Summer Internships 2017 – Rocky Mountain Institute

Application Instructions Please ensure you have read the entire announcement below before submitting an application.

Be prepared to upload (1) a resume and (2) a cover letter , both documents are required . The first page of the online application will allow you to attach your resume. The second page of the online application will allow you to upload additional documents. Candidates who do not provide a compelling answer to the question “Why do you want to work at Rocky Mountain Institute” in their cover letter may not be considered. Additionally, incomplete application materials (for example, a missing cover letter) may not be considered.

Answer the following questions in your cover letter:
Why are you interested in an internship with Rocky Mountain Institute?

Why are you applying for this specific internship? (If you are applying for more than one initiative, explain how you can add value in multiple practice areas).

What unique experience and/or quality would you bring to this internship?

Full consideration will be given to applications received by January 31, 2017 . If RMI staff sees that a successful candidate will be more effective in a different initiative than was identified in the application, this will be communicated prior to the interview process.

Due to the large number of applications received, it may take 3-4 weeks to receive a response. We are working diligently and appreciate your patience.

If you have issues submitting your application or uploading your documents, please email humanresources@rmi.org.

RMI is an equal opportunity employer.

No phone calls please.

Location

New York City; Washington, D.C.; Boulder or Snowmass, Colorado.

Interns will be asked to work in the same office as their immediate supervisor. Boulder and Snowmass are the primary locations for these internships.

It is not required for the student to have a car, however transportation is recommended for the Snowmass location due to the more rural setting.

** We will be staffing interns in Beijing. If you are interested in working on our China project in Beijing, please explicitly mention this on your cover letter.

Interns are paid a stipend of $550 per week. Interns are expected to work a full-time schedule for 11-12 weeks. Start and end dates can be flexible based on individual needs. Housing options are available in our Basalt location.

Funding

As a 501(c)(3) non-profit, ensuring we are using our resources thoughtfully is a top priority. We encourage all students to contact their school to inquire about potential internship funding to match or supplement the RMI/CWR stipend. Students will not be screened on the basis of receiving funding.

We are seeking full-time interns to fill summer internship opportunities for 3 months. These positions will focus on projects relating to the electricity system, building efficiency, international energy, and transportation. Successful candidates will be assigned projects within the broader initiatives, which include but are not limited to: research and coalition-building that addresses pragmatic designs, practices, and policies, not social theories or laboratory experiments. We work on all parts of the solution process—idea, strategy, and implementation—in the high impact areas of energy, mobility and vehicle efficiency, energy resource use, security, and the built environment. Interns are expected to learn about all parts of the solution process and actively work on key areas identified by project managers.

Qualifications

Applicants should be pursuing a Master’s Degree in a related field and have basic knowledge of one or more of the team’s’ focus areas—energy efficiency; renewable energy; demand-side management; building science and energy modeling; efficient and low carbon light duty cars and truck design; and transportation logistics. Where applicable, the applicant should be comfortable working with, or reporting on, numerical analysis and spreadsheet modeling, research and reporting.

In addition to skills and expertise, we value and seek the following qualities in our candidate: intense curiosity, self-motivated and able to work independently, willingness to plunge into unfamiliar disciplines, creativity and willingness to take risks by exploring and testing new ideas, and a passion for making the world better.

Specific qualifications for each of our 12 internship program opportunities are listed below – Next Generation Electricity, Electricity Disruptor, Built Environment, Office of the Chief Scientist, China, Mobility, Global Energy Transitions, Business Renewables Center (BRC), Shine: Community-Scale Solar, Sustainable Aviation, Sustainable Finance and Trucking Efficiency.

Internship Opportunities:
Next Generation Electricity

Interns will work on a discrete piece(s) of the electricity practice’s work (outlined below), selected based on current status and needs of our work as well as on the interns’ particular interests and abilities. Intern’s work will be core to the team’s strategic focus and will have a defined scope with clear deliverables. Interns will be integral members of RMI and will conduct project work under the guidance of a full-time team member, usually as part of a small team. In addition, we encourage a highly collaborative work environment, which provides our fellows access to a number of senior practitioners and team members.

