Ben Weil is the Director of Climate Action and Project Administration (CAPA) for the City of Northampton, and has been in that role since June 2024. CAPA is a new agency in city government responsible for developing and implementing strategies to meet the city’s climate goals, including municipal decarbonization by 2030, city-wide net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and improving the city’s resilience and adaptation in response to increasingly frequent and intense impacts of ongoing global climate change. CAPA works with every city department to include, where appropriate, a holistic view of climate and sustainability in the selection, design, procurement, and implementation of projects and activities.

In his first eight months as Director, CAPA implemented $700,000 worth of energy efficiency projects, including a building controls overhaul that resulted in significant energy savings. Weil helped write the city’s new fossil fuel free construction ordinance and the city’s new EV-first vehicle procurement policy. Current projects include a comprehensive decarbonization plan, ground source heat pump retrofits at the High School and Forbes Library, a resilient PV+battery micro-grid at the Vocational High School, heating electrification at elementary schools, a municipal vehicle pool, fast EV charging, feasibility studies for a wastewater heat recovery thermal network, an outreach program for residential electrification and weatherization, and additions to the city’s PV arrays.

Prior to joining municipal government, Dr. Weil spent 15 years as the Extension Assistant Professor of Building Energy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he did research and teaching on building science, the management of HVAC systems, and the interactions between occupants and energy and health outcomes. Unlike most faculty, he also provided extension consulting services to municipalities, serving hundreds of schools, city halls, and DPW facilities with detailed analysis and plans for energy savings and decarbonization. For more than a decade he taught the only course at UMass on sustainability and the built environment, which covered everything from transportation systems, water, stormwater, streets, construction process, construction materials, project management, the electric grid, energy storage, toxics, and environmental quality. He received his Ph.D in Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz.