Much has been written about the state of Portland recently, but here’s a fresh take: There are a heck of a lot of renewable energy movers and shakers kicking around town.
That’s the realization after taking a closer look at announcements in January by two previously under-the-radar companies, reporting on news from another pair last fall, and factoring in familiar longtime players like Avangrid Renewables and Vestas (not to mention PacifiCorp, Portland General Electric and the Bonneville Power Administration, all of which have significant renewables sides).
“There is a really strong diaspora of energy executives here and, and I think more and more these days, they're all kind of pivoting into renewable energy,” Alex Ellis said.
Ellis is one of four partners at Excelsior Energy Capital. He forms the Portland outpost of a company headquartered in the Minneapolis suburb for which it’s named.
In early January, Excelsior announced a $504 million renewable energy investment fund that it’s using to buy, develop and operate solar and energy-storage projects in North America.
A couple of weeks later, Primergy Solar put out news about its growth, including a raft of new executive hirings as it builds a portfolio of projects for Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.
Primergy is officially based in Oakland, but the guy heading that burgeoning executive team, CEO Ty Daul, is in, you guessed it, Portland.
“I think a lot of that Portland concentration stems from the early days of wind,” Daul said.
That was at PPM Energy, a Portland-based arm of Scottish Power that developed wind projects in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere when the modern industry was really getting going in the 2000s. In 2007, the Spanish utility company Iberdrola acquired Scottish Power (two years after Berkshire Hathaway bought PacifiCorp from Scottish Power). PPM Energy became Iberdrola Renewables and later morphed into Avangrid Renewables.
“A lot of the individuals and professionals here in Portland either were part of that original group or competed directly with PPM Energy back in the early 2000s,” Daul said.
Ellis wasn’t among them. Looking to get into renewables, he arrived in Portland in 2009 — to work for Daul at Element Power.
That was a Portland-based company that, with Daul as CEO and another PPMer, Raimund Grube, as president and chief operating officer in North America, built a portfolio of solar and wind projects for the private equity firm Hudson Clean Energy Partners.
Jesse Gronner is another Portland exec with PPM roots, which extended into a run at Iberdrola/Avangrid Renewables, where he led renewable energy development for several years until early 2020. Later in the year he founded Triple Oak Power, a wind power development company focused on onshore wind with majority backing from EnCap Investments L.P., a Houston-based oil-and-gas private equity firm that’s growing a clean energy side.
About the same time, Portland-based Skyline Renewables — headed by Martin Mugica, a former chief executive at Iberdrola Renewables — announced a move into solar in Texas, adding to a growing portfolio of wind farms mostly in the Lone Star state.
The companies these executives help run haven’t brought new renewables to Oregon, at least yet.
“We haven't made an investment here,” Ellis, of Excelsior, said, “but we do have an exciting partnership with Unico Solar Investors.” That’s the solar investment and development unit of Unico Investments Group, which is based in Seattle — not Portland, but pretty close.
“Unico has a big presence here in Oregon, and we're hoping
to do more with them in the state,” Ellis said.
