Our EURO-TAM Excel @ Carolina student, Mackenzie Hansen, interviewed TAM graduates working in the Energy sector. Please see these wonderful Q and A sessions below. We are very proud of the contributions TAM grads make around the globe! In the year ahead we hope to pilot a class, taught by two of these graduates, on US-EU comparative environmental policy. Stay tuned for word about a new track of TAM focused on this topic!
Eva Palackova ’09
Eva Palackova is a senior political advisor on environmental policy and issues to the European People’s Party. Her primary areas of focus surround the European Union’s policies on the environment, climate change, and energy and agricultural policies. During the course of 2016, Eva served as a senior diplomat for the Slovak Presidency of the Council of the EU and was chair of the Council working party on the environment.
Can you describe how the TAM program offered you an avenue to explore your occupational interests?
I have always been passionate about politics and EU affairs and feel truly privileged to be able to work directly in this field as a senior political adviser for the biggest European political party. In many ways, I owe this to the TAM program.
I completed the TAM program by graduating from Sciences-Po Paris focused on European policy. The high reputation of both UNC-Chapel Hill and Sciences-Po Paris was an important factor when I started to pursue job opportunities in Brussels. Throughout the program, I gained a thorough knowledge of trans-Atlantic relations and European policies, which I was able to directly apply at my work. The TAM environment also nurtured other, “non-technical” skills, such as critical thinking, analytical skills, working with vast literature resources. As a non-native speaker, I perfected both my English and French, in which I now work daily. Finally, I made many meaningful connections with my fellow classmates or, as we like to call it, the TAMily, and I am glad our paths continue to cross also professionally.
What is the professional achievement or project of which you are most proud?
During the 2016 Slovak presidency of the Council of the EU I worked as a diplomat in the environment unit on the accelerated ratification of the United Nations’ Paris Agreement on climate change. According to the rules, following its adoption in Paris in 2015, the Agreement would officially enter into force if at least 55 countries accounting in total for at least 55 % of the total global emissions ratified it. The situation became dramatic when, in September 2016, both US and China, the world’s two largest emitters, ratified the Agreement. There was therefore a real possibility that the agreement would enter into force without the EU as a party to it. While it was only a procedural issue, it would have been a diplomatic embarrassment since the EU was the driving force behind the Paris Agreement and since it was even signed on EU soil, in France. Our team liaised with all member states and the EU institutions to organize an extraordinary Environment Council which successfully approved a resolution of accelerated ratification on behalf of the EU, and the Paris Agreement entered into force a month later.
What advice would you give to students studying TAM now?
Enjoy every moment of it because it passes too quickly. A Master’s program can be stressful, and one can lose sight of the big picture – forming a tunnel vision when you only focus on the approaching deadlines and assignments. My advice would be to take advantage of everything that the university environment has to offer – engage, explore, and be active. And don’t worry too much about the future. Looking back, I feel almost jealous of the freshly-graduated-me and how open the world of possibilities was at that moment. Seize it!
Based on your observations throughout the course of your career, how do you see the industry evolving for the next 5-10 years?
Working in the political environment, I see the evolving need for authenticity and real connection. Citizens want the politicians representing them to be genuine and understand their problems. Polished speeches in sterile studios don’t have the same impact as getting out there. We need to reach out to bring the people with us. And this is especially true for climate policy. People don’t understand if we talk about abstract targets far into the future. We need to give them real examples, show their individual impacts, and enable them to be part of the change. This next decade will be crucial if we want to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Under the guidance of its grads, TAM plans to offer a course based on US-EU comparative climate-change and environmental policy next fall and possibly launch a new track focused on this topic in 2022.
What in your mind would be essential for a new track of TAM to include? What would be essential reading on this topic?
Despite the unprecedented access to information, misinformation is one of the biggest problems of our modern era. That is why I think that any course on climate policy has to start by presenting the scientific facts on global warming. The Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and, the forthcoming sixth report due in 2021 and 2022, are essential reading before any debates on effective policy can take place.
If a full new TAM track on climate and environment policy were to be launched, it could explore other important international environmental issues apart from climate change – biodiversity protection, waste management, air quality, regulation of chemicals, sustainable development and many others. The track could also go deeper into the theoretical background as well as policy and legal implications of the different principles of environmental policy – the concept of risk, the “polluter pays,” the prevention and the precautionary principles. For the EU policy, in my view, the essential readings would include Ludwig Kramer’s EC Environmental Law and Nicolas de Sadeleer’s Environmental Principles.
What ideas come to mind/ what could you contribute to a TAM track focused on environmental policy?
Currently, the EU is in the midst of overhauling its environment and climate policy under the umbrella of the European Green Deal. By the time the new TAM track is set up, I would like to assess the success of this roll-out and compare it to the developments in the US, taking into account the results of the upcoming presidential elections.
