Three shocks. One decision.
On September 11, 2001, I was in New York for the CIBC Alternative Energy Investment Conference. My business-school classmate Ramzi Nassar had invited me. I had taken the red-eye from San Francisco. We were in a morning session when the organizer came into the room and told us the conference was over because of the tragedy at the World Trade Center.
I found a place in the hotel where I could watch the news and see the street outside. People were being cleared from Grand Central Station. Police and National Guard personnel appeared. The streets emptied. Later, people came walking north from the World Trade Center, covered in dust. Nobody knew what was coming next.
For hours, I tried to get a call through. With cell service unavailable, I turned to my laptop—emailing and exchanging IMs. Our MIT Sloan alumni network helped us locate one another, confirm we were safe, and work out how we could help. It was days before I could leave New York.
That day belongs first to the people who were killed, those who lost them, and everyone whose life was changed in ways they never chose. This is simply the story of how it changed the work I chose to do.
Two other shocks were already reshaping my world. The dot-com collapse was exposing the distance between a compelling investment story and a durable business. California's electricity crisis was exposing the fragility of an essential system—and, as investigations later documented, the role of market manipulation.
September 11 sharpened my questions about oil, dependence, security, and the conflicts entangled with them. My first question was how we could get off foreign oil. In the months that followed, it became a larger one: how could we build a prosperous economy without depending on burning hydrocarbons?
I was already deeply involved in technology and the environment. September 11 did not introduce me to either. It made solving the climate crisis my mission.
That commitment would shape the rest of my life. And it would require far more people than me.
We had to connect what was already there
The scientists, engineers, advocates, and communities working on renewable energy had been at it long before me. What I saw was a need to connect more of their work to entrepreneurs, capital, policy, and customers.
The pieces did not arrive all at once, and no one organization could supply them all.
Voice. Bob Epstein and Nicole Lederer's Environmental Entrepreneurs, or E2, gave business leaders a collective voice in environmental policy. I joined because a stronger economy and a healthier environment belonged in the same conversation.
Identity. With Nick Parker, Keith Raab, and the Cleantech Venture Network, we helped give a scattered set of technologies a name investors could recognize: cleantech. A shared identity made it easier to see the connections—and the opportunity.
Capital. We worked to bring institutional investors into that opportunity. California Treasurer Phil Angelides' Green Wave initiative helped put clean technology on the agenda of major pension funds. At Eastman Ventures, I worked across direct investments, limited-partner investments in funds, technology spin-outs, and funded demonstrations. Each supplied something different: a company, a partner, a proof point, or a path to a customer.
A place to connect. Through the MIT Club of Northern California's cleantech speaker series and Cleantech Open, we brought researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and experienced operators into the same rooms. Events became more than events. They created a recurring meeting place, a pipeline of ideas, and relationships that could turn a promising technology into a business.
Purpose. Rick Smalley gave the work its deepest anchor. In our conversations, he connected energy to water, food, health, and economic opportunity. His public argument called for scientific and engineering ambition equal to the challenge. The lesson I carried forward was simple: solve energy, and you expand humanity's ability to solve its other problems.
Scale. Years later, Tony Seba made the economic possibility explicit: solar, batteries, electric vehicles, and other technologies could improve and become cheaper as manufacturing and adoption scaled. His work with RethinkX explores how combining these technologies can create abundant clean energy, not merely substitute one fuel for another. Smalley helped me understand the size of the problem. Seba helped make the route to abundance visible.
For me, the thread running through all of this is the democratization of energy. A community should be able to produce more of what it needs, compete economically, and keep more of the value it creates. Technology opens that possibility. Market rules, incumbent business models, and control over infrastructure still determine who gets to use it.
Not every bet worked. Some technologies were too early. Some companies never found a market. But something accumulated beyond any one investment: people who knew how to work together, and institutions that made the next attempt easier.
A city could become a living laboratory
In Austin, I wanted to bring those ideas closer to the places where they could be used.
Austin Energy was an anchor. Mayor Will Wynn, Council Member Brewster McCracken, the Chamber of Commerce's Jose Beceiro, Roger Duncan, and Pike Powers brought civic leadership, utility experience, economic development, and the ability to bring others with them.
I led the Clean Energy Incubator, founded CleanTX, helped build companies, and convened people who rarely had a reason to work together. Conferences and policy efforts were part of that work—not separate from it. Entrepreneurs needed customers. Utilities needed confidence in new technologies. Researchers needed partners. Policymakers needed to understand what a new market could make possible.
Pecan Street grew out of the city-as-laboratory vision I was developing with these collaborators: make Austin a place where new energy technologies, business models, and ways of serving customers could be demonstrated together.
Through the Texas Solar Forum, we brought the industry's capabilities into a conversation about Texas's economic future. Solar was not only an environmental proposition. It was an opportunity for manufacturing, investment, infrastructure, and jobs.
Austin taught me that an ecosystem is not a list of organizations. It is the ability of people and institutions to keep finding useful ways to act together. The city could be a living laboratory, and the relationships could outlast an individual project.
The people behind the possibilities
At NREL, that lesson became more personal.
Through the Department of Energy's Entrepreneur in Residence program, sponsored with Kleiner Perkins, I met with more than 300 researchers and administrators. I built a database of people and ideas. But the most important work was listening: what were they trying to accomplish, what stood in their way, and who could help?
One day, when I was wondering whether my message about commercialization was making a difference, Art Nozik stopped me in the hallway. I remember him telling me that it had changed how he thought about getting research into use—and asking how he could help bring that message to his colleagues. I recorded that exchange in my 2009 program report.
