Ten years in, the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy is ‘just getting started’

Speaking at a recent event, Scott Kleinman, University of Pennsylvania alum and Apollo Global Management Inc. co-president, reflected on conversations he had more than a decade ago with Mark Alan Hughes, then a professor of practice at the Weitzman School of Design, about their vision for a new center for energy policy.

“I definitely saw that young people wanted to talk about this, but for the most part were really lacking the basic vocabulary of how to talk about energy and the energy transition,” Kleinman said. Raising the level of discourse around energy policy and the transition to clean energy was one of his goals, along with the goal of creating a space for developing research on important energy topics that needed to get into the hands of policymakers. So, he gave $10 million to start the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy in 2014, with Hughes as the founding faculty director.

A decade later, Kleinman said, “it really has achieved these two goals that I was hoping for.” The Kleinman Center, housed in the Weitzman School, has a mission to “create the conditions for policy innovation that support a just and efficient transition to sustainable energy.”

As the Center celebrates its 10th anniversary, there are many other milestones as well. It can boast nearly 1,000 publications—from op-eds to policy briefs to reports—and almost 200 episodes of the Energy Policy Now podcast. Since the onset, the Center has added three new core faculty members who bring perspectives from design, law, and engineering; has led delegations to the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference; and established Energy Week at Penn. Through the annual Carnot Prize, the Kleinman Center has recognized global distinguished contributions to energy policy and will soon honor Jacqueline Patterson, founder and executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project. 

“I am truly in awe of what a cadre of talented and dedicated individuals have accomplished in 10 years and extremely excited about what comes next,” Weitzman Dean Fritz Steiner said at the 10th anniversary dinner.

View large image

One of the tenets of Penn’s strategic framework In Principle and Practice is leading on great challenges of our time, and at the top of that list is climate.

“It’s a grand challenge that will require everything, all of the talents of the University of Pennsylvania. To do this, the scholars of the Kleinman Center will work diligently, think critically, and share their wisdom with the world,” Interim President J. Larry Jameson said. While many institutions will focus on climate change, he said, “where Penn can really be distinctive is in the area of policy. It’s arguably the most powerful lever that we have to work with, and we’ve now got a 10-year running start, and we’re just getting started.”

“There is no discipline that can solve the energy transition alone, and I think there is a real appreciation for that across campus. We are not having to preach that or convince people,” said Cory Colijn, executive director of the Kleinman Center. While energy policy research existed on Penn’s campus prior to a decade ago, she said, the Kleinman Center created a platform, providing the resources and capacity.

Punching above its weight

Colijn recalled to Penn Today that while she was getting her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Penn from 2007 to 2014, “there was no home” for her as someone interested in the intersection of energy and the environment. “Being able to build something and seeing it being used by younger versions of myself is gratifying,” she said.

At the beginning, Colijn said, she and Hughes secured space in the Fisher Fine Arts Library and got it renovated; then they began hiring. They went on a listening tour, talking to students, alumni, faculty, University leadership, and people outside Penn. They built an advisory board. They rapidly prototyped a grants program that is open to any faculty, postdocs, and doctoral students in the University’s 12 schools. That program, Colijn said, has since given out more than 100 grants. They created a visiting scholars program and a senior fellows program, and they built a certificate program for graduate students.

View large image

“We were just building, building, building,” but also “tearing down things that weren’t working,” Colijn said. “We were scrappy. I think we were punching pretty far above our weight pretty quickly in our tenure.”

Colijn said Kleinman’s $10 million gift and subsequent $30 million gift sparked an “unprecedented University commitment to energy policy.”

“Penn told us to hire the best faculty, and that’s what we did,” she said. The true indicator fulfilling that mandate is “that three of the world’s top energy scholars wanted to come to Penn’s Kleinman Center.”

The center’s first full-time faculty hire, in 2020, was Jennifer Wilcox, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She left soon after to serve as principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), but returned to Penn this summer.

Her research focuses on direct-air capture, pulling carbon out of the air and sequestering it elsewhere to reduce its negative effects on the environment. In a panel at the anniversary celebration, she explained that some of her work at the DOE was on understanding the legacy impacts of industrial waste and that her research is now pivoting toward determining how to extract critical minerals from waste.

Shelley Welton joined the Kleinman Center in 2022 as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Law and Energy Policy at Penn Carey Law. “I was at this moment where I didn’t want to just write articles and throw them into the ether,” she said. “I really wanted to do something with them, and I wanted them to have an impact, and the Kleinman Center has been phenomenal for helping me translate research into policy-relevant materials.”

View large image

Welton is currently focused on transmission grid planning, and she argues in her work that “what sounds maybe like a technical challenge is actually a challenge of law and governance,” she said.

Sanya Carley came to Penn in 2023 as Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Weitzman School, and she succeeded Hughes as faculty director of the Kleinman Center. Her work focuses on the design and implementation of both decarbonization policy and energy equity strategies. During the last several years, Carley said, she has been focusing on preventive solutions to address utility disconnections.

With all three core faculty now on campus, Carley thinks this is a particularly exciting time for the Center. She thinks that the coming years “will be ones of growth, with new collaborations and a lot more points of impact with the external world,” and that the Kleinman Center will be able to combine its efforts with new climate initiatives that grow out of the In Principle and Practice vision.

Speaking at the dinner celebration, Carley said, “The reason that I was so intrigued about coming here, in one word, is impact. It’s the reason I get up in the morning, besides my cat poking my face. I want to have the biggest impact I possibly can have on climate research, and the Kleinman Center allows me to do that.”