Karen DeGannes is the founder of DeGannes Consulting Group (DCG LLC), an energy, environmental management, and infrastructure advisory firm delivering project development, environmental due diligence and review, transaction advisory, strategy and capacity building, and federal finance structuring to clients navigating the evolving energy and infrastructure landscape. DCG’s clients include energy cooperatives, municipalities, small and mid-sized energy businesses, startups, and mission-aligned infrastructure developers across the U.S., Caribbean, Latin America, and East Africa.
Before founding DCG, DeGannes built a 25-year career as a state utility regulator, international environmental consultant, and senior utility leader with experience spanning gas operations, asset management, interconnections, sustainability, emergency operations, strategy and finance at a municipal and a major U.S. utility. Her breadth of operational and institutional domain knowledge informs two startup ventures currently in development.
DeGannes holds dual doctorates in Natural Resources & Environment and Organizational Sociology from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor and completed a DAAD Fellowship in Theoretical and Institutional Economics at the University of Saarland. Her research and practice interests span solving the problem of markets for physical AI infrastructure delivery, the political economy of energy and infrastructure development at home and abroad, energy finance under policy instability, and the environmental and ecological impacts of artificial intelligence at the frontier - from its integration with robotics and autonomous systems to its convergence with molecular genetics.