Julia is an experienced energy, sustainability, and climate professional with over 16 years of experience spanning the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Her work has encompassed policy analysis, regulatory strategy, carbon reduction initiatives, stakeholder outreach, and project management. She is skilled in both writing and public speaking, adept at tailoring communications for diverse audiences, and creating both written and visual content.
Julia holds a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota, with a focus on energy and environmental policy, and an undergraduate degree in environmental studies and geography from Macalester College. She is a founding Board member of the Twin Cities Young Professionals in Energy group, was named to the Midwest Energy News 40 Under 40, and is a co-creator of the Feminist Fight Club – Minnesota Women in Energy edition.
As Associate Director of Utility and Regulatory Strategy at the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), Julia leads the development and implementation of a comprehensive power sector strategy, provides technical assistance to local governments and community-based organizations (CBOs) on utility and regulatory engagement, and represents IMT as a thought leader across the industry. Prior to IMT, she was the Public Policy and Strategy Manager at Xcel Energy, where she helped develop the utility’s carbon reduction goal, tracked utility business model trends, coordinated regulatory strategies, and prepared policy comments.
Can you speak about what the Institute for Market Transformation is like, where you work, and your background leading up to joining IMT?
The Institute for Market Transformation, or IMT, is a national nonprofit focused on improving buildings for the people in them and the communities around them. We work at the intersection of businesses – including building owners and utilities – local and state governments, and, to some degree, the federal government. We also prioritize bringing in community members to inform policy design around buildings and business practices. This expands the idea of what building performance is. We’ll talk more about building performance standards as a policy later, but we’re going beyond just the technical and energy consumption focus of building performance, to include public health considerations and broader community impacts like displacement or affordability.
When talking to people outside the industry, I usually say we’re a nonprofit that works on energy efficiency policy, focusing on existing buildings, although we do work on energy codes for new buildings too. Increasingly, we’re working on energy equity issues, in addition to and integrated with building performance and benchmarking policies. My work focuses on utilities and regulators, and the innovative utility policies that can support building decarbonization. Green leasing is another area we’ve had experience with, especially around business or building owner practices.
I’ve been at IMT for nearly five years now. Before that, I spent over a decade in the energy industry, beginning by working for a small energy co-op that delivered low-income energy efficiency programs in a specific neighborhood of Minneapolis. Since then, I’ve worked in both the public and private sectors – for the city, a state agency, and at an investor-owned utility. I spent five years working for Xcel Energy here in Minnesota on the regulatory affairs and environmental policy teams.
After leaving Xcel, I took some time to figure out my next steps and whether I wanted to stay in energy. I always get pulled back because it’s such a dynamic industry that impacts so much. I didn’t know about IMT before applying, but it felt like the right fit as I learned more about it, especially in working from the outside to influence utilities and encouraging them to do more on energy efficiency, climate, and equity.
Over the last few years, we’ve taken a more community-centered approach to policymaking, while balancing the urgency to act on climate issues. We created a Community Engagement team at IMT that is leading this shift, bringing in CBOs and supporting them to participate in building decarbonization conversations. This shift aligns with my values and has kept me at the organization.
You mentioned that bringing community input is a newer approach. I’m curious why this component was recently added rather than historically.
Like many of our peer organizations, we were a very technically focused organization for a long time. We viewed the key actors around building performance as the building owners, businesses, and policymakers, not necessarily community members. We thought of it as a technical policymaking process that community members wouldn’t want to participate in.
Personally, I come from a community-based background. I started my career in energy doing low-income energy efficiency programs, going door-to-door to encourage people to swap out refrigerators and window ACs, so I was very much on the ground. I’ve stayed involved in other community-based clean energy work since then, both personally and professionally.
Being based in Minneapolis, MN, I experienced the uprising of 2020 firsthand. It really shook me, especially being so close to where everything was happening. It sparked a broader conversation on racial equity across many organizations and institutions, including ours. This pushed us to focus more on distributional equity – who’s involved in our processes – and expanding the scope of what should be included in building policy.
You must have gone through a significant change, moving from a big company like Xcel to a smaller, more focused organization. Was that an easy adjustment?
My career trajectory had been moving toward progressively larger organizations, starting with a smaller neighborhood-focused program, then expanding to Metro region work, statewide work in Minnesota, and then to Xcel Energy, which serves eight states. It was a much broader scope than any other organization I’d worked for.
