In this episode, we speak with Michael Eckhart, former Global Head of Environmental Finance at Citigroup, founding chairman and former president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), and co-author of the Green Bond Principles. Michael now serves as a board member for Hannon Armstrong and as an adjunct and visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, respectively. Michael discusses the history of the global clean energy financing space, the benefits of financing—rather than funding—renewable energy, what the Green Bond Principles offer the market, how today’s clean energy financing models evolved, and more.
In this episode, we speak with Michael Eckhart, former Global Head of Environmental Finance at Citigroup, founding chairman and former president of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), and co-author of the Green Bond Principles. Michael now serves as a board member for Hannon Armstrong and as an adjunct and visiting professor at Columbia University and the University of Maryland, respectively.
Michael discusses the history of the global clean energy financing space, the benefits of financing—rather than funding—renewable energy, what the Green Bond Principles offer the market, how today’s clean energy financing models evolved, and more.
Links:
American Council on Renewable Energy
International Capital Market Association Green Bond Principles
International Solar Energy Society
Episode recorded August 25, 2021
Michael Eckhart: I was almost giddy that I had lived through the period of getting renewable energy from nowhere to the bond market.
Chad Reed: Welcome to Climate Positive, a podcast produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions. I 'm Chad Reed.
Hilary Langer: I'm Hilary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I’m Gil Jenkins
Chad: In this series, we host candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers driving a climate positive future.
As the former Global Head of Environmental Finance at Citi Group, the Founding Chairman of the American Council on Renewable Energy, and an author of the Green Bond Principles, Michael Eckhart has helped transform clean energy from a niche market to a key industry. He now serves as a board member for Hannon Armstrong. In today’s conversation, Mike shares how his belief in the magic of solar PV led him to travel the world in support of cleaner energy sources. After surviving a hurricane while on the outside of a navy submarine, Mike went on to help bring electricity to Nelson Mandela’s village, coalesce wind and solar insiders around common goals, and establish innovative financing models for a nascent industry. Additionally, he explains why efforts to expand renewable energy need to focus on Wall Street, rather than the White House, and how “doing something useful,” remains the best response to today’s challenges. So with that, here is Mike Eckhart, Hannon Armstrong CEO Jeff Eckel, and Hilary Langer in conversation.
Hilary: Mike, thank you so much for being with me and Jeff today on Climate Positive. It’s great to have you here.
Michael: It's an honor to be on. Thank you.
Hilary: At the start of your career, you served in the US Navy Submarine Services. Did you know that you wanted to eventually focus on renewable energy?
Michael: No, but there were some awakenings on the power and importance of nature that I distinctly got, and remember those days of being in the ocean and realizing what is nature all about here. It had a distinct impact on me. It set the stage for other interests later.
Jeff Eckel: You did have one particularly fun ride outside the boat.
Michael: Oh, I did have that one fun ride, yes. We were in the Atlantic, north of Bermuda and discovered a hurricane. There weren't satellites in 1967. Now, we're in 50-foot seas in 100 mile an hour wind, then up comes what we discovered as a true rouge wave that we guessed was 150 feet tall and we just submerged right into the face of it, and it went over us.
There were three of us outside the submarine up on top of what you call the sail, that thing that sticks up off the hull… We held our breath for a while and the submarine came back up to the top and it didn't return to Lake Michigan. It returned to the hurricane. Now, so pick your poison. Do you want to be holding your breath underwater or do you want to be-- and it was very violent. This was solid water coming down on us and us submerging into it. It was a very violent experience.
Hilary: You were holding onto the submarine while holding your breath and it's going under?
Michael: The submarine has a hull, and then it has a section that sticks up, and that's the faring around the periscopes. We got blown down inside that. I had two life chains on and was just underwater and underwater a lot. I was thinking that the sail-- that part that sticks up, had actually broken off because the sound was so tremendous. I thought we were sinking in 33,000 feet of water.
I was actively trying to unchain from where I was with thoughts of swimming back to the surface to rejoin the hurricane. It was a little hazardous moment but we got through it and that experience taught me the power of nature. It's way different than we think living here on land.
Hilary: How did you move from rogue waves to renewable energy?
