The launch of the Lighthouse Energy Institute (LEI) reflects sharply growing demand for trusted energy and environmental (E&E) policy expertise. Stakeholders are highly motivated to pursue policy reform and crave information on the merits of doing so. Research and education gaps are pervasive in the pursuit of informed policymaking.
Energy policy is attracting more attention than usual. Destabilizing geopolitics has driven the largest energy fuel crisis in modern history. Aging grid infrastructure, supply constraints, booming demand, and outdated regulatory architecture are making niche electricity policy highly salient. Rising energy costs and supply reliability threats are top policymaker priorities, and environmental stewardship objectives remain top of mind.
Energy policy is complex, substantially decentralized, and voluminous. Congressional legislation shaped the landscape, but contemporary energy policy is mostly crafted by states and the federal executive, often within a technocratic lens. Informed energy policymaking therefore requires a high level of expertise covering a large surface area. The existing think tank ecosystem struggles to provide sufficient coverage in a trusted, nonpartisan manner. LEI aims to fill this void.
Our Backstory
In September 2025, stakeholders approached me about scaling up energy policy expertise to meet the moment. Discussions centered on the need for higher-quality work, broad stakeholder credibility, and the importance of covering practical but often neglected applications—especially in the federal executive and state policymaking realms. The shared perspective was that energy policy advisors and their influencers often struggled to understand the dense subject matter and identify actionable, quality policies. One participant remarked that “we need a lighthouse to illuminate a good policy path and to warn of problematic directions.” The “lighthouse” name stuck.
From there, I conducted a landscape analysis with the help of Nick Loris of C3 Solutions. Our analysis found a massive imbalance in funding, expertise, and general depth among think tanks by orientation. In particular, the skew heavily favored organizations that are prone to supporting high levels of policy intervention in energy markets. Energy expertise in market-oriented think tanks was confined to multi-issue tanks that could not scale or were housed in energy groups whose primary focus was advocacy. Overall, we found that no organization existed with a market orientation that exclusively focused on energy policy research and education. Suddenly, the LEI thesis was born.
I put in my unofficial notice to the R Street Institute in November of 2025 and departed in May of 2026. I was accompanied by Kent Chandler and Philip Rossetti, who joined me as LEI’s cofounders. We are proud of our amicable departure from R Street, extended our stay to facilitate backfills, and look forward to collaborating with our successors.
Our Mission and Principles
LEI’s mission is to provide information that improves the quality of E&E institutions and policies. LEI will achieve this by conducting honest, robust research and education.
Three principles drive our position formation:
- Competitive Markets: Private property rights-based markets are an engine of economic development, innovation, and human flourishing. Energy competition is suppressed by decades of policy interventions, which warrants market liberalization to improve social welfare (i.e., fix government failure). If the conditions of a competitive market are not met (i.e., market failures like externalities, natural monopolies, and public goods), it may warrant limited government intervention to improve social welfare.
- Limited Government: Quality public policy limits government intervention to instruments that remedy persistent market failures (i.e., those that do not self-correct). Policy interventions that weigh government failure and pass rigorous reviews are more likely to improve social welfare. Limited, effective government requires quality institutions.
- Quality Institutions: Effective, trusted government requires public institutions that uphold the rule of law, retain mission integrity, and are transparent, accountable, capable, and efficient. Effective public service requires a professional, merit-based workforce that maintains legitimacy through strong performance and stakeholder responsiveness.
Our People
Our strategy is to pair consultant-grade expertise with the credibility of an independent, mission-driven nonprofit. LEI follows a practitioner-scholar model, so we have the skills to tailor our work to decision-making contexts. Our three founders fit that billing. In August, we brought on Corie Whalen as our director of communications and editorial, as well as Beth Garza and Michael Giberson as nonresident senior fellows.
Our initial team has a century of energy experience combined. LEI staff have held previous positions that include Chairman of the Kentucky Public Service Commission; President and CEO of the Electricity Consumers Resource Council; energy economics professor at Texas Tech University; director of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Independent Market Monitor; two representatives on the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Member Representatives Committee; two energy and environmental policy think tank directors; head of the Organization of PJM States, Inc., and staffers at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.
We assembled a motivated, talented, and experienced board of directors (BOD). Our initial BOD comprises Nora Brownell (chair), John Graham (treasurer), Lynne Kiesling (secretary), Susan Dudley, and Gordon van Welie. Their combined resume includes the former CEO of ISO New England; two former presidentially appointed administrators of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; a former commissioner at FERC and the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission; the director of the Institute for Regulatory Law & Economics; professors at three esteemed universities; former dean of the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs; the founder of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center; and members of the National Academy of Public Administration and National Academy of Engineering.
We also launched an advisory board to provide strategic guidance and feedback.
