Summer 2025 FERC Schneider Fellow (Stanford Students Only)

Overview

NRDC is a non-profit environmental advocacy organization. We use law, science, and the support of 3.1 million members and online activists to protect the planet's wildlife and wild places and to ensure the rights of all people to clean air, clean water, and healthy communities. NRDC was founded in 1970 and our people helped write some of America's bedrock environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act and many of the implementing regulations. Today, our team of more than 600 lawyers, scientists, economists, policy advocates, communications experts, and others work across the United States and the globe from our offices in Beijing; Chicago; New Delhi; New York; San Francisco; Santa Monica; and Washington, D.C. 

NRDC is seeking a Schneider Fellow to work with the Climate & Energy Team in one of our Washington D.C. office.

Position summary:

NRDC's Sustainable FERC Project is seeking a Fellow (law, business, engineering, or public policy graduate students) to assist with research, policy analysis and drafting in support of our mission to decarbonize the grid and remove barriers for lower-cost renewables and customer-controlled distributed resources like solar power, electric vehicles, and demand response.

The successful candidate will take ownership of a major challenge or barrier facing the integration of clean energy into wholesale power markets regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The fellow will perform the necessary research, meet with key stakeholders, and take other action necessary to understand and synthesize the issue and develop solutions to it. The specific topic or topics will depend in part on the fellow’s experience and interest. Among current challenges are:  undercounting of the capacity value of clean energy resources; lack of sufficient transmission to connect large amounts of wind and solar power to the grid; interconnecting new clean energy resources into the grid, public participation in and governance of wholesale markets; and integration of rooftop solar and other distributed energy into wholesale power markets. A closely related challenge involves FERC’s widespread approval of gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and other gas infrastructure. A fellow’s work for the FERC Project could touch on a number of these aspects.

Responsibilities

 Past work for graduate FERC Project  interns/fellows have included:

• Research, development, and authoring reports recommending reforms to FERC-jurisdictional energy markets or gas infrastructure approval processes.
• Developing, drafting and publishing expert blogs on relevant subject matter.
• Participating in external stakeholder and coalition meetings relevant to work project assignments.
• Providing briefings to Sustainable FERC Project and NRDC energy teams.
• Traveling to and attending energy conferences.

Qualifications

Must be a Stanford Student to apply.

NRDC is committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, both in our work and in our workplace. We believe that celebrating and actively welcoming diverse voices and perspectives is essential to solving the planet's most pressing environmental problems, and we encourage applications from candidates whose identities have been historically underrepresented in the environmental movement. 

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate in hiring or employment on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, marital status, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.  

Our offices are open and we are operating in a hybrid model. We offer NRDCers flexibility, and we ask them to come into the office and spend meaningful time there in collaboration with their colleagues. We call this purposeful presence. 

As a science-based organization, NRDC aims to do our part to help contain the COVID-19 public health crisis. For the sake of health, safety, and equity, we ask that people be vaccinated unless they have an approved medical or religious accommodation or other exemption in accordance with state and local law. We consider a person to be vaccinated two weeks after receiving one full course of a CDC-approved vaccine. In accordance with state or local law, new hires will be asked to attest to vaccination, those wishing to do so may request medical or religious accommodations or other exemptions via NRDC Employee Relations. NRDC treats all vaccine-related data confidentially, in keeping with local, state, and federal laws. 

If you experience technical problems while applying or if you are a person with a disability and need assistance applying online, please reach out to iCIMS Customer Care at 1-800-889-4422. 

For more about NRDC, visit www.nrdc.org.