New Strategic Plan Sets ODOE’s Four-Year Direction
“The Oregon Department of Energy helps Oregonians make informed decisions and maintain a resilient and affordable energy system. We advance solutions to shape an equitable clean energy transition, protect the environment and public health, and responsibly balance energy needs and impacts for current and future generations.”
The Oregon Department of Energy finalized our new 2021-2024 Strategic Plan this week, which provides clarity and focus for our agency – including an updated mission and what we hope to achieve over the next four years to deliver on that mission.
Our plan outlines five imperatives, or high-level directions, that we want to focus on moving forward. The imperatives set goals for: expanding outreach, achieving inclusive and equitable outcomes, enhancing our data capabilities, modernizing our programs and activities, and optimizing our organizational efficiency and impact. We developed the imperatives and companion actions steps (shown as objectives and initiatives in our plan) following a series of surveys, focus groups, and interviews with our peer organizations, legislators, Tribal partners, and stakeholders, including the Energy Advisory Work Group.
Many of the initiatives we’ll work on reflect more than one imperative or can help us achieve more than one objective – a few examples of that cross-cutting work:
Increasing engagement with historically and currently underserved populations and communities. This includes collaborative development of a communication plan and engagement process, and expanding engagement with our Tribal partners. Recognizing the importance of internal capability, ODOE will also conduct a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion assessment and implement training.
Focusing on diversity in the energy industry, ODOE will work to increase agency job applicants who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and enhance our internship program to provide benefits, such as paid positions and educational credits.
Leveraging the incredible power of data, ODOE will invest in data analysis, data sharing, and collaborative development of state Key Energy Indicators (for example, number of registered electric vehicles in Oregon or a measure of the state’s electricity resource mix) to bring value-added products and monitoring to stakeholders – including new data dashboards and interactive reports.
Conducting a strategic evaluation of our unique work to ensure mission alignment, while also collaborating with other energy-related organizations to collectively identify gaps and redundancies in the state’s energy ecosystem as well as opportunities to advance Key Energy Indicators and state priorities.
Now we’ll turn to creating an implementation plan this spring, including prioritizing which initiatives to focus on in the first year to hit the ground running. We’re excited for this next step in the plan, and we’ll have more to share this summer.
Check out our Strategic Plan on our website.