LEI’s first advisory board members are:
- Nick Loris, the president of C3 Solutions and chair of the advisory board;
- David R. Hill, the executive vice president of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Energy Program;
- Shuting Pomerleau, the director of energy and environmental policy at the American Action Forum;
- Josh Smith, the senior fellow for abundance and environment and natural resources at the Pacific Legal Foundation;
- Catrina Rorke, the senior vice president of policy and research at the Climate Leadership Council;
- Sanjay Patnaik, senior fellow in Brookings’ Economic Studies program and the director of the Center on Regulation and Markets;
- Liza Reed, the director for climate and energy at the Niskanen Center;
- Alex Breckel, the CEO and founder of Tomorrow Energy Partners; and
- Casey Kelly, the senior program manager for research and electricity at ClearPath.
Our Functions
LEI’s research and education functions span all policy stages—agenda setting, formulation, implementation, and evaluation—with the aim of maximizing impact. Our engagements include conducting primary and applied research; media engagement; and stakeholder education, such as briefings, workshops, trainings, and technical advice. We aim to be a highly collaborative expertise hub, both to benefit external experts as well as improve the literacy of nonexpert stakeholders. For example, we are technical advisors to advocacy coalitions but refrain from being a member of those coalitions ourselves because we are not an advocacy organization.
LEI will articulate ideal policies but primarily emphasize pragmatic approaches. Our work accounts for institutional settings, such as legal and political constraints, to provide actionable and practical recommendations. Constraints will be informed by close coordination with policy practitioners, such as policy advisors, trade associations, consumer groups, and advocacy organizations. Our product mix will include research papers, commentary pieces, and applied policy analysis, such as regulatory comments and legislative testimony.
Our functions are adapted to today’s environment, which has a high volume of energy and environmental policy content creation, but its quality and applicability to policymaking varies. LEI will coordinate with the academic and think tank research communities to ensure our original work adds the most value, and to give others feedback on maximizing their own value. Policy advisors and reporters have requested that LEI develop a review function for others’ work because they feel overwhelmed with the volume of content creation. This will summarize the body of quality work, help stakeholders interpret studies accurately and distill policy takeaways, give productive feedback to researchers, and provide a filtering function that amplifies high-quality work and deemphasizes low-quality work.
Our Independence
LEI’s calling card is trusted energy policy expertise. Integrity begets credibility. LEI’s research, conclusions, and policy recommendations are driven by its subject-matter experts consistent with principled, transparent analysis methods. Our credibility is built on empirical evidence to guide us toward truth. Our positions will be updated as new evidence emerges.
LEI is, and will remain, truly nonpartisan and independent of our donors. We call balls and strikes the same way, regardless of who is associated with a given policy idea. This means our work provides positive reinforcement and negative accountability under any political backdrop.
LEI’s robust internal controls uphold its independence from donors. This includes independence statements in our proposals, protocols that insulate scholars from undue influence, disclosures, and conflict-of-interest policies for staff and our independent board. Our initial funding comes from a blend of self-identified liberty, abundance, climate, and effective altruism philanthropy. We do not receive government funding, because it presents an unnavigable conflict when LEI critiques government policy.
Our Work
LEI’s initial work will focus on three core areas: electricity policy, energy permitting and siting policy, and energy innovation and fiscal management. We will later scale into other subfields, including transportation and environmental policy that affects the energy sector.
Our planned work includes:
- A policy handbook on our three core areas. This will apply our mission and principles in a manner that embodies the rigor and practicality behind our positions. It will serve as an educational document and be updated annually to reflect new evidence and changes in technology, economic fundamentals, and the policy landscape.
- A paper evaluating state-level issues on permitting, siting, and electricity policy. Findings will be tailored to inform 2027 policy agendas.
- Co-launching a scholarly working group with the American Enterprise Institute on electricity policy in the load growth era.
- Publishing a collaborative paper with C3 Solutions on the cost-effectiveness of climate regulations in a peer-reviewed journal.
- State-specific co-branded papers with intrastate think tanks on topics including electric competition, transmission, and permitting and siting.
- Briefings for federal officials, the Department of Energy, FERC, governors’ associations and advisors, congressional staff, and state energy regulators and legislative staff.
We have already engaged in some nonpublic and low-visibility settings. This includes providing expert testimony for a consumer-led coalition on a transmission complaint before FERC, advising energy consumer groups on policy reform, and participating in a congressional energy briefing hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Between our existing and planned work, we anticipate spurring higher-quality energy policy research that creates useful knowledge for practitioners; elevating the energy policy literacy of policy advisors, regulators, public staff, advocacy organizations, media, and other stakeholders; and yielding higher-quality energy and environmental policymaking and institutions. That is what LEI is all about. We are excited to embark on this journey with you.
