The energy transition from multiple perspectives with April Salas
April has blazed a successful career in the private sector, public sector, academia, and with international organizations - all focused on the energy transition.
“I think one of the most important things that's helped shape my career is a mix between technical expertise and knowing how to work in an office and communicate your work and your thoughts. I think we always lose sight of those practical skills, and those are the ones that actually sustain you through time, because the technologies come and go, and they ebb and flow.”
April Salas is Chief Operating Officer of the EFI Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank focused on harnessing the power of technology and policy innovation to accelerate the clean energy transition. Before joining EFIF, Salas served as the global director of public policy at Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability team, where she developed and advanced key global policy and legislative initiatives across the company’s global sustainability commitments and led public policy strategy on AI’s role in advancing a low-carbon energy transition. Additionally, Salas served as the inaugural executive director of the Tuck School of Business Revers Center for Energy, Sustainability and Innovation and at Dartmouth College’s Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society, and held senior roles at the U.S. Department of Energy. Salas holds MBAs from Cornell University and Queen’s University; master’s degrees from the American University of Paris and L’Institut Catholique de Paris; and an undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary.
Transition Leads profiles top executives and policymakers — like April Salas — as well entrepreneurs, strategists, scientists, and investors in the energy & decarbonization transitions who share their insights, personal stories and career advice for the new generation of leaders.
Rob Griffen
Today we’re talking with April Salas who has held a range of leadership roles in the private sector, public sector, local government, and federal government with a focus on energy and the energy transition. April, can you give us a brief history of your background and your career path?
April Salas
Thanks for having me. I always struggle with where to start in talking about my career, the beginning or the end, but I think it's sort of the sandwich in the middle that’s the most fun.
I was really curious about energy, sustainability, climate as a young person. One of the more formative experiences was seeing a house that was being ripped down in my neighborhood and the pile of garbage it left, including things like the carpet and old appliances, sitting on a curb. And I looked at my mom and asked, “Where does that go? What happens to all of this junk?” And I felt this sort of injustice around the idea that we would bury it, burn it, or use some other way of making it go away — getting it out of where we were, and making someone else bear the brunt of that choice. And so that really kick-started my curiosity.
I went to the College of William & Mary in Virginia, and I studied environmental science and was interested in marine and ocean health, but I also took my first international relations class which helped me understand how it all came together. And so I focused on international relations pre-law and environmental science.
I started working with very large international non-profits, anything that would help me continue along that path of international exposure, and then I ended up going to Europe to do my first set of master's degrees. I thought I was going to be a lawyer, and in the spirit of talking to people and getting advice, I couldn't find a lawyer that really loved their job! I also found a really creative new program with the American University of Paris and the L’Institut Catholique de Paris — which is now with the Sorbonne, where you could get a double master's degree in international affairs, security and economics, and I could get a French master’s, Research master’s and an American master’s. I focused on energy poverty and rural electrification strategy and policy, in particular in Kenya and South Africa, some of the newest countries and emerging economies at the time.
I stayed in Europe and worked for both the UN in New York and UNESCO in Paris, and one of the transformative experiences working in international development was the realization that at the heart of many conflicts was energy and environment — whether it be access to water or lack of access to water, heat and extreme weather, droughts, too much oil and gas or not enough. I just kept seeing conflict around these natural resources. And that pushed me to transition to the private sector.
I started at a firm that eventually was acquired by S&P Global as a geostrategic analyst working with energy companies and came to understand and appreciate the role of industry in developing economies. People need jobs, and we need companies and other organizations to provide those jobs. I did a lot of work across Europe and in the Middle East and Africa.
That lead to a position at the US Department of Energy, which was standing up a new program on energy delivery and reliability after the Northeast blackout [of 2003]. We did permitting, signing and analysis for large infrastructure projects in the US all the way through from the R&D to the systems and tools to better measure the health of the grid. Given that the US government doesn't own most of the energy infrastructure in the country, we had to figure out ways to build coalitions, to align policy and to work with the private sector, not only when things go wrong, but to incorporate the best technology for the future.
