Jeanne Currie and I spent the first week of May in beautiful Boise at a series of excellent conferences. The first half of the week was dedicated to the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s Efficiency Exchange (EFX), which gathered over 500 regional and national attendees from public and private utilities, consulting and research firms, government and nonprofits together to help the region achieve its energy efficiency goals.

Jeanne and our colleague, Poppy Storm of 2050 Institute, shared the SCALE 2030 Roadmap at a lunch roundtable and Poppy spoke on a panel designed to help small building owners scale energy upgrades in the Northwest. EFX is always a terrific conference, and this year was no exception.

We then spent the second half of the week at the Northwest Energy Coalition’s Northwest Transmission Summit, which brought together 130 clean energy advocates, utility representatives, electricity grid experts, and transmission developers from all four Northwest states to learn about and debate the region’s challenges with developing the transmission needed to meet soaring electricity demand.

All panels were excellent and explored the history of regional transmission; opportunities to expand the transmission system; community and environmental impacts and siting; regional planning and coordination; costs and benefits determination and allocation; and workforce, construction, and supply chain challenges. All slides are available here and you can read NWEC Communications Manager Sara Burleson’s summary of the event.

Jeanne and I are working on a Washington transmission brief that we will release sometime this summer, so this summit was hugely beneficial – not only the rich content, but also the opportunity to connect with so many colleagues engaged in this critically important arena.

On the CETI front, the ED Search process to replace me is going extremely well with a strong candidate pool. We anticipate announcing CETI’s new leader sometime this summer. In other CETI Team news, we are pleased to welcome Aiko Chang who will intern with us for six weeks starting today! See below for more details about Aiko.

Until next month,
Eileen V. Quigley
Executive Director

SCALE 2030: Clean Buildings Roadmap for Washington

Our SCALE 2030 project hit an exciting milestone this month with the launch of the SCALE 2030: Clean Buildings Roadmap for Washington (the Roadmap), which lives on a brand-new SCALE 2030 website. Research Analyst Jeanne Currie has written a helpful blog that highlights five key Roadmap recommendations.

The Roadmap focuses on structural changes and strategic investments that the state can make in the next five years to create the regulatory and market conditions needed to deliver a clean buildings transition in Washington state. The website also features information about the SCALE 2030 project and the Ecosystem Assessment and Transition Framework papers we published in May 2025.

Join us for a webinar on June 2 at 2pm PT during which Jeanne and 2050 Institute Founder Poppy Storm will walk through the levers and actions that the Roadmap identifies as critical to scaling building decarbonization in Washington.

This webinar is for policymakers, advocates, regulators, utilities, program managers, service providers, building owners and tenants, and anyone interested in how Washington can use clean buildings to save energy and money, respond to grid stress, ensure healthy indoor environments for Washingtonians, and advance the state's economy.

2025 Impact Report

CETI released our 2025 Impact Report at the beginning of May. The report details last year’s programmatic work, from the Oregon Energy Strategy to supporting Washington’s Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP), diving deep into building decarbonization, examining community-scale solar, and so much more. We had such a productive year. We hope you enjoy perusing the report to be reminded of all that we accomplished in 2025.

CETI Welcomes Aiko!

We are excited to welcome Aiko Chang to the CETI Team as a Summer Research Intern. Aiko is a Wellesley College student double majoring in Geoscience and Philosophy with an interest in the intersections between geo/environmental science, law, and policy. They will be working with CETI Research Fellow and Wellesley College Assistant Professor Mariah Caballero on a project with CETI this summer examining data centers in the Northwest and how insights from local and state stakeholders could inform broader conversations about rural energy justice in the United States.

Demystifying Washington's CCAP

Washington released its Comprehensive Climate Action Plan (CCAP) in April. This nearly 400-page document represents nearly two years of effort and was developed by the Washington State Departments of Commerce and Ecology, with extensive input from Tribes, communities, workers, businesses, subject matter experts and others. This month, Eileen offers a high-level overview of the plan.

Are You Following the 9th Northwest Power Plan Development?

If not, you may want to join our friends over at the Northwest Energy Coalition’s upcoming webinar, “What you need to know about the 9th Northwest Regional Power Plan” on Tuesday, June 9 from 10:00-11:30am PT. NW Energy Coalition Senior Policy Associate Fred Heutte and Regional and State Policy Director Zach Baker will be presenting on why this plan is so important and you can get involved in shaping its development. You can register here.

In Case You Missed It

• The Pew Charitable Trusts and Gridworks released a new resource this month: a Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Policy Playbook. The Playbook offers state lawmakers and regulators practical strategies to expand DERs and improve energy affordability and grid reliability. The Playbook’s recommendations encourage lawmakers to explore strategies to accomplish three goals:
  • Integrate DERs into utility planning and procurement
  • Reduce barriers to DER permitting and grid access
  • Strengthen community resilience with DER solutions
• The Washington Department of Ecology released a report analyzing the state’s Clean Fuels Standard. The findings showed the policy had a greater-than-expected impact on emissions reductions, exceeding its reduction target threefold with a three-million-ton reduction in carbon emissions. The policy also generated over $67 million to invest in decarbonizing transportation fuels and projects that reduce emissions and provide community services.

Worth a Listen or a Read  

• By far the most interesting podcast this month was the very long (just over four hours), extremely informative The Grid: The Largest Machine Ever Built produced by our friends Ben Shwab Eidelson and Anay Shah at The Stepchange Show. Their lively, tour-de-force narrative walks you through the dawn of electricity in the United States from the 1700s-1800s up to our present-day affordability crisis. We highly recommend taking the time to listen. Each section is time-stamped on the site so you can listen in chunks or straight through as one of us did. 😉
• Heatmap published a provocative piece, Is This the End of the Utility As We Know It?, keying off of two developments: Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro’s letter telling the state’s utilities that “the 20th century utility model is broken” and Berkshire Hathway’s new chief executive Greg Abel’s pronouncement at the company’s annual meeting that utilities may be seeing the end of the regulatory compact.
• Dave Roberts of Volts dropped two interesting pods this month. The first was thought-provoking, if a bit wonky, The case for using prices rather than VPPs to coordinate distributed energy. Roberts talks to Bruce Nordman, who spent nearly four decades as a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory studying network technology and energy systems.
• Roberts’ second pod of note was a return appearance by Sparkfund CEO Pier LaFarge in Sooner than you think, electricity is going to be cheap, abundant, and boring in which they discussed Minnesota’s landmark decision to let Xcel Energy deploy batteries directly into local distribution networks. If you want to listen to LaFarge on his first Volts interview last 2024, we recommend Should we put utilities in charge of distributed energy?.
• Spokane Public Radio’s Inland Journal published a long piece on the Novara Energy Alliance that aims to research and solve energy supply issues and minimize impacts on existing water to develop affordable, resilient energy solutions and create economic development in Spokane. At timestamp 21:55, the segment talks about Washington Builds, the state’s green bank which is able to leverage public sector dollars to increase private funding for clean energy projects.
• With his customary insight, former Los Angeles Times climate reporter Sammy Roth has an interesting take on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, which has been all the rage in some circles. Roth has written extensively about the need to balance building clean energy projects with protecting wildlife habitat, so his take is informed.

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