Imagine you’re at the Yolo County Fair in Sacramento, California in the early 2000’s.   You wander the fairgrounds inhaling the smells of cotton candy, the livestock and chili dogs in the air and enjoy the music from the Carousel.   Next to a giant pumpkin, you see an exhibit tent with a sign that reads “Sunrun” and the lady there manning the booth says to you:  

“Let’s create a planet run by the sun.”

Keep moving, right?  What a hippy dippy tree-hugging looney toon.  

Well, if you had walked away, that would have been a mistake.  You would likely have been talking face to face with Lynn Jurich, who went from telling families about solar power at county fairs to becoming the co-founder and CEO of the largest dedicated residential rooftop solar company in the country, Sunrun (Nasdaq: RUN).

Pioneers in renewable energy have not had it easy.  Many of their ideas seem at first farfetched and unrealistic.  However, to solve big programs like those facing our power grid, sometimes the crazy ideas are the best ones.  

Fast forward a few years to 2019, and we’re seeing more and more big “wacky” ideas coming to fruition to solve the complex problems facing our planet and the energy industry.  Many of the innovators and pioneers putting forth these solutions are women.

For example:

• Turning buildings in to power plants. Robyn Beavers and Claire Woo are two New York-based co-founders of BluePrint Power develop electricity grid blueprints designed to accelerate the transformation of buildings into intelligent power nodes

   

• Redesigning nuclear energy.  Leslie Dewan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Transatomic Power whose molten salt reactor has the potential to generate clean, safe, proliferation-resistant and low-cost nuclear power, and can help replace coal plants coming offline.

   

• Creating self-reliance. Karen Morgan is Co-Founder, President and CEO of Dynamic Energy Networks.  Her firm is developing microgrids and distributed energy sources that can work independent or in parallel with the current utility grid.

   

• Connecting communities to share solar gardens.  Sandhya Murali and Steph Speirs are Co-Founders of Boston-based Solstice who believe every American household can be powered by affordable renewable energy and believe community solar to be the answer.

To learn more about pioneers in renewable energy, download our report Top 19 in 2019: Renewable Energy Firms Founded by Women.

 

VIEW THE TOP 19 IN ’19