As GTM's Stephen Lacey just reported, "NRG Energy, one of America's biggest competitive energy suppliers, is 'resetting' itself in an effort to tighten its balance sheet, unlock $1 billion in capital, and clearly define the clean energy piece of the business." Lacey adds, "In order to simplify itself, NRG will spin off a 'GreenCo' in January 2016. The public company will include residential and commercial solar, electric-vehicle charging, home energy management, and anything else unrelated to fossil fuels."
But that "reset" could result in some management changes at NRG Energy -- including the CEO role. Fierce Energy reports that an anonymous, "highly credible Wall Street analyst" claims to have information "that suggests the ouster of NRG Energy CEO David Crane."
Doyle Beneby resigned as CEO of San Antonio’s municipally owned utility CPS last month and has now signed on as CEO of New Generation Power. Founded by Chirinjeev Kathuria in 2009, New Generation is a renewable power generation firm focused on "acquiring, developing, owning and operating power projects." NGP also develops distributed generation and microgrid projects for on- and off-grid applications.
Sunlight Financial, a provider of long-term solar loans for the residential solar market, named Matthew Potere as CEO. Potere was most recently a senior VP at Bank of America, where he was responsible for a $90 billion home equity portfolio. Sunlight just closed a series of investments "providing access to $300 million for middle-market solar infrastructure assets in North America." Sunlight's founding investors are private equity firms Tiger Infrastructure Partners and Hudson Clean Energy Partners.
Yann Brandt was promoted to regional head of the Americas division at solar developer, financier and EPC Conergy.
Storage software provider Geli named Dan Loflin as president and COO. Loflin was executive VP of sales of Locus Energy, which was recently acquired by Genscape. Geli also added Dave Watson as senior VP of operations. Watson was formerly lead solutions architect at Advanced Microgrid Solutions and was the principal architect of OpenADR at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
GTM has confirmed that Jeff Loebbaka, senior VP of global sales, marketing and customer support at microinverter manufacturer Enphase, has left the company.
Joe Philip is co-founder and VP of engineering and operations at Energicity. The firm is looking to lead "the engineering and operations for deployment of solar microgrids to provide power to villages and households not currently connected to the utility grid." Philip was most recently director of global design and engineering at SunEdison. Energicity's founder is Nicole Poindexter, former senior director of global business development at Opower. Energicity's Ghanaian subsidiary, Black Star Energy, has a commercial license from the Ghanaian Energy Commission for developing off-grid solar powered mini-grids.
Matt Lugar is now VP of sales and business development at energy storage developer and virtual power plant platform provider Sunverge Energy. He was most recently VP of global sales and marketing at QBotix.
Kristian Hanelt, most recently senior VP of renewable capital markets at Clean Power Finance, has joined Ultra Capital, an investment platform focused on sustainability. Hanelt describes Ultra Capital as "accelerating the flow of institutional capital to finance small and mid-size sustainable real asset projects in agriculture, energy, water and waste." In July, CPF and Kilowatt Financial announced plans to merge into Elevate Power, which will offer PPAs, leases, and loans for PV and energy efficiency.
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We welcome Enertech Search Partners, an executive search firm with a dedicated cleantech practice, as the sponsor of the long-running GTM jobs column. Here's one of the firm's active searches:
- VP of Sales (East): At a pivotal point of revenue growth, our client is seeking a VP of sales for the Eastern U.S. to manage a team of enterprise sales executives to drive deals of significant scope and size selling regionally to utilities. Sales methodology and proven leadership in the enterprise environment are critical to success.
Enertech Search took just 12 days on average to identify the perfect candidates for five positions at Sunverge. To see a snapshot of Enertech's active searches, click here.
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8minutenergy named Marc Atlas as CFO. Prior to 8minutenergy, Atlas was VP of finance and director of international development for Invenergy. 8minutenergy has developed 1,400 megawatts of contracted solar projects.
Chris Bailey, previously senior VP and head of global capital markets and structured finance at TerraForm Power, is now CFO at the firm he co-founded, PowerScout, a "cloud-based big-data intelligence platform for clean energy."
Tucker Ruberti, previously with inverter maker Advanced Energy, is now managing director at Envect, joining Ed Heacox and Casey Miller at the venture consulting partnership.
Dana Olson has been a technical advisor and monitor on early-stage research and next-generation photovoltaics funding opportunities at the DOE SunShot Initiative since March. He was previously a senior scientist at NREL.