During 2017, the electricity practice’s work will focus on three areas:

1. Targeted consulting with individual utilities and regulatory agencies

RMI works directly with utilities, regulators, and other industry businesses to test and refine solutions. These fast-paced projects frequently involve interaction with clients, analysis of real-world data, and economic and technical evaluation of proposed strategies. Efforts in 2017 are likely to focus on developing new electric utility business model solutions that enable increased adoption of distributed energy resources. A current examples include a project that analyzes the role that distributed resources can play in deferring central investments in the grid.

2. Collaborative learning and innovation involving multiple stakeholders

e – Lab (Electricity Innovation Lab) is a working group representing a microcosm of the electricity system: utilities, technology companies, customers, regulators, and NGOs are working together to find solutions to overcome the obstacles to achieving a cleaner and more reliable electricity future. e – Lab is an ongoing effort that supports learning and information exchange, and also conceives and execute innovation projects. RMI developed and facilitates e – Lab, and provides research and analytical support on a variety of topics, ranging from best practices from Europe to the real technical and economic impacts of distributed resources on the distribution system. e – Lab’s key focus areas include 1) understanding the real benefits and costs of distributed resources, 2) harmonizing business models between utilities and distributed resource providers, and 3) developing strategies to increase customer adoption of economic distributed resources. e – Lab works closely with industry practioners on analysis and research, as well as convenings and other peer learning mechanisms.

3. Partnership with jurisdictions and communities

The electricity practice seeks to work with forward-looking national-, state-, and local-level jurisdictions to develop ambitious energy, environmental, and resiliency goals, and strategies to achieve those goals. This work often entails direct engagement with government and a broad set of stakeholders, facilitation of conversations among key stakeholders, and economic and energy analysis to inform goals and strategies. Current examples include a partnership with a community to develop a comprehensive energy efficiency and renewables plan to avoid investment in centralized fossil fuel generation.

Ideal candidates will have:
Excellent quantitative analysis skills (including working with spreadsheets) is an important requirement

Ability to work effectively with a team and communicate technical ideas

A knack for synthesizing and framing key issues and opportunities for industry leaders

Applicants with a functional knowledge of key issues and concepts in one or more of the following focus areas:

Energy efficiency in buildings and industry

Distributed and renewable energy

Electric utility resource planning and strategy

Quantitative modeling

Stakeholder management

Energy economics and policy

Business strategy, finance, and decision-making

Electricity Disruptor

RMI’s work in the electricity sector spans a range of topics and utilizes a number of approaches. The Electricity Disruptor program works with “disruptive,” distributed technologies, such as solar PV, battery storage, and demand flexibility to remove the barriers these technologies are facing to widespread adoption and grid integration. We do this work in a variety of ways, including:

Building models and tools that help us understand the value that DERs can provide to the electricity system, and the conditions that need to exist to optimize this value.

Writing cutting-edge reports that show the industry the economic implications of ignoring current DER (distributed energy resource) adoption trends.

Working with utilities and industry partners to develop programs, rates, and market mechanisms that maximize the value that DERs can offer to the electricity system.

Interns will be working on an ongoing project that the Electricity Disruptor program is running in collaboration with the Electricity Platform and Built Environment programs focused on utility capital expenditures. Utilities are currently projected to spend $1.4 trillion on capital expenditures for the electricity system over the next 15 years. However, under business-as-usual assumptions, most of that spending will be on grid resources that reflect the 20 th century grid, resulting in a significant level of misallocated investments in the electricity grid. This project focuses on how evolving technology and customer demands are driving the need to change how grid investments are planned moving forward.

Interns will be fully integrated into the project team and will have both a discrete project they own for the duration of their internship and varying daily analyses and tasks that support the needs of the project team. An ideal candidate will have:

Excellent research skills, with the ability to identify relevant sources and effectively summarize and synthesize findings.

Ability to work effectively as a member of a team, communicate the results of work and analysis, and ask relevant questions.

Built Environment

The Buildings Groups drives impact by coalescing powerful industry partners through three complementary building program-led initiatives, and by developing insights and adoption approaches to the buildings sector in China as part of RMI’s Reinventing Fire: China program.

