Senior Policy Advisor
Mike Winka is Senior Policy Advisor at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
The PUF team was warmly welcomed by those energy stalwarts charged with drafting and implementing Governor Phil Murphy's Energy Master Plan at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.
It's serious work, but it's fun too, as you will hear Staff attest. And the New Jersey BPU is big, with some two hundred and twenty-five Staff, because in 2003 it established the Office of Clean Energy to help administer its programs. Talk about forward thinking.
PUF: Talk about your background and how you ended up here at the New Jersey Board.
Mike Winka: My background's environmental engineering, and environmental science, with a Master's in environmental engineering, the green environmental science. In the middle of my Master's, I went to work for the Department of Environmental Protection, in civil engineering.
I worked on solid waste landfill design. They had this new project called resource recovery facilities. They're waste energy facilities, they burn their trash, recover their energy, and generate electricity.
A couple of years later, I worked under Governor Whitman. Bob Shin was Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection. We developed the first greenhouse gas action plan in the state.