Peter McPhee

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Director, Clean Heating & Cooling — Massachusetts Clean Energy Center

I'm working to solve one big issue: that 30% of Massachusetts’ emissions come from heating. My job is to figure out how to reduce heating emissions to a tiny fraction of that. In practice, I have to come up with a plan, convince people to invest state money in it, and then deliver the plan. And then I need to keep key decision-makers engaged in the plan for long enough to make it work. I’ve made what at the time seemed like drastic changes in career path. The first of these was when I left college after 2 years and became a carpenter. The second of these was when I left carpentry after two years and went back to school. I ultimately attended four colleges before getting my undergraduate degree at UMass Amherst at 25. By that time, though, I was intensely interested in medical applications of engineering and started doing a Ph.D. in biomechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins. After a couple years of that, though, I realized academic research wasn’t the right fit for me. This coincided with a growing obsession with climate change and energy. I made a third hard decision and abandoned the pathway I chose in order to pursue something I felt enormously driven by. I took a job with a European energy consultancy (now DNV GL) which exposed me to a wide array of energy topics, which was enormously enriching. It ultimately led me to establish a wind energy practice at this consultancy. I transitioned these skills to helping develop clean energy industries and projects at the state’s clean energy development agency. I’ve been working for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center for nine years, and it has been an incredible experience and privilege to be part of making the Commonwealth a leader in clean energy. In my current role as Director of Clean Heating & Cooling at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, I championed and gained buy-in for approximately $65 million of programs to support the development of industries that have the potential to reduce our heating emissions by an order of magnitude. These programs contributed to developing a clean heating industry, seeded programs in other states, and supported the transition of 20,000 Massachusetts homes and businesses to clean heating systems.