Koben is a Principal in RMI’s Carbon-Free Electricity program. Koben is currently co-leading a new initiative at RMI to support and scale city efforts to procure and deploy clean and renewable energy. He is also co-leading RMI’s support of the America’s Pledge Initiative on Climate to analyze, catalyze, and showcase climate leadership by US governors, mayors, and CEOs. While at RMI, Koben has also led a DOE-funded solar cost reduction project, industry engagements to scale commercial energy efficiency, and the development of community-based strategies to achieve deep carbon reduction goals.
Koben has experience in energy policy and economics, statistical analysis, and energy modeling. He has managed a national collaboration to research and implement clean energy infrastructure in cities, worked as a technical advisor on green building and zero energy projects, and consulted on developing new programs and policies to address the impacts of climate change on buildings and cities. While in graduate school at the University of Michigan, Koben focused on energy policy and researching the impacts of climate change on buildings and cities.
Master of Public Policy, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Master of Urban Planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan
BA, Economics, University of Puget Sound
Boulder, CO
“I am consistently inspired by the commitment and passion of my colleagues and our partners to work on complex and challenging problems that they believe will make our world a better place.”
It is becoming clear that an accelerated coal-to-clean transition in the global electricity system is both necessary and feasible. Commitments to cease new coal investments are critical in the near-term but insufficient to meet global emissions reductions required by the end of this decade. According to Carbon Brief, any…
RMI report introduces new concept --- Whole-System Zero-Emissions Demonstration (WS-ZED) that goes one step further than net-zero carbon and proposes a broader concept to reveal the added value of synergy among net-zero carbon, net-zero waste, and net-zero pollution while supporting green economic growth.
Editor’s note: The following op-ed was posted in Mandarin in Caijing Magazine, an influential Chinese publication that covers social, political and economic topics. On April 20, 2020, for the first time ever, the price of oil—specifically the price on the futures contract for West Texas crude oil—was negative. COVID-19…
When President Trump walked away from the US target under the Paris Agreement, we knew states, cities, and businesses needed to pick up the mantle of climate leadership. But people wanted to know: what difference can these bottom-up initiatives make? Is America’s pledge still within reach despite the abdication of…
It’s official: U.S. states, cities, and businesses have emerged as the new face of American climate leadership on the global stage. Today, November 11, 2017 at the United Nations climate conference in Bonn, California Governor Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled the first product of…
Since the White House announcement of its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, American mayors, governors, CEOs, and other leaders have been reaffirming their support for continued action on climate change. As of last month, we have seen nine states, 227 cities and counties, 315 institutions of higher education,…
The energy revolution has been fueled by business model innovations that provide services to end users, rather than selling them capital. For solar photovoltaics, the innovation was the power purchase agreement. For mobility, it’s been a shift from personal car ownership to mobility services provided by the likes of Uber…
Download RMI’s new report, Lumens as a Service: How to Capture the Technology-Enabled Business Opportunity for Advanced Lighting in Commercial Buildings. In recent years, building owners and property managers have been inundated with information about how they should invest in advanced lighting systems that enable increased control, save on…
In April 2016, RMI hosted its third annual eLab Accelerator. Described as a boot camp for electricity innovation, the four-day intensive work session brought together 13 teams from across North America—from North Carolina to Ottawa and California to New York—to work on new business models, energy innovation districts, and innovative…