Michael: It's like I did everything else first and then realized where I wanted to go. At GE, I was in all power systems, but quite a bit of nuclear power. At Combustion Engineering, I was the head of marketing of the largest coal fired boiler manufacturer in the world, so I did coal for a couple years. United Power Systems, did gas-fired IPP development. I did nuclear, coal, and gas before I went back to renewables from the Booz Allen days in the '70s.
In the 1995-ish, I just made a decision I was not going to do nuclear, coal, and gas anymore. I was going to go back and do solar energy and it was just a career decision, just a personal decision. Like, "I've done all that other stuff. I don't like it." I trained as an electrical engineer, just fascinated by what solar PV is. It's a big diode that converts photons of energy light into electricity in wires. That's pretty magical.
I just said, "I want to work on that, I want to make that successful." The thing I can bring to it that it doesn't seem to have is financing because in order to deploy that technology, you've got to pay for it. The Department of Energy R&D budget doesn't have enough money to pay for all the $100 billion a year of PV we install every year today. Where'd that money come from? It came from Wall Street.
In the mid '90s, I really went after a personal goal to bring financing to solar energy.
Hilary: Throughout the ‘70s you focused on new energy technologies. How was that talked about at the time, before global warming and climate change were part of our common lexicon?
Michael: The late '70s was the era post oil crisis from '73, the government formed ERDA, the Energy Research and Development Administration in '75. It then formed a DOE and '77 and it was the Carter days and it was all about energy independence on oil plus damage to the environment. The climate word didn't really show up-- in my recollection, till about 1990. It was energy and environment. Those are the two words that even many people use for our field. Climate is dominant now but in those days, it was energy independence, and dealing with the environmental damage of energy production and use, particularly production.
Hilary: You then moved to General Electric. What was your focus there?
Michael: In 1981, GE got a request from a big industrial client called Big Three Industries in Houston to deliver a cogeneration-- or what we call now combined heat and power, power plant under the new law called PURPA, the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, that ordered utilities, they had to buy the energy output from alternative energy sources, meaning solar, wind, renewables, and cogeneration. Which we now call the IPP model.
Well, it started with that project, it had never been done before. Here, an industrial customer wanted to implement the law, this is '81 and the law wasn't challenged up until a Supreme Court decision in '83, as to whether the law would stand. We were actually implementing a power project under a law that was being challenged to the Supreme Court, but GE decided to go ahead and do it and we had formed a cogeneration marketing team in GE and I was more or less the secretary of that.
This request from Big Three Industries fell in my lap and we organized to get it done with all the different players, the turbine manufacturing plants, the installation and service engineering, or what we now call EPC, and all the bits and parts that have to go into putting a power plant together. Even though GE was the leading player in power plants, it had never delivered and owned the power plant. It always sold it to the utility, so this is quite revolutionary.
The long and short of it is we hired Skadden Arps-- the law firm in New York, to draw up the documents to implement this under this new law and it came back for the first review of those documents and the plan was GE would build an own the power plant and operate it and GE Capital would finance it. When it came back, the loan documents specified that, of course, GE would be recourse to GE.
Whoops, can't do that. There was a smart guy in the room from GE Capital who said, "Big Three Industries is a A credit, and Houston Lighting & Power is a AA credit. If we could really strengthen these power sales agreement and steam sales agreement to be rock solid contracts, we could look through those contracts to the credit worthiness of the offtakers." Of course, that became-- the first time it was ever done, that became the standard financing that we have today in the IPP industry.
Jeff: Mike, a historical note. I financed my first cogeneration project at Hannon in '87. Until you just mentioned the timeline, I was not aware of how close that was to the Supreme Court decision.
Michael: Yes, you were only four years past. Let me just work that. What happened then when the Supreme Court decision was in favor of PURPA standing, a whole new industry of lawyers and financiers went to work on that GE model because Skadden Arps then had the documents. Of course, Skadden Arps lawyers went to work at every law firm taking those documents with them. It was really the gas-fired IPP industry that got born, as you were doing in the '80s. That model got perfected and all the lawyers knew how to do those documents.
All the financiers agreed they'd rather have the credit worthiness of the offtake utilities, in those days, than to have the recourse to the developer of the project. Who knows if that developer is going to be in existence a year from now, but the utility wasn't going anywhere. That structure really hit a nerve in the whole industry and that is now the standard model around the world.
It's just the standard way of project financing today.
Hilary: Were you able to draw on that GE model when you then looked to establish solar financing abroad in Europe and India and Africa? You're very active with the Solar Bank initiative. What were some of the overlaps there?
