Camille Fassett

welcome

I used to keep an album on my phone in which I’d keep pictures I took of plants growing in strange, often hostile, places. When I started, I lived in New York City, so it was mainly plants growing through cracks in the sidewalk, in pipes, on the sides of buildings. Last time I was there, I found a tomato plant with ripe fruit growing near downtown Brooklyn under some discarded safety webbing in an alley. I’ve always been awed by the quiet power and strength of life — if the ingredients for life exist in a place, life will follow. Recently I’ve been thinking about how systems-level change and my own work in this context.

I feel excited about leaning into the niches in which the ingredients for change are all there. Rather than fighting flow, I think there are always opportunities to adapt to what is abundant and build something from that.

It’s August 2025 as I’m writing this and we continue to live in the most interesting of times. Lately I’ve felt energized by what feels like a growing collective push to remove barriers to building infrastructure — especially energy and housing. I’m excited about the wealth of possibilites that open up when we have abundant clean energy and vibrant, thriving cities, and have been thinking lots about electrification, energy project permitting, and load flexibility.

work

Currently I’m an analyst at WattTime, where I supercharge companies’ efforts to reduce the emissions impact of their business operations by automating the adjustment of their energy usage to cleaner times and locations.

Before that, I was a data reporter at the Associated Press for four years, where I built tools to streamline investigative journalism and uncovered climate and energy related stories through data and technical tools. Here are a few stories and projects I worked on:

• Billions are being spent to turn the tide on the US West’s wildfires. It won’t be enough
• When destitute small towns mean dangerous tap water
• Arctic sea ice is disappearing and it’s harming polar bears
• Wildfire smoke in US exposes millions to hazardous pollution
• Tiny wrists in cuffs: How police use force against children
• AP analysis: COVID prolonged foster care stays for thousands

I was also a data science fellow at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and a Venture Capital Fellow at Third Sphere. In a former life, I developed privacy-preserving technology for journalists and whistleblowers. I also co-developed an open source database project to track and document police misconduct in the Bay Area.

contact

I live in San Francisco. Feel free to say hi at camille [at] sempervirens [dot] io about collaborations, or if you want to chat energy over coffee or just to recommend a good book.