Inevitable Ep 51: Bill Nussey, CEO & Founder at the Freeing Energy Project
Today’s guest is Bill Nussey, CEO & Founder at the Freeing Energy Project.
Bill Nussey is the founder of the Freeing Energy Project, whose mission is to accelerate the shift to cleaner, cheaper energy. Prior to Freeing Energy, Bill spent most of his career as a tech CEO. His first company, which he co-founded in high school, provided graphics software for early, text-based personal computers. His second company, Da Vinci Systems, was started out of his college dorm room and grew to serve millions of users across 45 countries. Later, he spent several years as a venture capitalist with Greylock. In 1998, he left the firm to run a portfolio company, iXL, which went public and grew to almost $500 million in revenue. After iXL, he joined Silverpop as CEO. Silverpop grew to nearly $100 million and became a global leader in cloud-based marketing. In 2014, IBM acquired the company and made it the foundation of the IBM Marketing Cloud. Shortly after the acquisition, Bill was promoted to VP Corporate Strategy out of IBM’s world headquarters in New York. Bill’s companies have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value.
For the last few years, Bill has been conducting research for a 2019 book called Freeing Energy. Supported by 200 interviews across the world, the book’s mission is to help non-industry readers understand how we can accelerate the shift to clean energy. The core ideas focus on decentralized (or local) energy, novel business models, and new approaches to ownership and finance. Much of his early research was shared at Bill’s October 2017 TED talk called Accelerating the Shift to Clean Energy.
In 2018, Bill co-founded Solar Inventions. Based at Georgia Tech’s ATDC incubator, the company’s mission is to commercialize a set of scientific breakthroughs for improving silicon photovoltaics.
Bill received a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He holds several patents, has published two books and sits on several commercial and non-profit boards. Bill and his family are involved in a handful of projects providing off-grid, resilient electricity in places like East Africa and Puerto Rico.
In today’s episode, we cover:
- Bill’s history, and what led him to get excited about energy
- How Bill went about switching gears to transition into this new field (to him)
- Bill’s book, why he wrote it, and the process he followed to pull it together
- Digitization of energy opportunity
- Potential of energy innovation of appealing across both sides of the political aisle
- Role of venture capital in clean energy innovation
- Lessons from last cleantech bubble
- Solar and batteries, and implications when cost becomes less than purchasing electricity from the grid
- One policy change that would move the needle more than any other
- Bill’s thoughts on politics, GND, etc.
- Importance of looking at carbon equivalents as well, not just carbon
- Inevitability of putting a price on carbon
- Role of utilities and oil/gas companies
- Thoughts on upcoming election and the stakes
- Bill’s advice to others trying to find their lane in the climate fight
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Freeing Energy: https://www.freeingenergy.com/
Bill Nussey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billnussey/
Bubba McDonald: http://www.psc.state.ga.us/pscinfo/bios/mcdonald.asp
Amory Lovins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amory_Lovins
Loren McDonald: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenmcdonald/
Solar Inventions: https://www.solarinventions.com/
Henry McCance: https://skoll.org/contributor/henry-mccance/
Fullstory: https://www.fullstory.com/
Arcadia Power: https://www.arcadiapower.com/
Drift: https://www.joindrift.com/
Form Energy: https://www.formenergy.com/
Ethanol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant