Events

"Promise and Challenges of Renewable Energy." Michael Skelly, CEO, Clean Line Energy Partners and former head of development, Horizon Wind Energy.

Renewable energy holds the promise to create millions of new jobs, reduce carbon emissions, create long-lasting infrastructure for future generations, and bring economic prosperity to rural America. The last decade has witnessed tens of billions invested in wind energy in particular, and the next decade may see hundreds of billions of new capital invested in this promising sector. Nevertheless, massive renewables deployment poses tremendous financial, political, and siting challenges. In this talk, Michael Skelly discusses the challenges of massive renewables deployment in the United States from a policy, finance and infrastructure perspective.

Clean Line Energy Partners is a company based in Houston, Texas focused on developing and building long-haul transmission lines from renewable resource areas to areas of high electricity demand. As the former head of development for Horizon Wind Energy, Skelly led the company from a two-man operation to an enterprise with hundreds of employees in a dozen states. Horizon Wind is today the third largest wind energy company in the United States, $1.5 billion per year in new American wind projects, and will have nearly 3,000 MW of projects by the end of 2009. Skelly ran for the United States Congress as the Democratic nominee in the 7th District of Texas in one of the most competitive challenger races in Texas in the 2008 election cycle. He has a BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame, and served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Central America before obtaining an MBA from Harvard Business School ('91).