Brooks Herring, former corporate executive officer at Showa Shell Sekiyu (the parent company of Solar Frontier), is now GM of acquisitions and divestments at Shell.
Holger Giebel is the new CEO of racking firm Mounting Systems. Giebel founded and sold Timber Towers, a developer of wooden wind turbine towers.
Solazyme once aspired to produce algae-based biofuel. The company has settled on being a supplier of algae-based ingredients and is looking for a replacement for CEO Jonathan Wolfson, who is now assuming the role of chairman of the board. The firm is changing its name to TerraVia as it focuses on food, nutrition and specialty ingredients.
Louis-Philippe Lalonde is now chief marketing officer at Ygrene Energy Fund, a provider of property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing for residential and commercial sites. Previously, Lalonde served as GM at Akeena Solar and VP at Enecsys.
Michael Kanellos is now head of corporate communications at OSIsoft. As Jeff St. John reported, OSIsoft develops data historian software for North American utilities, and uses geographic information system (GIS) software tools from big utility vendors such as Esri. Most recently, Kanellos was editor-in-chief at SanDisk. He also served as GTM's editor-in-chief a few years back.
Richard Huntley has joined EEme, a "disaggregation-as-a-service" platform, as a sales and business development executive. Huntley has held leadership positions with Oracle, Retroficiency and Aclara.
Forum Equity Partners named Nikolas Novograd as principal for energy and renewables. Most recently, Novograd was VP of origination at Renewable Energy Trust Capital. Before RETC, he was a director in Wells Fargo’s Renewable Energy and Environmental Finance Group. Forum is an investment firm with a focus on renewable energy and infrastructure with $1 billion in assets under management.
Thomas Golden has left his technology development manager role at Duke Energy in order to become manager of energy market design at the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO).
Cary Hayes, formerly VP of sales and marketing at Pristine Sun, has joined Clean Focus as VP of sales and business development. Clean Focus is a commercial and utility-scale solar developer, financier and independent power producer.
Tabuchi Electric just opened a 40,000+ sq. ft. headquarters for its solar-plus-storage technology in San Jose, Calif. The company claims that it will triple its headcount in the next three months.
Andrew Nichols joined APsystems as senior VP of sales for the U.S. Nichols most recently served as VP of worldwide sales for SolarBridge through its acquisition by SunPower.
James Bickford, formerly of Sunverge and Tigo, is now the Powerwall program manager at Tesla Motors.
Nate Beckett, the former VP of R&D at Cogenra Solar, is now a director of engineering at SunPower, following Cogenra's acquisition. Ellen Struck was promoted to director of residential channels at SunPower.
9to5Mac covers Tesla's rampant poaching of Apple's elite engineers, including a duo of chip designers, feeding the rumor that Tesla intends to design its own silicon.
Rest in peace, Andy Grove:
RIP Andy Grove. The best company builder Silicon Valley has ever seen, and likely will ever see.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 22, 2016
From last week's column:
According to a number of sources close to the company, Sungevity laid off 250 people earlier this month.
A spokesperson for the solar sales company responded, "Our recent headcount reduction consisted mostly of field sales personnel and related support functions. This was a strategic business decision to reduce field headcount in our least profitable geographies and to focus on growing our most profitable geographies and channels," adding, "We recently closed significant growth equity and project financing that provided us with further stability and the opportunity to grow our business. We continue to hire staff and fill positions that allow us to build out our platform business model." The company is "focused on profitable growth this year."
The solar sales company closed a $600 million financing round in December of last year and signed a deal with Viridian in September. We'll keep digging for more news on this.
As reported in Forbes, SunEdison's long-time CFO Brian Wuebbels is departing that role to join YieldCos TerraForm Power and TerraForm Global as CEO.