I had the really fortunate opportunity to work with the co-founders of EFI while I was at the Department of Energy — the then Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernie Moniz, and Melanie Kenderdine, Director of an innovative new office called Energy Policy and Systems Analysis (EPSA). They are both phenomenal energy and policy experts, but also have a real vision and understanding of how pragmatic the approach to our energy system needs to be. Under Secretary Moniz’s leadership, DOE led a consortium of 22 federal agencies created by executive order of President Obama, the Quadrennial Energy Review. It was an attempt at our first comprehensive national energy policy. Roughly 20 to 30 of our 60 recommendations were actually implemented into law.
Rob
But then you went into the academic world. Why did you make the change?
April
Working at the federal level can be a lot of grant-making and project management and I wanted something more hands-on. At the end of President Obama’s second term, some of the leaders at Tuck had an idea that the energy and power industry is changing so rapidly that we needed to educate students and the future workforce around these critical topics and issues. Fortuitously, my husband was retiring as a pilot from the Navy and going to medical school at Dartmouth, and the Administration was changing. So I took the role of running the Revers Center for Energy Sustainability and Innovation from its inception.
I also worked on local issues where we lived, starting out as a volunteer and eventually ending up taking the inaugural Chief Sustainability Officer role within the Town of Hanover, New Hampshire [where Tuck and Dartmouth are located]. My role was to help drive their portfolio strategy to obtain 100% renewable power, transportation and building energy by 2030. People always say all implementation is local. And I wanted to know what that meant. And I found out.
Rob
Tell us about those local efforts.
April
New Hampshire is one of the largest legislatures in the in the world, with over 400 members and a real mix of “red” and “blue.” Half of the people want only wind and solar. The other half want the lowest price, most reliable energy. And you've got to figure out a way to chart a path that's somewhere in between. We ended up launching our own [Joint Power Authority] called the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire, and as a co-founding member of that organization and the founding chair, I thought we would launch with six cities and towns. We ended up launching with 13, and now the Coalition is serving over 50. And by bringing in about $100 million in revenue, it's transformative for those communities.
Rob
And then you went to one of the largest corporations in the world that's also a leader in sustainability.
April
I knew I wanted to go back into the private sector, and Microsoft is doing such an incredible job creating, shaping and moving markets in a way that’s advancing sustainability commitments for everybody. And that really drew me, because Microsoft’s commitments aren't just for themselves, it's also for their customers and for the world.
At Microsoft I was Global Director for Public Policy on the environmental sustainability team, and we had a billion-dollar climate Innovation Fund. A lot of the work that we were doing, and I was managing in particular, was focused around our AI and energy work and accelerating the decarbonization goals and commitments on waste and water. I did a lot of Scope 3 supply chain emissions decarbonization work applied to industries such as semiconductors and embodied carbon materials like cement and steel. And that was really, really cool. But I was itching again to be back in the seat and working on implementation again.
Rob
And that lead you to EJM and EFI Foundation.
April
Yes. EFI is doing such incredible things and is led by someone I had worked closely with at DOE [Secretary Moniz]. Our mission is focused around working with government and industry leaders to harness the power of innovation to build secure and accelerate the low carbon energy future. That includes business model, policy, technology, innovation and deployment.
EJM is the complement to that work, a for-profit consulting firm that allows us to work directly with a company to accelerate and push forward a particular solution. So the two firms working together mean that we're able to bring coalitions together, publish things that are for the general public, help influence policy making, and also work on discrete projects that keep us sharp on the nuts and bolts of things that are either prohibiting growth or that we need to put into place to accelerate growth.
Rob
If you were to give advice based on your career path, where do you see the areas of opportunity for people today and in five years in energy and the transition? Is it the convergence of AI and energy? Is it nuclear? Is it hydrogen? What would you be thinking about if you were starting out now in your career?
April
I think one of the most important things that's helped shape my career is a mix between technical expertise and knowing how to work in an office and communicate your work and your thoughts. I think we always lose sight of those practical skills, and those are the ones that actually sustain you through time, because the technologies come and go, and they ebb and flow. That’s the advice I got early on. And now I'm old enough and have at least a few gray hairs that actually confirm that that's true.
I started my career when the US was importing the predominance of our energy resources, and now we're one of the world's largest exporters of many energy resources.
