Stephanie Greene on buildings electrification and the climate challenge

Stephanie Greene has just stepped down from a role as managing director at RMI, where she led the Buildings Program. She also helped launch RMI's building electrification initiative, which is focused on enabling a cost-effective, sustainable, and equitable path to building decarbonization, with work spanning the U.S., China, and India. We talked to her about this work, her previous work at PG&E, building teams, and about how crucial systems thinking is to working on climate issues and the built environment. “I feel like buildings are the center of all the other topics I have worked on,” she says. “It’s exciting to work on buildings because they interact with everything -- utilities, energy, site, transit. And there is a whole human health component, too.” Stephanie says she feels like she is part of a building decarbonization movement “Like many of us, I think, I alternate between frustration and despair and hope and optimism. But that is to be expected -- this is a tough industry. The movement context means that what any one person or team does can have a ripple effect -- and we are seeing more and more of that.”