DOE Announces New Senior Leadership Appointees

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced new senior leadership appointees, which it says will help the agency deliver on the Biden administration’s bold climate agenda to create an equitable clean energy future for the American people.

Jigar Shah will serve as the director of the loan programs office - which oversees the DOE’s more than $40 billion in loan authority across manufacturing, innovative finance, and tribal energy projects - and Karen Skelton will serve as a senior advisor to the secretary of energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

Shah was most recently the co-founder and president at Generate Capital, where he focused on helping entrepreneurs accelerate decarbonization solutions. Prior to Generate Capital, Shah founded SunEdison and served as the founding chief executive officer of the Carbon War Room. Skelton joins the Biden-Harris Administration from California, where she spent the last decade as the chief executive officer and founder of Skelton Strategies. Skelton has also served as Governor Jerry Brown’s director of strategic partnerships at the Global Climate Action Summit and has founded and managed a series of reports on the transformational role of women in American life, including an Emmy nominated documentary.

“DOE is thrilled to bring on these dynamic leaders, who understand the urgency of the climate crisis and will help us seize opportunities to deploy the clean energy technologies of the future,” the organization’s chief of staff, Tarak Shah, said in a statement posted on the DOE’s website.

“Jigar and Karen both know how to implement the kind of transformative policies we need to build our energy economy back better, while creating millions of good-paying union jobs and delivering benefits to the hardest-hit communities,” Shah added in the statement.

For a full list of Biden-Harris administration appointees who have joined the DOE, click here. To contact the author, email andreas.exarheas@rigzone.com