A startup founder helping tribal communities establish microgrids. A Nigerian immigrant helping low-income Texas residents get solar power. A pageant queen building miniaturized nuclear reactors. An engineer bringing a hackathon approach to the climate crisis.
What ties these people together is the energy of youth and a sense of urgency in finding solutions to address the problems arising from climate change. In the face of rising energy prices and the keenly felt impacts of the climate crisis — including unpredictable and extreme weather that can affect everything from our health to our homes — they’re shaping their careers around pursuing these solutions.
Bobuchi Ken-Opurum, director of Research at TEPRI.
Zooey Liao/CNET/Photo courtesy of Urban Institute
“We were used to seeing smog and bad air quality — the water is bad,” she says. “There’s so much pollution that was ingrained in our lives.” Her father, a real estate developer and former oil company consultant turned community advocate, purchased a set of encyclopedias. Ken-Opurum used them to immerse herself in the science of climate change.
This goes some way to explain how, rather than finding herself in the employ of an oil giant, she instead ended up over 6,500 miles away from home in Austin, Texas, as director of research at the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute. Here, the 29-year-old researches how energy poverty affects the state’s most economically disadvantaged communities. She also runs pilot programs that can bring people the clean, reliable and affordable energy they so badly need.
She’s just completed work on a statewide report looking at the experiences of people living in low-income communities across Texas, the second most populous state in the US, and how they struggle to afford energy. What she discovered was that 30% of respondents cut back on food to be able to pay for the energy they needed to keep their medical equipment running or heat their homes. In spite of these difficulties, many people — almost 50% — said they’d be willing to pay more than they do now for clean energy. “While affordability is a priority … people are very interested in clean energy as well,” Ken-Opurum says.
Through this research, she’s exploring solutions to problems. That means looking at solar energy and batteries to help plug the reliability gaps and build neighborhood resilience hubs to prevent people from having to flee the state when they’re hit with power outages or heat waves, for example.
One pilot project funded by an Inflation Reduction Act grant is just getting started in the city of Brownsville, Texas, in partnership with community housing development nonprofit Come Dream Come Build. It involves installing solar panels on a manufacturing plant where affordable, modular, energy-efficient homes are made. The homes, too, are designed to accommodate and make use of solar panels if their owner wants them, but the aim is for the plant to demonstrate and educate people on the benefits of solar, building trust before they buy in.
Grace Stanke, nuclear engineer.
Zooey Liao/CNET
At 21, Stanke is working as a nuclear engineer and clean energy advocate at Constellation, which operates the biggest fleet of nuclear plants in the US. It’s a far cry from the world of tiaras and sashes, but Stanke feels just as at home visiting a nuclear power plant as she does playing her violin on stage.
For a first job out of college, a nuclear engineering role sounds daunting, but Stanke is prepared. She’ll be doing core design work on pressurized reactors, putting into use the expertise that her faculty adviser Paul Wilson says she developed in safety and design during her studies. She also worked with Constellation during her time as a student, so she’s ready and raring to go.
Stanke was determined to pursue a career in engineering after being inspired by her father, a civil engineer. But her decision to specialize in nuclear engineering was the complete opposite — an act of teenage defiance.
After touring colleges, she raised the possibility of majoring in nuclear engineering. “My dad looks at 16-year-old me and he’s like, ‘Grace, don’t go into nuclear, there’s no future there,'” she says. “Now, to a 16-year-old teenage girl that means go and do exactly what your dad just told you not to do.”
What started out as a rebellion quickly became a passion for Stanke, as she learned more about the role of nuclear power in different aspects of life. It’s nuclear medicine that means her father, as a two-time cancer survivor, is still alive, she says. Plus, there are the environmental benefits of using nuclear energy to power the country amid the transition away from fossil fuels. “It’s an emissions-free form of energy, which as a Gen Z-er… is really important to me,” she says.
Throughout her life, Stanke has visited Glacier National Park three separate times and was deeply saddened by the degradation of the glaciers she witnessed across those different trips. It provided a “come-to-Jesus moment” about the fast-moving progress of the climate crisis, she says.
Stanke is also a firm believer in the potential for nuclear power to provide energy that is reliable and affordable not only in the US, but around the world. She’s been working on a project based in Ghana, where there is interest in building small modular reactors that could provide energy and jobs. “It comes down to making sure that we can transport this energy to the areas that need it, and to continue to build it in safe environments,” she says.
