What are you most proud of accomplishing in your role as Senior Climate Advisor to Governor Inslee?

Anna Lising: The Inslee team wrote the Evergreen Action Plan during his 2019 presidential campaign, which became the blueprint of how you create a clean energy economy. Most of those programs are in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and that includes Justice40 – which was originally an Inslee idea. For example, our Climate Commitment Act is a cap-and-invest system that sets a hard cap on pollution and then ramps down to get us to net-zero emissions by 2050, and it generates revenue. 40% gets reinvested in overburdened communities to repair environmental justice harms, and build resilience and adaptation programs.

What would be your message to investors and startups if Trump wins the White House?

Anna Lising: If the federal government gets lax on climate action, the states are going to step in and not just step in to fill the federal government's shoes, but we are going to try to figure out how we can push forward even further.

And by the way, energy policy is done at the state level, so we will back up our commitments. Now, the US Climate Alliance, when we first started it was three states, New York, California, and Washington. We now have 24 governors and make up, I think 60% of the GDP and 55% of the US population. There's a lot more of a footprint that we have where we can help move markets in the absence of federal leadership.

Climate justice and energy equity are important to you. How do you bring that to your work?

Anna Lising: I can't ever uncouple my lived experience from how I approach my work on climate. I come from a pretty marginalized group. I'm a woman of color, an immigrant, and I grew up in poverty. All of those things are not common for folks who work in climate at the government level, or on the investor and cleantech side. So typically I am the only one whenever I enter a space talking about climate and clean tech, and there's a lot of burden and tokenism that comes with that. The thing I always keep in my mind is that creating a clean energy future requires a ton of persistence and creativity. Who else is more equipped to do that than people who exist in a world that was not designed for them?

How is the Inslee Administration responding to growing energy demand from companies like Microsoft because of generative AI?

Anna Lising: For a long time we generated more power than we needed and would export energy. Now, we're going to have roughly 30% load growth in the next 10 years or so, and we're going to double our electricity demand within the next 20. So the state is very focused on how we set ourselves up for success. In the last couple of years, our big pieces of legislation and investments have focused on siting and permitting for new clean energy generation projects and improving our transmission planning.

What changes have you made on transmission permitting and planning?

Anna Lising: Like many other states, Washington has had a backwards looking approach to transmission. We looked at historical load growth to determine our future transmission capacity needs, which just doesn't make sense in this new era of electrifying everything. So now we require utilities to have a 20 year rolling forecast for projected load growth.

A couple of months ago, we stood up a federal state transmission initiative with the White House. The coalition is looking at how we increase transmission capacities in existing infrastructure through grid enhancing technologies, and how utilities get cost recovery for these capital investments. Washington requires that utilities' first point of order is to maximize their existing infrastructure. But we’re also working on how to leverage existing rights of way, to be able to deploy higher capacity wires and reconductoring.

Washington state has three notable fusion energy start-ups: Helion, Zap Energy, and Avalanche Fusion. Is there a strategy to try to build a “fusion alley” in Washington?

Anna Lising: The reason fusion energy companies come here is because there's a level of precision in building the technology, which is closely tied to aeronautical engineering. We have a lot of expertise around that because of our strong aviation industry. It's also the supply chain – they're able to source materials from Boeing, and they get to rent out these massive airplane hangars to build these things. Washington wants to be a partner, and because we have the leading fusion energy companies they are very anxious to make sure that we get the regulatory oversight part right. Because what we do will probably be adopted by other states.

The Governor is just about at the end of his term. What do you want to do next?

Anna Lising: The governor always says there is no such thing as a lame duck season – it’s a sprint. The theme of his last state of the state address was “run through the tape.” So we are in a mad dash to do as much good work as we can in the next four months. So I’ll keep running through the tape.