Shannon Weigel will discuss Promises, Promises: The Many Ways to Accelerate the Energy Transition and Make Net Zero a Reality. Shannon will share how President Biden’s pledge to halve U.S. emissions by 2030 with a "whole of government" approach is playing out in the infrastructure bill and actions at FERC, an agency known for pipelines that now has a central role in decarbonizing the grid. She'll give her outlook on using budget reconciliation to pass climate policies, and what it will take to continue the rapid growth of renewables, energy storage, and transmission critically needed to keep net zero promises.

The next speaker, Adam Cohen, will cover A Policy Potpourri: How a Mixture of Federal, State, and Local Policies Will Make (or Break) New York City’s Fledging Energy Storage Market. Adam will give his view on a handful of small changes to New York City’s Climate Mobilization Act (Local Law 97), New York State’s Climate Act (“CLCPA”), and Federal tax credits that can have outsized impacts on the business models and scaling opportunities for local battery energy storage system development. These big-picture legislative achievements aim to drive large-scale battery deployment, but it’s within their nitty-gritty details that will determine if energy storage fizzles or thrives.

Shannon is the Head of Policy at Edison Energy. In this role, she tracks regulatory, legislative and administrative proceedings in North America and uses this information to help clients make better energy procurement decisions. At Edison Energy, she has supported over 6 GW of PPAs for corporate and institutional clients, including 300+ MW of onsite and community solar. Prior to joining Edison Energy, she led state and federal policy initiatives as Director of Policy at SoCore Energy, a Chicago-headquartered commercial and community solar developer. Shannon also worked as a political organizer for Clean Energy Illinois and with the Environmental Law and Policy Center and Natural Resources Defense Council. She is currently a Board Member of the Illinois Solar Energy Association. Shannon has over 8 years of experience in energy policy analysis and governmental affairs and holds a B.S. in Biology and Environmental Studies from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Adam Cohen is co-founder and CTO of NineDot Energy, a New York City-based developer of community distributed generation. Adam is a physicist who thinks of our energy system as a complex, interconnected experimental laboratory. He seeks to uncover small technical, financial, and regulatory improvements that will cause tipping points for clean energy diffusion. Prior to NineDot, Adam was Science Team Lead for Split Technology, a smart transportation start-up (acquired by Volkswagen Group). Adam was a post-doctoral fellow of the U.S. Department of Energy where he launched a new research program applying social and behavioral science to scale up solar energy adoption. He earned a PhD from the Chaos Group at University of Maryland and a BS in physics from Bucknell University.