Heather House

Principal

Team: Climate-Aligned Industries

Heather is a principal at RMI leading the Cement and Concrete Initiative and Embodied Carbon Initiative. She has a decade of experience working closely with industry, the private sector, government, and utilities to accelerate decarbonization across the industrial, buildings, transportation, and electricity sectors.

Heather’s team focuses on reducing embodied carbon in construction materials and accelerating the use of low-carbon cement and concrete through demand creation, supply-side decarbonization roadmaps and technical support, policy and regulation research and analysis, accelerating innovation through start up support and unlocking capital for FOAK projects. Heather’s team launched the Sustainable Concrete Buyers Alliance and a first-of-its-kind book and claim framework for buying, selling, and retiring low-carbon concrete environmental attribute certificates.

Prior to leading the Cement and Concrete Initiative, Heather co-led the institute’s work on mode-shift and the intersection between transportation, land-use and housing, notably leading a team of researchers to produce first-of-its-kind analysis highlighting urban land-use reform as a key climate solution. Heather showcased the team’s work on David Robert’s Volts podcast. From June 2022 to March 2023, Heather was seconded to the United Nations Climate Change High Level Champions team, where she worked globally to mobilize nonstate actors around ambitious targets for cities, transport, resilience, and nature.

Prior to secondment, Heather managed RMI’s Resilient Texas Communities Initiative, enhancing the resilience of Texas cities and counties, inclusive of resilience hubs, power sector transformation, municipal fleet electrification, and residential weatherization. Heather also worked on Bloomberg Philanthropies’ American Cities Climate Challenge, where she built coalitions of cities and counties and provided them strategic guidance and technical assistance to advance their climate goals in critical decisions made at regulatory agencies, utilities, regional transmission operators, and state legislatures. In partnership with NC DEQ, she also managed a statewide initiative in North Carolina, convening key stakeholders, culminating in the creation of key regulatory reform policies for the state. Heather was also a core team member on a 3-year mobility transformation partnership with the City of Austin.

Heather has been with RMI since October 2016.

Background

Heather came to RMI with a diverse background in the cleantech industry. Before RMI, she worked at Austin Energy as part of the Electric Vehicle and Emerging Technologies team, where she worked on the Department of Energy’s grant-funded SunShot Initiative, Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) project, and EV programs. She also worked at Meridian Solar, CleanTech Open, and CleanTX, where she ran the first-ever EV group-buy in Texas.

Heather completed a graduate degree program in Japan and Germany with a focus on International Material Flow Management and International Cooperation Policy. While studying, Heather interned at the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and the German Institute for Applied Material Flow Management. She also worked at Chesapeake Energy and Access Midstream for a year in their GIS department.