— PROJECT NAME

Swiss-US Energy Innovation Days

— ROLE

Program Design

Sponsorship Development

Startup Liaison

— DATES

Aug 21-24, 2016

Aug 20-23, 2017

Aug 19-22, 2018

Oct 07-09, 2019

Jun 16-17, 2021

The clean energy transition is happening with differing speeds of intensity in different countries. Reasons for this have to do largely with energy policy, though technology and business innovation play a role. Together with Switzerland’s Federal Office of Energy, the equivalent of the US Department of Energy, I have organized annual programs aimed at connecting researchers, labs, policy makers, startups, and industry players to share what they are working on in the clean energy realm.

The Swiss-US Energy Innovation Days are a means to facilitate international knowledge exchange on a topic of critical importance for sustainability and innovation. Switzerland’s energy market has not been deregulated yet and provides an interesting case study for how to decarbonize at scale in an extremely distributed generation market currently dependent on increasingly variable hydropower and nuclear energy. Further challenges come from a democratically-supported national phase-out of nuclear energy coming at the same time as efforts to move away from fossil fuels.