In the past, RMI interns have been responsible for: researching and writing white papers, stakeholder engagement workshops, technical energy conservation measure analysis, development of financial models and participation in design charrettes. RMI is seeking interns for the following program-led initiatives:

Superefficient Buildings and Districts: Develop and demonstrate replicable market-based solutions to deliver net-zero energy and near-zero energy buildings in new and existing building portfolios and districts, such as developments, cities, and university campuses. Work under this initiative may include: District level energy systems development and modeling, design charrettes or stakeholder engagement workshops, and financial modeling.

Portfolio Efficiency: Drive adoption of wide-scale energy interventions in existing commercial buildings through the development of real estate portfolio energy strategies. The focus of this work is on identifying existing or new solutions to deploy through direct engagements with commercial real estate portfolios. This includes developing innovative energy analytics for portfolio-scale interventions; integrating energy efficiency, demand management, and renewable energy solutions; evaluating new and innovative technologies?;? and defining the business case for commercial real estate portfolios to invest in and deploy identified solutions.? Come help RMI scale clean energy adoption in our nation’s largest real estate companies.

Residential Energy +: Drive widespread adoption of home energy upgrades by improving homeowners’ desire, information, and means to invest in energy upgrades. This includes developing financing solutions, technical analysis and working with national partners to create fast and scalable retrofit approaches, and using behavioral change theory to redefine efficiency as the new normal. From culture change to net zero energy retrofits, we invite you to come help us transform homes across America.

Reinventing Fire China Buildings: Deliver an analysis of the buildings sector to spotlight the economic, social, and environmental benefits of energy efficiency to slash buildings-related CO2 emissions by 44 percent by 2050 relative to 2010 emissions.

An ideal candidate should have:
Exceptional quantitative analysis skills (including working with spreadsheets or energy models

Excellent technical knowledge of building components, buildings systems, energy efficiency measures, and/or energy-related business models within the built environment

Strong writing and communication skills and the ability to work in a team dynamic

An independent and self-directed work style

Office of the Chief Scientist

At Rocky Mountain Institute the Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) is tasked with exploring and hatching new programmatic efforts. OCS sustains RMI’s thought leadership by a unique com­bin­ation of invention or ideation, incubation, and synthesis. OCS is not an instrument of RMI’s normal day-to-day operations and campaigns (though it supports them as an internal consultant), but rather is the comple­men­­ta­ry place where creativity, vision across boun­daries, and fresh trans­disciplinary insights can flourish. OCS is led by Amory Lovins, RMI’s Co-Founder and Chief Scientist.

OCS’s talents best support three main themes: invention, incubation, and synthesis. Invention, or ideation, starts with asking new questions (or old questions in a different order). This underlies much of RMI’s historic innovation. Incubation is OCS’s role in ex­ploring and testing new topics that may evolve into programmatic efforts—most re­cent­ly Reinventing Fire: China. OCS synthesizes massive, disorderly sets of ideas and facts into big new stories (such as Reinventing Fire). OCS’s current activities include incubating an Integrative Design initiative, that aims to transform the way that design is taught and practiced by influencing pedagogy, design practitioners, and software makers. OCS is also currently leading a “Transformative Mobility Solutions” project in India in partnership with India’s central government.

The 2017 OCS intern will support all aspects of OCS’s activity including research, writing, and project execution. The ideal candidate will have experience in a technical field (engineering, design, physics mathematics, etc), experience collaborating with business and industry to drive change, and motivation to transform global energy use.

China

RMI’s China Program is working to accelerate the energy revolution across the globe by working directly with government and business partners in China. RMI’s China work spans all disciplines (Electricity, Buildings, Industry, Transportation, and Finance). RMI plans to engage in the following project types to achieve energy transformation:

Participate in multi-lateral research coalitions to inform national level policy design and administration

Develop comprehensive energy road maps that connect leading regional, provincial, and municipal governments with the technical expertise, administrative experience, and capital to pioneer new paradigms of green development.

Collaborate with Chinese government, academics and industry stakeholders to identify regulatory and market structures for electricity markets that maximize the use of renewable generation.

Work with major purchasers of electric power to identify and scale methods to accelerate the purchase of renewable electricity.

Fluency in Mandarin is required. It is desirable, although not required, that interns be located in Beijing.

