Junior at Harvard (‘27)

Alright, this is a ramble, but I think a necessary one. No bullshit. I am in love with the clean energy transition, skeptical of the “problems within the solution,” and persistent and honest with myself about solving them. That’s what I’ll try to relay here. Decarbonizing the United States and enabling the clean energy transition feels like a string pulling me toward creative thinking and diligent leadership. It has led me to understand new topics and disciplines very thoroughly at a very rapid pace. Here are some examples:

I’m the Co-President of the Harvard Undergraduate Clean Energy Group (huceg.org), a 350-person powerhouse that was half the size when I took over. We went from seven programs to 15 in under a year — and our thesis is as followed: let’s be a horizontally integrated powerhouse that allows you to do to consulting, finance, engineering, entrepreneurship etc but with PURPOSE behind it. We want to make the clean energy transition obvious, irresistible, and inevitable. This requires training our leadership and membership to bind themselves to this cause. We also have big parties sometimes. Buy in. Believe you can decarbonize the world because you’re crack smart, you can, and it can also serve you professionally.

I moved to New York the summer after my junior year of high school and produced a sold-out (300+ tickets) my own two-act political drama off-Broadway— not because I care about theater, but because at the time, there was a problem with storytelling in the space. I took courses on playwriting, taught myself to direct, hired actors, created an LLC, put a team of motivated students together to fundraise 20, 0000 and made it happen because I was obsessed, and I got everyone else obsessed. It was a story that needed to be told.

Last summer, I traveled the country on a $5,000 grant, trying to find the “American” approach to the energy transition. Europe does it for the climate, China does it for the global market control, why do we do it? I locked myself in a café and cold emailed hundreds of energy pioneers (contacted local agencies, traced federal funds, went through coalitions, emailed journalists etc). I found myself watching a rodeo with veterans designing microgrids in Oregon, eating with Catholic farmers and ex-coal miners enabling distributed solar in West Virginia, teaching kids about clean tech with a battery start up in Tennessee, and learning about virtual power plants and grid infrastructure with Conservative advocates in Houston.

Following this experience, I just launched a documentary project to depoliticize clean energy (solutionistsdoc.org). Excited to see that get going. Messaging matters and the project is VERY synergistic with Powertown.

I returned to Harvard obsessed with an idea I had thought of in Oregon and doubled down on through reading around 45 research reports, conducting my own research at the Kennedy School, and working at EV start-up itselectric. My life became about the problem within the energy solution: the grid. I took courses like an Electricity Law class at HLS, an EV seminar, an MIT Mobility Ventures class, and a History of Energy class (and some more basic ones).

Powertown is about knowing how the grid actually works. It’s about understanding demand charges and tariffs, the 13 value streams of a battery, and how to arbitrage electricity. It’s about knowing how to make a battery asset class profitable, predictable, and essential. I consider myself a technical founder because I –– through months of research, policy consulting, and working at a start-up myself, understand why clean, distributed energy isn’t scaling. So we set out to make it obvious and irresistible to the market.

Powertown started in a very different place. Elio hopped on board about five months in, and we have had hundreds of conversations to get to the idea we have now. We both just turned town multiple job offers, and we’re making this happen over the summer. And we’re so lucky to have Noah! We won’t stop until we’re the most successful battery enabling, customer-centric solution in the country — not because it’s obvious, but because it’s urgent and hard, and you have to be a little egomaniacal to think you can do it.