David Crane’s Crusade for Clean Energy

作为一个70年代中期在芝加哥以北30英里的伊利诺伊州森林湖长大的青少年，大卫·克兰有一对不同寻常的童年英雄：阿奇博尔德·考克斯和约翰·西里卡。”我真的认为，虽然这听起来很恐怖，水门事件是美国法律界的最高点，特别检察官考克斯和法官西里卡拯救了国家，可以说，”55岁的首席执行官说NRG能源公司, the U.S.’s largest independent power-generation company. “So I went to law school, wanting to be a crusading person like that.”

今天，克雷恩是一个不同类型的十字军战士。这位哈佛大学法学院毕业生，曾经的公司律师，已经成为能源行业在气候变化以及像他这样的公司需要减少碳排放方面最响亮的声音之一。克兰在职业生涯的早期一直致力于开发和资助独立发电厂，他说，美国能源行业是“问题的一个巨大组成部分”，有义务找出如何以经济合理的方式解决问题。

Crane is doing his part. When he joined NRG as CEO in December 2003 after running U.K.-based International Power, the former Northern States Power Co. subsidiary was just emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a victim of troubles in the energy sector following the collapse of Enron Corp. two years earlier. NRG operated power plants around the U.S., most of which used coal to generate the electricity that the company sold to utility companies. After a series of divestitures and acquisitions, including the $287.5 million purchase of Reliant Energy in 2009, Crane had refocused NRG’s wholesale power generation in a few key regions and added retail businesses.

He also began to build out the company’s renewable-energy effort. In 2012, NRG brought online 420 megawatts of solar projects, including a solar ring at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, an hour’s drive from the company’s Princeton headquarters. That same year it paid $1.7 billion to merge with GenOn Energy; the combined entity has the capacity to generate about 46,000 megawatts of electricity — enough to power about 40 million homes — and employs 8,000 people.

在起重机的领导下NRG relia已经减少了nce on coal to produce electricity. Today just 15 of its 100 facilities are powered by coal. Still, coal represents as much as 70 percent of the company’s total energy production because NRG’s coal plants are enormous and run continuously, the CEO explains. The owner of three electric cars, including a Tesla Roadster, Crane is quick to point out that the transition to a cleaner power-generation future is a long-term proposition for NRG, whose shares, at $30 on March 14, were up 17 percent for the preceding 12 months. “When I’m talking to environmental people, I say, ‘Look, before anyone hugs me, I just want you to know that my company is one of the largest polluters in the United States,’” he says. “‘But we’re trying to get out of it.’”

亚博赞助欧冠编辑MichaelPeltz最近与Crane就气候变化问题以及NRG为提供“安全、可负担、可靠和可持续”的能源所做的努力进行了交谈。

Institutional Investor: You recently celebrated your ten-year anniversary as CEO. Did you have a vision back then for what NRG would become?

Crane: Not really. The company was just this motley conglomeration of old power plants that had been bought from various utilities around the U.S. I knew we had to shape it into something that was more coherent that we would try to concentrate in certain markets. In my first three years, I think we sold 23 assets. And then we bought a company called Texas Genco, which was owned byKKR公司and Blackstone. We did that in 2006, and that gave us coherence around three regions: Northeast U.S., Texas and then California. In total I think it was 12 states, but 11 states with 50 percent of the American GDP, so it wasn’t bad.

Then we got an opportunity in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis to go into retail, so we bought Reliant and 2 million customers. I’d seen that model work in the U.K. and Australia: a combination of power generation and the retail customer. But I would never have originally planned on that because retail companies don’t come available for purchase that often. So we got a little lucky that they were in a little bit of trouble during the financial crisis.

我真的有点晚了气候变化bit. I was by no means the first utility executive or power industry executive to sort of embrace that there’s a big problem here and we have to do something about it because we’re a big part of the problem. I realized that it was not going to be in the interests of NRG shareholders long-term to be the most carbon-intensive power-generation company in the U.S. and that we had to build up our zero-carbon-generation business, if only to average down our overall carbon emissions per megawatt hour produced.

我们最初进入风能领域，然后我们对太阳能技术比风能更感兴趣。这发展了我们业务的第三个分支，即可再生能源业务。这引起了人们对我的关注，他们在寻找那些试图找到解决气候变化的方法的人，因为我是一个局外人，一个最初在煤火发电上赚大钱的人，如此积极地拥抱风能、太阳能和其他可再生能源。

NRG有多少业务来自煤炭？

Some years coal-based generation would be 80 or 90 percent of our actual output. Now it’s a little less because natural gas is dispatching ahead of coal in some places and we have one nuclear plant. But coal is still probably 60 or 70 percent of our production and probably 80 to 90 percent of our emissions.

