Rob Phocas

Rob is the energy & sustainability manager for the City of Charlotte. Serving an organization of 7,000+ staff and a city of nearly 800,000 people, he supports a variety of internal and external programs in the energy, sustainability and smart city spaces.

Examples of internal initiatives include the implementation and continued evolution of Charlotte’s Internal Environmental Operations Plan, which sets goals, tracks, measures and reports the organization’s environmental footprint. To illustrate this work, Rob’s office has developed an online dashboard. Externally, Rob works very closely with Envision Charlotte (“EC”) and other community entities to advance Charlotte’s goals. As Rob’s primary community project, Rob works very closely with EC’s executive director and Board to bring about success. Most recently, Rob has worked to develop and launch Envision America, which, with White House support aims to replicate EC’s public-private-plus partnership.

Rob plays an important role in the community supporting energy and sustainability conversations by connecting and facilitating collaboration and innovation between academic, utility, business and government entities.

For example, Rob lead the City’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program, under which he lead the development and implementation of seventeen energy & energy efficiency projects for the city organization as well as the community. These programs ranged from the development of an electric vehicle program to a commercial building energy efficiency retrofit program. He is also leading smart city efforts locally, nationally and internationally. Rob has created an internal smart city cabinet to organize staff efforts and is organizing a similar effort in the community.