is an army of researchers studying climate change, looking at melting icebergs, weather patterns and greenhouse gas emissions. Jenkins’s ZERO Lab, short for zero-carbon energy systems research and optimization laboratory, has become an important place for data and analysis of the energy transition. The climate law, which directs billions of dollars into clean-energy technologies, was tailor-made for the ZERO lab’s skill set.
Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal.