Executive Q&A: Stuart DeCew ’11, Executive Director at CBEY, on Accelerating Climate Innovation

Stuart DeCew is executive director at Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY). He oversees the management, strategy, and development of the research, education, and outreach programs in business and the environment within SOM and the Yale School of the Enviroment (YSE), and leads a team of over 50 resident fellows, research assistants, faculty, and staff. In addition, Stuart is an advisor to Yale Ventures, focused on the development of climate tech innovation and entrepreneurship across the campus, and a YSE lecturer. Stuart helped start and now serves on the board of ClimateHaven, New Haven’s climate tech incubator. He earned an MBA from Yale SOM and a Master of Environmental Management at YSE in 2011.

Q1: Can you share context on the origins of CBEY, and how SOM alumni are engaging with the center as the climate crisis accelerates?

Yale has an incredible history of firsts here. YSE is the first school of the environment in the U.S, and the YSE-SOM joint degree program is the first joint degree program in the world for students of the environment and students of management.

CBEY was formally established in 2006 and when you think about what was happening at Yale in the early 2000’s, we needed a rallying point across the university for all the research, convening and activity that was unfolding on business and environment issues. Sustainability as a concept was entering the mainstream and becoming a magnet for a wider range of students, alumni, and faculty. Just as when the joint degree was founded, students helped drive the founding of the center, they knocked on the doors of YSE and SOM and made the case that we needed a hub to connect leaders for business and society with leaders who are protecting and managing the natural resources of future generations. CBEY became the center that would represent Yale’s history of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit with the very real intent of being an applied center focused on global challenges where we needed a response that included new curriculum, programs, and research initiatives that were interdisciplinary, benefitted the whole campus and enabled students to have an impact on the issues that were impacting the world. CBEY’s mission is to inspire, support, and accelerate the transition to a just and thriving world and the YSE SOM joint degree program was built to foster a community of changemakers taking action within the intersection of business and the environment.

Alumni from SOM and YSE were deeply engaged and involved in the formation of CBEY and remain so today. When you look at the quality, depth, and breadth of where alumni have had influence on business and environment issues, it is remarkable. SOM and YSE alumni have advanced pioneering and significant achievements in clean energy, conservation, finance, and corporate sustainability and created some of the most significant climate partnerships between industries and NGOs. These achievements have shaped markets and practices across all sectors.

Another “first” we are proud of is CBEY’s launch of the first Yale graduate professional certificate program - a pathway to extend and expand our curriculum to the widest possible audience in a way that can impact public and private sector decisions in real time.

CBEY’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy Certificate Program is a 10-month program for working professionals that gives decision makers across sectors access to best-in-class curriculum, faculty and practitioners across clean energy policy, technology transitions, renewable energy projects and innovation. The format is online and allows us to bring the best faculty and industry practitioners to alumni who are making business, policy, and climate innovation decisions in their day-to-day roles. SOM and YSE alumni leaders teaching these courses include:

• Daniel Gross ’98, a graduate of Yale College, SOM, and YSE, is director of the Climate Pledge Fund at Amazon and teaches our Renewable Energy Project Finance course.
• Richard Kauffman ’83 is CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital and chair of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and teaches our Innovation course. He is a pioneer across clean energy and a recognized leader in green finance and the creation of financial structures that have enabled us to accelerate and scale the climate transition.
• Jahi Wise ’16, a joint-degree graduate of SOM and Yale Law School, is the founding director of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and was a special assistant to the president on climate policy and finance in the Biden Administration, where he led the deployment of $27 billion in funding and incentives that shaped clean energy projects across the U.S. He worked at CBEY during his tenure as a student and now teaches our Innovation class along with Richard Kauffman.

These are the types of leaders and practitioners teaching our next cohort of 200 working professionals. The goal of the program is to share this level of experience and leadership with professionals who remain in their day jobs and already have influence on the way things get done. The curriculum, discussions and debates provide insights, tools, and real-world experience that help inform the strategies, decisions, and commitments our students are overseeing in their work, whether that be capital allocation, financial modeling, technology rollouts or policy. The program is focused on how and where we innovate and how to accelerate climate progress and the admissions cycle for our next cohort is open right now. We’ve got a remarkable amount of work to do but we have also made a remarkable amount of progress.

Q2: What are the biggest innovation opportunities and greatest threats to accelerating the clean energy transition?

Climate innovation, specifically investment and deployment of advanced clean energy technologies like solar, batteries and wind, is mainstream and well understood in global markets. And at the same time, we face significant headwinds.

About 70 years ago, researchers at Bell Labs invented the first practical silicon solar cell, and over the next 68 years, we built and deployed about a terawatt of solar power, the equivalent of powering about 46 million homes. In the last two years, we deployed another terawatt of solar, essentially doubling 68 years of solar output in just a two-year period.

The increase in the rate and pace of innovation and deployment is significant on many levels. It’s enabling us to build incredibly large pieces of infrastructure with solar and battery power across the U.S. and it also gives us the opportunity to see that we can reach the targets and goals that scientists and policy makers have set. When we see a curve bending this significantly, the opportunity to drive economies of scale, improve learning curves, and bring together engineers, operations experts and manufacturers is significant—it has created the tipping point required to produce and scale high-quality, low-cost solutions that make clean energy affordable and accessible. The focus now is how do we accelerate, maintain that rate of change, and meet those goals and targets for clean energy. That requires the entire energy ecosystem to work together and CBEY is working with SOM and YSE alumni to ensure future leaders understand the entire ecosystem and have the insight and tools required to make decisions that will shape the business models and deployments that will accelerate this progress.

