Episode 71: Chad Farrell

This week’s guest is Chad Farrell, founder and CEO of Encore Renewable Energy. He is a developer, project manager, and engineer with over 20 years of experience in the industry. At Encore, Chad works towards the development of alternative energy and the redevelopment of contaminated sites.

Host Jon Powers dives into Chad’s past experiences, how he started Encore, and the company’s role in the energy transition. They discuss some interesting topics such as brownfield development and pollinators.

Transcript

Jon Powers:

Welcome to Experts Only Podcast, sponsored by CleanCapital. You can learn more at cleancapital.com. I’m your host Jon Powers. Each week we explore the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance with leaders across the industry. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jon Powers:

Welcome back to Experts Only podcast. I’m your host Jon Powers. Today we talk to one of the nicest guys in the renewable energy industry, Chad Farrell. Chad’s the CEO and founder of Encore Renewable Energy. He’s got over 20 years of experience in the space, developing projects. We talk a lot about his amazing background, the work he does passionately in Vermont or on climate, and of course the incredible work Encore does developing projects. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and as always, you can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. Thanks. Chad, welcome to Experts Only Podcast.

Chad Farrell:

Thanks, Jon. It’s tremendous to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, absolutely. Just to set the stage for the audience, Chad and I are interviewing this in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, so we’re both sort of working out of our home offices. There’s a lot going on in the industry. We’ll definitely talk on some of that.

Jon Powers:

But, Chad, I’m want to step back. You grew up in the Boston area, decided to go to school for mechanical engineering at Bucknell. Talk about what led you to Bucknell, how did you decide to get into the engineering side of things?

Chad Farrell:

That’s a good question, going all the way back to Bucknell. I was a competitive swimmer growing up, and I think Bucknell had a good team, and I was sort of recruited to-

Jon Powers:

Because it sort of in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, right?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. I certainly didn’t go there for the cultural offerings of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. So, mainly it was a good school. It was one of the better schools that I got into. I was recruited to swim there and I really liked Bucknell because, yes, I did end up studying engineering, but I remember thinking, well, they’ve got really good liberal arts and good engineering, that seems like a pretty good place for me to land at 17, 18 years old, not knowing what the heck I want to do with my life.

Chad Farrell:

So it was a good experience. I still have lifelong friends that I’m very close with from Bucknell. We’re supporting each other through this crazy new reality of COVID-19 and have a couple of different text chains going providing moments of levity and humor throughout the day. Yeah so-

Jon Powers:

My college buddies and I all joined a workout app for no reason, just to push each other every day.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

Should we go run? Actually, my wife and I had just started at Peloton before this, and thank God, because it’s been huge.

Chad Farrell:

I’ve got my bikes out. Here in Vermont, I mean, there’s still snow on the ground from the other day, but there’s people outside bundled up riding around on bikes. So I’ve got a couple of bikes I got tuned up and I’m meeting some folks at 5:30 later today. Stay six feet apart.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, social distance.

Chad Farrell:

But ride and push each other a little bit. Yeah, for sure.

Jon Powers:

So you leave Bucknell. For folks that don’t know, so my wife and I used to drive through the Bucknell basically monthly, between going from Buffalo to Washington. Beautiful part of the world, for sure.

Jon Powers:

So you leave Bucknell, you go back to Massachusetts, and you sort of get involved. We talked to you a little bit about joining and working on brownfields. How did you decide to go that path?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. So, boy, there was an economic slowdown going on when I came out of college. I was fortunate to get a job in the environmental engineering field, which was a field that was growing despite that slowdown early on. So I got a job with a environmental engineering firm because I knew AutoCAD and I was helping doing drafting. I mean, it’s an entry level job. You take what you can get when you’re 22 years old. But I really came to like the work, and obviously learned more on the job. As a lifelong environmentalist, I think it spoke to my interest in sort of cleaning up the world and protecting it for future generations.

Jon Powers:

Was there any inkling at that point of the idea of using this to develop something else? Or was it still just learning the economy there?

Chad Farrell:

No. Quite frankly, as a young professional in my twenties, I got to work outside a lot, which was really great. But I really enjoyed it, and I really wanted to learn more about it. Right? I mean, I think you just scratch the surface of things in the undergraduate experience. So I knew that going back to graduate school would allow me the opportunity to really dig deep into a field of study that I was quite interested in.

Chad Farrell:

I applied to a number of different schools. The University of Vermont had the best program, as well as the best sort of financial package for me. So I decided to matriculate to Burlington way back in 1995. The outdoor environmental community here speaks to me, so I was able to leverage that graduate school experience into another couple of jobs.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. So what did you do coming out of University of Vermont?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. I ended up working for a company over in Montpelier that was doing actually international work around brownfield assessments and cleanups.

Jon Powers:

Oh, interesting.

