Virginia Lacy

Staff

Virginia Lacy

Virginia Lacy is a former Principal with RMI’s electricity practice, where she leads research and collaboration work with electric utilities, corporations and government agencies to accelerate the clean energy transformation of the U.S. electricity sector. She has over 10 years of experience working across multiple dimensions in the electricity and clean energy space, including regulation, policy, operations, planning and finance.

BACKGROUND

Over the last several years, Virginia has led research and collaboration work focused on new utility business models, valuation of distributed energy resources and their integration into the grid, and resource and business strategy for electric utilities. She is a founder of RMI’s Electricity Innovation Lab (e^–Lab), a unique multi-year collaboration of electricity industry leaders to develop and test new solutions to enable greater adoption of distributed energy resources. Most recently, Virginia served as a strategic advisor to the NY Public Service Commission and NY Department of Public Service in the Commission’s Reforming the Energy Vision (NY REV) initiative. She supported Commission staff and advised the NYPSC on electricity market reform, distributed resource valuation, rate design evolution, and performance-based regulation of utilities. She also led RMI’s DOE SunShot funded project, Innovative Solar Business Models, which partnered with key electricity sector actors to pilot-test new solar business models that recognize and create value for multiple stakeholders.

Virginia’s portfolio of work at RMI has also included research, analysis or quantitative modeling on a variety of topics including in the integration of variable renewables into the grid, fuel price volatility, energy commodities markets, and the financial valuation of energy efficiency and renewable energy. Select electricity sector partners have included Pacific Gas & Electric, Duke Energy, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, Hawaiian Electric Company, Hawaii State Energy Office, Public Service of New Mexico, Silicon Valley Power, Invenergy, Great River Energy, and Northern California Power Agency.

Virginia has authored or coauthored several publications, including the electricity chapter of RMI’s book Reinventing Fire, which assessed the potential for an 80% renewable, 50% distributed U.S. electricity system by 2050. As part of that work, she led RMI’s analysis team that partnered with the National Renewable Energy Lab to use ReEDS, a long-term capacity-expansion model for the deployment of electric power generation technologies and transmission infrastructure throughout the contiguous United States.

In her graduate studies at Yale, Virginia focused in energy policy and investment and served as the co-coordinator of the Yale Climate Initiative, an ongoing effort to recommend and implement greenhouse gas mitigation strategies at the University. Prior to pursuing her master’s degree, she was a research analyst with the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), a socially responsible investment research firm, where she analyzed the environmental performance of S&P 1500 companies for some of the largest institutional investors in the U.S.