Alumna Rachel Henderson
- Fabiola M Rivera
- May 6
- 5 min read
Rachel Henderson
GDS (Public Health) - Class of 2015
My career has focused on complex challenges in the climate and energy space, particularly within the clean energy sector. After nearly a decade in the field, my biggest takeaways can be distilled into three themes: multidisciplinary perspectives are essential, renewable technologies alone won’t solve our energy crisis, and personal healing is imperative. Together, I believe these are foundational to addressing the planetary challenges ahead.
My path into clean energy began through a public health lens. While launching a rural health initiative in Appalachia at UVA, I saw how energy systems—especially those tied to coal—shaped both health outcomes and economic opportunity. That experience sparked my commitment to systems-level change and a belief that the transition to clean energy could be more just and equitable than the fossil fuel industries that preceded it.
From there, I’ve worked at the intersection of technology and electric utilities to help advance that transition. Early in my career, I convened conversations with utility executives, energy tech CEOs, and regulators—often in closed-door settings where people spoke candidly about the future of the industry. Those discussions shaped my perspective on what’s possible, and showed me that real progress depends on collaboration and shared vision, not competition.
That mindset carried into my work supporting advocacy efforts for the Biden-Harris Administration’s “Build Back Better” legislation. I helped unify support from large energy buyers—companies like Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, and Google—whose scale and public commitments made them powerful voices in advancing clean energy policy. I also returned to my Appalachian roots, working with regional advocates and on-the-ground practitioners to develop a more unified strategy for clean energy policy and deployment across the region. These efforts aimed to align initiatives across groups who work in silos.
Most recently, I worked on the corporate delivery side, helping bring clean energy solutions directly to customers. I led the go-to-market strategy for products that integrated technologies like smart thermostats and electric vehicles into utility programs, designed to benefit both households and the grid. Through all of these experiences, I’ve gained a wider and deeper understanding of some of the nuances and challenges of transforming the U.S. energy system. One thing I’ve kept returning to is the importance of multidisciplinary views. The cross-disciplinary principles that are integral to GDS are needed now more than ever in our business and policy settings. It’s easier to understand in theory than in practice how our energy decisions have numerous health, societal, and ecological implications. Actually implementing a multidisciplinary approach in day-to-day business decisions is another thing entirely.
To meet this challenge, the skills and perspectives that I’ve found most valuable are: the courage to ask uncomfortable questions, challenge assumptions, probe and understand the historical influences driving deeper structures (like capitalism and technological optimism), and project future implications. Given the complexity and interconnectedness of our global energy predicament, it’s important to carefully weigh decisions–even seemingly small ones–when our choices have nonlinear effects and their downstream consequences are potentially irreversible.
We also need to move beyond our culture’s narratives around “progress” and modern financial systems that are structured on continuous growth. An electric utility executive once confided in me that their utility struggled to pursue more innovative energy plans because they were beholden to deliver 5% annual returns to shareholders as a publicly traded company. It takes courage to express and implement unconventional views when the industry is stuck operating in a “business as usual” mindset and growth prerogative.
Furthermore, as important as new and existing renewable energy technologies are, they are overshadowing more fundamental energy issues. Adding more and more solar+storage, wind turbines, “clean” hydrogen, or even better electricity transmission infrastructure won’t solve our climate predicament. Among many reasons, adding more renewables is accelerating a fossil-dependent system that simply can’t evolve fast enough to meet climate targets. This is because the climate crisis is not just about how we produce energy, but about how much total energy the system demands. Jevons paradox illustrates that as technology improves efficiency and lowers costs, it actually drives increased overall consumption rather than reducing it. So even as more solar and wind make electricity costs cheaper and we see record amounts of renewables, total energy demand is also driving record fossil fuel consumption. New data center demand fueled by AI, industrial mining, and electrification efforts from electric vehicles are just some of the areas driving our total energy consumption. Also, unfortunately, we are dependent on fossil fuels for the mining and industrial processes needed to even build out the renewable energy systems.
Taking a step back, the energy transition demands not just a technological switch in resources, but an energy systems transition. We need societal and cultural shifts in how we use, consume, and think about energy. Ideally, we can design solutions for our whole planet, based on real-life conditions, in anticipation of future consequences. This requires multidisciplinary thinking at its core. We need design principles that extend beyond simply putting energy efficiency efforts before renewable technologies, or hoping that our large corporate energy buyers will decarbonize their supply chains. Some of the principles core to a systems transition are: finding leverage points where small interventions create large systemic shifts; designing solutions as interconnected systems of energy, materials, human behavior, and ecology; increasing performance while decreasing resource use; and serving all of humanity and life on our planet–not just profit-seeking companies or nation-states.
Finally, I believe underpinning our climate challenges is a lack of emphasis on personal –and therefore collective–healing. We cannot heal the planet if we do not heal ourselves. Our personal healing is central to our development, which in turn informs how we see and create the world around us. It has taken my own burnout, eco-anxiety, and disillusion with performative corporate sustainability to prioritize my own healing journey. I learned firsthand that it’s easy to get caught up in the chaos of a rapidly transitioning planet and forget about your own well-being in the process. To recover and heal, I’ve needed dedicated time away from my professional life, space to learn to regulate my nervous system, and slower-paced travel and new intellectual guides to widen my perspective.
I know many others who are working tirelessly in the climate and sustainability fields who, like myself, have neglected their inner work because they have prioritized a bigger mission to support the planet. However, some of the most essential work is confronting our personal ecological grief, healing our inner child, addressing ancestral trauma, and rekindling wonder for the beautiful world around us. Especially when embedded in a culture that has one of the most toxic and extractive relationships to the environment, healing ourselves has ripple effects in how we then choose to show up in the world. Our planet is waiting for us to recreate a healthier relationship with ourselves and our collective culture, and in doing so, wake up to its brilliance.
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