煤炭的未来是什么？

Coal is not nearly as profitable today as it was back in 2008. But it’s still the biggest part of our production. The Sierra Club focuses a lot on shutting down coal plants, and I understand that’s what they want to do. But the most important thing is that the existing coal fleet is withering away now. These power plants have a limited life expectancy, including all of our coal plants. I think the average age of our coal plants is 40 to 43 years, and that’s the same for basically the entire American coal fleet. The question is, what does this country build going forward for the 21st century? And that’s where I think we more than anyone have aggressively embraced this idea that the future should be driven by wind and solar.

How long will it take to transition from coal to alternative sources of energy?

我认为这是一个世代的事情-可能20年左右。值得关注的是，分布式太阳能和天然气暴利在我们的太空中造成的破坏。人们不是拥有这些巨大的发电厂，而是在自己的地下室从天然气管道开始发电，天然气管道进入他们的房子，为他们的炉子供电吗？对我们来说，这是未来的重要组成部分。就像人们最终摆脱了长途六线电话一样，他们即将开始摆脱集中式电网系统。我们想成为这方面的领导者。这并不是百分之百的可再生能源，但从排放的角度来看，这比目前的系统要清洁得多。

Is that the retail part of your business?

The retail part of our business would be a big part of it. The parts of the U.S. where there’s most room to sort of disrupt the existing system are the places where electricity is most expensive, which is the Northeast U.S. and California. So that’s where our initial effort is going to be focused.

Looking at it in brutally frank terms, for a long time the energy industry worked on the principle that no matter how much energy we produced, someone would buy it for a good price. But right now we’ve shifted over the past few years into this period of energy overabundance, so all of us in the energy industry have to look to take market share away from other forms of energy. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big proponent of electric cars, because two out of every three energy dollars spent in the U.S. are spent on transportation fuel, and of course that’s overwhelmingly gasoline and diesel. I’d like to get a portion of those dollars into my pocket.

You’ve got a business that allows people to charge their cars?

Yes. We have a subsidiary called eVgo. What we’ve done in both Houston and Dallas initially and now in the real market, which is California, is we’ve put a network of eVgo chargers around the cities. The claim we make is that you’re never more than five miles away from one of our chargers. We also finance the car charger that goes in your garage, which is actually your principal charger. So the chargers around the community are basically an insurance product, and they’re supposed to allay your range anxiety. So if you miscalculate or if unbeknownst to you your teenage son or daughter went out and ran down your battery, you can get home. As a business model, the way it works is we charge one flat fee a month, $89, and for that you get this charger in the garage, you get access to this charging network in your city, and you get all the electricity that you can use, from either source, at no additional cost.

At what point will the market reward you for your investment in alternatives?

We’ve studied this question exhaustively. The fundamental truth is that system power in the U.S. from conventional power plants is a declining business. I mean, the historical connection between GDP growth and electricity demand growth has been broken. Even when it existed, if the U.S. was going to grow at 1.5 percent per year, that would mean that electricity demand would grow at 1 percent per year — not too exciting to growthinvestors. But the green-energy end of our business is growing at double-digit rates from a very small base. And so theinvestorsdon’t need to see that renewables and clean-energy ebitda is more than 50 percent of your overall business, but they like the growth rates.

你花了多少钱使你现有的煤厂更清洁？

在我们公司和过去几年收购的公司之间，我们至少投资了30亿美元，对煤厂实施后端控制，以控制（二氧化硫、氮氧化物）和汞的排放。如果你看看我们的煤电厂和全国各地的很多煤电厂，他们今天的环境足迹只是十年前的一小部分，只有一个例外，那就是没有一项后端技术能真正解决碳问题。这就是为什么气候变化隐约可见。因此，我们现在正在做的是，我们有一家名为Petra Nova的子公司，在能源部的支持下，在德克萨斯州进行了一项价值9亿美元的碳捕获项目，该项目将附属于我们最大的燃煤发电厂。它将从该工厂的废气中捕获更多的碳，比国内任何其他碳捕获项目都要多。具有讽刺意味的是，为了使经济效益发挥作用，我们必须分离这些碳，将其泵入地下，并将其用于提高石油采收率。这是因为，既然碳没有价格，如果你想花9亿美元买东西，你就必须在另一端想出一些经济高效的东西。所以对我们来说，另一端是一桶油。这在经济上对我们有好处，但最终当石油本身被消耗时，就会产生与之相关的碳足迹。

But showing that you can capture the carbon from the exhaust gas on our coal fleet is important for the company, it’s important for the country, and I think given that, ultimately it will be the critical技术在中国,Indians, who are building coal plants all the time, to cut their carbon footprint. • •