Her senior project, which she cites as her proudest technical achievement so far, was focused on these small modular reactors, which she describes as a “new-hype technology.” The miniaturized nuclear reactors, about the size of three-story house, can be built in a factory and then shipped to a site, which reduces construction costs immensely, she explains. She and her team — all women — combined this with a newer form of enriched uranium known as HALEU fuel to create a more efficient, cost-effective reactor.
Stanke has plenty of experience countering the arguments against nuclear, which include the expense, safety concerns and a potential increase in nuclear waste. But even during the short period she’s been studying and working with nuclear energy, she says she’s witnessed a shift in understanding and attitudes.
The figures back it up. Research published by Pew in August says that 57% of US adults are now in favor of the government pursuing more nuclear energy projects, up from 43% in 2020.
Marissa Sisk, founder of Sunstone Energy.
Zooey Liao/CNET
“The only connections I have to the land and the people are just secondhand from what my mother taught me, but even then she’s a bit separated,” Sisk says.
It was Sisk’s father, who died in 2010 following a battle with cancer, who inspired her journey into environmental circles. During his illness, he poured his energy into fundraising for the American Cancer Society. “At the end of the day, I felt like he saved the world, and I wanted to save the world,” Sisk says.
For someone coming from a media studies background as an undergrad, environmental science wasn’t an immediate natural fit for Sisk and neither was Santa Barbara, which was “very wealthy and predominantly white” — not at all like the communities in Oregon and San Diego she grew up in. It took a while for her to click with her master’s, but things fell into place when a fellow student approached her about working on microgrids for tribal communities. Together, they founded Sunstone Energy and got to work.
“I just kind of hit the ground running and we got connected with some pretty powerful people,” Sisk says of the project. She met with the head of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority and had hundreds of conversations with people from tribal communities across the country. “People keep asking me, what does your research look like?” Sisk says. “I’m like, there’s no better way than talking with elders, talking with people, collecting what you need to move forward.”
Solar is an ideal solution for many tribal communities due their geographical positioning and the value placed on the sun according to many traditions, Sisk she. “If you overlay maps of different solar potential, like how much sun the US actually gets, there’s a tremendous overlap between tribes, tribal lands and solar,” she says. Microgrids, which are solar plus a battery to provide storage for backup, are even better, as they also solve the reliability problem.
Sanjana Paul, executive director of Earth Hacks.
Zooey Liao/CNET/Photo courtesy of NASA Langley Research Center
Through it all, she felt that STEM was the right fit for her. “I didn’t face the same gendered pressures that my peers did,” she says. Still, she was wary of engineering as a field — mainly because she didn’t actually know any engineers.
Paul credits a National Geographic article about Rainforest Connection, an organization that uses sensors to monitor illegal logging and poaching, for inspiring her change of heart. She ended up double majoring in electrical engineering and physics.
“I went into an electrical engineering degree saying that I’m going to be the person who builds the infrastructure for climate science, because I think this climate change thing is … probably the most important issue we’ve ever faced,” she says.
This passion for solving the most critical problems in the most practical of ways is perhaps the unifying theme of Paul’s career so far. While she was at engineering school, she fell in love with using sensors and lasers for monitoring air quality, but hated how divorced the “ivory tower” research she was doing felt from the real world.
During a summer internship with Conservation X Labs, which works on applying technology to prevent species extinction, she came up with the idea for Earth Hacks, an organization she cofounded and still runs to this day. As an engineering student she’d participated in hackathons as a way to learn new skills and hang out with friends. But she says she became depressed with how heavily corporate they often felt. “I was like, I thought that this was supposed to be open source and cool — why is Lockheed Martin here?”
Instead of focusing on obtuse computer science problems, she saw an opportunity to harness the hackathon model as a form of climate action. What began with a single hackathon at the Museum of Virginia — “a night at the museum,” as Paul calls it — blossomed into a movement. Earth Hacks has now worked with over 4,000 students from across the globe who have participated in more than 60 hackathons.
Throughout this time, students have tackled problems from conservation to urban heat islands to the energy transition. While some interesting spinout projects have emerged from the program, Paul defines the success of Earth Hacks in her own terms.
It’s not about launching startups, but rather “transformative environmental education [and] a fundamental shift in how students see themselves in relation to working on climate issues. She calls it “an opportunity multiplier.”
“We want computer science students who did not care about anything to come to a hackathon and suddenly have a huge interest in air quality because the sky turned red where they lived one day,” she says.
After graduating, Paul went on to apply her engineering skills at NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center. She monitored noise in the environmental data gathered by the Calypso satellite for climate-related infrastructure planning. At first, she says, it was her “dream job.” But over time, while documenting one large-scale tragedy after another — including the 2020 Australian bushfires and Hurricane Dorian, which struck the Bahamas and the US South Atlantic coast in 2019 — a sense of powerlessness set in.