Chad Farrell:

We were supporting other industries as they were trying to assess their environmental liabilities globally, so I actually got to travel around the world. This is before kids and before things changed. You can be gone for two, three weeks at a time and it was an exciting career path for me for a while.

Chad Farrell:

It did introduce me, I think, as the early 2000s rolled around, this concept of repurposing environmentally challenged or contaminated sites for more traditional forms of real estate development, really started to gain traction. I think that stirred additional interest in me to sort of take the next step in my career, which was to learn how to take some of the harder engineering skills that I was using and employ them in more of a development kind of arena. Project management, development, really taking a big complicated project and breaking it down into a number of different manageable pieces and tackling it.

Chad Farrell:

And I learned a lot about just process and project management, things that I just wasn’t exposed to directly through my schooling. But really, had some good experiences, worked on some interesting projects.

Jon Powers:

So let me ask you a question before we get into the Encore stuff. With that sort of background, coming to it as an engineer and now sort of seeing projects being developed, working on them, diving in, how has that experience helped you now as a sort of a CEO when you’re overlooking whether it be develop a pipeline, or just a company budget, right? I mean, you’re touching so many parts of-

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, I think it’s really a process, right? I think it was gaining the tools that allowed me to sort of map out a process. If you think about it as a solar project or an energy storage project, you take a project from concept to commissioning, and how do you map out that whole process and how do you do it in a way that various resources can plug in throughout the process along the way?

Chad Farrell:

So we’ve got a Stage-Gate model where we break down the whole solar development process into a series of stages and decision points or gates. We get to one of those decision points and make a decision, whether it’s a capital commitment meeting or something, and we go through the gate if we are all aligned and feeling comfortable. So we’ve mapped out that whole process. We also call it value stream mapping.

Chad Farrell:

A lot of the work that we’ve done at Encore over the last couple of years, I know we’re jumping ahead a little bit here, but it’s all around trying to systematize the platform, right? To make it a little bit more… allow different employees, allow different professionals, to kind of plug in to the process, regardless of who that individual may be, right?

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Chad Farrell:

This is the process, whoever is plugging in here knows what the process is and knows what to do.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, honestly, that’s a major component of CleanCapital, right? We view the process really is efficiency, right? So the more efficient you can do these DG projects, the better you can finance them.

Chad Farrell:

The more margin there is, the better the returns.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Whatever. Let’s jump into Encore. So you started Encore about 10 years ago. First of all, what was the impetus? How did you decide that, okay, I’m going to start my own company developing solar?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. Well, so in order to answer that question, I think just to jump back to sort of my postgraduate school experience, which was working on these brownfield sites and then realizing that, you know what? I think this project development, I think that would be an interesting place for me to go.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Chad Farrell:

So really Encore was formed as Encore Redevelopment, and the whole objective was to redevelop brownfield sites for commercial real estate endeavors. The world changed again in 2008, right?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Chad Farrell:

We got the news that Lehman Brothers had failed, and I’ll never forget that moment driving in the car, hearing NPR, Lehman Brothers just failed. Wait how is that possible?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Chad Farrell:

So the world changed at that point the way it’s changing right now.

Jon Powers:

Where were you in that stage? Where were you in starting the company?

Chad Farrell:

I had done a couple of projects. I was probably a year in. I actually started Encore Redevelopment in August 2007.

Jon Powers:

As you?

Chad Farrell:

As me. I hired a couple of interns from Middlebury and UVM to help delegate some of the blocking and tackling. I mean, it was amazing. Some of these interns built some of the initial financial performance for Encore.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Chad Farrell:

Hour of interns, new job. But anyways, I think, well, what happened was, as a result, then there was the election, the Obama administration had to create all kinds of stimulus programs, as you know. And many of them were anchored around clean energy and clean tech. And so the proverbial light bulb went off over my head. So I guess I should also mention that at that same time, the governor here in Vermont, Governor Peter Shumlin, ran on and won on basically a climate economy kind of platform. Where he was looking ahead and seeing renewable energy, solar and wind at that point, as potentially being transformative for the Vermont economy.

Chad Farrell:

And he was dead on. So anyways, those two signals really caused me, again the light bulb went off over my head. I knew I had to go to the school of hard knocks to learn solar. Solar design-

Jon Powers:

Everyone did though then, right? I mean, really-

Chad Farrell:

Right, exactly. I was not unique. So yeah. So Vermont initiated a standard offer program. It was the only feed-in tariff program in the United States at the state level. City of Tallahassee had a program and Ontario up in Canada had one. But anyways, so there was a named price, 30 cents per kilowatt hour for these standard offer contracts. So sure enough, that was the market signal that I think folks were looking for. Everybody, all the traditional real estate developers, lot of business owners, a lot of high net worth individuals, sort of came in, saw this opportunity. And that was sort of a jumpstart to the Vermont solar market. So that program went to a lottery and despite submitting five different brownfield and landfill sites into the lottery, we didn’t win one of them. So we were able to work collaboratively with a gentleman who did win one of the auction spots and we helped him co-develop a three and a half megawatt, 2.2 megawatt AC project. And we were kind of off to the races.