Interns will work on a discrete piece of the larger analysis, which will require the following skills:

Strong research skills with the ability to identify relevant sources, summarize key findings, apply knowledge to unique problems, perform original meta-analysis, and document these items clearly.

Strong analytical skills focused on high-level quantitative analysis in the areas of engineering, economics, predictive modeling, and optimization.

Ability to work in multidisciplinary teams that span several organizations, while maintaining professional, open-minded and collaborative spirit.

Some experience in project management with an emphasis on constructing a work plan and project timeline, harmonizing, integrating, and managing different work streams, and managing upward to establish clear expectations for deliverables and resource requirements.

Specific expertise in one or more RMI’s focus disciplines (Electricity, Buildings, Industry, Transportation, and Finance) is desired.

Mobility

Today’s mobility system is built around personal vehicles available for any combination of potential needs—just in case. These privately-owned, individually-driven, gas-powered vehicles sit unused 95% of the time, cost their owners over $1 trillion annually, and account for 15% of all emissions in the U.S. As city populations increase, so does pollution, traffic congestion, and pressure on infrastructure. Emerging technologies and societal trends are creating an opportunity for a new mobility future in which mobility becomes a service, available when and where it is needed—just in time— allowing fewer vehicles to do the same job at lower cost.

RMI’s Mobility Transformation program is collaborating closely with both the City of Austin—as the Lead Implementation City—and the City of Denver—the Lead Scaling Partner City—to leverage the power of emerging technology and business innovation to expand and enhance mobility options, in turn reducing congestion, decreasing costs, improving equity, enhancing safety, reducing emissions, and ensuring continued economic growth. Mobility Transformation is currently focused on developing collaborative solutions with Austin and proving out a scaling model with Denver.

For 2017, the transportation team seeks interns for five projects with both Austin and Denver:

1) Interoperable Transit Data : RMI is working with national and international partners to build a consortium to govern transit data best practices and standards allowing for integrated and real-time multimodal trip planning, real-time route optimization, and integrated booking and payment that is readily available to user-facing data consumers such as transit app developers. Current partners include Google, Apple, Portland TriMet, Cambridge Systematics, TransitApp, Swiftly, moovel, Austin CapMetro, and IBI World.

The intern will support efforts to collaboratively establish the interoperable transit data consortium and to establish a membership fee structure to give the consortium long-term viability. Examples of current work being done for this project include establishing minimum data requirements for mobility providers, understanding the incentive and regulatory environment to boost data interoperability, and building stakeholder support.

2) Mobility as a Service : RMI is working with partners to develop and deploy integrated, multimodal commuting services with Austin and Denver employers, laying a foundation for citywide, on-demand Mobility as a Service.

The intern will support efforts to engage Austin and Denver employers to aggregate demand for commuting solutions, stimulate new business partnerships among mobility service providers, and streamline delivery of mobility services from providers. Examples of current work being done for this project include developing a comprehensive set of policies that incentivize alternate mode commuting, recruiting employers to commit to provide commuting benefits to their employees, and developing business models for integrated commuting solutions and pilot programs.

3) Fleet Electrification : RMI is working with partners to deploy high-mileage electric vehicles in Austin and Denver fleets and lay a foundation accelerating electrification.

The intern will support RMI’s efforts (1) to team with transportation companies to drastically reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of fleets by electrifying high-mileage vehicles like taxicabs and transportation network company vehicles; and (2) to work with local utilities to enable electric vehicles to improve the electricity grid with smart charging and to potentially provide other ancillary services like frequency regulation. Examples of current work for this project include development of new business, ownership, and financing models for for-hire vehicle fleet electrification and designing pilot fleet electrification programs.

4) Autonomous Vehicles : RMI is working with the City of Austin and major Tech Companies to create autonomous vehicle pilots in Austin, Texas. Pilots may include:

Designing a simple AV service from a neighborhood to a destination. eg – grocery service.

Designing recurring redesign of a major thoroughfare to test AVs and infrastructure. eg – Turn a two lane street into one lane for AVs and one lane for bikes and convert parking to greenery and pop-up restaurants.

Design a request for product (RFP) for AV tech companies to provide autonomous mobility services for a special event like SXSW.