I appreciated the scale of impact, especially working on the regulatory side and climate policy. However, I also felt frustrated by the pace of change at utilities. I was involved in conversations about distributed energy resources, grid modernization, and regulatory reform with folks in the industry more broadly, but felt the utility wasn’t moving quickly enough on those topics and others. That frustration partly led to my decision to leave.
At IMT, our scope is national, so I work with cities, states, community-based organizations, and utilities across the country. I have a lot of autonomy over my work, especially around utility and regulatory issues. The scale feels right sized for what I was looking for.
You mentioned distributed energy resources. I was just sent the Xcel Minnesota Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) filing. It seems like they’re exploring more than just the traditional “match supply to demand” approach.
Xcel has been a leader – in part due to advocacy and state policy in their service territory – in clean energy, energy efficiency, and demand flexibility. I worked on the Xcel Energy 2014 Upper Midwest IRP, and we received a lot of pushback from a Commissioner on the Minnesota Public Utility Commission to do more around demand response. Since then, their demand response efforts have expanded significantly.
Xcel has long treated energy efficiency as a resource, comparing it to other supply-side resources. We’re seeing more of that now, with demand flexibility being modeled alongside other resources. The other recent development requiring the Minnesota IOUs to do integrated distribution planning (IDP) has introduced a new set of challenges and opportunities around how those two processes are coordinated.
Considering benchmarking, BEPS, and stretch codes, and how there’s increasing cohesion between codes and BEPS policies, what does successful deployment of a building-focused policy look like to you? What would be the best-in-class components for the best outcomes?
Starting with what IMT means by building performance standards (BPS): it’s about reducing carbon emissions in existing buildings by improving energy, gas, and water use and managing peak demand. The standards take a trajectory approach – becoming stricter over time to drive continuous improvement in building stock. That’s a key part of our idea of BPS design. We see BPS as complementary to building codes, which generally only affect new construction or major renovations. BPS fills a gap in existing building requirements, which are crucial to meeting climate and energy goals. Benchmarking is a different but enabling policy that’s about tracking a building’s utility consumption data without requiring action.
There are elements needed across benchmarking, BPS, and stretch codes to be successful. Early stakeholder engagement is key for shaping policies and building buy-in. Clear goals, metrics, and timelines are essential, especially for BPS. Adequate resources for implementation and compliance are crucial. Streamlined data access, reporting processes, as well as training, education, incentives, and financing options are also important. Regular evaluation and refinement are necessary, allowing room for policy modification as needed.
In our BPS implementation guide, we discuss challenges too. Data access, resource constraints from both building owners and local governments, and stakeholder pushback are common issues. We’ve developed a structure for a Community Accountability Board to represent more stakeholders, ensuring equity considerations are addressed throughout the process. We always suggest including this in policies.
Where do you stand on utilities claiming savings?
In Massachusetts, for example, utilities couldn’t claim savings for bringing a building up to code. When the stretch code was introduced, there was concern that if buildings adopted the code, they would lose utility rebates. Do you have a position on how utility efficiency should be treated for meeting performance standards or stretch codes?
BPS policies need utility program support to be both politically viable and practically achievable. That said, the relationship between utility savings attribution and BPS is fundamentally different from building codes for several key reasons:
- In new construction, work is happening to comply with the code – the question is just what standard it meets. With BPS, many retrofits wouldn’t happen at all without the policy driver. This makes BPS more like a “market opportunity” in EM&V terms, where utilities can typically claim full savings between old and new systems.
- BPS are performance-based, not prescriptive. They don’t mandate specific equipment upgrades, just overall building performance improvements. This gives more flexibility in how savings are achieved.
- Unlike building codes which update every few years with utility involvement, BPS typically set long-term performance targets.
DC provides a good model through their Sustainable Energy Utility (DCSEU), which was explicitly authorized to support BPS compliance through incentives. This allows them to provide comprehensive support while still claiming appropriate savings attribution. This ACEEE Summer Study paper written by my IMT colleagues along with representatives from the City of Denver and DCSEU explains that model for BPS support through utility efficiency programs: Lessons from the Ground – Implementing BPS
We need a new framework that moves beyond just counting incremental savings above code, while addressing the unique ways BPS differ from prior code programs. The key is finding the right balance that maintains program integrity while providing the financial support needed to make BPS successful.
