In this VX News interview, Stuart DeCew, Executive Director at Yale University’s Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY), offers a dynamic perspective on clean energy, education, and leadership development. With a wealth of global and interdisciplinary experience—from the Peace Corps to Capitol Hill, to teaching at one of the nation’s top universities—DeCew emphasizes the need for pragmatic optimism in addressing the climate crisis. Discussing innovative programs, like Yale’s Clean and Equitable Energy Development (CEED) Program, DeCew highlights the role of academic institutions in empowering the next generation of environmental leaders through practical, hands-on education and cultivates reimagining of climate tech commercialization, renewable energy finance, and clean energy development.
Stuart, as the executive director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY), let's begin with you sharing the Yale University’s’ SOM/YSE program offerings.
The Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY) is a joint initiative between the Yale School of Management and the Yale School of the Environment. In 2006, it was founded upon and builds on a long history of firsts at Yale. Yale's the first school of forestry in the United States that was established in 1900 and the first joint degree program where we connected up getting an MBA and a degree in the School of the Environment, whether it's a Master of Environmental Management or a Master of Environmental Science or Master of Forestry.
Building on all these firsts, we have a lot of entrepreneurial and nimble people who come through here and themselves, build a range of programming. We do everything at the center, from really large-scale field trials with world-class faculty like Ken Gillingham on how to make solar go viral at a community level, running interventions on a town-by-town basis or how we change the marketing parameters to ensure that more people are adopting residential solar. We've been doing that for a decade.
We do huge online learning programs. We have thought deeply about the mission and focus of what an institution like Yale should be as a public good. One of the things we came back with was it matters what a 45 or a 65-year-old does tomorrow on clean energy, where they can have a lever on how funding gets deployed, policy changes, or a business model switches. We've been able to build online programs where we unlock the best curriculum out of Yale and offer it to those individuals, where five hours a week, we’re teaching them exactly what they would need to know to use the next day in clean energy policy, development, deployment, technology transitions, finance, and a range of other issues.
We also support all the early-stage entrepreneurs in and around Yale, which I think we'll talk about a bit more later – where do we get the earliest ideas here and give them bits of non-dilutive capital, like $3,000 to $5,000 for a climate tech venture, support services, mentorship in the university, and then build them up through the 2 to 3 years that they're on campus to the point where they can go out and raise a seed round and establish their business and begin hiring, whether here in New Haven or the region or anywhere around the globe.
It ends up being a really interesting place to work. I love it here. I've been here for 16 years as a student, administrator, and faculty member. We sometimes describe ourselves as like the mycelial network at Yale, where we're enabling all the growth in the soil from all these other things that are popping in and around. We're the unseen force enabling other things to be successful in and around the university – it's a great place.
Impressive answer! Using your ‘mycelial network’ metaphor above, what are you planting in the soil? And, how has SOM/YSE’s student body changed over your 16 years?
You know, there are the things that haven't changed, that have stayed consistent. You have incredibly curious people who want to be where— I describe it as—where fresh and saltwater meet. The most productive place in a fishery is where those two happen to come together. You find all these people who are melding and changing between different disciplines of business and the environment, or law and business, or divinity and the environment, or public health and management. You find them at these intersections, and they're trying to put things together. Innovation is this element of recombination, of grabbing bits of one idea and building on the others, and you find those over and over again.
A great example is we had a student come through here from the Law School and the School of Management who was interested in different models for clean energy finance at a local level and where it would benefit the broadest number of communities. He was putting together all these early-stage models for how to create better financing structures and better business models for folks at a local level. He worked here and worked on one of our publications, the Yale Clean Energy Forum, writing articles for it, went on to have a very successful career, and ultimately ended up designing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at the EPA. His name's Jahi Wise, and he's a wonderful, talented, creative human with an understanding of the private, public, and social sectors, pulling on all of those.