“I just kind of started to feel like I was passively monitoring just mass death, which sounds very bleak,” Paul says. She wanted to come back down to Earth, so she left NASA to pursue her master’s at MIT where she hoped to work on more localized environmental sensing.
In doing so, she came face to face with the reality that we already have a clear understanding of what was causing the problems she was monitoring (the oil and gas industry) and the solution (the transition to renewables).
It prompted a reckoning with where she should be focusing her efforts. She realized, she says, “I have to have my own energy transition, and have to switch from environmental sensing into energy.”
As an engineer, Paul is trained in root cause analysis, and when she examined what was broken in the circuit of tackling the climate crisis, it wasn’t due to a lack of technological solutions. Heat pumps, solar panels and wind turbines already exist. The question was, why weren’t they being deployed?
She recognized that there was a process problem within the energy transition, and found a supervisor at MIT, Larry Susskind, who was already working on solving it. Some might be intimidated by making the switch from engineering into applied social sciences, but not Paul. Susskind sees her as “a wonderful example of homeschooling,” able to independently consume information from many different sources to learn about a new subject from scratch.
Susskind’s work has focused on identifying the reasons that in spite of successful funding and regulatory approval, clean energy projects don’t end up being built. The most common answer is conflict with local communities, which developers consistently fail to consult and involve in the planning process. It’s this knotty issue that Paul is working to help him solve.
It’s not that communities are always opposed to clean energy, or even having projects built in their backyards, she says. It’s usually a lack of care, recognition and respect for local ecosystems, property prices or other factors that local people care about. “Because of this intense focus on techno-solutionism, as opposed to the more difficult, more emotionally driven social problems, they don’t get the attention that they need,” Paul says.
Her work on Susskind’s team involves spinning up renewable energy clinics that can be used for resolving these conflicts so that more clean energy projects get the final go-ahead. She’s also been instrumental in building a course to teach students about renewable energy conflict, as well as creating a MOOC — a massive open online course that anyone in the world can access for free.
She’s now working on establishing mechanisms such as community benefit agreements that are crucial in making the clean energy transition a reality — more crucial, she argues, than making a solar panel 2% more efficient.
Paul, who as well as running Earth Hacks, studying for her master’s and working on Susskind’s team, is also involved in negotiating a green new deal for Cambridge and efforts to decarbonize the MIT campus, is clearly driven by a sense of urgency. “We needed to be doing this before I was born,” she says. “This never should have happened.”
Paul’s work is also suffused with dedication to environmental justice. She takes every opportunity to talk about climate, including to her tattoo artist as she adds to her collection of climate-related tattoos. At the same time as she sees a need to build a new energy system, she recognizes that there is a chance to rebuild the social fabric of the US. “Collective solutions are kind of the way to go,” she says.
Opportunity knocks
There’s something about being a woman in the male-dominated energy and engineering industries that can bond young women coming into this space not just to their peers, but to those who came before them.
Paul cites the environmental justice campaigner Sharon Lavigne as a major inspiration. “The intergenerational aspect of it is so powerful, and I’m really grateful for people who have been in the space for a long time,” she says.
The sense of being inspired flows both ways, with older generations excited to see what the fresh crop of young women bringing ideas and passion into this space can do to shake things up. The need for their talents is more crucial than it’s ever been. Lippert points to LinkedIn’s 2023 Global Green skills report that shows we need two times as many people working in the climate space as we do today. “Any job can be a climate job,” she says.
The one thing Baker would like young people entering the energy industry to prioritize is centering communities. “At the DOE, we believe that not only are those closest to the problem also closest to the solution, but they have more investment in finding the solution,” she says.
To achieve the just and equitable transition to clean energy that serves the entirety of the population, the Biden administration wants the industry to be reflective of US demographics — including young women, but also youth who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. “We want to ensure that we build a diverse technology workforce and develop the next generation of scientists,” Baker says.
She sees historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions as critical to developing the talent pipeline that will increase diversity. There are many newly available opportunities in this space up for grabs, including $24.7 million in financial assistance grants for seven minority-serving institutions.
When the American Climate Corps opens for applications later this month, thousands more young people across the US will have the chance to join the likes of Sisk, Paul, Stanke and Ken-Opurum and their peers in powering the country’s transition to clean and renewable energy sources.
“We need young people to carry the torch in the energy workforce,” Baker says. With so much at stake in terms of rapid climate breakdown, it’s a big opportunity to pursue meaning, purpose and job security in a world where little is certain and everything’s to play for.