The intern will support RMI’s work with partners to help accelerate the coming wave of autonomous vehicles. Example work includes interacting with AV tech leaders like Google, GM, Uber, and Tesla; Designing pilot programs and projects with the city; Drafting and issuing RFPs to companies to provide service; reviewing RFPs for best fit.

5) Mobility-Oriented Development : RMI is working with partners to advance innovative urban design practices that will lay the groundwork for future mobility paradigms and reshape cities as thriving, walkable, and auto-independent environments.

The intern will support RMI’s work with partners to push forth urban design practices that encourage dense, multi-use developments that decrease the need to drive, enable alternative forms of transportation, and improve quality of life. Examples of current work for this project include developing “placemaking” strategies, researching and analyzing impacts of land use policies, and working with partners (e.g., developers) to create mobility oriented developments.

Ideal candidates will have:
Strong interest in advanced vehicles and mobility solutions;

Strong quantitative backgrounds

Experience working with industry consortia and/or the startup space

Familiarity with business, financial, and economic concepts;

Excellent writing, organizational and communication skills; and

Ability to self-start and structure ambiguous and complex problems.

The transportation team is especially interested in candidates with:

Backgrounds in computer science and software/app development;

Marketing/sales experience;

Backgrounds in physical sciences, engineering, environmental studies;

Prior experience in public policy, especially regulations and policymaking at a city level; and

Prior experience in public transportation, urban planning, or the automotive and mobility industries.

Global Energy Transition: Island Economies and Sub-Saharan Africa

RMI-CWR’s Islands team, in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, works to accelerate the replicable transition of island economies from a heavy dependence on fossil fuels to a diverse and renewable energy mix including energy efficiency. Islands are not large enough to create a significant impact on global carbon emissions reductions, but they are poised to capture economic and environmental benefits from energy transitions. Critically, they also represent a powerful example to demonstrate sustainable solutions implemented across entire economies that will serve as useful blueprints for the rest of the world. The Islands team seeks an intern to focus on a discrete piece of the team’s work, composed of one or more of the following aspects:

Energy – a focus on technical, electrical system operations and opportunities for incorporating renewable energy technologies for Island economies

Economics – a focus on current utility business models and, looking forward, how they may change with increased adoption of energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Stakeholder engagement – a focus on supporting diverse viewpoints, bringing people together, and facilitating productive conversations.

On the Islands team, we often work across all of these aspects as we employ a system’s level analysis to reach an economy’s energy transformation goals.

Closely related to the Islands team, RMI’s SEED Initiative is working to accelerate economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa by applying pragmatic, unbiased, renewable and efficient energy solutions to deliver energy access. The SEED Initiative works closely with governments, development partners and the private energy sector in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide country-level strategic energy support.

We create country-level diagnostics analyzing the costs and opportunities of existing and potential generation, transmission, and off-grid technologies. This diagnostic is underpinned by significant in-country fact gathering including listening carefully to local experts and stakeholders and collaboration with government, development partners, and the private sector. We deliver this diagnostic and its succinct and immediately actionable recommendations to key stakeholders.

We then work with stakeholders to take the first steps to capture the near-term opportunities: We build strategic capacity in implementation partners, and identify opportunities for development partners to target their aid to the most critical needs and help private sector companies and investors stimulate rapid deployment of solutions.

Finally, we continue to work with trusted implementation partners to ensure that there are clearly established roles and responsibilities so that progress continues after our initial intensive work is concluded.

Ideal candidates for either of the Global Energy Transition programs will have:

Willingness to plunge into unfamiliar disciplines

A passion for tackling complicated energy and resource problems

Familiarity with business, financial, and economic concepts

Comfort working with spreadsheets including numerical analysis or modeling, case study research and concise writing

Excellent writing, organizational, and communication skills

A proven ability to communicate and affect change across cultural and/or linguistic divides

Business Renewables Center

Interested in renewable energy, corporate sustainability, or clean energy finance? Want to interact directly with the biggest renewable energy project developers and Fortune 500 companies seeking to procure utility-scale renewables? Looking for an internship that will allow you to do real work and have real impact?