Those types of individuals are still coming through. The topics they're interested in change over time. You see these waves where students, if you listen to them at an early stage, will tell you what's coming. Fifteen years ago, everybody was focused on clean energy at a very early stage, saying, ‘this is going to be huge, you have to pay attention to it.’ We built a lot of programming and activity on that. Seven years ago, students started saying, ‘I am coming to Yale to study regenerative agriculture.’ We looked at them and said, ‘We're not an ag school. This is not a land grant university. We don't have that.’ They were coming because they said, ‘I can put together the finance, the business models, the ecology, and I see the legal structures all in this place.’ Other places, you would have a locked-in approach to how they see and understand the system and how they want to increase yield, apply fertilizer, or apply pesticide. Here, they can reimagine it.
You see those topics shift. Now, regenerative agriculture, textiles, and sustainable fashion are a huge focus in addition to clean energy. Another trend I think is remarkable is the breadth of people with different expertise coming to these topics—from political science, public health, law, or the Divinity School. These are all students we work with, support, and engage. Maybe when I was a student here 16 years ago, the School of Management and the School of the Environment were the places holding these conversations. Now, it's everywhere, including technical disciplines—people with deep technical backgrounds in the final year of their PhDs saying, "I'm going to build something over the next 10 years." They’re putting their pre-commercial research and bench-top research into practice when they come out. It’s a vibrant time to be in this space.
Given you are centered in New Haven and Yale, and our VerdeXchange conference and publications are centered in California, what, if anything, re environment policy and practice differs as a result of coastal location?
Well, I think there are some things where California is a place to be, or one of the places to be. We love it. You learn so much from it in terms of environmental policy making, innovation, and the California effect. We have a joint degree graduate, Elliot Mainzer, who runs CAISO. He's the president of it, coming out of Yale, and he is a brilliant, incredible market maker and individual who's considering all these factors. Staying connected to those people and learning from them is part of what this institution really has to do.
In the Northeast, you look at the Fertile Crescent of clean tech or climate tech investment in the world—from New York to Boston. That's where the vast majority of money is concentrated. You look at everything from New Lab in New York to Greentown Labs and the Engine in Boston to Climate Haven, the new climate tech incubator we've set up in New Haven. There’s an emerging ecosystem of early-stage startups focused on the 45% of really hard-to-decarbonize industries, where they’re making a lot of progress at a rapid scale.
The Northeast has been a great place for experimentation at scale. The Connecticut Green Bank, founded 13 years ago by a Yale School of the Environment alum, Bryan Garcia, working with folks in the state, became a model for how to develop markets, deploy finance, and partner with community lenders and developers. It showed a dynamic, entrepreneurial, quasi-public-private organization in action. That became the model for green banks across the United States. Now, with the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, that model has proven its value.
Connecticut is a "one-call state." You can get in touch with the commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the head of Yale Ventures, or the MD of CT Innovations Climate Tech Fund quickly. This allows flexibility and nimbleness where California is massive. There are layers of people to go through. You can run quicker experiments in Connecticut, Massachusetts, or New York. Massachusetts just passed powerful climate legislation, aiming to fund, support, and focus on climate tech and clean energy at scale.
You see cool developments—solar in California, offshore wind on the East Coast. There’s interesting battery storage work in California and innovations for grid flexibility in the Northeast. Both are neat spots to explore and experiment. There are a lot of cool places in the U.S., but we’re proud of our home here.
Share with our readers your involvement with New Haven’s ClimateHaven.
ClimateHaven is a fantastic development for all the people who've come through Yale and been focused on climate, clean energy, and environmental innovation, and wanted to stay here. More importantly, it's a central place for the region where everyone interested in this can convene and connect—the entrepreneurs, the venture capital investors, the strategics, the corporates, and all the people who support them in different services.
This is an early-stage climate tech incubator and accelerator set up in New Haven. It just celebrated its official year anniversary for the space, although we've been up and running for almost two years as an organization. This year, there are now over 20 early-stage climate tech ventures based there. About half have come out of the university, and those ventures have raised $13.5 million in that year. We expected to hopefully get to 20 ventures by the end of this year. We achieved that very quickly in the first quarter, and we anticipated seeing term sheets and people funded by the end of next year, but we're already seeing that, beating all our expectations.
