By Reagan Priest | Arizona Capitol Times
Autumn Johnson, an attorney and executive director of the Arizona Solar Energy Industries Association, says she has a “challenge accepted” personality. It serves her well in her role advocating for solar energy at the Arizona Corporation Commission and other public bodies.
How did you end up in solar advocacy?
I was a social worker after graduating from college before attending law school, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study law for. I always had a public interest focus, but I saw that documentary An Inconvenient Truth before I went to law school, and so I decided to focus on environmental law. Then, when I got out of law school, it was the Great Recession, and so it was not an ideal time to be trying to get a job in the environmental law sector. I moved back to Idaho to pursue a PhD in public policy at the time, and I didn’t want to pay tuition, so I applied to the Energy Policy Institute. And I’ve been in energy ever since. I like to tell people that once you’re in, you’re in. Once you get your foot in the door, there’s just so much opportunity and so many different ways you can go. I wasn’t planning to move here. I was planning to move to New Mexico, but I got a job offer here to work in energy policy specifically, and I got into solar after that, because the executive director of AriSEIA happened to be leaving and so they just asked me if I would do it.
What has kept you in the energy and solar policy areas?
What I used to tell people was that I thought energy was just the right amount of interesting — but it also doesn’t keep you up at night. There are some topics for which I feel like I would be so passionate about that I wouldn’t be able to turn off at all. It used to be (that) energy was something that was very intellectually stimulating, very important — but it wasn’t like, you’re gonna burst into tears over something that happens in energy. Because there is sort of an intellectual component to it that’s like, this is a mathematical problem that we can solve. That has changed, I think, more as of late, and it really has become a little bit more of a personal imperative because of how much backtracking has happened and also because of the immediate impact on people’s lives. Every time you hear one of those stories about someone’s power getting shut off and then them dying, it’s just a wake up call that these are real people’s lives that we’re dealing with here. It becomes a lot heavier when you think about it from the weight of the responsibility.