I do think one thing that is critical is being curious, because as we've seen, things change, and it is important to continue to keep learning. AI is a new area that was not receiving as much attention three years ago, and it is the top story now. And today nuclear, carbon capture, advanced geothermal are also being discussed and those used to be the most boring technologies. Geothermal was the most boring technology we could think of. And now it's so exciting. Hydrogen is figuring out its footing, and wind and solar are a growing part of the energy mix. So it really is moving to an “all of the” above energy portfolio, which I think requires people to understand bits of each of those.
James Socas
April, as you noted a lot of people are talking about the growing demand for power coming from AI and the challenge that poses for companies, like Microsoft, that would like to stick to their commitments on decarbonization. How do you see AI specifically impacting the mix of energy technologies? And, to make it an even tougher question, do you see the current political environment changing things?
April
Let me start with the politics and come back to AI. The rest of the world is carrying on the climate and energy transition conversation, and, unfortunately, because the US has been flip-flopping over the last handful of administrations, companies and governments outside the US are trying to figure out how to work around us rather than work with us. That's not healthy for our economy or our global status. And the lack of collaboration and leadership adds costs. Companies like Microsoft are operating in over 190 countries. Having to create bespoke systems to comply with multiple forms of regulation is not good for anyone, particularly consumers, because those expenses now need to be covered.
Right now we're in this moment where Europe is leading the way on regulations, where large corporates are also not wavering on their decarbonization commitments, and where other very big markets like China and Southeast Asia are establishing new energy markets and carbon markets. I think there is a sense those are durable factors that are going to outlast the current political environment within the United States.
Because AI requires so much energy — as does re-shoring manufacturing in the US — we will need amounts of energy that we've never seen before, and that requires putting a lot of energy resources into the mix as I talked about earlier. Given that this is a long term shift with large amounts of capital required, I think it would be better to have more stability in our policies, but the news cycle right now is happening so fast that it makes it very difficult to plan.
James
Let me ask a follow up on that from the perspective of people earlier in their careers choosing to focus on this sector. On the one hand, we seem to be reversing direction on climate topics, and on the other hand the news is filled with reports of storms, heat waves, droughts. When do you think businesses prioritize what's happening in the physical world as much as things like AI or some of the other alluring topics?
April
I think we're already there. I’ve just come back from several conferences — Aspen Climate Ideas, CERAWeek — and a few other big industry gatherings, and it is becoming top of mind. In insurance it’s a very big focus today, and insurance underpins a lot of other decisions. Extreme weather is forcing the issue, not just for personal homes and vehicles but also for business insurance. Companies that are looking to make large investments are struggling to underwrite some of them because of the risks and unpredictability of extreme weather.
Climate is now an unavoidable topic in the business community. It’s part of business risk analysis, investment decisions, etc., whether we want to talk about that from a political lens or not, it's already happening.
I think for young people today, figuring out climate, risk, insurance, finance-ability, and aligning capital behind solutions are really, really important opportunities. There is a lot that can be done with analytics; we have so much more data now as a result of digitization, and we now have AI tools to help us process that data. I think students or young professionals should be sharpening their skill sets and knowledge of how these two worlds can come together.
Rob
On career planning, you've had many different experiences from government, to the private sector, to academia, to internationally — how important is it for somebody starting out to get a breadth of experience?
April
I have been very lucky to have a really fulfilling career, and I found it helpful to be able to piece things together. I don't think everybody needs to take the same path, but you do want to have some intentionality on how to build your personal portfolio and career. You might start in a particular vertical, but realize that the pace of change is so quick that it leads to another area. Even businesses that have been around for a long time, like utilities, are under disruption. So, I think continued learning and being curious are really, really important, because the pace of change is not measured anymore in decades, it's five year increments or less.
Rob
That's great advice. And I’ll ask the last question that we ask of everybody — was there a book or a mentor who was particularly influential in how you thought about your career?
April
That’s a really good question because my pathway has not been straight. I've had to create not one mentor, but more like a personal board of advisors. That’s become a group I can reach out to and ask questions and be in a safe space to help chart through to the next step. I do think it's really helpful to have a few people in your corner that are able to help guide you in that way.
I also really encourage students and younger people I have worked with to lean into the human connection — talking to people, having coffees. I have a personal policy of setting aside one morning every two weeks or so to take somebody out to coffee, somebody I don't know much about or who I have admired — and just asking them open ended questions and developing the relationship from there.
James
The importance of having good people on your side is a great way to end. Thanks, April, for your time and terrific insights.