From Policy to Practice: A Conversation with FDCE's Jahi Wise
We sat down with Jahi Wise, the new lead instructor for FDCE’s Innovation course, to discuss how the course is evolving to reflect today’s clean energy landscape—and how his experience across government, finance, and implementation is shaping a course designed to meet the moment.
What does it actually take to deploy clean energy at scale? On paper, things can look neat and clean and straightforward, but very often in practice you will run into practical issues like New York City apartments where the buildings are too close together to install a heat pump, or policy issues like working in a state where a new governor has just eliminated the incentives your 20-year project depended on.
These are the kinds of challenges Jahi Wise has been wrestling with throughout his career, and they're exactly the questions he's bringing to the Innovation course in Yale's Financing and Deploying Clean Energy (FDCE) certificate program.
A Career Built Across Silos
Wise came to energy and infrastructure through an unlikely door: community organizing. Early in his career, he led a campaign in Washington, D.C. to direct funding for a major stormwater project into low-impact development projects like rain gardens, bioswales, and neighborhood-scale green infrastructure. This experience gave Wise firsthand knowledge of how a place’s built environment could be both a vehicle for economic opportunity.
That conviction carried him to Yale, where he earned a joint JD and MBA at the Law School and School of Management, immersing himself in the emerging clean energy financing space alongside faculty and the practitioners helping to shape it. After graduation, he spent three years at a global law firm working across tax equity, M&A, debt, and securitization in energy project finance. He then pivoted to deployment, joining a VC-backed startup building a project finance platform for electrification in New York City.
"It's really great to set ambitious targets about decarbonization," Wise said. "It's really hard when you can't get a contractor into the building because the walls between buildings are so close that you can’t physically install a heat pump."
From there, he moved to federal policy, spending several years working on climate policy and finance from the White House and on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at the EPA. Work he described as trying to implement policies at the national level that support what is needed at the local level.
Navigating the Gray Space
What makes Wise's perspective distinctive is his ability to move fluidly across a number of clean energy-related domains. He describes himself as a practitioner and a facilitator, someone who can get into a room, understand what's happening in project and financing docs, understand what's happening in a community, and understand what's happening in policy, and connect the dots between them. Perhaps more importantly, he draws on a network of specialists who can help him understand the intricacies and nuances that can be difficult to fully appreciate without specialized knowledge: "Clean Energy deployment is a team exercise. It's often as important to know your piece of the puzzle as it is to know a bunch of other people who can help you understand the pieces that you don't know really well."
"Oscillating back and forth between these different spaces has been really useful for me to see where policy breaks down when it gets to deployment — and where deployment can kind of separate from the policy objectives," he said.
He also brings a pointed perspective on distributing the benefits of the energy transition, one grounded less in moral argument than in pragmatism. Ensuring that the benefits of decarbonization reach working-class and low-income communities isn't just the right thing to do, he argues, it's what determines whether the systems we build will last: "We've typically thought about that as a moral or ethical, kind of noble thing. It's actually not — it's very much a matter of durability."
"It's not enough to put in place the right policy," he said. "You actually have to make sure that the policy has a constituency."
Inside the Innovation Course
The Innovation course is designed as a capstone for the FDCE program, a space where participants apply what they've learned across policy, technology, and finance to real-world problems with no clean answers.
This year's anchor theme is electricity demand growth, a force reshaping the clean energy landscape in ways that weren't on the radar even five years ago. Through eight interconnected modules, participants will dig into demand forecasting, grid capacity, cost allocation, the emerging transferability markets for clean energy tax credits, financing for early-stage technologies, supply chain constraints, and the thorny politics of it all (where energy gets built, and who bears the consequences).
"We intentionally pick topics that are hard," Wise said. "There's no easy answer to a question like 'how do we strengthen the clean energy supply chain?' Lots of very intelligent people disagree about the right answer. The point of this course is to identify the trade-offs and how they actually impact deployment."
Participants will work collaboratively, responding to a real clean energy deployment RFP as a final project. The final projects puts into practice not just their own expertise, but their ability to build on the expertise of everyone around them. "The final project is intentionally designed as a team exercise," Wise said. “One person can’t know it all. To finance and deploy energy infrastructure at scale, it takes a village of experts working together hand in glove.”
A Returning Perspective
For Wise, the connection to CBEY runs deeper than the course. As a Yale student, he wrote for the Clean Energy Finance Forum and found in CBEY a place to try out ideas at the intersection of clean energy and community, ideas that shaped the next decade of his work.
"CBEY always had an emphasis on interacting with the real world," he said. "Getting involved with live projects and programs is the way I learn and CBEY provided a powerful platform for me to get engaged. "
Now he's back at CBEY, not just as a guest instructor and mentor, but to help the next generation of clean energy practitioners understand the complexities of getting the work done.
About Yale’s Financing and Deploying Clean Energy (FDCE) Certificate
FDCE is a 10-month admissions-based online certificate program at Yale that trains and connects rising leaders to accelerate the financing and deployment of clean energy at scale. FDCE participants join a growing network of clean energy experts at the forefront of our energy transition and build key abilities in the areas of policy, finance and technology. Learn more and apply at cbey.yale.edu/FDCE
About the FDCE Innovation Course
This course, conceived and designed by Yale School of Management Lecturer Richard Kauffman, explores the innovative models needed to accelerate the clean energy transition.
Now led by Jahi Wise, who brings extensive experience at the intersection of climate policy, finance, and implementation, participants will explore how policy, technology, and finance can work together to scale clean energy solutions in a rapidly evolving landscape. Designed to stay responsive to current market conditions and emerging challenges, the course continuously adapts its content to reflect the latest developments in clean energy deployment, finance, and policy.
Through insights from leading practitioners, participants engage with the most pressing barriers and opportunities shaping the transition today—from shifting capital markets to new models for risk, scale, and implementation. The course emphasizes real-time learning, drawing on current examples and emerging approaches to ensure participants are equipped with relevant, actionable strategies.