Two Yale centers are teaming up to launch a certificate program in clean and equitable energy development

Tim Tai, senior photographer

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Center for Environmental Justice are teaming up to launch a new online certificate program for working professionals.

The program, the Clean and Equitable Energy Development Certificate, or CEED, opened registrations on April 10. It is designed to train working professionals to develop equitable clean energy infrastructure in their communities. Program administrators hope to target clean energy advocates and community leaders, such as church facility managers or low-income housing and health care workers.

Gelbotar said they also hope the course will attract clean energy developers eager to serve these communities.

“For a system to work in a way that is fair, equitable and functional for communities, the environment and the energy system, many things need to change,” said Stuart DeCrew, executive director of CBEY. “We need people who can teach us what that transition looks like.”

The online program will consist of two cohorts per year and will last twelve weeks in both the fall and spring. Classes start on September 2. The program will be delivered entirely online, with a combination of short, asynchronous lectures and other longer synchronous content, including panel discussions and office hours, said Coral Bielecki, director of online programs at the Yale Center for Business and the Area.

Students, who administrators expect to come from all over the world, are expected to spend about five hours per week on the course.

Based on a pilot cohort that tested the course last semester, program directors said they expect participants in CEED will come from a variety of backgrounds — including school administrators, bishops, energy developers, policymakers and financial professionals, said Michel Gelobter, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice and one of CEED’s lead instructors.

Graduate degree programs, developed in collaboration with the Poorvu Center, exist at several of Yale’s professional schools, including the School of Public Health. DeCrew said they are designed for individuals who may not have the time or resources to attend Yale’s graduate programs full-time, but still want to further their education and “explore the best that Yale has to offer.”

“We take the best lessons from tenured faculty around Yale and condense them into a program that a 45-year-old with two kids and five hours a week could take,” he said.

The Center for Business and Environment, housed at the School of the Environment, previously developed a certificate program on the financing and deployment of clean energy in 2019. Since then, DeCrew said, Center staff realized there was a need for a course to teach a step-by-step process for developing clean energy programs.

Gelobter said the launch of CEED is also timely. He pointed to a recent influx of federal money to fight climate change in underserved communities — including the Biden administration’s Justice40 Initiative, which calls for 40 percent of nearly $2 trillion in federal climate and clean energy investments to go to underserved communities must flow.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $20 billion in grants to create a national financing network for clean energy infrastructure. Another federal program, announced April 22, set aside $7 billion in grant funding to bring solar energy to low-income communities, DeCrew added.

Given the increase in available funding for clean energy projects, Gelobter said he believes local organizers need to understand how to design clean energy programs that effectively use federal money.

Many of the participants in the program’s pilot cohort have been people who distribute federal funding or who will receive funding at the state and local level, Gelobter said.

“There is enormous pressure and demand on anyone who is committing that much money to do it in a way that is just, fair and equitable,” Gelobter said. “A large part of the audience for this course is people in those positions.”

Key to the program, the instructors say, are the principles of environmental justice and energy justice: how climate change can worsen economic inequality and how to equitably distribute clean energy infrastructure to underserved communities.

Students will also learn how to design and implement clean energy programs at the technical level. They learn how, for example, to finance and design projects such as solar arrays, and then connect them to existing energy networks.

“If we want to get anything done, we have to see ourselves as the makers of the changes and not wait for a new generation to do it,” Bielecki said.

The Yale Center for Business and the Environment was founded in 2006.