Jon Powers:

Right. So now you had a track record.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, We just sort of… Those were tough years. I mean to be having your head down, just trying to learn as much as you can and find as many opportunities as you can. I think for a couple of years there, we might’ve done a couple of hundred kilowatts per year.

Jon Powers:

Right. I wrote a piece of a while ago and I’ve talked about it before on the show, but about sort of solar finance and the growth of it. Those are the years where people are like one, what do these tariffs mean? What’s a PPA, do these panels even work? And there’s definitely, is there enough sun in Vermont, to even work, right? Versus where we are today, it’s about the size and scale and then I’ll take…

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. I refer to deals back in those days as Frankenstein deals. Right. I feel like you needed a mission driven investor, somebody who’s interested in taking a four or 5% return, less than that, just to do the right thing. You needed a grant, maybe two, you needed zero interest debt from a community development financing organization.

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Chad Farrell:

You needed all these things and then maybe you could get 150 kilowatt project on. And that would be such news that the governor and all the legislatures will come out for the press event, the ribbon cutting that was, those are tough.

Jon Powers:

So looking now over 10 years, right, and give some color of how Encore has grown in scale. And I want to go back too to the CDFI comment in a second, but just from a developer’s perspective, you’re knocking out a couple of hundred megawatts a year, so how did that change and grow here now there we’re in 2020.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. Well, for sure I think we did a lot of legislative advocacy work. The standard offer program is still there and it’s still the source of some project opportunities. Really Vermont, led by green mountain power, quite frankly, created a virtual net metering program. And at the time, they viewed solar as having six cents per kilowatt hour more value than the retail rate. So they were willing to pay more for solar at that time. So, really the state kind of followed suit and our virtual net metering program enjoyed a lot of success through 2013, 2014, 2015, into 16. It’s changing. I think that program has, there’ve been additional constraints put on that program. And a lot of those constraints are in our view justified, right? We need to continue to be as competitive as possible. We need to move towards the locational value of generation preferred site citing and things like that. But yeah, it was largely the virtual net metering program that kind of kept us alive.

Jon Powers:

As that scale sort of happened, right, going back to your earlier comments about being an engineer and efficiency, how have you seen sort of the efficiency of just the market as a whole change from having, now all of a sudden probably the mid- 2010s, you’ve got a qualified workforce, right. There’s more than two people that can be the UPC on these now. How has that sort of grown in scale for you guys and both within Encore, but just as a market as a whole?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, I would say yes. In terms of the skilled labor that we need both on the construction end, as well as the development end, right. The volume of solar engineers and environmental experts who really can kind of speak a renewable energy language at this point, the fact that all the professionals in the legal and accounting communities have really come up the curve, that’s all been tremendously helpful. And I also think about where you sit project financing, right. Again, getting back to that Frankenstein comment. I mean, those were the days when there were just more opportunities out there than there was cash. And now, we’re at a point where I feel like, and again, we’re going to have to see what the effect of COVID-19 is here, but recently there have been in my view, in our view, a lot more money out there than there were good projects.

Chad Farrell:

So for us, our focus has always been as an origination platform. We’ve over the years discussed numerous times, probably too many times to count, should we raise our own fund? And we’ve always come around to no, because I think we excel at originating the best sites and the best projects, and then driving them through the project development process and really minimizing the risk associated with the development process. And then now that we have a wealth of project capital available, again TBD where that ends up this year, but I feel like that’s been one of the greatest evolutions in this industry is just the availability of low cost of capital.

Jon Powers:

And hopefully that continues. I feel like both the capital, but we have, I believe that as the market continues to sort of be unsettled right now, these sort of steady assets, people are going to be coming back, even if it’s five and 6% returns, right. That’s the place you can park your money. It’s better than a 30% hit. And some of these pension funds and others-

Chad Farrell:

100% agreed. Yeah. We’re all obviously trying to look at the pros and cons of what we’re going through here. And that could be something, right. This thing and hard assets have a much greater value than stocks.

Jon Powers:

Can you talk just for a second, I want to come back to CDFI, but how much of your portfolio that you’ve developed has been on brownfields and then for folks that are not familiar, can you just add some color to some of the challenges, but also sort of opportunities, that the brownfield space bring.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. So I was just looking at this and I yes, we do specialize and focus on brownfields and landfills, parking lots. We’ve done a number of rooftop projects. So all projects within that sort of, I call it a preferred site bucket, represent about 30% of the total number of projects that we’ve done. That’s on a project basis, not a megawatt scale basis. I’d have to do that math. But yeah, because I think I’d be… One thing we did, one of the challenges associated with brownfields and landfills is that in a competitive, lowest per kilowatt hour price wins kind of environment, we’re at a competitive disadvantage because landfills cost, depending on scale of the project, anywhere between 10 and maybe 20% more to build.

