About Jeffrey Rissman

Jeffrey Rissman is Senior Director, Industry at Energy Innovation, where he leads the company’s work on technologies and policies to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the industry sector. He is the author of Zero-Carbon Industry: Transformative Technologies and Policies to Achieve Sustainable Prosperity (2024) and coauthor of Designing Climate Solutions: A Policy Guide for Low-Carbon Energy (2018). In 2024, Jeffrey was appointed by the secretary of energy to the Department of Energy’s Industrial Technology Innovation Advisory Committee, where he currently serves as Vice Chair.

Jeff is also the creator of the Energy Policy Simulator, an open-source computer model that quantifies the effects of various energy and environmental policies in combination, predicting outputs such as fuel use, pollutant emissions, financial cost or savings, electric vehicle deployment, power sector structure, and more. Versions of the simulator have been developed for an ever-growing list of countries and regions, in partnership with in-country government agencies or NGOs, accounting for more than 60 percent of the world’s emissions.

Previously, Jeff worked on policies supporting R&D for clean energy and efficiency technologies for the American Energy Innovation Council, where he led a survey of 17 R&D leaders investigating trends, opportunities, and challenges to unleashing private sector energy R&D.

Jeff holds an M.S. in Environmental Sciences and Engineering and a Masters in City and Regional Planning, both from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was a Research Fellow for the University of North Carolina Institute for the Environment, where he studied aircraft emissions for the Federal Aviation Administration. Jeff also holds a B.A. in International Relations with honors from Stanford University.