CIERP Alumni Perspectives: A Conversation with Grace Tamble

By Olivia Luciani

Though this is a blog post celebrating Women’s History Month, Grace Tamble is focused on the future. Specifically, creating a future that is more sustainable and equitable through climate action and energy access.

Grace first became interested in climate change issues in her hometown of Fresno, California. In high school, she noticed that there was not a lot of interest in environmental conservation or policies in her conservative, agricultural area. She saw a need for greater action, especially given the increasing air pollution and elevated temperatures that she witnessed.

At her undergraduate alma mater DePaul University, Grace studied International Relations with a concentration in Sustainable Development. She was able to put this education to good use shortly after graduation in a position with AmeriCorps VISTA and GRID Alternatives, an NGO with a vision for a successful transition to clean, renewable energy that includes everyone. At GRID Alternatives, Grace worked to bring energy access and job opportunities to underserved communities while increasing awareness and use of solar energy. Grace then expanded upon her solar background with a position at Embark Solar, where she built custom solar proposals and was exposed more deeply to the financing of solar projects.

At Fletcher, Grace focused on International Energy and Climate Policy. She was a co-organizer for the Fletcher Arctic Initiative, co-Leader of the Fletcher Environment and Energy Club (FLEEC), and a content team member for the 2018 Tufts Energy Conference. With the Arctic Initiative, Grace got to take advantage of Boston’s connections to the Arctic community and focus on a specific geography, which she enjoyed. One highlight of her Fletcher experience was when she went to COP24 in Katowice, Poland, where she was dropped in the middle of the climate policy space and got to interact with impactful organizations in the clean energy space.

Grace appreciates Fletcher’s interdisciplinary approach and values the classes she was able to take outside of the energy and climate space that help to inform her current work. She especially enjoyed taking climate and energy policy classes with Dean Gallagher, and Professor Aker’s Econometrics course.

Grace’s involvement with The Center for International Environment and Resource Policy (CIERP) lead her to an internship with Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL). Like GRID Alternatives, SEforALL focuses on increasing access to sustainable energy. At SEforALL, Grace was able to synthesize stakeholders and activities on gender equality, social inclusion, women’s empowerment, and sustainable energy. She also prepared policy briefings on the electrification landscape in the Sahel Region and aimed to increase financing for women energy entrepreneurs.

After graduating from Fletcher, Grace took a position with consulting firm ICF as a Climate Change and Sustainability Specialist. At ICF, Grace worked on sustainability and greenhouse gas mitigation projects for international, federal, and local clients. She primarily focused on greenhouse gas accounting but also supported development of climate action plans, sustainability plans, clean energy roadmaps, and political-economic assessments.

Currently, Grace works as a Policy Associate for the Energy for Growth Hub, where she has been able to expand upon her previous work in energy access and equity, but with more of a focus on development. The Energy for Growth Hub is a small think tank that is dedicated to the intersection of energy access and international development, focusing on how to inspire energy for prosperity and economic growth. It focuses its efforts on Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. At the Energy for Growth Hub, Grace works primarily on Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) transparency. In many of the markets she concentrates on, power contracting disclosures are opaque, and energy contracts are secret. This limits competition and is a barrier to renewable energy scaling. Working with civil society members and policy makers to shed light on PPA content is a key step to equitable, sustainable energy access. In this role Grace is able to work with the nuances raised by a push for meaningful energy access (the ability to get on a Zoom call, for example) and a transition to renewable energy. These issues look different in each country’s individual context.

One of Grace’s professional highlights is her participation in a Net Zero Working Group focused on Africa. This group explores what net zero really means in various African contexts, what it looks like, and if that should be a goal for everybody at this time or not. The group examines how African countries can grow and increase economic activity through expanded access to electricity and emissions accounting. Currently, many energy system models do not adequately account for an African context, which this group aims to change. One of the big problems with these models is that their general assumptions group all of Africa together. This ignores the major diversity of the continent and creates problems, while passing up potential opportunities. The models may also simply overlook the region, base assumptions for the whole continent on anomalous economies, or make very limited assumptions about future energy needs and economic growth. The Net Zero Working Group creates recommendations both for policy makers and the creators of these models to address these issues.

Grace’s career is a good example of a Fletcher approach to the energy transition. She would stress to current students that while drastically reducing global emissions is critical, a rapid switch to 100 percent renewables may not be practical or equitable for certain markets in the short term, partially those with low energy access rates. We must also consider how communities are able to achieve fully productive economies and successfully adapt to the extreme impacts of climate change. An example that Fletcher students could explore would be balancing grid expansion with mini-grids, and exploring just how far mini-grids can go in achieving robust energy abundance that is on par with Western economies.

This Women’s History Month, we are happy to celebrate Grace and her contributions to a just and sustainable world. ∎

Olivia Luciani is a MALD student at The Fletcher School, Tufts University.

This is the first post in the CIERP/CPL Women’s History Month blog series. Stay tuned for the second and third posts coming soon.