Profile

Evan Mills, founder of Energy Associates, has worked as an energy and environmental systems analyst since the early 1980s—from local to global scales.

His key interests are in pinpointing "sleeper" uses of energy and empowering nontraditional market actors to capture improved efficiencies, resilience, and other non-energy benefits. His technical specialties are energy efficiency in buildings and industry and the intersection of energy technology, global climate change impacts, and risk management. His undergraduate work was in Conservation and Resource Studies at UC Berkeley. He received a Masters of Science degree from the Energy and Resources Group (where he is now a Research Affiliate) at UC Berkeley in 1987 and a Ph.D. from the Department of Environmental and Energy Systems Studies under Thomas B. Johansson, a leading energy futurist, at the University of Lund in Sweden in 1991.

In the early 1980s at Berkeley, Dr. Mills studied and taught about green buildings—before they were in vogue—with Sim van der Ryn, a founder of the green-buildings movement. In Sweden, he worked closely with the Swedish State Power Board and the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development on national energy planning projects.

He also consults widely for private industry and the public sector and has keynoted many meetings. Dr. Mills spent his career at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (University of California), within a world-class research center on energy and environment with a staff approximately 400 people. He collaborated for many years at LBNL with Art Rosenfeld, widely known as the “grandfather” of energy efficiency research and policy, serving as his Deputy Director of the Center for Building Science, later leading the Center.

He has published over 300 technical articles and reports and has contributed to ten books, including Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, a definitive US government report published in 2009. He frequently writes for popular and trade publications, and has contributed to Forbes, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and The Washington Post. His work has been reported in publications including The Boston Globe, Business Week, CBS Radio, CNN, Discover Magazine, The Economist, Financial Times, The Huffington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Mother Jones, National Public Radio, Nature, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Popular Science, Scientific American, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

Dr. Mills is a member of the international body of scientists which has worked over the past two decades under the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC collectively shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."