Follow the Green Thread
There’s no stopping the clean energy transition
Story by Heidi Koelz
Illustrations by Stuart Bradford
It’s been a volatile year for renewable energy. After federal policy reversals and the United States’ second withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the ambitious international treaty to address climate change, the world’s ability to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise can seem increasingly imperiled. But people involved with clean energy say there’s still reason for hope.
Affordable and quick to produce, renewables dominate new energy projects. And with demand for electricity surging, they make business—as well as environmental—sense.
We talked with six Concord Academy alums who demonstrate the tenacity of the clean energy sector. In fields as diverse as real estate and higher education, and in workplaces ranging from a scrappy data-wrangling co-op in Colorado to a leading European solar provider, their stories highlight both the complexities and the momentum of the clean energy transition.
“How else could it be done?” Adam Knoff ’01 learned to ask that question as a CA student. Challenging the status quo has guided his clean energy career, as has the conviction that sustainability and profitability aren’t mutually exclusive.
Knoff majored in environmental studies at Connecticut College, then earned a master’s in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts in 2010. “I was intrigued by how cities form and interested in how we could build or retrofit them in sustainable ways,” he says.
He worked in an energy efficiency trade association before taking a role in 2012 managing sustainability projects for Unico Properties, a Seattle-based commercial real estate owner and operator with a significant portfolio in Boulder, Colo. With no previous real estate experience, he says, he found himself “speaking two different languages, using my technical and scientific knowledge to make a financial argument.”
His first projects focused on energy efficiency, but when he realized that a LEED Platinum building in Denver with a new 100,000-square-foot roof seemed tailor-made for solar, Knoff started calling contractors and solar developers. For two years, he tried to negotiate a power purchase agreement, a contract with a solar developer to install panels and sell back the electricity at a fixed rate. Eventually, he says, he realized the markets were misaligned: “Real estate needs to be nimble and able to sell at the drop of a hat, and solar is infrastructure investing—long term, low risk, low reward.”
So he and a business partner pitched the idea of making the investment themselves. They began developing solar projects for Unico Properties, and soon they were fielding calls from other real estate investors who had run into similar obstacles. Eventually, their solar operation required its own financing; in 2018, Knoff co-founded Unico Solar Investors, which he and his partner ran for six years before it was acquired by Altus Power. He also co-founded a solar asset management company, Luci Renewables, that manages 150 megawatts of installed capacity for large infrastructure investment clients.
Now Knoff directs service delivery at Euclid Power, a software and services operation that helps the renewables industry efficiently move through the development and transaction processes required to get more capacity on the grid. Since 2013, he has served on the board of the Denver 2030 District, an emissions-reducing, public-private partnership. And he teaches in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Masters of the Environment program. He reminds his students, “It’s not the first time we’ve dealt with some seemingly upending change.”
Knoff has been observing artificial intelligence (AI) companies pursue off-grid, utility-scale solar projects to power hyperscale data centers. “I see a healthy, thriving industry,” he says. “What can get lost in the noise is that people still believe in it—including the people making a healthy profit—or we wouldn’t be doing it.”
“I see a healthy, thriving industry. What can get lost in the noise is that people still believe in it—including the people making a healthy profit—or we wouldn’t be doing it.”
— Adam Knoff ’01
Sean Chung ’14, a senior research analyst for the American Clean Power Association, tracks clean energy projects and industry trends. He, too, says renewables are highly competitive: “It’s not a nascent technology that can be easily stifled.”
Although the industry faces challenges, milestones are being met, including the first large-scale offshore wind power plant, which came online in 2024. A second, almost 20 times its size, is being built off the coast of Virginia, and large onshore wind projects are moving forward in New Mexico and Wyoming. Utility-scale solar projects are also being deployed rapidly, and advances in battery technology have provided important services to the electric grid. “In 2021, across Texas, winter storm Uri caused rolling blackouts, which are also a concern during summer months,” Chung says. “But thanks to renewables, grid reliability is improving.”
Load growth, or rising cross-sector energy demand, is increasing sharply, Chung says: “For decades, the load was relatively flat. Despite population growth, increasingly energy-efficient appliances offset the growth in demand.” Now load growth is projected to skyrocket, tied to data centers, electrification, and the return of domestic manufacturing. Data centers consumed about 4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023, according to a 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, a figure that could climb to 12% by 2028.
Chung says renewable electricity is cost effective and rapidly deployable—indispensable for meeting rising demand. “Looking at what’s in the interconnection queue right now,” Chung says, “over 90% of energy projects are solar, wind, or battery storage.”
The growth of clean energy, he says, is the result of improved economics and supportive state and federal policies. And he doesn’t discount individual influence. Many utilities allow customers to elect renewable sources of electricity. Chung says his own cost for this is only a few dollars more per month.
