In 2006, Kate Sherwood left her job in strategy consulting to work in solar.
“I realized what I had been doing wasn't getting me out of bed anymore,” says Sherwood. “So, I took a very big pay cut to move into carrying a bag, into being a salesman.”
Selling solar to corporate customers at that time wasn’t easy. But C&I solar blossomed as the technology got cheaper, financing got better, and companies got more comfortable.
Today, Kate is the vice president and head of sales at Centrica Business Solutions North America. There, she runs a team that packages all kinds of energy tech for commercial and industrial customers — solar, batteries, combined heat and power, demand response.
So much as changed since 2006. There’s a new company committing to 100% renewables every week; tech firms and industrial giants are looking to procure gigawatts of wind and solar for their operations; and extreme weather is forcing a lot of companies with critical infrastructure to build on-site generation with a green twist.
In this podcast episode, produced in partnership with Centrica Business Solutions, we’ll speak to Kate Sherwood about the biggest shifts in commercial energy since she first found her calling in the space.
"I think corporate energy buyers have gotten more sophisticated. Hats off to the commodity suppliers and even the brokers and aggregators out there who have helped educate large customers on that their energy load, their spend is not just a liability, but also an asset that they can deploy. I think customers today are more sophisticated on average," says Sherwood.
Centrica Business Solutions is using analytics, market know-how, and distributed energy tech to help C&I customers take control of their energy use and improve their environmental performance. Learn more here.