Focus on Energy
Jolene Sheil is Portfolios Manager, Mitch Horrie is Performance Manager, and Alex Fortney is IT Product Owner and Program Manager for the Focus on Energy program of the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.
PUF's Lori Burkhart: Talk about your backgrounds that led you all to the Commission.
Jolene Sheil: As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, I majored in public and environmental administration, and political science. I focused my emphasis on environmental energy policy, and then I received a graduate degree from the University of California Riverside and the UW Madison in political science.
With the master's degrees, I again had an emphasis on energy and environmental policy and had an internship in 1988 when climate change started being a topic. The internship was at the Department of Energy's environmental office, and climate change clicked into high gear the summer I was working there, which further reinforced that was the field I wanted to work in.
My first job was at the Department of Administration as an environmental energy analyst, and I worked on acid rain and climate change. Then the Focus on Energy program came about as a pilot in 1998 and 1999, and I worked on that. Focus on Energy became a statewide program in 2001. I've worked in various capacities on that program as it's evolved through the years.
Mitch Horrie: I'm new to this Commission and am about seven months into the position that I hold. In undergraduate and graduate school, I studied geography with an emphasis on environmental resource management and planning.