Max Luke, Transmission & Grid, Massachusetts
Max Luke, who has been in the industry for 12 years, is the Director of Business Development & Regulatory Affairs at VEIR.
Why is clean energy important to you? It’s important to me because of the link to climate change. It's necessary to achieve clean energy economy if we're serious about avoiding the worst consequences of climate change. When I joined VEIR nearly three years ago, everyone recognized that we need a lot of transmission in order to achieve a net zero economy, but the dialogue and the public discourse was still really focused on the supply side technologies. After joining VEIR, there started to be a lot more media focus and public discourse about transmission. I was really interested in tackling a problem that wasn't getting as much attention or funding as some of the other pieces of the puzzle.
What's a memorable clean energy project you’ve worked on? At my current company, we installed and deployed a 100-foot long transmission line about 10 minutes away from our headquarters in Massachusetts. We wanted to see if it would be possible to install and operate a VEIR transmission line in an outdoor environment. One of the things that was really exciting was that it was the first time external utility line workers had worked with a superconducting transmission line suspended on standard poles. And we came into that anticipating that it would take those line workers weeks to install the line but it only took them an afternoon. It was very exciting from VEIR’s perspective.
What did you do prior to working in clean energy? Why did you transition to the clean energy industry? Before I was in clean energy, I was an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montreal. I grew up in Canada, but it was actually while I was doing that degree program that I decided to embark upon a career in clean energy. I actually started my degree program in conservation biology but it dawned on me in my junior and senior years that climate change is a very significant problem that's not going away anytime soon. And that was the lightbulb moment. So in my senior year, I pivoted from biology and dove into learning more about the energy system and how I can I help.
What do you wish more people knew about the clean energy industry? Energy underpins the economy in the US. Even though energy industries are only 5% of total GDP, they're the first 5%. If you don't have energy, you don't have everything else — from how we get to work, to all our devices, our laptops, everything. Everything requires energy. So if you don't have reliable energy, we go back to like the 1700’s. Increasingly clean energy is replacing old technology and that's, that's why it's such an exciting industry to be in. You're you're connected to what those solar electrons are supplying and providing and opening up in in the economy.
Why should congress invest in clean energy jobs? You can't find a better case of a public interest type issue than climate change, where you've got emissions in one location affecting everyone. It's got this public interest quality to it, and Congress should be doing a lot more on the jobs front. Clean energy workers are pushing a rock uphill in the sense that we're trying to innovate into energy systems that have been around for hundreds of years. And so the clean energy economy needs help.
