Victoria Farella makes renewables reliable

When Victoria Farella arrived at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2022, she thought she knew exactly where she was headed. A lifelong scuba hobby — something she shared with her stepfather — had pulled her toward marine biology. Protecting oceans felt like the clearest path to protecting the planet.

One lunch meeting later, her vision for a sustainable future took a far deeper dive.

Gregory Gangi, the Carolina professor who taught her first environmental science course, invited her to intern with the UNC Cleantech Summit — the largest university-run clean technology convention in the country.

Suddenly, Farella found herself surrounded by hundreds of entrepreneurs, scientists, and policymakers all motivated by the same question: What will it take to build a clean-energy future? She didn’t speak the language of renewable energy yet, but the optimism in the room was contagious.

“As a freshman, getting pushed into that is daunting,” she says. “But seeing it all together made me think. For something as formidable as climate change, you need every single perspective, and I really wanted to prove myself. I just said ‘yes’ to every opportunity.”

In 2023, one “yes” led Farella to an internship with a startup making battery components. While she enjoyed the technology, she gravitated toward the people behind it — the founders willing to gamble their time, careers and savings to move new ideas into the world.

That curiosity guided her to risk management, the art of calculating and mitigating losses across industries from cybersecurity to public health. She learned that the challenges companies face aren’t always about money; sometimes they touch strategy, daily operations, reputation, or even the quality of what they produce. In this work, specialists sift through those possibilities, trace the weaknesses that could cause trouble, and help organizations move forward with confidence and clarity.

For Farella, this meant protecting clean energy investments by promising businesses financial safety nets during inevitable ups and downs in production.

Farella set out to find communities where this approach could build confidence among investors and consumers. Today, she works with the UNC Institute for Risk Management and Insurance Innovation, developing strategies to protect Texas’s power grid against wind energy droughts — periods when turbines slow and renewable power drops.

“I like odd and niche problems,” says Farella, a senior majoring in environmental science and minoring in data science in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, with an additional minor in risk management in the UNC School of Data Science and Society. “While wind energy droughts are cyclical and expected, impacts from exposure to volatile electricity markets are rare and significant for a business’s bottom line.”

Powering new perspectives

Through the Cleantech Summit, hosted by the UNC Institute for the Environment and the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, Farella has spent four years developing a renewable energy mindset. She’s introduced speakers, built networks and even interviewed the U.S. deputy secretary of the Department of Energy before hundreds of summit guests.

Moments like these remind Farella why she puts in the work. She sees resilience as a guiding principle for change.

“I want to make sure that, going forward, people have a plan and can continue from the challenges that they endure,” she says. “I like giving people that hope.”

Working under her thesis advisers, Farella has learned to question her own viewpoints as deeply as any dataset. Their mentorship, she says, has shaped her as much as her research.

“My mentors advocated for me, and they gave me the confidence to advocate for myself,” she says.

Read more about Victoria Farella’s work.