The people who put it together are a coalition from the state, the Connecticut Green Bank, the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, entrepreneurs who’ve been successful in the climate tech space in Connecticut, representatives from Yale and Yale Ventures, the City of New Haven, and community foundations. It was a multi-sectoral effort by people working in big institutions who wanted to scratch an entrepreneurial itch outside of them.
This was a way we could do that together in a way that benefits the community. It’s exciting to see the dollars raised and the real-world impact—like these new ventures hiring 42 people in the first year. That workforce development and the creation of meaningful careers, where people have ownership, agency, and jobs they love, is where you see real power in climate tech and environmental innovation reaching a broader set of people.
Stuart, we are well aware of Yale World Fellows Program, but share how global CBEY is? Do you draw from around the world? If so, how does that influence your programs, priorities, and focus?
That's the remarkable part of being at a place like this. Over 30% of the student population and faculty are drawn from around the globe. Walking around a city of 135,000, you can hear 4 to 5 languages spoken on the street in a simple walk. We embrace that diversity of perspectives, thought, and action. Earlier, we heard from an incredibly talented student here on a full scholarship through the Three Cairns program, a scholarship program for students from countries in the Global South. They're doing a deep-dive independent study with a community solar developer in the Northeast, figuring out the model—how to model it financially, assess risk profiles, and everything else. This student, with incredible talent from another part of the world, is studying and exploring what works here, with the potential to translate it or bring it back to their home country.
We’ve also seen the reverse, where people bring distributed models and approaches from their regions and embed them in our practices and programs. One of the best parts of being here is being in groups where someone from Chile, Kenya, Maine, and Latvia are all in the same learning team or project. They're incredibly global, wildly intelligent, and focused on clean energy and climate solutions.
Stuart, you personally been experienced the consequences of political election results - 2016, 2020, and now 2024, where climate policies zig and zag dramatically. How challenging is it to keep you CBEY students positive re their long-term aspirations when the zag portends policies they reject?
One way to keep them focused on the long term is to look at the macro trends. Seventy years ago, Bell Labs invented the solar PV. In the first 68 years, we deployed about a terawatt—enough to power 46 million homes. In the last two years, we've deployed another terawatt. That demonstrates vast change in the market, which is dramatically shaping things.
Heat pump sales have outpaced gas furnace sales for the past three years by a significant margin. This past year saw the largest investment in clean energy and climate technology in the U.S. by a wide margin. These are signs of tremendous growth.
Yes, federal policy can shift, but the long-term trends remain strong. In 2016, global clean energy investment was around $287.5 billion; by 2020, it was over $500 billion. During that period, incredible innovation happened at the state, regional, and local levels. For example, the Connecticut Green Bank experimented with expanding solar access to low- and middle-income communities. That model proved so successful it became the basis for the federal Solar for All program, now a $7 billion initiative. You have to maintain pragmatic optimism. Each day presents challenges or opportunities to address. Political shifts are real and require attention, but we need a clearer and more empathetic message for communities wondering where their opportunities lie. It’s about showing electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and others what clean energy can mean for them—jobs, ownership, and agency.
We focus on addressing uncertainty and offering solutions through initiatives like our clean and equitable energy development program. These programs teach how clean energy development works at the local level and ensure it's accessible and attractive to rural and urban communities often left behind. We’re also fostering regional clusters of trained individuals to enable workforce development and economic growth across the country. Academic institutions need to step up, and our students must step up as well. They need to listen, engage, and have the entrepreneurial drive to move policy, finance, and business models toward where they need to go.
The science and macro trends are clear. Market forces like economies of scale and innovation are making technologies like solar and batteries cheaper and more deployable. Scientists and technologists have done their part. Now it's time for others to deploy and implement these solutions. This is the moment for our students to step up and become the individuals they imagined when they came here. The world needs them, and so do the communities they care about.
Pivoting to your accomplished career. You’ve been a Peace Corps volunteer, worked with the Sierra Club, served as a congressional aide, done research in Mexico, and organized a film festival in Cairo. How has the above shaped who Stuart DeCew is?
