The former head of the Advanced Research Projects Agency and the one-time number-two at the National Nuclear Security Administration will lead the latest incarnation of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, the Department of Energy said Monday.
Stanford University professor Arun Majumdar, once the head of the Joe Biden administration’s transition team for the Department of Energy, will chair the group, which meets quarterly or as needed to provide informal advice to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Madelyn Creedon, another transition team member and principal deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) from 2014 and 2017, will be the vice chair.
The 18 advisory members whose appointments DOE announced Monday also include a former second-in-command from the Office of Environmental Management, which helms DOE’s roughly $7-billion-a-year cleanup of shuttered nuclear-weapon production sites: Retired Navy Captain Tracy Mustin, who was principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management from 2011 to 2014.
Granholm’s advisory board packs in more experience from the DOE nuclear weapons complex than did her predecessor Rick Perry’s, though it lacks the explicit nuclear power representation that Perry’s had in Marvin Fertel, the former president of the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute.
The board does, however, include former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Shirley Ann Jackson, who led the commission during the Bill Clinton administration and had a famous, and contentious, confrontation in 1998 with the powerful Sen. Pete Domenici (D-N.M.), which Domenici described in his 2004 book, A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy.
The new Secretary of Energy Advisory Board had not scheduled a meeting as of deadline. The full slate of appointees, whose terms were set to expire in August 2023, are:
- Trenton Allen, Managing Director and CEO, Sustainable Capital Advisors
- Priscilla Almodovar, President and CEO, Enterprise Community Partners Inc
- Norman Bay, Partner, Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP
- Roxanne Brown, International Vice President at Large, United Steel Workers
- Madelyn Creedon, Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (Ret.)
- John Dabiri, Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, California Institute of Technology
- Noah Deich, President, Carbon180
- Kerry Duggan, Chief Executive Officer, SustainabiliD
- Bryan Garcia, President and CEO, Connecticut Green Bank
- Phil Giudice, Chair, FirstLight Power Resources
- Paula Gold-Williams, President and CEO, CPS Energy
- Denise Gray, President, LG Energy Solution Michigan Inc.
- Shirley Ann Jackson, President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Arun Majumdar, Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor, Stanford University
- Captain Tracy Mustin, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Retired as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management, DOE
- Maria Pope, President and CEO, Portland General Electric
- Adrianna Quintero, Senior Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Energy Foundation
- Michael Skelly, Chief Executive Officer, Grid United LLC
The Secretary of Energy Advisory board can have “approximately 20 persons” on its rolls and costs about $400,000 for two full-time equivalent employees to administer each year, according to its most recent two-year charter. Typically, members only receive reimbursement for travel and associated expenses.
