According to a number of sources close to the company, Sungevity laid off 250 people last week.
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.
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Spruce Finance (the entity comprising the merged Clean Power Finance and Kilowatt Financial) named Jeff Loebbaka, formerly senior VP at Enphase Energy, as its CCO. Spruce provides consumer financing for residential solar, energy efficiency and water conservation upgrades.
NextEra Energy announced that John Ketchum has been appointed executive VP of finance and CFO following the retirement of Moray Dewhurst, vice chairman and CFO.
Christopher Edgette, former VP at Strategen Consulting and senior advisor at the California Energy Storage Alliance, has joined the global energy team at Apple.
Cyrus Wadia was promoted to VP of sustainable business and innovation at Nike. Prior to Nike, Wadia was assistant director for clean energy and materials R&D at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Jim Hanna joined Microsoft as director for data center sustainability. Hanna was most recently director of environmental affairs at Starbucks.
Doug Gross moved from Nexant to join Sunverge as director of utility sales for Western North America. Sunverge just closed a $36.5 million Series C round. The California startup calls itself a "utility-centric" storage integrator that wants to aggregate behind-the-meter batteries for demand response, frequency regulation, and smoothing intermittent renewables. The firm says it has between 700 and 800 systems in operation around the world.
Mike Miskovsky, former CEO of Zep Solar and QBotix, has joined Obvious Ventures as a venture advisor.
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Enertech Search Partners, an executive search firm with a dedicated cleantech practice, is the sponsor of the GTM jobs column.
"In today’s tight hiring market, candidates are only available for a few weeks and are negotiating impressive compensation packages," according to Enertech Search. "The cleantech hiring endgame starts now." Read more here.
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Wei-Tai Kwok, previously with Andalay Solar and NRG's residential solar division, was named COO at Amber Kinetics, a startup that claims its flywheel system can provide 4-hour duration energy storage, much longer than typical flywheels.
GlassPoint named Sanjeev Kumar as its senior VP of project development. Kumar has served as CFO for Enphase Energy, HelioVolt and TerraForm, where he helped launch the YieldCo's IPO.
Enlighted, a provider of internet-of-things solutions for commercial buildings, added Gaile Gordon as a senior director of technology. Gordon was a co-founder of TYZX, which was acquired by Intel in 2012 for its 3-D cameras and image analysis applications.
From last week's column:
Verengo Solar named Dan Squiller, the former CEO of battery developer PowerGenix, as its new CEO. Residential solar installer Verengo is ranked No. 7 nationally according to GTM Research's Q4 2015 U.S. PV Leaderboard (based on Q1-Q3 installs), but its market share hit a new low of 0.6 percent in Q3.
GTM just covered the fund-making, record-breaking 43X return on Veolia's $400 million acquisition of nuclear cleanup expert Kurion. We spoke with Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital and chairman at Kurion, in a recent GTM Squared piece. Wolfe is now a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.