On the morning after the Department of Energy’s Deploy conference last December, Susan Kish and Jonah Wagner recapped the event over a latte and an espresso, and then drew the idea for their next project on a napkin.
Each had spent the last several years working in DOE’s Loan Programs Office — Kish as a senior advisor and the executive producer of the Deploy conferences, and Wagner as a chief strategist who co-led DOE’s reports on commercial liftoff for various nascent technologies. In the wake of Trump’s election they would need to do something new. It was “a flash of insight,” Kish told Latitude Media, that they could continue their work using the tools that the clean energy industry already possessed, with or without the government’s cooperation.
“What we want to do is harness existing events and existing frameworks and reports, and try to connect the dots between them,” Wagner said.
It took several months to formalize the plan and then test it in the market — but last week, the LPO alums went public with their new group, a nonprofit dubbed Constructive. The work, which began after the organization’s soft launch back in March, aims to forge partnerships with everyone from state regulators to industry groups, startups to city mayors. The group wants to encourage something of a decisionmaker afterparty, bringing together those with the power to make real decisions and keeping discussions going beyond formal, rehearsed gatherings where rhetoric seldom translates into real action.
“Constructive sets out to build on hard-won trust and momentum across industry, finance, government, and the broader energy and climate ecosystem,” the organization wrote in a LinkedIn post on launch day, referencing the Biden LPO’s reputation in the industry. “We’re nonpartisan and partnership-led, meaning our intention is to multiply rather than duplicate existing efforts.”
LPO was once responsible for $400 billion, a key resource for supporting early-stage companies looking to demonstrate the viability of their technology. The office is now fighting for its future as the Trump administration threatens its work via a combination of political infighting, administrative holdups, and staff exodus. But Constructive is betting that at least a portion of LPO’s work can endure in the private sector.
The group, which runs as a nonprofit, takes a fee from its partners, but told Axios that it ultimately expects philanthropic grants to be a major source of support.
How it came together
Constructive came together via two insights: First, that the Deploy team at LPO had amassed unique and valuable insights about engaging the private sector to make the most of clean energy investments.
The second insight was that the vast number of events in the clean energy sector have “a shortage of follow-through,” said Wagner. A conference’s concluding reception is often the end of the event, he noted, rather than the beginning of sharing outcomes and opportunities for collaboration.
“That insight isn’t hard, but it’s surprising how challenging it can be to put it into action,” said Kish. “That is one of our core premises, is we have to produce [these events] so that they are designed for the action afterward, for the connection, the publication, the investment — whatever it is you’re looking to follow.”
That approach to event planning prioritizes space for hard conversations over rehearsed talking points, and comes down to everything from how tables are laid out to how an agenda is set up.
The last Deploy conference — which took place after November’s election, but before Trump’s inauguration — demonstrated the industry’s clear demand for these opportunities to gather. According to Kish, the conference team at LPO feared that nobody would want to come, given the uncertainty at the time. But the reality was the opposite: “The fact was that we were sold out.”
In the months since, Kish and Wagner have pulled together a team of seven Constructive staffers — mainly DOE alums — as well as the volunteer help and introductions from many other people from the agency. According to Wagner, “we are likely to be a small but mighty team with a large scope of influence,” because their partnership model means they might work with 100 people for a short period of time to deliver a Deploy-scale event.
The potential for partnership
The ideal Constructive partner, Wagner said, is someone who shares the group’s conviction about outcomes, and who has the resources to support truly impactful work. The group’s early partnerships are firmly in the clean energy space — Constructive is already helping to produce the Distributed Energy Resources Task Force upcoming “DERvos” conference in October — but Kish said there is room for them to work with organizations that span other industries as well. Constructive is already working with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, for example.
One perhaps surprising potential partner is the Trump administration. Wagner said that Constructive would certainly be open to working with the current DOE, especially given the resources and institutional knowledge that remain there, even after months of uncertainty.
(In fact, the liftoff reports that Wagner championed — which had disappeared from the DOE website for months — reappeared just last week. Those reports, he said, exemplify the role of LPO that Constructive is now hoping to take on: “The report was helpful, but it was [also] a mechanism for bringing people together.”)
As for whether the group will proceed with a version of the Deploy gatherings that had become so popular? At least for 2025, it’s a no.
“There are just a lot of convenings that currently happen, and it’s unclear if Deploy as it was structured adds value in this current environment,” Kish said. “Like this year? I don’t think so.”
