Michael Shepard

Founder and Director

Michael Shepard has enjoyed a 40 year career on the front lines of sustainable energy. He was co-founder (with Amory Lovins) and former CEO and Chairman of E Source, a research and advisory firm in energy efficiency and sustainable energy. Prior to that he directed the energy program at Rocky Mountain Institute, and worked at the Electric Power Research Institute, the New Mexico Solar Energy Association, and with British economist E.F Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Michael has written, spoken, and consulted widely on topics ranging from the state of the art in efficient buildings to climate strategies for business, innovative distributed energy models for utilities, and electric transportation. From 2016 through 2019 he served as sustainability advisor to the pioneering clean cooking enterprise Inyenyeri. He was a visiting fellow at the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at Colorado State University, served on the energy efficiency advisory board of Avista Utilities, spent a decade on the judging panel of the Global Energy Awards, and for twenty years chaired the board of ISET International. Michael holds a BS with distinction in Natural Resources from Cornell University, and an MA from the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley.