This paper will answer an important question: how does the U.S. Government make major decisions about our energy future? A major part of the answer comes from an unlikely source: an Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.
During the high-stakes negotiations over what became the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Princeton’s ZERO LAB led by Professor Jesse Jenkins, 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.