Michael: Well, it was the same issues. We were dealing with, in those days, late '90s, I was going to Europe, India, and South Africa as my primary target areas. Financing solar in India in those days, which was all off-grid solar, it was against the rules to finance poor people in India. The only accepted collateral for a loan in India in those days was land and poor people didn't own land. How could you arrange a financing?
We stood up a program to train 1,000 bankers and their senior executives creating solar loan as a bank product line, like auto loan, sewing machine loan, housing loan, now you have solar loan. We actually created that as a product line for banks in India. Over three years, I had a team of about 10 people, all Indians and former bankers doing the training.
Hilary: It's an interesting mix of locations from India to South Africa and Europe, so distinct and they're probably looking at solar in different ways. Why did you select those three areas?
Michael: My program was to develop investment support and financing for the off-grid solar. We needed to have a solar market starting to happen. It wasn't my role to create solar PV manufacturers and distributors and installers. We wanted to bring the financing to an industry that was struggling because it didn't have financing.
In other words, in those days, the industry was implementing in a way that they could not succeed because they just had little bits and pieces of money from USAID and DOE and the European Commission. They were starving to death. They needed capital from the lending sector and equity from the investment sector to make it go.
In the case of South Africa, it actually started when the European Commission gave a grant to the European PV industry association EPIA, and it sent John Bonda, to send a renewable energy trade mission to South Africa to create an export market for European manufacturers. On that trip, I met a gentleman named Herman Bos, who's still a good friend, to create an off-grid solar company.
To do it, we had to do 100% equity and it had to have a real muscle behind it. We ended up creating a joint venture of Shell Oil Company in London and Eskom, the Electric Utility of South Africa. A 50/50 joint venture and that each committed $25 million to it. It was well-capitalized and Herman Bos became the CEO of it. We were going to work in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, on that section of South Africa in the rural areas.
They even did Nelson Mandela's home village. His office actually called the company to say that that the president-- Mandela was president at the time, that he wanted to give a two-day party at his village to celebrate what we had done. It just so happened that I was in South Africa the day that the party happened. I was there and I met Mandela and it was all quite the adventure.
Hilary: What were people most excited about during the celebrations in Mandela’s village?
Michael: Celebrating that his village had light. It could end the use of candles and kerosene lamps for the first time ever. Getting light into the rural areas is what it's all about, transforming lives. I've actually been in people's houses, actually only in India not Africa for this experience, but when the families, particularly the fathers, when they think about having light for their children, they burst out crying.
This is the biggest change in their lives for generations. Also, solar electricity for water pumping because now they can have managed agriculture versus just being exposed to nature and whatever nature delivers to you. It's light and water pumping.
Jeff: I would also say it's for cooking instead of woodfired, cataract producing fires and huts. Based on your good work in India and South Africa, we tried to do this in Indonesia, utter failure from a business standpoint, but solar home systems were taking off to do exactly as you said. Put light on the equatorial communities that only have light from 6:00 to 6:00. Sun goes down to six o'clock and kids still have to read.
Hilary: Coming back to your domestic initiatives, after working around the world, partying with Mandela, I believe your next step was to come back to the States and start ACORE, the American Council on Renewable Energy. How did those experiences then inform your mission and your priorities at ACORE?
Michael: Generally, yes. It skips a very important phase, which is work in Europe because to get to India and Africa in those days, you had to fly through Europe. I fell in with the real renewable energy radicals of Europe. These were the real missionaries pushing renewable energy policy forward, Herman Scheer-- the late great Herman Scheer, was a member of the Bundestag was pushing solar energy across Europe.
Herman Scheer had a conference on financing renewables which is a revolutionary thing to do in 1998. He and I got in quite-- I don't want to say an argument, but a debate on what was really needed and I was pushing financing, not social programs. Even though California did the social program cash subsidy approach, I had tried to get California to do financing under solar bank and everybody else, but they went with the subsidy. Again, that was 1998 also, but Herman Scheer listened.
My point was that to get a 15-year loan, which levelizes the front-end cost of a solar system over a lengthy period of time, you would need 20 years of guaranteed revenues. Herman Scheer said, "Well, why's that?" I said, "Well, you got to have assured revenues to pay off the loan." Very interesting little experience, he said, "Come with me." And we walked down the road in Bonn to where the development bank, KfW, was headquartered.
