Jonathon Monken, Resilience, Virginia

Jonathon Monken is a principal at Converge Strategies Inc. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia, and he’s worked in the industry for 6 years.

Why is clean energy important to you? The clean energy transition is essential to reducing future climate-driven impacts, addressing existing issues related to energy equity and resilience, and economic growth.

What’s your proudest accomplishment in clean energy? Helping the energy community and critical customers in government and the private sector improving their understanding of how to make their systems and communities more resilient. This includes the development of new, publicly available planning resources to assess and quantify benefits.

What did you do before entering clean energy? U.S. Army officer, law enforcement, homeland security/emergency management, and grid operations.

How did you first get introduced to clean energy? Working for PJM Interconnection on Grid Resilience and partnering with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)

How does clean energy impact your community? Clean energy can help address multiple challenges with local economic growth, and reducing the human impacts of climate-driven events

What is something you wish more people knew about your job? My work focuses on the nexus between the clean energy transition and improving energy resilience for communities and the essential functions of national security and life support systems.

Why should Congress invest in clean energy jobs, not fossil fuel jobs? Long-term economic growth and national security both depend on U.S. ability to address the training, funding, manufacturing and implementation of a comprehensive strategy to facilitate the clean energy transition.