David Crane currently is the senior operating executive at Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York City-based private equity firm focused on investment in sustainability and wellness. As part of his responsibilities at Pegasus, David is chairman of Impala Holdings, a renewables development company focused on sub-Sahara Africa, and GVL, a biological lighting joint venture. David is also focused, on behalf of Pegasus, on new investment in clean energy technology, including distributed generation, energy storage, energy efficiency and EV infrastructure.
Prior to Pegasus, David Crane was CEO of NRG, which he led out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2003. He transformed NRG over his 12-year tenure to be a Fortune 200 company, engaged not only in conventional power generation and competitive retail electricity services but also green retail, large scale renewables, home solar, EV charging and portable solar. David pioneered the yieldco asset class with the IPO of NRG Yield in July 2013.
David was awarded the Corporate Environmental Leadership award by GlobalGreen in 2014 and the Equinox Solar Champion Award and more recently The C.K. Prahalad Award for Global Sustainability Business Leadership in 2015. He is also editor at large for greenbiz.com and leads the B Team's corporate "net zero" initiative.
For further reading on David Crane, start with this interview with GreenTech Media
About our 22nd Century Leadership podcast:
Our current social and economic systems were designed in and for a different time. Namely the 19th and 20th centuries. A time when there was a lot less people changing life on earth a lot slower and less systematically. Today, each day we add approximately 200,000 new humans to the 7+ billion people occupying our beautiful blue orb floating through space. Add to this the addition of tech innovations associated with machine learning, DNA manipulation, and flash stock trading, and we are living in the midst of a volatile cocktail that has manifest in unusual politics and a broad sense of dissatisfaction.
For the last 15 years we’ve worked with CEOs, corporations, non-profits, foundations, and even a city, on taking action to build long-term resilience and sustainability in light of these trends. Along the way, I’ve met a lot of interesting people engaged in what I’ve come to call the act of History Making. These are leaders who are actively transforming the way that human beings ‘see the world.’ Known examples are people like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Desmond Tutu. In our case, we are going to focus this podcast on a subset of these History Makers. Namely, leaders who are actively working to help people appreciate the beauty, utility and fundamental necessity of a healthy environment to a thriving human economy and existence.
These 22nd century leaders are applying the best of human leadership capabilities to successfully helping their fellow humans through the what is sure to be a very turbulent transition from an economics built for 19th century realities to a society and economics built for 22nd century realities.