We went up to see the president of KfW, they were good friends. Eventually, the president said in English, "Yes, Dr. Scheer, Dr. Eckhart is correct. We need 20-year revenues. If you can get that change made," because the law had been passed for the first feed-in tariff with the five years of revenues. "If you can get that changed to 20," he says, "I'll Institute the solar loan program for all Germans."
If you go back in history, there was never a study, never a hearing, no nothing. It's just all of a sudden, KfW announced that they were initiating the solar loan program for all Germans.
Hilary: In those early days. How are proponents of renewable energy in Europe selling it?
Michael: It was principally anti-nuclear. The renewable energy was an alternative to nuclear power. There was the beginnings of climate and the issue with coal-fired power. That was generally in the news that renewable energy was going to displace coal-fired power. The reality is that was a false cover story of politics because the politicians love coal-fired power because it employed a lot of people.
Particularly if you have a construction program and you're continually building new coal-fired power plants, these things take 10,000 people-- workers, on a site and it employs a lot of people. Whereas nuclear power had finished its construction period from the '70s and it was no longer employing a lot of people. From a politician's point of view, coal-fired power was a huge social plus, and nuclear power, they didn't really care about.
The politicians wanted to keep everybody's eyes off of coal because of the jobs. There was a lot of political cover to what was being said at the time, but solar was an answer to both of them. I'd say for the solar leaders that I was working with, their principle motivation was to stop nuclear.
Hilary: How did those experiences then inform your mission at ACORE and your focus there and priorities?
Michael: The creation of ACORE was because Hermann Scheer convened a conference in June of 2001 in Bonn, Germany to create the world council on renewable energy. I was one of two Americans there. They asked me if I would chair it for the US and then I said, "Sure." I came home from that trip, had breakfast for three good friends in the industry, and we decided to create the American Council On Renewable Energy.
That's where ACORE got born at a breakfast at a restaurant in downtown Washington. Then through that summer, I had various meetings with various association CEOs and things like that. Just called a meeting September 4th, 2001 one week before 9/11 it's so happens. About 10 people came to the meeting and we founded ACORE. ACORE's mission was, again, to advance investment and financing for renewables.
We wanted to do something totally different which is instead of lobbying Congress, we would set out to lobby Wall Street because we realized doing what we were doing, that's where the money is. There's no money in Washington. It's a big fight over almost nothing.
Jeff: Mike, I remember the very first invitation to REFF, Renewable Energy Finance Forum, which a great idea, and you put it at the Waldorf Astoria. That was brilliant. That meant this industry had arrived.
Michael: That was the message.
Jeff: Nobody was going to miss a renewable energy conference at the Waldorf Astoria. We were renewable energy people. We never got to go to places like the Waldorf. This was awesome.
Michael: That was the whole point. During my GE,CE, and United Power System days, there were three or four times I attended an energy finance conference at the Waldorf. They were all at the Waldorf. The first one was in 2003 and then ACORE produced the Renewable Energy Finance Forum. It was the first renewable energy finance conference in history.
Jeff: I call you the father of the us renewable industry because of my experience in the '90s the solar industry was siloed, the wind industry was siloed, the biomass industry was siloed. There was no notion of a renewable energy industry in this country until you put ACORE together.
Michael: Thank you for that. More than me, ACORE had-- I founded ACORE and then ACORE got all this great work done of creating the industry you're talking about. It was literally true that in coming home from these trips to India and South Africa and Europe, I learned that in Europe, Europe had transformed itself from solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, into the renewable energy idea because politicians didn't like to have to work with wind and solar in each of these individual things. They wanted a whole industry.
We really had a very targeted strategy of educating senior people in the financial services sector about renewable energy as a means of getting them active. I remember recruiting speakers for the first conference and I called a banker who had led the financing of my last successful cogeneration project and I asked him if he would like to speak at REFF.
He said, "Well, Mike, you know I do gas-fired power. I don't do renewables."
I said, "Did you do any renewables?" He said, "Well, yes, I did two wind farms and a landfill gas last year." I said, "Then why did you do them?" He says, "You know very well why. Because it was an important client and the numbers worked." I said, "Can you get up on stage and just say what you just said." They were transitioning from prospective successes to current successes.
