George Sfinarolakis, Ph.D.

George Sfinarolakis, Ph.D.

2025 to present

Assistant Director for Administrative Services

Office of Energy Resources · State of Rhode Island

  • Lead the statewide Lead by Example program, coordinating efficiency and clean energy work across state agencies, municipalities, and public schools.
  • Direct energy procurement for all state agencies, holding the state's electricity supply at fully renewable.
  • Built Rhode Island's first commercial and residential energy storage rebate program, from design through launch.
  • Run statewide benchmarking for state facilities, setting performance baselines and tracking progress against mandated reduction targets.
  • Oversee interagency agreements, program budgets, and EV charging infrastructure across state property.
2021 to 2025

Implementation Director, Policy and Programs

Office of Energy Resources

  • Established the Public School Energy Equity Program, securing federal and state funding for efficiency upgrades in underserved schools.
  • Principal Investigator on federal Department of Energy grants, carrying both compliance and delivery.
  • Led competitive energy procurement, sourcing renewable electricity at meaningful cost savings against the prior contract.
2018 to 2021

Administrator of Energy Programs

Office of Energy Resources

  • Managed statewide efficiency retrofits across government facilities.
  • Directed EV charging deployment and wrote the state's fleet electrification strategy.
  • Established a strategic energy management partnership with the state's major utilities.
2015 to 2018

Chief of Program Development

Office of Energy Resources

  • Partnered with RIDOT to convert every state-owned streetlight to LED, then built the municipal conversion program behind it.
  • Created master procurement agreements for turn-key efficiency, renewable energy, and EV charging projects: the contracting spine the programs above still run on.
2013 to 2015

Energy Fellow

University of Rhode Island

Supported the federally funded Rhode Island Public Energy Partnership, a deep-retrofit initiative across state and municipal facilities.

2011 to 2013

Research Assistant

University of Rhode Island

Applied GIS and econometric methods to the economic effects of environmental quality on property values.

1998 to 2009

Store Manager

Expert · Consumer electronics and appliances · Athens, Greece

Ran a retail operation and its staff for eleven years before leaving Greece for graduate school. It is still the best training in demand forecasting I have had.

Research

The Windy City: Property Value Impacts of Wind Turbines in an Urban Setting

Lang, C., Opaluch, J., and Sfinarolakis, G. Energy Economics, vol. 44 (2014), pages 413 to 421

Rhode Island builds single turbines in densely populated places, not in open country, which gave us 48,554 nearby home sales to work with, far more than comparable studies. Across a wide range of hedonic difference-in-differences specifications, we found no statistically significant negative effect on house prices, either after a project was announced or after it was built.

Read at Energy Economics  ·  Open copy at URI

Background
2018
Ph.D., Environmental and Natural Resource EconomicsUniversity of Rhode Island
2011
M.S., Applied Geospatial SciencesNorthern Arizona University
2010
Graduate Certificate, Geographic Information SystemsNorthern Arizona University
1999
B.S., EconomicsNational and Kapodistrian University of Athens · exchange at Boston University

Analysis

Econometrics, hedonic and difference-in-differences methods, energy benchmarking, spatial analysis in ArcGIS and QGIS.

Tools

Python, R, Stata.

Practice

Public procurement, federal grant management and compliance, interagency agreements, program budgeting.

Contact

Dual U.S. and Greek citizen. Views here are my own and not those of the State of Rhode Island.