The Business Renewables Center, or BRC, is a fast-growing RMI initiative that provides concrete tools and guidance to Fortune 500 companies who want to purchase renewable energy at a large scale. After launching in 2015, the BRC was selected as a runner up for Utility Dive’s 2016 Company of the Year award due to its significant impact and growing reputation as a key convener and innovator.

Large corporations have become a major player in the renewable energy industry. In 2015, non-utility companies signed contracts for 3.24 GW of new renewable energy capacity in North America and surpassed utilities as the leading driver of wind energy development. However, the process to sign a PPA is difficult and well outside most companies’ existing expertise. The BRC’s mission is to provide education, drive awareness, and develop specific tools and resources to enable up to 60 GW of corporate purchasing by 2030. To learn more about our community and what we do, please visit our website at www.businessrenewables.org .

As a BRC intern, you will:
Develop valuable experience in the rapidly expanding corporate PPA market;

Learn about key trends in renewable energy;

Interact with our network of over 170 leading companies; and,

Contribute to specific guides, online web applications, or processes that will directly enable this business-led sustainability movement.

An ideal candidate would have some or all of the following characteristics:

Strong interest in renewable energy, particularly large-scale wind and solar

A desire to directly interact with leading renewable energy companies

Some familiarity with U.S. energy markets and PPA transactions

Significant experience with quantitative analysis and computer programming

Excellent writing, research and communication skills

The ability to work both independently and in collaboration with others

Shine: Community Scale-Solar

The Shine Initiative aims to provide every American with clean, affordable electricity, by making community-scale solar the most economic source of electricity. It does so by breaking open the community-scale solar market, by working directly with cities, small utilities, and corporations to reduce community-scale solar costs by 30-40%. The team’s work focuses on three key areas:

Reduce costs so that solar energy can serve all communities, especially those that do not typically have access to clean, affordable electricity

Increase awareness by helping communities and utilities quickly understand the benefits and value provided by solar PV

Increase availability by working with developers to introduce competitive offerings and suitable business models that will be adopted by the full spectrum of communities

Shine executes its vision through collaboration with community-based organizations, not-for-profit utilities (rural electric cooperatives and municipal utilities), and innovative developers. For more information, watch the first half hour of this eLab webinar on community-scale solar.

For 2017, Shine seeks interns to support ongoing activities. Interns should be prepared to contribute to the following efforts:

Business development and outreach to cities, small utilities, and corporations.

Quantitative analysis of the value of solar PV for different stakeholders.

Analysis and communication of lessons learned from completed and ongoing pilot programs.

Analysis, communication, and problem solving for collaborative engagements with developers.

Ideal candidates will have:
Excellent written and oral communication skills

Outstanding analytic and problem-solving capabilities

Strong familiarity with solar market and solar economics

Ideal backgrounds will comprise a mix of:
Energy economics

Engineering

Corporate finance

Project finance

Business operations/ procurement

Community/ economic development

Experience working with community-based-organizations and/or electric utilities

Sustainable Aviation

The Sustainable Aviation Program is partnering with airports around the world to act as low-carbon, sustainable aviation fuels demand centers. Our team, as an objective third party solution provider, is uniquely positioned to convene, align, and inspire the diverse stakeholders that can deliver this bold initiative.

CWR has a robust network of advocates and partners at every level of the aviation industry and has worked with partners such as Virgin Atlantic, Delta, and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Our partner for our airports work is SkyNRG—the global market leader in the blending, distribution, and sale of SAF, and a key influencer and partner of aviation brands including KLM, Virgin, Qantas, Boeing and the world’s largest airports, like Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.

Our team has developed an innovative business model to enable airports to catalyze the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels. In implementing this initiative, our team supports airports every step of the way, advising, problem solving, and engaging stakeholders across the supply chain. We are currently seeking partnerships with pioneering airports. Over the next 12 months, we expect to recruit additional airports and start implementation. We are also developing several tools as guidance for airports to adopt finance mechanisms to cover infrastructure and premiums associated with biofuels.