We also cannot underestimate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the global economy and how the recovery will affect the environment and the climate. This interplay is interesting from both the political as well as the environmental point of view and should lead to engaging discussions for the students in the future track.
https://www.facebook.com/epp.eu/videos/1103507820025253/?v=1103507820025253
Jan Ahlen ’09
Jan Ahlen is Director of Energy Solutions at NRECA in Washington, DC where he has worked for the past six years. Prior to his work at NRECA, he worked as a government relations representative for the National Farmers Union. He attended UNC Chapel-Hill and Sciences-Po in Paris, graduating from the TAM program in 2009.
Can you describe how the TAM program offered you an avenue to explore your occupational interests?
TAM provided multiple avenues for me to explore career opportunities.
Beyond the relevant coursework, the most important influence was the opportunity I had to network with people in various fields. I got my start in the Washington, DC government relations industry thanks to the TAM alumni network.
What is the professional achievement or project that you’re most proud of?
My first job as a DC lobbyist was working for an agriculture organization that strongly supports renewable energy. As part of the 2014 Farm Bill, I successfully lobbied for mandatory Congressional funding that would incentivize American farmers to install renewable energy systems like wind turbines and solar panels.
What advice would you give to students studying TAM now?
Focus on relationships. The relationships you make with your classmates and with people you meet through the program will enrich your life personally and professionally. It’s a big world, but many industries (such as energy, lobbying, policy, etc) are remarkably small and tight-knit communities. Your network is one of your most important assets.
Based on your observations throughout the course of your career, how do you see the industry evolving for the next 5-10 years?
The energy industry is in the midst of a massive transformation and will continue that transformation over the next 5-10 years. The energy industry will continue to decarbonize, with less reliance on coal power generation and more emphasis on renewable energy, particularly wind and solar. The energy field (utilities specifically) will become more digitized and the electric grid will start becoming more automated through artificial intelligence and machine learning. While this will lead to more opportunities to decarbonize the grid and bring down costs, cyber security will become more and more of a concern.
Kevin Chandler ’09
Kevin Chandler is the Director of Government and Regulatory Affairs at Apex Clean Energy, having worked for the company for five and a half years. Mr. Chandler studied at UNC Chapel-Hill, Charles University in the Czech Republic, and the University of Bath in the UK.
Can you describe how the TAM program offered you an avenue to explore your occupational interests?
The flexibility of TAM gave me the opportunity to explore new subjects. Always interested in environmental issues, I began focusing on energy and climate policy during my time in Prague and continued this research in Bath. My professors in both Chapel Hill and Europe encouraged this research.
What is the professional achievement or project that you’re most proud of?
I was part of the team that secured the governmental approvals for Virginia’s first onshore wind farm. In Europe, wind farms are ubiquitous, but in the United States, they’re largely confined to the Midwest and Texas. By using new technology and better project design to expand wind energy’s footprint to new regions, we can accelerate the clean energy economy.
What advice would you give to students studying TAM now?
Spend as much time as possible researching career paths and use the TAM network whenever possible. The research, analytical, and writing skills developed by TAM open up an incredible variety of opportunities, and TAM alumni are almost always willing to help current students explore career possibilities.
Based on your observations throughout the course of your career, how do you see the industry evolving for the next 5-10 years?
As the effects of climate change grow more pronounced, governments everywhere will accelerate their climate commitments. European countries are already leaders in setting climate targets. In the United States, many of the largest state economies, led by California, have aggressive climate goals. Biden’s presidential victory could lead to a national goal, and if President Biden recommits the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement, international climate policy will receive a needed boost.
For my industry, renewable energy development, that means more opportunities for wind, solar, and battery storage. Already, cost competitiveness and consumer demand are leading to an unprecedented build-out of clean energy. Demand will grow exponentially as we proceed to full decarbonization.
Expanded climate commitments will drive innovation in other areas like electric vehicles, renewable hydrogen, sustainable agriculture, and decarbonizing the built environment. All of these changes combined could reshape huge swathes of the global economy over the next decade.
Under the guidance of its grads, TAM plans to offer a course based on US-EU comparative climate-change and environmental policy next fall and possibly launch a new track focused on this topic in 2022.
What in your mind would be essential for a new track of TAM to include? What would be essential reading on this topic?
This list could get really long, but I’ll focus on areas that come to mind right now.
● The politics of energy and climate policy, how they affect state and national policy, and their contribution to global climate negotiations.
● Regulatory policy. Climate policy goals are meaningless without an implementation strategy. Understanding how regulation helps or hinders decarbonization would be an important track component. This could include state and local regulation, national or EU regulation, or future international frameworks. I’m not sure about academic research, but the Regulatory Assistance Project has led to some very interesting work in both the U.S. and Europe: https://www.raponline.org/
● Environmental justice. Environmental justice concerns underpin every aspect of decarbonization. This means thinking about how sustainability and climate policy can correct past wrongs (such as fossil fuels impacting low-income communities) and how to avoid creating new inequities. This is an incredibly important issue in both the EU and the US.
● How clean energy is reshaping global geopolitics.
What ideas come to mind/ what could you contribute to a TAM track focused on environmental policy?
I would be happy to provide a perspective on clean energy investment and policy/political trends, and I could also speak to public perceptions of clean energy. Additionally, between my environmental NGO and clean energy experience, I have worked extensively on environmental justice issues.