“It sends a demand signal to utilities, so the industry sees that customers are interested in buying clean power,” he says.
Like Chung, Jamie Biggar ’89, who co-founded the online solar marketplace EnergySage with Vikram Aggarwal in 2009, believes individuals can lead the way. “The more you see people adding solar, the more people talk about their experience, the more natural it seems,” he says.
And environmentalism isn’t the only reason, he adds: “Even unsubsidized solar is quite competitive with other sources of energy now, and at the utility scale, it’s cheaper.”
Aggarwal realized early on that solar panels could provide cash flow: After an initial investment, they pay for themselves in around six years, then they provide low-risk, tax-free profit. “Nobody was looking at it that way back in 2010, 2011; it was just a thing to save the planet,” Biggar says.
Over Biggar’s 12 years at the company (he left in 2024, two years after its acquisition), EnergySage had great success making that financial case. The company connects customers to vetted solar contractors and also offers community solar, essentially rental agreements for a share of solar panels installed off site. It recently expanded its marketplace to include air-source heat pumps.
Biggar recalls the earlier response to a lack of clean energy leadership in Washington. “It led to states, municipalities, nonprofits, and individuals stepping up, and it drove a lot more interest in solar,” he says. “We’ll figure this out. There are smart people working on the problem.”
Institutions are also driving the transition, and not just to solar. As the associate director of sustainability at Emerson College, Jennifer Lamy ’09 oversees progress toward its goal of carbon neutrality by 2030. After a decade of purchasing renewable electricity credits, in 2024 Emerson became the first college to convert 100% of its heating to carbon-free electricity by contracting zero-emissions steam from a district provider that operates an industrial-scale thermal heating system.
In 2007, Emerson signed the Presidents’ Climate Commitment, an agreement among higher education institutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate climate research. Since then, the college has cut its emissions nearly in half. Lamy coordinates with the nonprofit Second Nature, which tracks progress across colleges and universities.
“This is the most collaborative space I’ve ever been in,” she says. “So much of this work is rooted in community, and it helps to have colleagues—here and at other institutions—who aren’t slowing down, even if it feels harder.”
Lamy is certain Emerson can meet its commitment. And other Boston institutions are also reducing their emissions to meet the city’s 2050 carbon-neutrality goal. “In times like this, you have to rely on subnational actors,” Lamy says. “Companies and colleges are stepping up. So are cities and states.”
Emerson is an arts and communications college, so its students tend to find creative connections to the work. About half its undergraduates are film students; they focus on sustainable film production, and many take on the subjects of climate and sustainability in their films.
While Emerson is moving steadily to meet its sustainability goals, “our impact is probably greater through how we’re educating and empowering our students, who will go out into the world and create this ripple effect,” Lamy says. “Both are important.”
Using reliable data to measure our progress toward lowering emissions is another key aspect of addressing the climate crisis. Behind the scenes, organizations are monitoring the complex system of energy providers to hold the industry accountable.
Austen Sharpe ’14 is a steward of public energy data at Catalyst Cooperative, an environmentally focused data science team. State and federal governments are required to collect and publish information about the utilities they regulate. But just because the data is publicly available doesn’t mean it’s publicly usable.
“All of this information paints an interesting picture of our national electricity grid, but because of how it’s disseminated, it’s very difficult to piece together,” she says. “It’s an absolute rat’s nest of interconnections.”
Regulations differ by state, she explains, and “utility” means something different in West Virginia than in Massachusetts. For example, some utilities own physical power plants, whereas others purchase their power elsewhere. Sharpe says academic researchers can toil for years to answer questions about energy usage, “at which point they find them irrelevant.”
That was the experience of Catalyst Cooperative’s founders. While working on policy, they frequently stumbled without infrastructure that made energy data immediately accessible, reliable, and reusable. Now regulators, researchers, and reporters can get that data for free from Catalyst’s Public Utilities Data Liberation Project, an open-source data resource.
“The hope is to provide access to better data for more stakeholders, to level the playing field between utilities and everyone else,” Sharpe says. “We need more smart people providing options, not just utilities saying this is the only way.”
Growing up in Concord, Mass., Sharpe was influenced by her grandparents’ environmental activism. As an environmental co-head at CA, she became keenly aware of ecological fragility and the importance of understanding how human-created systems operate.
At Brown, Sharpe majored in environmental studies, joined a fossil fuel divestment group, and built solar panels for a satellite. Through the university’s Climate and Development Lab, she attended the 2016 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Morocco. At that time, she says, college students looking to work in sustainability were typically presented with two paths: science or activism. In Marrakech, her committee work advocating for more renewable energy in developing countries felt to her like empty ideation. But she says the variety of organizations represented at an exposition was jaw-dropping: “It was like, this is the most expansive field, and there are opportunities to carve out the most specific of niches.” She soon realized she wanted to have an impact on state-level utility regulation.
