Host: Washington State Department of Commerce
Region: Washington
Openings: 1
Project Focus: Affordable Housing, Energy Efficiency
Skills Needed: Community Engagement, Relationship Management, Community Outreach, Stakeholder Engagement,

Remote or On-Site Placement

Hybrid – Our group works mostly remotely across Washington state, including Seattle, Olympia, Ellensburg and Spokane. We meet in-person, typically on a quarterly basis. Folks in the Seattle Office go into the office once a week.

Service Needs & Plans

The Department of Commerce seeks a fellow that will help the agency go deeper in our ambitious appliance efficiency work by engaging appliance stakeholders, creating outreach and educational resources, collecting and analyzing market data, and developing new processes for enforcement. Energy efficiency provides a resilience and capacity benefit to the state’s grid—benefitting all customers—in addition to saving customers money over the product’s lifetime. Washington’s state appliance energy efficiency standards save homeowners an estimated $500 in avoided utility bills annually.

Project Description

The overarching goals of the project are to accelerate the deployment of energy efficient appliances and help the state achieve real energy efficiency gains by improving outreach, education, and enforcement around appliance standards. The fellow will be responsible for a three-prong scope:

1.Outreach and education to manufacturers, organizing events and workshops to keep stakeholders engaged in our state appliance standards. The fellow would be responsible (with help from staff) for developing the Washington appliance standards stakeholder network that is engaged on a regular cadence.

2.Market transformation data collection and analysis. The agency would benefit from data analysis that shows a current baseline of compliance, in addition to opportunities to make public-facing dashboards that shows state progress on specific technologies (ex. heat pump sales).

3.Re-developing how the agency conducts appliance standards enforcement and making recommendations to agency staff on how enforcement could be made more effective. This could include the drafting of official amendments for consideration by the legislature, or creating enforcement tools, among other deliverables.
These activities will help the state achieve tangible energy efficiency gains for consumers using residential and commercial appliances.

Desired Skills

An ideal candidate for this role would have excellent stakeholder management and engagement skills (encompassing some mixture of communication, writing, and coordination skills). In addition, a self-motivated candidate interested in or possessing experience with data collection and data analysis would be a good fit for the data needs of this role.

Organization & Workplace Highlights

Our Mission
The mission of the Washington State Department of Commerce is to strengthen communities and grow the economy.

Our Vision
With a broad scope of over 150 programs and partnerships, Commerce has a unique opportunity to create transformative change. Improving the health conditions for people of color, indigenous individuals and communities, and low-income people who continue to be disproportionately harmed by environmental and health hazards is essential to our vision of a more equitable, inclusive, sustainable and resilient economy.

Our key customers include businesses, local governments, community-based organizations and tribes. We also play the crucial role of convening numerous local, state, regional and federal partners and stakeholders, public and private. Together we work to support the Governor’s priorities and achieve shared goals and objectives for the citizens of Washington.

Community Highlights

We are creative, collaborative, and trusted. We cultivate a work environment in which we continuously learn, and we own our work.

Improving the health conditions for people of color, indigenous individuals and communities, and low-income people who continue to be disproportionately harmed by environmental and health hazards is essential to advancing our mission to strengthen communities.

Our organization our offers a great professional development experience as it is filled with highly trained policy staff working on important clean energy, climate, environmental justice, and equity issues. Staff are dedicated to helping our fellows succeed at Commerce and their future goals.

The Energy Office is an interesting place to work because it is a national leader in climate and clean energy policy, and at the forefront of policy on equity and environmental justice issues. Washington is home to wonderful communities, and fellows may join our team from any location in the state and fully participate in agency events and activities.