Art had already devoted decades to solar research. His own account of that journey deserves to be read. The point was not that an entrepreneur had arrived to explain the value of science. It was that people approaching the same mission from different directions could help one another see another way forward.
NREL's contribution deserves far more space than this essay allows. Research, testing, models, data, and the people behind them become part of the foundation beneath other people's accomplishments. Tools such as SAM and REopt make analytical capabilities available beyond the lab. Companies, developers, and communities can start with knowledge they would otherwise have to recreate.
In Colorado, I also helped build the industry relationships around the laboratory. The opportunity was not simply to take an idea out. It was to connect the lab with people who could apply its capabilities—and bring problems and learning back.
Following the obstacles into infrastructure
My emphasis increasingly shifted toward applying technology to the delivery of infrastructure.
At Brightman, I assembled a team and originated and advanced more than 1.5 gigawatts of renewable-energy projects in Texas. Market modeling, project design, capital, utility needs, and partnerships had to fit together. The Beyond Fayette work asked a larger question: could a renewable portfolio offer Austin a different path from coal?
At Catalyze, I took the integration problem into commercial real estate. We used technology and analytics to identify opportunities for distributed energy across properties and build a repeatable development approach. The building was not just a customer at the end of the wire. It could become a productive part of the energy system.
The question kept expanding. What if energy, buildings, mobility, water, and thermal systems were designed together? What if we modeled the economics and consequences before committing capital? What if the result could be adapted to another place without starting over?
Not every concept reached construction. That distinction matters. Through NET+ Solutions, our municipal, transit, campus, and community work included studies and preliminary designs. Their value was in making integrated options visible, testing their economics, and establishing a basis for decisions—not claiming operating results before anything had been built.
We also learned from failures. A sound technology could still meet the wrong market, an unworkable financing structure, or a policy change. What mattered was whether we understood why—and whether that understanding survived into the next effort.
Build something others can carry forward
One of the most instructive examples was not a gigawatt-scale project. It was Les Anglais, Haiti.
I helped bring together microgrid design, financing, a cellular-carrier partnership, and the modeling capability of HOMER and its founder, Peter Lilienthal. My role was to connect knowledge, resources, and people so others could build. EarthSpark, with Allison Archambault, and SparkMeter, which emerged from EarthSpark and was led by Dan Schnitzer, did the heavy work of implementation and expansion. The metering capability developed around the Haiti demonstration went on to serve operators across Africa and beyond.
The breakthrough was not just a solar-powered microgrid. It was the combination of generation, metering, payments, operating knowledge, and a business model that could travel. EarthSpark's account of the metering story shows both that reach and the continuing work required to sustain it.
That is what makes a demonstration important. Others can learn from the combination—and change it for their own conditions. Learning does not travel only from wealthy countries to poorer ones. It travels wherever someone has solved a problem another community faces.
At Florida Memorial University, the design and process I developed were a gift to leaders building solutions for their own community. The purpose was to increase their ability to act, not make them dependent on me.
The same ambition runs through the integrated-place concepts I have been developing: create something useful, let others adapt it, and learn from what they do next.
Powered Places—and the work ahead
A home, a campus, a hospital, a transit system, a neighborhood: each has its own needs, resources, constraints, and opportunities. Start there.
That is what I mean by Powered Places. Design energy with the place it serves, connect electrical and thermal needs, and make the relationship with the wider grid part of the solution. Model affordability, resilience, ownership, and long-term operation together rather than treating them as benefits that will somehow arrive afterward.
Technology lets us examine more possibilities before we build. Geospatial analysis, simulation, system modeling, and AI can help teams compare options and understand interactions earlier. Their value is in better decisions, shorter cycles, and stronger outcomes—not in adding another layer of technological spectacle.
The work is still difficult. Technology does not remove the need for sound economics, trusted partnerships, good governance, or local knowledge. Nor does one demonstration prove that every community should copy it.
But we can make the learning cumulative. Model. Build. Scale. Keep learning.
Twenty-five years later, let’s build the next phase
September 11 clarified my mission. A decade later, my mentor Dan Friedlander broadened it: confront global warming, bring facts and solutions back into our conversations, and renew the spirit of creation. That is another story, but its challenge still guides me.
Now, twenty-five years after the day that set my course, I am opening this next chapter of serface.com as an invitation to act together.
We have technologies, experience, and capabilities that once seemed out of reach. We also have communities waiting for reliable power, projects stalled between promise and delivery, and knowledge that never reaches the people who could use it.
Let’s close those gaps. Not by starting every effort from zero, but by making what we have learned available to one another.
Bring a story, a solution, or a problem that needs a team. What was the obstacle? Who came together? What did you change? What happened—and what could someone else build from it? Name the people. Share the evidence. Include the failures and the questions still unanswered.
Researchers: tell us what happened after the lab. Entrepreneurs and investors: tell us what made an idea viable. Utilities and public leaders: tell us what unlocked delivery. Communities: tell us what you need, what you have built, and what others have overlooked.
If we worked together, help tell the story. If we have never met, bring the part I could not know.
The point is not to collect credit or admire the past. It is to connect people and knowledge so we can engineer the next phase: more affordable energy, stronger economies, greater resilience, and the ability for more people to shape their own futures.
I remain a technology optimist. We can innovate, integrate, and collaborate our way toward a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient world. But that is work we must choose—and do.
Share your story. Bring a problem. Help build what comes next.
Model. Build. Scale. Keep learning.