“We’re just a group of individuals who want to do something good for the world—to make this information more accessible and improve people’s lives.”
— Austen Sharpe ’14
The summer after she graduated, in 2018, Sharpe and a Brown classmate set out on a self-guided U.S. energy tour. “I wanted to see the energy infrastructure in the wild,” Sharpe says. They drove through wind farms in Kansas and were met with skepticism when they stepped out of her Prius to ask for a tour of a coal mine in Wyoming.
Sharpe moved to Colorado to intern with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). There, a data-scraping project kick-started her current work. NREL releases a national renewable energy data book annually, which at the time was compiled manually. Sharpe and a colleague figured out how to automate it.
“I love what NREL is doing, but working there, I realized government entities don’t do a great job talking to each other, even internally,” Sharpe says. That’s why she was drawn to help construct meaningful narratives about environmental challenges and progress from outside the bureaucracy of a national lab.
Catalyst Cooperative relies on grants and financial support from core users. “We’re not growth-oriented,” Sharpe says. “We’re just a group of individuals who want to do something good for the world—to make this information more accessible and improve people’s lives.”
As part of a volunteer coalition, Public Environmental Data Partners, the co-op recently helped archive environmental data before the current administration removed it from government websites. “There was a lot of fear that these historic data portals would disappear,” she says. “Some of them did.” One was the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice Screen, which connected demographic and pollution data.
While Sharpe hopes the EPA won’t stop publishing continuous emissions monitoring data altogether, she is concerned that the agency will stop both monitoring and regulating. “It’s a data travesty,” she says.
Still, she’s optimistic that because states regulate utilities, they’ll be able to learn from each other and take the lead and play bigger roles. “I still have a fervent belief that the renewable energy transition is good for all of us,” Sharpe says. “It’s not political, and I hope people will finally start to see that.”
Elsewhere in the world there’s ample support for clean energy. The Swedish government, for example, says the nation already produces more than 70% of its power from renewable sources and aims to be 100% fossil-fuel free by 2040.
Anna Dibble ’18 leads the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability efforts of Alight, a rapidly growing Swedish solar developer with nearly 4 gigawatt-hours of projects in its pipeline. One of the cheapest and fastest forms of energy to deploy, solar is critical to the global energy transition, Dibble says. In 2024, according to Bloomberg, E.U. solar power production jumped 22%, surpassing coal for the first time.
Dibble earned a B.S. in business administration and management from Babson College, then worked at Fidelity on its sustainability investing initiatives. In 2022, she moved to Stockholm to serve as Alight’s head of ESG while pursuing a master’s degree in finance, with a specialization in sustainability, at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Alight offers energy-intensive businesses solar power purchase agreements (PPAs)—the same financing model Knoff used in the U.S. real estate market. PPAs expand renewable energy while offering corporations financial predictability through long-term contracts. The Stockholm-based clothing retailer H&M signed its fourth PPA with Alight in 2024, becoming the largest buyer of solar power in Sweden. Dibble says PPAs are also emerging as a solution to AI’s strain on power grids.
Some of the other ways individuals and corporations can invest in clean energy “shuffle certificates of ownership,” Dibble says, “so you’re just taking credit for renewable electricity that was put on the grid a long time ago.” In contrast, PPAs bring additional renewable energy projects online and tie a company’s renewable energy claims to specific new projects and sources.
“When you can understand your tie and responsibility and relationship to your investment, I think that’s very significant,” Dibble says.
Alight also works to combat the biodiversity crisis. “If we’re building on agricultural land where the soil is depleted, we might reintroduce native flora and fauna or restore it to its previous use as grassland, with local sheep grazing the fields,” she says.
Dibble drives the company’s commitment to responsible solar practices, ensuring that ESG considerations are fully integrated throughout all operations. She oversees supplier traceability audits and analysis that considers the entire life of a solar site—from the raw materials used in its components through the repurposing of panels when a site is decommissioned. Such work helps Alight strengthen accountability across this life cycle and advance more ethical and sustainable development of clean energy.
Dibble ties this holistic aspect of her work back to her CA education: “Spending time with Thoreau’s original manuscripts in the Concord Public Library archives during classes with Ed Rafferty P’19 ’21, modeling the impacts of nuclear energy with Jodi Pickle, studying environmental leaders with Jenny Chandler, and sharpening analytical and empathic thinking with Mark Engerman P’19 and Sabrina Sadique—each of these experiences strengthened my dedication to intentional action and advocacy.”
Studying in Concord, Mass., the birthplace of transcendentalism, also “offered a unique opportunity to develop lasting respect for nature and a deeper understanding of our responsibility to the planet and its people,” she says. “CA is a community that plants the seed for appreciating nature as one of our most important stakeholders.”
Solar photos by Alight
Anna Dibble photo by Christian Åslund