There are important clients of banks who are doing renewables and the numbers work. That's what this conference is about and he did. He got up on stage and he said exactly that.
Jeff: Mike, one other thing that I remember being very influenced by was your phrase at ACORE. First, the renewable energy industry was a bit of a circular firing squad. The wind folks didn't want the solar folks to get a subsidy that they could get. It was really not a very functional organization, but by putting the renewable energy label on it, this particular quote stuck with me, "ACORE isn't against anything, we're for everything."
You changed the tone of the industry in a way that I think just needs to get a lot of credit. That's where I say you created this industry.
Michael: Now, that's actually true. It's a lesson I learned in General Electric. There's an idea at General Electric that business does not occur in the presence of negativity. That's why you don't get into an argument with the guy you're trying to sell a coal-fired power plant to. Our slogan, as you point out, was and to create ACORE was we're for renewable energy and against nothing. People just love that phrase.
I remember the then head of the American Petroleum Institute, Red Cavaney, I said that to him and he came around his desk and gave me a bear hug and then he says, "Finally, you renewables people have figured out how Washington works. People that don't know how this works are against everything, except the one thing they're for and that's what you guys have been doing."
He said, "The winners are just for the one thing they're for and forget the rest. Just be for your thing." He says, "API is not against any non-oil. We're just for oil." The industry really accepted us and our battle was with the trade associations of renewable energy, the solar, wind, geothermal and so on, that felt that we were stepping on their toes. They wanted to stay siloed and DOE had whipped them into competing with each other. People didn't know it, but in those days, the associations were actually DOE contractors. DOE paid them each $100,000 to just put on an industry conference. That was a big transformation just philosophically to say we're creating an industry and not trying to win an argument.
Hilary: Mike, I love how you talk about being financed, instead of funded to reach Wall Street.
Michael: That is still a vocabulary that is still getting infused. The Washington Inside the Beltway crowd still talks about getting funded. There's very little consciousness that Wall Street is actually the source of funding through financing and that transformation really happened, as Jeff was saying, through the conferences, and the education we were giving. ACORE created a program called US PREF, Partnership for Renewable Energy Financing.
Which was actually a subgroup of actual managing directors in banks that were not VPs of government relations. They would actually come down from New York for these meetings.
These were real bankers that competed against each other in doing deals in renewables. They agreed to cooperate and not compete in this group working with ACORE. They really appreciated the opportunity because normally, they're frozen out.
They're not allowed to speak to a senator, a congressman, or anybody in the White House but under this cover, they could. It was about once a month, there was a gathering in Washington and would actually go into the White House, the EOB, not the West Wing, but actually meet with top White House staff, and officials, and also go up on the Hill and meet with senators and congressmen.
The idea was that that group would not lobby, would never say, "Vote for this bill." It would never say, "Please, extend the tax credits." It would never say, "Vote for this person," which is lobbying. Instead, we would answer questions, again, to educate. What questions do you have? It's just amazing. These people work on literally 10,000 issues a day, so how can they become an expert on how solar energy is financed? Why is the tax credit relevant?
Hilary: I do want to make sure we can touch on your time at Citibank. After working both in politics and then on Wall Street through ACORE, you were recruited by Citibank. While you were there, established the Green Bond Principles. Could you give an overview of what drove this and why that was important?
Michael: I announced in 2008, a two-year notice that I'd be "retiring" from ACORE in 2010, 2011 just because I'd spent 10 years building it and we were starting to repeat. I was doing the same thing over and over again every year. I thought I'd get some fresh blood in here and take it to a new level. Also, I could use a break from working six and a half days a week for 10 years. [laughs]
My views since the '70s under the studies with Carter is because renewable energy is all front-end loaded and capital costs, financing is everything. Cost of money is everything. Eventually, where this ends up in success is in the bond market. Which is where the longest term, lowest cost capital lives if you could make it to the bond market. In 2013, two years after I joined Citi, it was clear that renewable energy was reaching the bond market.
I was almost giddy that I had lived through the period of getting renewable energy from nowhere to the bond market.
The bond market doesn't need a definition of green. It needs an opinion of something is green." They go to Standard and Poor's & Moody's, and Fitch, and so forth and they get credit opinions. Then they have ratings and then they get consultants. The pricing of a bond is set by the underwriters. They don't say they placed it. They say they priced it.
