Bio

Madison Freeman is a Knight Hennessy Scholar pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a master’s degree in environment and resources at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability through the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. She focuses on innovative approaches to scale emerging climate solutions, especially those accelerating decarbonization of heavy industries and transportation.

Immediately prior to Stanford, Madison served in the Biden administration as a senior advisor on technology and innovation to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, where she led industrial decarbonization global initiatives including the First Movers Coalition. She spent three years in venture capital at Energy Impact Partners, a leading climate investment fund with strategic LPs across the utility and built environment space. At EIP, she developed investment strategy for new sectors explored by the firm, engaged strategic LPs, invested in hardtech startups and helped establish funds focused on backing underrepresented founders and deep decarbonization breakthroughs. She started her career in climate and innovation policy think tanks, at the Atlantic Council and Council on Foreign Relations. Madison founded and directed the NYC chapter of the Clean Energy Leadership Institute, was a 2021 Women Leader in Energy and Climate Fellow with the Atlantic Council, and her clean energy analysis has been published in outlets including NPR, Foreign Affairs, and The Hill. She graduated from American University with a bachelor's degree in international relations and economics.

Contact

  • Academic
    madisonc@stanford.edu
    University - Student Department: Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources Position: Graduate
    University - Student Department: Graduate School of Business Position: Graduate, Business

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 4810

All Publications

  • Guidebook for Early Climate Infrastructure: Case Studies of First of a Kind Projects Freeman, M. C. Stanford University. Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance. 2024

    Abstract

    The early-stage climate technology ecosystem is flourishing, and an increasing number of entrepreneurs and scientists are bringing forward startup companies with promising solutions for some of our hardest challenges. Many of the climate problems that once seemed nearly impossible to address—decarbonizing cement, storing low-carbon power for days, replacing high-temperature heat in heavy industry—now have alternatives demonstrating viability in pilot projects around the globe. However, scaling these innovations to commercial scale presents technology, operational, customer, and construction risks that make them difficult to finance through any traditional sources of lower-cost capital like project or infrastructure finance. Increasing attention has been given to this first-of-a-kind “valley of death,” but startups have limited visibility on the levers they can pull in advance of their first commercial-scale project to smooth their trajectory. This white paper is designed as a guidebook for early-stage climate startups to prepare for project scale, including case studies from four recent deployments, risk mitigation levers from the perspective of project investors, and strategies for developing greater sources of capital, knowledge, and operational capacity.

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