When I came out of college, I was looking for opportunities that matched my skills and interests, while allowing me to be helpful. I explored different fields in two-year cycles—diving into politics to see where I could be effective, then onto Capitol Hill, and later teaching civics and government to get closer to the root of the issues I wanted to address.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, I worked on municipal services development in a town of 20,000. Being close to real challenges, like a whiskey factory upstream flooding a river and making livestock sick, gave me a deep understanding of how bad policy and business practices harm communities. While I couldn’t enact change there, I saw opportunities to be effective back home, where I understood the systems—political structures, financial flows, and business models.
These varied experiences provide me with multiple lenses to approach problems, allowing me to quickly cycle through perspectives. That’s where innovation happens—on the edge. David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World captures this idea well. By pulling insights from different areas and recombining them, you can create connections and solutions others might not see.
This perspective helps me serve as a guide and leader at Yale, supporting students, faculty, alumni, and partners by offering diverse ways of thinking and problem-solving.
A somewhat provocative question: What are Yale’s CBEY POV blind spots? Are there topics, like nuclear energy, that are politically difficult for students and faculty to address?
I think we’re fortunate to be in a place where we can talk about and explore almost any topic. For example, we’ve had students deeply interested in nuclear energy—examining its models, political will, timelines, costs, and whether we have the expertise to deploy it. By breaking it down into practical questions like “What would it take?” or “How do we do this?” you can move past the “why” and into problem-solving. This approach sparks more constructive conversations, like comparing nuclear to other options—solar, batteries, wind, or advanced geothermal—and considering the right energy portfolio.
We’re also able to leverage the experiences of students here, like former oil and gas engineers transitioning into clean energy. They bring invaluable insights into how major energy companies operate, both domestically and internationally, which fuels informed discussions. At the same time, we explore what it would take for every U.S. community to have equitable access to clean energy. We look at how regulatory structures or investment practices have historically excluded certain urban and rural areas. Often, when a clean energy project is proposed, these communities resist—not out of opposition to the idea but because they’ve never been included in the process before. It’s crucial to rethink ownership models so these groups can benefit meaningfully from this massive energy transition.
Ultimately, I hope a place like this continues to foster free, thoughtful, and open debates on any topic that comes through.
Can our readers take your class, Stuart? Quite impressive.
I teach a class called Fundamentals of Working with People. It’s kind of funny—students laugh at the name—but it focuses on organizational behavior, leadership, and team dynamics. We distilled these topics for students who’d rather measure trees or analyze data sets than think about the social science side of working with people. It’s simulation-based, emphasizing how to get people to listen, engage, and collaborate, as well as pushing students into different parts of the community to hear other perspectives.
I also work on independent studies and collaborate with other faculty. This spring, we’re launching a new course on Climate Tech Innovation and Commercialization, taught by Steph Speirs, the founder of Solstice, one of the first community solar developers in the U.S. Another standout is Renewable Energy Project Finance, taught by Daniel Gross, head of Amazon’s Climate Pledge. It’s the largest elective between the School of Management and the School of the Environment, with over 200 students learning intricate financial modeling. Richard Kauffman teaches Financing Green Technologies. As New York’s former energy czar and the chair of Generate Capital, he has a wealth of experience that far surpasses mine. You just sit and soak up knowledge from someone operating on that level.
We also bring in top practitioners. For example, Jamie Carlson from SoftBank teaches in our Clean and Equitable Energy Development program. When we realized no one else was teaching clean energy development—purely expecting people to figure it out through experience—we went directly to professionals like Jamie and Sarah Slusser, CEO of Cypress Creek. They condense decades of expertise into an online five-week course for 35 working professionals. Topics include siting, permitting, interconnection, and community benefit agreements. It’s phenomenal to see such expertise distilled and shared in this way.
There are so many people here I’d take classes from if I had endless time.
All Yale and CBEY are missing is Jigar Shah.
If you have a connection, send it over! We’re taking applications. Jigar would be incredible. Peter Boyd, who teaches the leadership course here, worked closely with Jigar as his COO at the Carbon War Room. Jigar would be perfect for a global online course on creative and dynamic thinking—putting together the puzzle pieces of clean energy. If VerdeXchange gets it going, I’ll take your course!