The Transformer: How energy modeler Jesse Jenkins helped Congress get serious about the power grid

IN THE PAST TWO YEARS, the U.S. Congress has provided hundreds of billions of dollars to speed the deployment of clean-energy technologies. These investments are one reason why the International Energy Agency (IEA) in September insisted that there's still hope to hold global temperature rise to 1.5 °C in this century. Thousands of Washington insiders and climate activists have had a hand in these legislative breakthroughs. Among the most articulate and almost certainly the wonkiest is Jesse Jenkins, a professor of engineering at Princeton University, where he heads the ZERO Lab-the Zero-carbon Energy systems Research and Optimization Laboratory, that is. In 2021 and 2022, during the high-stakes negotiations over what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, the ZERO Lab and the San Francisco-based consultancy Evolved Energy Research operated a climate-modeling war room that provided rapid-fire analyses of the likely effects of shifting investments among a smorgasbord of clean-energy technologies. As legislation worked its way through Congress, Jenkins's team provided elected officials, staffers, and stakeholders with a running tally of the possible trade-offs and payoffs in emissions, jobs, and economic growth. Jenkins has also helped push Congress to think more seriously about the power grid, releasing a report last year that showed that much of the 43 percent emissions reduction expected by 2030 would be squandered if the United States doesn't double the pace of transmission upgrades.