November Top Ten Players in Green Energy: Nos. 1-5
GER’s ranking of the top ten players in green energy for the month of November are out! There are some new entries in our monthly ranking (Wilbur Ross, former BP exec. Vivienne Cox, Warren Buffet…) and some holdovers from the October ranking, (Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson and U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and John Kerry) that were kept on because of their continued influence on the clean energy and climate change debate.
5: Rex Tillerson, chairman and chief executive officer Exxon Mobil Corp.
When we included Rex Tillerson in our inaugural ranking last month (fourth place) we said:
“The head of the world’s most powerful company will always be a force to be reckoned with.”
Our assessment has not changed. Despite Tillerson’s ongoing effort to attempt to delay cap-and-trade (his ploy on that – advocate an outright carbon tax). And despite the fact that his company continues to plow tens of billions of dollars in oil and gas E&P, Exxon Mobil, because of its enormous balance sheet wields a lot of clout in the energy space and as a cleantech investor. Cleantech investments out of the Arlington, Texas oil and gas giant may not be frequent, but they sure pack the punch – take the $600 million the company invested this summer in algae-biofuel maker Synthetic Genomics.
4: The Department of Energy’s venture capitalists
Of all the government agencies now overseen by the Obama administration, the Department of Energy is probably the one experiencing the most drastic change as it morphs from a dusty nuclear administrator into a leading clean energy investor.
To oversee this transformation and in particular the dispersal of nearly $37 billion in stimulus money, over the past year the DOE has turned to a group of private sector veterans, which in a short time have turned the DOE into a leading cleantech investor.
Leading this crew of benchmark-driven professionals is Matt Rogers, who joined the DOE from consulting power house McKinsey & Company. Just this month the DOE released a much awaited $620 million in funding to support the next generation’s smart grid and energy storage projects.
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Silver, a Washington-based venture capitalist, joined the DOE from Core Capital Partners, to administer the DOE’s loan program office. Overseeing the department’s investments in cutting edge energy technologies (the ARPA-E program) is David Danielson. He joined this summer from Cambridge, Mass.-based General Catalyst Partners.
(It can be noted that the VC influence is also felt outside of the DOE. Nick Sinai was appointed energy and environmental director at the Federal Communications Commission this summer. He joined the FCC from Tenaya Capital, the former venture unit of Lehman Brothers.) Read More »
