About Jake Hiller

Jake Hiller

Dir., Sustainable Finance Operations, EDF+Business

Work

Areas of expertise:

Corporate partnerships, energy management strategy, energy efficiency finance

Description

Jake Hiller is the Sustainable Finance Manager for EDF+Business. In this role, Jake oversees development and implementation of strategies that help to leverage the influence, expertise and capital of the financial marketplace to protect the environment, improve livelihoods, and achieve the ambitious goals in Blueprint 2020.

Key Current Projects

Clean Energy Finance: Creating and launching a strategy to scale investment in clean energy across the United States in close collaboration with EDF’s Climate and Energy program. 

Sustainable Fisheries Finance: Developing principles for sustainable investment in fisheries and catalyzing proof-of-concept deals with EDF’s Oceans program. 

Key Past Projects 

Tropical Forest (REDD+) Finance: Conducted market assessment for tropical forest carbon credits and supported development of a new financial vehicle to catalyze early-stage investment. 

Methane Detectors Challenge: Supported launch of groundbreaking partnership between EDF, oil and gas companies, US-based technology developers, and other experts to enable oil and gas companies to detect and fix methane leaks in real time. 

EDF Climate Corps: Co-created with the MIT Sloan School of Management The Virtuous Cycle of Strategic Energy Management, a framework for understanding how organizations can overcome internal barriers and create a cycle of continuous improvement for energy management. Leveraged this framework to drive improvement in EDF Climate Corps organizations.

Energy Efficiency Finance: Co-wrote EDF white paper on energy efficiency financing barriers and opportunities. Coordinated discussions with investors, corporate partners and government actors to catalyze broader investment in the energy efficiency space. 

Green Returns: Developed environmental benchmarking tool for portfolio companies owned by leading private equity partners in EDF’s Green Returns program. Assessed key opportunities around energy, water and waste reduction for The Carlyle Group.

Jake’s work with EDF began through the High Meadows Fellowship, a two-year competitive program that places graduating Princeton seniors in leading non-profit organizations with an environmental focus.

Background

B.A., Chemistry, Sustainable Energy, Environmental Studies, Princeton University

Jake has previously worked at the University of South Carolina’s Graduate Science Research Center, the Princeton Chemistry Department and the U.S. Department of Energy. His independent work at Princeton focused on developing new varieties of organic electronic materials for applications in transistors and photovoltaics.

In 2010, Jake won the Princeton TigerLaunch Business Plan Competition and became a semi-finalist in the MIT Clean Energy Prize Competition for his team’s efforts to bring scalable sustainable energy technologies to communities in the developing world.

Publications

“Show Me the Money: Energy Efficiency Financing Barriers and Opportunities,” July 2011.

“Reducing Contact Resistance in Multi-Layer Organic Thin-Film Transistors,” Princeton University Senior Thesis, 2010.

“Inclusion of electrochemically active guests by novel oxacalixarene hosts,” New Journal of Chemistry, 2008.