You’re an accomplished clean energy expert, having worked at many of the world’s largest renewable energy developers. Can you walk us through why and when your focus shifted specifically towards data center development/power procurement?

I entered the renewables business in 2011 as a wind originator for the German utility-scale developer e.on Climate & Renewables. Everything I did in those days was geared towards investor-owned utilities (“IOU”). Many of the IOUs had Renewable Portfolio Standards (“RPS”) that required them to procure wind and solar generation to meet RPS thresholds. When e.on decided to enter the US solar market, I eagerly began working with that team on California projects. California solar was growing tremendously at the time – for a lot of the same RPS-driven reasons as wind – so many of those early transactions in California were based around IOU solicitations.

However, I started to hear rumblings about bilateral transactions that developers were doing with voluntary corporate buyers, and I was intrigued. In 2014, there were just a handful of PPAs executed by C&Is and these were mostly big tech companies. It was clear that the voluntary buyers were committed to offsetting their carbon footprints and that the PPA market was going to increase in scale – so I decided to focus my attention on this burgeoning segment of offtake opportunities.

As I shifted my attention to the corporate market it became clear that there was a lot of interest from a broad segment of corporate buyers; but it was also clear that there was a distinct differentiation between tech focused companies (“ICT”) and every other type of industry. There was an ever-increasing awareness that tech companies were using a ton of electricity to power their businesses, and it was oftentimes electricity generated with a massive carbon footprint. In the early years of corporate renewable energy procurement (up until ~2015) ICT accounted for roughly 90% of all of the volume of PPAs executed.

Fast forward to today and it is clear that technology has become elemental to modern living. The tools of our digitalized world generate a massive amount of data that needs to reside somewhere. The migration of computing resources to public cloud platforms has precipitated the need for larger and more diverse data centers. All of this infrastructure uses a massive amount of energy – which has significant carbon content and implications for climate.

How did you land at CleanArc?

CleanArc Data Centers was founded through a collaboration of Gabriel Alonso (EDPR and 547 Energy) and Jim Trout (Vantage Data Centers and Digital Realty). Gabriel and Jim realized that through an investment in the energy transition space, CleanArc could change the future of data center power. There is a nexus between the compute-heavy digital transition and the data center customer’s focus on sustainability and net-zero emissions. I was fortunate to be introduced to the 547 Energy team and Jim and, having had some experience in the data center space, we all started working on the CleanArc business model.

How does your professional experience to date serve your current role at CleanArc?

I am a recovering scientist. I completed a Master’s in groundwater hydrology and physical sciences. That said, I’ve also worked in the financial markets and fancy myself as a commercial type. I believe that solving the problem of supplying data centers with locally sourced, hourly renewable energy requires a merging of the analytical and commercial worlds –  thankfully, I’ve enjoyed a rather unconventional professional career that lends itself well towards this need. I got my start trading foreign exchange and interest rates, then worked on the trading wholesale power desk for a large utility. Most recently, I moved into the renewables development space, both as an energy marketer and the head of a development team.

My professional experiences to date have given me the toolkit necessary to address the complex problem of revisioning energy contracts for large ICT loads. The way that power contracting has been done in the past needs a rework, as the demands of data centers do not fit the old paradigm. At CleanArc, I’m working to build better power structures that allocate risk in more appropriate ways while creating a home for a mass of green electrons.

Can you walk us through what CleanArc True Additionality is in your own words?

True Additionality is all about meeting today’s hyperscalers where they want to be. Hyperscalers have imposed ambitious internal mandates to manage the carbon footprints associated with the massive energy consumption of their data centers. Offsetting annual consumption nationally, or even globally, is no longer enough; offsets must be more local and more temporally granular. 7/24/365 load following structures that incorporate the highest amount of hourly renewable content is paramount to the clean energy transition.

True Additionality is responding to these lofty ambitions by crafting diverse portfolios of renewable energy products, bundling those portfolios as part of our data center infrastructure sighting, and then creating a “last mile” structure that allows delivery of the highest hourly renewable content possible in the most financially responsible way.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?

The thing I am most proud of professionally is being lucky enough to have arrived in a place where I get to work on solving problems that can directly address some of the most critical issues of our time. The digital transition is a part of modern sustained life. My job is to make that transition as sustainable as possible.