Wendy De Wolf ’18
THE CLIMATE CHANGE DEVELOPER
AS SOON AS Wendy De Wolf started thinking seriously about her future career, she felt certain she wanted to devote herself to addressing the problem of climate change. But where could she make the greatest impact?
As an undergraduate at Yale, she majored in geology and geophysics, and gravitated toward renewable energy. In her sophomore year, she began an internship with Energy Management, Inc. (best known for the Cape Wind Project in the Nantucket Sound, which was never built). The internship became a job as a project developer at Energy Management, where De Wolf helped build up the firm’s solar group, alongside her colleague Jamie Fordyce.
In 2016, she and Fordyce spun out Energy Management’s solar group to co-found a new solar project development business, which they named East Light Partners. She started Columbia Business School that same year, clear on the work ahead.
“I think of myself as a climate-change developer,” De Wolf says. “To me, this is such an incredibly tangible way to address climate change.”
De Wolf says she thinks about climate change mitigation work as falling along a spectrum. On one end, she says, are the policymakers writing sweeping federal laws; on the other end are “steel-in-the-ground” developers like East Light Partners, who are enacting small-scale, incremental change.
East Light Partners handles the first stages of solar project development, investing capital early in the lifecycle of a project to de-risk it, with an eye toward eventually selling the project to a larger infrastructure asset manager. This means East Light takes on the tasks of finding a site for a new renewable project, building a relationship with landowners, determining where to connect to the grid, and more, up to the point of construction, which the asset manager buyer typically hires a contractor to do.
“I’ve felt a real draw to this world because you’re having a direct impact on climate change,” De Wolf says. “At the same time, it’s small; it’s one project at a time. It’s not grand policy, but you can see the change that you’re making when the steel goes in the ground.”
Of course, the work East Light is doing to site, develop, and finance renewable energy projects is intricately tied with renewable energy-related policymaking on the federal and local levels. East Light has trained its efforts on states with proven markets for clean energy, and policies in these states have been integral in establishing and supporting such markets.
For instance, New York state, where East Light does much of its work, has a goal of generating 70 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 — a significant leap from its roughly 30 percent share of renewables today.
As more states set similarly ambitious targets, demand for new solar projects is mushrooming, and this demand is only further intensified by solar energy’s progressively falling prices. East Light is eager to step in to meet this demand.
“Sourcing these renewable projects is easier said than done,” De Wolf says. “We’re filling the pipeline for the demand that’s forming as our economy and investor community become more focused on mitigating climate change.”
Still, there are challenges. De Wolf acknowledges that negotiating the balance between traditional business demands and climate demands can be difficult, even in her sector, where decarbonization is an explicit part of the service provided.
“There’s always a push-pull in which choices we make,” De Wolf says. She points to the example of a solar project that East Light Partners recently worked to get permitted in the Adirondack Park in New York state. De Wolf and East Light engaged in an ongoing discussion with the park’s agency about how to balance the various — and at times, competing — needs and desires for the project: protecting the park’s gorgeous views, minimizing disturbance to ecosystems and park resources, and managing to connect to the grid.
“The goal is to end up with the best project you can design,” De Wolf says. “You’re not going to please everyone, but the best possible project takes into account these issues, along with climate change goals — and obviously you still need to have a business, too.”