It's like real estate. If you price it right, it sells right away. I really found myself the only one in those rooms and conferences in London and Paris who thought on the way to go. I had a conversation with a lady named Susan Butler from BAML, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who was a bond specialist. We agreed to have dinner in New York when we got back. We did and we agreed that we're going to have to write this guideline for so-called green bonds because nobody else except us seem to understand the bond market.
We agreed to do that. I had a flight to San Francisco from JFK the next night and so I said, "I'll take a run at it. I'll send it to you for comment." Three hours on a flight to San Francisco, I wrote a four-page document and the Green Bond Principles is still a four page document today, so many years later, eight years later. Very, very simply, we took the way the bond market works and we attached behaviors that bond issuers had to carry out in order to call it a green bond.
The proof that it's a green bond is that an investor interested in green bonds would buy it as a green bond. They would buy the bond, okay, done deal. That's how the bond market works. You don't need a fixed opinion. We completely avoided the very idea of defining the word green.
Jeff: Notwithstanding my efforts to get you to use carbon count in the Green Bond Principles.
Michael: I think the only error we made was not using something called carbon count.
Hilary: What 's carbon count? tell us about that.
Michael: It's a quantitative analysis on the amount of carbon emissions that's avoided by the investment. It has tons of carbon per 1000 dollars of investment. That becomes a quantitative benchmark on how good is your investment. Great.
Hilary: Jeff, why were you pushing for that to be included?
Jeff: I've never used the phrase green in my entire career because there are so many shades of green. What we're really talking about is carbon. We're not talking about Crayola shades. We're talking about actual carbon and the carbon intensity. That's where I have a slightly different aspiration for this industry.
Michael: I think carbon count when you did it was 10 years ahead of its time. What I see today is everybody wanting more definitive criteria by which to evaluate investments and financings. They want it quantified. Not shades of green and just moving in that direction. I think what we accurately assessed-- it was 10 years ahead of its time, that the world had to adopt even the very idea of green as an investment thesis. Which then evolved into ESG, of course.
There would be a battle over whose methodology would become the world's standard. As recently as three weeks ago, I was in a conversation with strategy consultants at IBM who had been tagged with coming up with IBM's offering in the ESG world. You'll be so proud to know that I recommended they look at carbon count.
Jeff: God bless you.
Michael: There's the qualitative world and the quantitative world. We felt that the world had to go through a qualitative period of even adopting this in their psyches before we agree on whose arithmetic methodology is just perfect. I actually recommended that IBM adopt carbon count for its global offering to its corporate clients and government clients to maintain a quantitative database and forecasting methodology on carbon.
Jeff: I do remember a CFO at Southern Company listening to me talk about carbon count saying, "Well, that sounds good," because they'd just done a solar project. Then he stopped. He said, "Wait. You could do that for our brown bonds too." I said, "Yes, I can."
Well, Mike, this is the fun part of the show. Some hot questions. The most important advice I have ever followed is-- you fill in the blank.
Michael: Do your best.
Interviewer: The best feedback I ever rejected is--
Michael: Anything negative. [laughs]
Jeff: Alright.The best oysters are from--
Michael: Chesapeake Bay.
Jeff: What Creek?
Michael: Probably off the Choptank River.
Jeff: The sustainability phrase or acronym we should ban from our lexicon is--
Michael: Barriers. When we founded ACORE, I banned the word barriers on the industry. Barriers are what keep government people working day after day because there are barriers that have to be overcome. When you're starting an industry, there are no barriers. Just go do it.
Jeff: To me, climate positive means--
Michael: Working on solutions. I find a great divide between the climate policy world and the climate action world. The climate policy world is very negative. It's negative on the issues we face. It's negative on the likelihood of success. It's argumentative and everybody dislikes everything except the one thing they're for. On the industry side where you and I work, it's just the opposite. Skip all that. Just go do something useful.
Jeff: Love it. Mike, I absolutely want to thank you for your leadership in this industry. It has come at great personal sacrifice, but you have indeed created a renewable energy industry and I'm very grateful you serve on the Hannon Armstrong Board. You make us a better company, a better board. Very much appreciated.
Chad: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong and David Benjamin Sound. If you like what you heard today, please share the show with friend and leave us a comment and a rating on our show page.
You can send us show and guest suggestions by tweeting at us @HannonArmstrong or reach us via email at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com
I'm Chad Reed
And this is Climate Positive.