Distributed energy folks don’t often find themselves on the same list as Billie Eilish and MrBeast. But such is the case with this year’s Time Magazine 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders in Business 2023.
Annette Clayton, CEO of Schneider Electric North America was named in the Leaders category. She told Time we need more resources like virtual power plants and distributed energy management systems to create a “decentralized and more democratic clean energy future.”
Time put Jigar Shah, director of the Loan Programs Office, U.S. Department of Energy, in the category of climate “Titans.”
Shah told Time that the technologies to meet President Biden’s decarbonization goals “are already within our grasp. It’s a matter of doing rather than waiting for a breakthrough.”
Manoj Sinha, CEO and co-founder, Husk Power Systems, made the list in the “Innovator” category. “Solarizing the agricultural value chain gets far too little attention, especially in the Global South, where smallholder farmers dominate economies yet are the most vulnerable to climate change. And one important way to address the issue is not difficult and exists today: using distributed solar and batteries in food production, processing, and transportation,” Sinha told Time.
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Michael Bakas, executive vice president at Ameresco, has been a star in the energy efficiency arena for a long time. So it’s great to see him and Massachusetts-based Ameresco getting recognition, not once but twice in recent months. The Energy Choice 2023 awards named Bakas a finalist for Energy Champion of the Year and named Ameresco’s project with Colorado Mountain College and Holy Cross Energy as a finalist for Energy Efficient Partnership of the Year. The same project and Bakas were also nominated as finalists for the 2023 S&P Global Commodity Insights Global Energy Awards. S&P listed Bakas for the 2023 Rising Star Individual Award and the project was nominated for Infrastructure Project of the Year.
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