Now is the time for airports to become a key driver in decarbonizing the aviation industry and we are seeking a highly motivated and talented intern to be an active contributor to our team. A successful intern will have the following skill and knowledge set:

Excellent creative problem solving abilities

Exceptional communication skills, both written and oral

Proven ability to work in a fast-moving and dynamic team

Functional knowledge of key issues and concepts in one or more of the following focus areas:

Biofuels and regional supply chain development

Aviation industry

Life-cycle analysis

Quantitative modeling

Energy economics and policy

Business strategy, finance, and decision-making

Stakeholder engagement

Aptitude to quickly learn new content areas involving technical and financial components

An independent and self-directed work style

Self-confidence to participate as an informed observer in meetings and partner telecons, transitioning into an active contributor in the second half of the internship

This internship will be based out of Boulder, CO or New York City.

Sustainable Finance

RMI launched a Sustainable Finance practice in 2014 with two goals:

Increase the level of rigor and innovation in using finance as a means of driving the success of other initiatives within RMI and CWR.

Develop programs that use finance as a primary means to increase the availability and/or reduce the cost of capital for a broad range of initiatives that can assist in the transition to a cleaner energy economy.

For 2017, SF seeks an intern(s) to support these ongoing activities. Interns may work on one or more of the following types of assignments:

Thought leadership: assisting in analysis, writing reports or preparing presentations to demonstrate the importance of finance as a key driver in accelerating a global energy transition.

Project collaboration: working with other RMI and CWR teams to consider the optimal role of finance to help drive success of that initiative. As part of this role, SF team members may engage with financial market participants, develop or evaluate new financing structures, or review the performance of existing financial instruments.

Support of group activities: SF regularly interfaces with market participants, and in connection with that function, requires assistance in researching the activities of market participants, coordinating dialogue and preparing presentation materials.

Ideal candidates will have:
Strong interest in sustainable finance.

A thorough understanding of business, financial, and economic concepts.

Excellent writing, organizational and communication skills.

Experience using spreadsheets for financial analysis and familiarity in using presentation software (e.g., PowerPoint).

Independence of thinking and action, and ability to work effectively with limited supervision.

Ideal backgrounds will comprise a mix of:
Energy economics, business or finance.

Environmental studies and/or public policy.

Prior experience in any part of the financial services industry.

This internship will be based out of New York City only.

Trucking Efficiency

Trucking Efficiency is a joint effort between NACFE and Carbon War Room to double the freight efficiency of North American goods movement by eliminating barriers associated with information, demand, and supply.

Worldwide, heavy-duty freight trucks emit 1.6 gigatons of CO 2 emissions annually—5.5% of society’s total greenhouse gas emissions—due to the trucking sector’s dependence on petroleum-based fuels. With fuel prices still commanding nearly 40% of the cost of trucking, the adoption of efficiency technologies by all classes of trucks and fleets offers significant cost savings to the sector while reducing emissions. These technologies are relatively cheap to implement and widely available on the market today.

Trucking Efficiency provides detailed information on cost-effective efficiency technologies, including data from across a variety of fleets and best practices for adoption. This Confidence Report series from Trucking Efficiency aims to serve as a credible and independent source of information on fuel efficiency technologies and their applications.

In order to generate confidence on the performance claims of efficiency technologies, Trucking Efficiency, via these reports, gathers and centralizes the multitude of existing sources of data about the performance results of different technology options when employed in a variety of vehicle models and duty cycles, and makes all of that data openly accessible and more easily comparable. Furthermore, we assess the credibility of the available data, and provide an industry-standardized ranking of confidence in performance results, including ROI and efficiency gains. www.truckingefficiency.org

The intern opportunity centers around studying and creating a compare and contrast model for the four teams who participated in the US Department of Energy SuperTruck 1 and now SuperTruck 2 teams. See http://energy.gov/articles/infographic-how-supertruck-making-heavy-duty-vehicles-more-efficient for a summary. All teams delivered tractors and trailers that improved freight efficiency by over 100%. This project will study the publicly available information on their efforts, conduct interviews of the teams, explore with them the technologies and ideas being pursued for SuperTruck 2. The deliverable will be a roadmap on the various decisions reached by the different teams and to create a publication and set of tools that the industry can use to help make decisions for adoption of many emerging technologies. Collaboration will also be conducted with the DOE itself, end user fleets and others with knowledge of an interest in high efficiency Class 8 tractors and trailers.