CleanCapital's Experts Only Podcast: How is the Department of Defense Approaching Clean Energy?

May 19, 2021

“All of the avenues open to transformational investment in the military today, I think are too slow to meet the size and scale and speed needed to really confront climate change and our energy resilience challenges.”
— Michael Wu, Co-Founder and Principal, Converge Strategies on Experts Only

Experts Only Podcast #90: How is the Department of Defense is Approaching Clean Energy with Michael Wu

Host Jon Powers interviewed Michael Wu, Co-Founder, and Principal of Converge Strategies, get into the latest developments on the intersection of national security and clean energy. Dive deeper into the topics that Mike and Jon discussed below the Veterans Energy Project and the launch event for the The Resilient Infrastructure + Secure Energy (RISE) Consortium.

Veterans Energy Project @vetenergyproj | https://vetsenergyproject.org/

The Resilient Infrastructure + Secure Energy (RISE) Consortium

Mission: To address the energy security and climate crises by reimagining how we use, generate, transport, and store energy and how we build efficient, modern, resilient infrastructure.

The RISE Consortium will work with innovators and experts to rapidly deploy technologies for installation and operational energy, integrate energy and climate resilience into performance contracting and develop new business models to ensure those solutions are scalable.

The RISE Consortium will also serve as an industry forum to engage with new federal energy and resilience policies, standards, and programs.

Who Should Join RISE: The RISE Consortium is a national consortium whose members include manufacturers, technology startups, energy services companies, utilities, academic institutions, financiers, and legal, consulting, and engineering firms who wish to work with the federal government to accelerate energy and infrastructure modernization.

Why Join RISE: The Consortium structure allows you to collaborate directly more effectively with the federal government.

DoD leadership can directly engage with the RISE consortium to articulate the challenges and problems that they’re facing from an energy and climate standpoint.

Industry can provide with a unified voice what the current state of technologies are, what kinds of solutions are available.

Click to Register Virtual Event: The Future of Resilient Infrastructure and Secure Energy (RISE)

Join the Resilient Infrastructure + Secure Energy (RISE) Consortium on 15 June from 1:00 PM ET – 3:00 PM ET for a virtual event on addressing energy security and the climate crises.

The Future: Join us to unpack how industry and the federal government can work together to reimagine:

  • How we use, generate, transport, and store energy
  • How we build efficient, modern, resilient infrastructure
  • How we scale innovative technologies to accelerate energy security and infrastructure modernization

About Michael Wu

Michael has strong working relationships within the U.S. military, and a deep expertise related to how defense energy business is transacted. Michael previously served as a senior advisor on energy resilience and clean energy in the U.S. Air Force. In that role, he founded the Resilient Energy Demonstration Initiative (REDI), and helped create the Air Force Office of Energy Assurance. Previously, Michael founded the Defense Energy Program at the Truman National Security Project, which developed and advocated for policy supportive of the military’s clean energy and energy resilience initiatives. Michael is a graduate of St. John’s College and Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and serves as an officer in the Judge Advocate General Corps of the United States Army Reserves. He is a Fellow with the Resource Security Program at New America.

Media Contact

Adair Douglas

adouglas@convergestrategies.com

315.263.2382

“We can reduce our carbon footprint, which again is breathtakingly large, just within the military. We can strengthen the resilience of the infrastructure on our bases, and we can strengthen military capabilities by making investments in clean energy, renewable energy, energy storage, in order to ensure that our operators have what they need when they need it.”
— Michael Wu, Co-Founder and Principal, Converge Strategies on Experts Only

“We created the Resilient Infrastructure and Secure Energy (RISE) Consortium because we wanted to organize and structure, the energy and climate innovation ecosystem in a way that the Department of Defense can access so that you can collaborate directly more effectively.”
— Michael Wu, Co-Founder and Principal, Converge Strategies on Experts Only