Lena Hansen is the Managing Director of Rocky Mountain Institute’s China Program, based in Beijing, where she leads a team of 20 to advise and support China’s energy transition in the areas of power market reform, city carbon peaking, near-zero carbon development, and freight electrification. She has 15 years of experience developing, testing, and implementing innovative efficiency and clean energy solutions.
Prior to joining the China program, Lena led RMI’s US electricity program, where she focused on electric utility business models and the integration of renewable and distributed energy resources into the grid. She co-founded RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab (e–Lab), a unique multi-year collaboration of leading power sector decision-makers to create transformational solutions, and led RMI’s collaboration with the New York Public Service Commission on its industry-leading reform initiative “Reforming the Energy Vision.” Lena co-authored RMI’s 2011 book Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for a New Energy Era, a roadmap for an economic transition to a low-carbon system in the US.
Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program
Master of Environmental Management in Economics & Policy, Duke University
Certificate in Energy & Environment, Duke University
BA, Physics, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Beijing, China
The year 2017 was an impressive one for China in its effort to achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions. Based on scenario analysis in the Reinventing Fire: China report launched by Rocky Mountain Institute in 2016, China can do this by decreasing primary energy demand and increasing the…
The year 2017 was an impressive one for China in its effort to achieve economic growth while reducing carbon emissions. Based on scenario analysis in the Reinventing Fire: China report launched by Rocky Mountain Institute in 2016, China can do this by decreasing primary energy demand and increasing the…
It has been more than three years since Superstorm Sandy came ashore, creating massive storm flooding, gasoline shortages, and more than a week of power outages. Sandy’s devastation revealed critical gaps in New York’s utility infrastructure that inspired Governor Cuomo’s administration to launch New York’s Reforming the Energy Vision (REV)…
The session explored how platforms can enable value exchange of distributed energy resources, both vertically to the distribution and bulk power system, as well as horizontally through bilateral transactions from distributed resources.
This discussion document reviews 15 distributed photovoltaic (DPV) benefit/cost studies by utilities, national labs, and other organizations to determine what is known and unknown about the categorization, methodological best practices, and gaps around the benefits and costs of DPV. It also begins to establish a clear foundation from which additional…
The electricity industry is evolving from a traditional value chain to a highly participatory constellation of interconnected business models at the distribution edge, where retail customers interface with the distribution grid.
In RMI’s recent book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for a New Energy Era, we suggest it’s possible to transform the U.S. electricity system over the next 40 years to one that is clean, secure, and customer-centric, all while not sacrificing affordability or reliability.
This was originally published at GreenBiz.com on March 5 as the final installment in a five-part series by RMI professionals on how to put into practice the ideas of Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for a New Energy Era.
Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles are poised to allow, for the first time, large-scale interaction between the transportation and electric utility sectors. Electricity is a more efficient vehicle fuel than are liquid fossil fuels, and it can reduce system-wide greenhouse-gas emissions by transferring energy demand and emissions from the transportation to…
The “next generation” electric utility must incorporate variable renewable resources, including wind and solar, in much larger quantities than conventionally thought possible. While resource variability presents a challenge, it should be possible to reduce and manage that variability by geographically distributing renewables, combining them with different renewables, and having more…
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