I reread your Fortnightly article in preparation for this interview. It felt like a precursor reading it now a year later. Do you see a connection between the Fortnightly article, the Model Law, and the Invisible Elephant Summer Study paper?
Our main goal with the Fortnightly article was to bring these issues to the attention of utilities. These policies are happening in more places, and we need to address questions of savings attribution among other things. I’m interested in considering how buildings are considered in utility planning processes, for example. We talked a bit about demand flexibility, but utilities should see buildings as more of a resource to the grid, like a distributed energy resource.
The Calico and EPA ACEEE Summer Study paper brings up whether to pass benchmarking or data access policies separately or combine them. Decoupling it can prevent confusion about implementation. While it may feel like backtracking, there’s value in doing them separately. Our model law, developed in partnership with the Regulatory Assistance Project, provides comprehensive language and considerations for expanding access to whole-building utility data. This will provide a foundation for developing future, data-driven building performance policies.
As some of these BEPS move to carbon goals rather than energy, I’ve noticed a sentiment at building conferences that if something doesn’t have any carbon, it can be used as much as we want, disregarding efficiency. Traditionally, the cheapest fuel is the one you don’t use. Do you see any tension between that?
There’s definitely tension there, and it’s a crucial issue we need to address. While prioritizing carbon reduction is our policies is positive, we can’t ignore efficiency. The idea that zero-carbon energy can be used without limit is shortsighted.
Even with renewable energy, our grid has capacity limits. Inefficient use puts unnecessary strain on the system and slows down the overall transition. Plus, generating renewable electricity still requires resources for equipment like solar panels and wind turbines.
And you’re absolutely right that the cheapest energy is still the energy you don’t use. Efficiency measures often have quicker payback periods than renewable installations, making them a cost-effective first step in decarbonization. Efficient buildings also help with peak demand management, increase resilience during outages, and contribute to holistic sustainability beyond just carbon emissions.
The goal should be efficient electrification – using renewable energy sources but doing so efficiently. As we design BEPS and other policies, we need to incentivize both carbon reduction and energy efficiency. The most sustainable built environment will be both carbon-free and highly efficient. We shouldn’t sacrifice one for the other but strive for both simultaneously.
In Conclusion
We always enjoy our conversations with Julia, and this time was no different. We value her emphasis on including community voices in shaping building performance standards and energy policies. Her pragmatic approach focuses on setting clear goals and allocating the necessary resources to ensure these policies are effectively implemented. Julia’s insights into integrating energy efficiency and carbon reduction into utility planning highlight the importance of balancing technical solutions with real-world community concerns. Her perspective shows that successful energy policies require collaboration across sectors and the flexibility to adapt to new challenges, all while keeping the focus on positively impacting both people and the planet.
More IMT Resources
Empowering Climate Action in Minneapolis How do we ensure communities can withstand the impacts of climate change? In a new paper and factsheet, IMT examines this fundamental question and solutions in the context of Minneapolis, MN. These resources, created in partnership with members of the Just Transition Fund Coalition, recommend sustainable approaches to generate funding for equitable climate action and just transition efforts in Minneapolis at the scale needed to address the problem.
Transparency in Utility Bills: A Key to Building Performance Unlocking the potential of building performance requires seamless access to utility and energy data. To help with this challenge, IMT and the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) created the Model Utility Data Access Law, which aims to facilitate more cooperative relationships among utilities, building owners, and customers. We hope to see more creative solutions for obtaining accurate utility data to improve energy efficiency in the built environment!
A Roadmap for Cities to Navigate the Gas Transition Many cities have set ambitious goals to decarbonize buildings through energy efficiency and electrification, but few have grappled with the critical role of the gas distribution system in this transition. This resource provides a guide for city leaders navigating this complex landscape and examines the current state of the U.S. gas system, key barriers cities face in regulating gas infrastructure, and case studies of leading cities implementing policies to halt gas expansion and facilitate a clean energy transition.
Learning Series: You Have the Power! Want to learn more about how you can plug into utility work in your community? Public Utility (or Service) Commissions are critical decision-makers who have the power to lower building emissions by: ordering the closure of fossil fuel power plants, approving renewable energy projects, and creating financial incentives for individuals or communities to implement energy efficiency solutions.
Whether you’re a business leader, community organizer, policy advocate, or curious resident, this series will equip you with the knowledge and tools to build a more equitable, resilient energy future. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to unlock your power for change!