For context, on the innovation side, about 55% of the technology we need to reach scientific targets is already commercial, deployable at scale and working in the market today. And 45% of the technology required to meet our climate goals is pre-commercial, in the invention stage and will need to be rapidly scaled to sustain us on this planet in a way where communities and people can thrive. The CBEY community is essentially individuals who are creative, understand market fundamentals, and know how to build and scale consistently. When you combine this with the broader community of scientists, engineers and YSE faculty and students focused on the next stages of innovation, the opportunities to accelerate progress are vast.

At CBEY we also support the 45%—the early-stage environmental innovators and entrepreneurs in and around Yale addressing huge challenges in climate, materials, and biodiversity. We get the earliest versions of ideas and give them bits of non-dilutive capital, like $3,000 to $5,000 for a climate tech venture, support services, mentorship from across the university, and then build them up through the two to three years that they're on campus to the point where they can go out and raise a seed round and work on their venture full time, here in New Haven at ClimateHaven or anywhere around the globe.

That said, we also face a number of headwinds and challenges in clean energy and climate. For example, it is getting harder to build things in a lot of areas and more difficult to site and permit these massive projects. We aren’t necessarily great at building shared infrastructure like high voltage transmission lines in the U.S. anymore. In addition to these physical constraints, there are significant political headwinds and opposition. At the local level, individuals are very focused on how their specific communities will benefit from the energy transition, in terms of job growth, prosperity and the wealth that will be created as a result of these technology investments. At a building level, a lot of people just want the right financing product, a healthy place to work and live, great technology and stable energy costs. They aren’t thinking about global warming on a daily basis.

CBEY staff and faculty and SOM and YSE alumni are deeply involved in these discussions and adept at coming up with rapid and informed answers to complex challenges like modernizing our grid or scaling the right financing product for clean energy at a building level. SOM and broader Yale alumni who are doing groundbreaking work include:

• Elliot Mainzer ’98, a joint-degree graduate of SOM and YSE, is CEO of the California Independent System Operator, and is essentially the market maker for one of the largest energy markets in the U.S.
• Ali Cooley ’12, also a joint-degree graduate of SOM and YSE, and Jessica Bailey GSAS ’04 are CEO and chief investment officer, respectively, of Nuveen Green Capital. During their tenures at the Connecticut Green Bank and then in founding Greenworks Lending they essentially invented the asset class of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy or CPACE, which is today a $6 billion asset class and counting.

These individuals are models of how you can improve connections across sectors, develop vibrant markets and scale new technologies and financing tools. At CBEY we look to these alumni for ideas and inspiration on how to get big things done.

We also get to work with world-class faculty, whose work is taken up by the market. For example, faculty member Ken Gillingham has 12 years of work on testing and understanding how solar and other clean technologies go viral at a community level. CBEY worked with Ken to conduct large- scale field trials at the community level and then distill the insights of the work for practitioners. To do that successfully and at scale we need to understand the best marketing approach, technology packages, the way cities and communities finance and incent the rollout, and the way the installers are engaged to be able to increase the rate of adoption at a residential level. We are driving significant progress and impacts today well beyond the early adopters who were historically able to afford clean energy and it’s really rewarding.

Q3: As the scope and frequency of natural disasters accelerates, what’s the call to action?

Each of us can imagine a place of deep importance and meaning from our childhood or a place we would love to protect. When you see the wildfires in Los Angeles, or the flooding in North Carolina, or the disruptions that have happened globally, we need to put ourselves in the position of the people who care so much and so deeply about those places and how their lives have been forever shaken.

And we need to consider what are the best pathways and collaborations that will help us avoid and mitigate those impacts going forward. Our world is an incredibly lovely, shared experiment of collaborating and living amongst eight billion people. All of us have places and people we would do anything for. When we think about that shared commitment to people and places, it requires us to then take actions that are beyond what we potentially thought we were capable of. What happens upstream impacts everything downstream. The infrastructure that gets built in one community benefits or impacts another community directly. We already have a shared fate, so let’s understand and embrace the power of those connections.

The talent and breadth of the SOM, YSE, Yale and CBEY network to respond to environmental challenges and chart scalable solutions for mitigating future crises is immense. People from this university have a strong motivation and skills to work across boundaries and sectors. Those are critical resources in responding to complex challenges. We have to trust the expertise of others, show up at town meetings, care for our neighbors, build big things and teach other people how to do the work.

Look at the work of Jamie Carlson ’09. She lives in Los Angeles and is currently housing her friends impacted by the wildfires. She has worked across sectors since graduating from SOM and YSE. She’s one of the leading developers of grid scale renewable energy projects in the US, she finds time to teach clean energy development in our online program with SOM alumna Sarah Slusser, while being deeply engaged with the wider Yale alumni community. We have so many examples of multifaceted incredibly talented people across the community with the skills, expertise and commitment required to develop very powerful and also profitable solutions to these issues.

For all of us, when we think about the challenge and the response we need to bring forward, I think we raise our expectations of each other. Getting things right on the environment is a mix of incredible challenge and skill that will keep us humble and fully employed until we pass the baton along to our kids. Let’s go.