Allison Johnson ’14
Allison Johnson is a Program Analyst in the Water Power Technologies Office for the US Department of Energy, a position she has held for five years. She graduated from the TAM program in 2014 with an MA in Political Science and Government. Allison also attended the Charles University in Prague and Università degli Studi di Siena.
Can you describe how the TAM program offered you an avenue to explore your occupational interests?
TAM opened the doors for a number of important experiences, but what’s really front of mind now is how the program improved my ability to comprehend complex political and market structures. This skill has become so important to my career at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Through TAM, I had the opportunity to study how different values, historical factors, economic structures, and systems of government across Europe played out at the EU level. Almost any policy issue within the EU reveals diverse positions and sometimes even competing interests among members, and the impacts of any policy change are usually not felt equally by all. In short, the EU is complicated.
My TAM experience improved my own systems thinking, which is often defined as a holistic approach to analysis that stresses the interrelation of different parts and how they may affect each other or the whole. I believe this way of thinking is required for almost anyone working in government or in energy policy, markets, or research. U.S. and Canadian power systems are interconnected technologically and any shift in U.S. energy policy—whether related to technology incentives, environmental regulations, or market rules—can have far-reaching impacts across the industry. The U.S. energy sector is a complicated, interdisciplinary field. And when you scale your thinking about what’s happening within the U.S. to what’s happening in many countries, and add the need to collaborate internationally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring energy security… Well, the dynamics become even more interesting and complex.
What is the professional achievement or project of which you are most proud?
Last year, I led the planning and execution of a multiyear review of my office’s R&D programs. We brought together over 300 leading researchers and industry members and gathered feedback critical to the execution strategy of our $148M annual budget. DOE’s R&D programs are mandated to conduct a comprehensive review every few years where subject matter experts evaluate our portfolio and assess how well our research aligns with industry needs. This was a big undertaking for me as the project manager, and I had to manage tasks with almost all of our staff, most of our funding recipients, and our 24 expert reviewers. We made even more work for ourselves because we decided to organize the review like a conference to achieve the review requirements while also bringing together key thought leaders and organizing keynotes, panels, and networking sessions. The review required more than a year of planning and then another six months to compile and release our public report. I am still proud of myself and my team as this is the biggest event our office has ever organized, and we all considered it to be the best review we’ve ever had.
What advice would you give to students studying TAM now?
I’d encourage students to remember that TAM offers opportunities for you to learn just as much—if not more—outside of the classroom as in the classroom. That’s not to say you shouldn’t work hard and take the curriculum seriously, but you should also take advantage of the opportunities you have to learn from the people you meet along the way and just explore. I don’t know that I’ve ever grown so much so quickly than in my two years of TAM, and that’s because of the unique educational experience and adventures TAM offers.
Based on your observations throughout the course of your career, how do you see the industry evolving for the next 5-10 years?
I strongly believe—and I truly hope—that our power sector will decarbonize dramatically over the next decade and we will also reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in other sectors. In the U.S., we already significantly reduced our reliance on fossil fuels over the last decade thanks in part to the declining costs of renewable energy technologies. And while many would argue the federal government has not done enough in terms of incentivizing clean energy adoption and coordinating internationally to curb emissions, state and local governments are stepping up. State and local leaders often see the transition to a cleaner power sector as not only good for the environment, but also for the local economy and the health of their communities. And this is happening in the transportation sector too; for example, municipalities are starting to electrify their buses to reduce emissions in dense, already polluted urban environments, and states are expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure throughout much of the country.
Under the guidance of its grads, TAM plans to offer a course based on US-EU comparative climate-change and environmental policy next fall and possibly launch a new track focused on this topic in 2022.
What in your mind would be essential for a new track of TAM to include? What would be essential reading on this topic?
Studying international climate negotiations through the Conference of the Parties (COP) framework is a must. It’s also important that students are given a basic understanding of the different sources of emissions; for example, those who are new to the topic likely think about pollution from the power and transportation sectors but might be surprised to learn how much of global carbon emissions are due to agriculture or land use. And I think it’s important to teach about the power sector at a system level, with essential reading or lecture topics to include an overview of how electricity grids work and how/why they are evolving, various energy technologies and their impacts to the environment or the grid, and the different public vs private nature of countries’ energy sectors.
What ideas come to mind/ what could you contribute to a TAM track focused on environmental policy?
I’d be happy to share my understanding of clean energy technologies and their trade-offs, how electricity grids work and how/why they are evolving, the history of the U.S. electricity sector, and an overview of federal government clean energy R&D. I could also provide an overview of the key policy levers we have domestically to increase the development and adoption of clean energy. There’s actually this long standing debate in energy policy—even within the clean energy community—about the importance of government-funded research versus subsidies. Some argue it’s more appropriate and within the government’s role to fund R&D to drive down the costs of energy technologies and allow them to compete on their own, while others advocate for subsidies to incentivize the development and use of particular energy sources. The answer, in my opinion, is we desperately need both to limit the observed, rapid increase in global warming.