November Top Ten Players in Green Energy: Nos. 6-10
10: Democratic Sens. John Kerry and Barbara Boxer
It was, in many respects, a disastrous month for the two authors of the senate climate change bill, widely known as Kerry-Boxer.
All of the Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which Boxer chairs, boycotted a vote on the measure on Nov. 5, which lead Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., to declare the bill dead.
Oddly enough, it was Kerry who effectively killed his own bill when he started pursuing a separate track of negotiationson climate change legislation with Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham. But all is not lost. The Obama administration’s newfound seriousness about emissions reductions, symbolized by his trip to the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, could give a boost to the foundering process in the senate. Expect Boxer and especially Kerry to become relevant again soon.
9: Wilbur Ross, Founder and Chief Executive Officer W.L. Ross & Co.
At a time when China’s cleantech sector has been rolling out deals that are starting to create ripples on Capitol Hill, billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, founder and Chief Executive Officer of buyout firm W.L. Ross & Co., picked up $100 million in shares in China’s Longyuan Power Group Corp, Asia’s largest wind power generator. The share offering this month is expected to raise $2.2 billion, one of the sector’s largest flotations and Ross is obviously looking to cash in on a possible upside in the Longyuan share offering.
Ross is joining a growing list of billionaire greens who’re eager to ride the cleantech wave. They include Richard Branson at Virgin, Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway (who also features in our November ranking), and George Soros (#10 in our November ranking). Yet, unlike Branson or Soros, who have said that climate change issues are motivating their green investments, Ross’ Longyuan play seems to be solely about the bottom line.
8: Vivienne Cox, chair of Climate Change Capital
As head of BP’s well funded alternative energy unit, Vivienne Cox embodied a pragmatic and bottom-line-driven approach to environmentalism. A chemical engineer, Cox climbed BP’s corporate ladder over a 28-year career. But then in June, shortly after announcing the close of its dedicated alternative energy unit, Cox left BP, officially retiring. Media reports said she’d actually grown frustrated over the business downgrade in importance.
When Cox took over, BP Alternative Energy was backed by a $1.4 billion budget. However, over the past year CEO Tony Hayward refocused investments on its oil and gas business, slashing its cleantech budgets from $1.4 billion last year to an expected $500 million this year.
We had not heard from Cox since her departure from BP in June, but she reemerged last week at Climate Change Capital, a London-based cleantech-focused fund. There, Cox will oversee an investment pool of $1.5 billion (a little more than BP Alternative’s $1.4 billion 2008 budget), leading the company’s diversification beyond carbon markets into areas such as land, water use and flood defenses.
7: Joe Romm, blogger, Climate Progress, senior fellow, Center for American Progress
No cool dispassion here. Romm matched the crazy fervor of the global warming skeptics this month while arguing about the meaning of the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Skeptics claimed that the emails were proof of that man-made global warming is a scientific fraud. Armed with his customary array of ocean and land temperature graphs, Romm did what few others on either side of this debate can do: he explained the science behind global warming in forceful and easy to understand terms. He also used a lot of exclamation marks. A sample sentence from one of his posts on “Climategate”: “Everything fuels the disinformers!”
No blogger or journalist covering climate change and green energy issues matches Romm for depth of scientific knowledge and force of expression.
6: NRG Energy
NRG has seen the future and it’s going to be carbon constrained. And so, like a growing number of utilities, it is greening its portfolio so it can remain competitive in a cap-and-trade world.
As part of its cleantech strategy, over the past month NRG, one of the country’s largest coal consumers, has made two significant acquisitions. First, it snatched New Jersey offshore wind developer, Bluewater Wind, for an undisclosed amount. With that acquisition, NRG becomes a clean tech pioneer and could become the country’s first offshore wind operator.
A couple of weeks after its Bluewater acquisition, NRG bought a 21 megawatt solar energy project in Blythe, Calif. from First Solar. That acquisition bolstered NRG’s clean energy portfolio in the Western U.S. Anchoring its effort there is its $10 million eSolar investments, which gives NRG the right to develop up to 500 megawatts of solar-powered electricity based on eSolar technology.