Jon Powers:

Right. Because of environmental permits and other key-

Chad Farrell:

It’s more on the hard construction end of things where we’re not able to just drive right out into the field and drive piles and hang panels and pull wires. We’ve got to use low tire pressure or track mounted Kubota rigs. So it’s just really, it slows things down.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Chad Farrell:

And so it’s really the labor cost associated with that, taking a project that would normally take two or three months and kind of doubling that timescale.

Jon Powers:

Are there additional incentives that help bring that down. Can you talk about that for a second?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah absolutely. So we’ve worked really hard in Vermont to try to advocate for… I mean because the benefits of the brownfields and landfills is you are citing generation, generally much closer to load, you are utilizing an otherwise undevelopable, or very difficult to develop, site. These sites are generally not in residential high view, aesthetically high quality areas. And yeah. And I think the general public is of the mind look, yeah. If we’re going to do solar projects, which take significant amounts of land, let’s use the land that is not prime ag or otherwise have a higher and better use for housing or other commercial real estate. So-

Jon Powers:

Up here in Buffalo, we’re seeing a lot of brownfield development for solar, we have a huge former industrial base. And I actually on the board of a group called Buffalo Waterkeeper, which is, do a lot of ecosystem work here. But they’re now getting pulled into the solar discussion because all these local communities that they’ve done water ecosystem works for are now being approached by major developers. And they’re like, “What do we do? What’s the decision point on our ag”. We may be underwater to begin with right now, or do we give up this prime location versus there’s brownfield space.

Chad Farrell:

Well yeah, absolutely. And one of the other benefits that we’re seeing actually comes from the regulatory community. We’ve seen actually members of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation actually approach us and ask if we can engage with a landfill owner, maybe it’s a private landfill owner, could be municipal, and they’re viewing the lease payments that we can provide that landowner as financial security for being able to continue the environmental remediation or monitoring or whatever the annual environmental costs are. They’re viewing us as being able to essentially securitize those future payments so that the regulators can continue to do their jobs, which is make sure they’re protecting human health and the environment.

Jon Powers:

Right. So is the reason you guys were working with CDFI… First of all, can you explain what that is for folks that aren’t familiar, but is that because of the brownfield work or were you doing that just in general before?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, so I think we did… Yes. So we’ve secured financing from a few CDFIs, Community Development Financing Institutions. The first slug of capital that we received was from the Vermont Economic Development Authority, or VEDA, who have a statutorily defined mission to support entrepreneurial activities, especially in certain industries like energy and food and tourism. And then, so we saw that as a good sort of source of capital and in doing so it’s a lower cost of capital, right. But it also aligned us with an organization that’s now helping us to succeed. We’ve also secured funding from the Vermont Flexible Capital Fund, who’ve been tremendous as investor partners. It’s again, it’s a mission driven-

Jon Powers:

Is it almost like a private partnership there or is that all state money or?

Chad Farrell:

No, that is… Well, there is some state money, there’s the Vermont Community Foundation, it supports them. But there are some individuals who are mission driven impact investors who are interested, again, in the Vermont Flexible Capital Fund, they’re targeting renewable energy companies, food and beverage companies, working landscape companies. So kind of in tune with Vermont’s kind of ethos. But the most recent round of funding that we got from them, they brought in the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund and Coastal Enterprises out of Portland, Maine. And was of interest to us because while we were raising that capital to begin to deploy our go to market strategies in those two markets that are not our home market. So-

Jon Powers:

This is all sort of pre NTP development capital you’re using, right?

Chad Farrell:

Working capital, yeah. Growth capital, absolutely.

Jon Powers:

That’s awesome.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, so again, now that we have… in New Hampshire, the New Hampshire market’s been a little slower to develop as you’re probably aware, but-

Jon Powers:

We’ve done nothing there yet.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. We’ve done one project there. So, but we have them kind of as a resource to help us understand and make connections, boots on the ground, and really help us succeed in that new market. And Coastal Enterprises in Portland, another good example, through them we’ve met a lot of the players over there. They now have a vested interest in our success in that market. We’ve been a source of a lot of intelligence and contact information.

Jon Powers:

So I want to talk about the future of Encore in a second, but just in your sort of corporate structure, right. I mean, you’ve got, you’re talking about a lot of different buckets that you’re touching, right, to pull this capital from, which is great and creative. Who manages that within your team? So are you doing it or do you have someone specifically doing that type of management?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. All of that work falls under the purview of our CFO, COO Blake Sturcke.

Jon Powers:

Right, okay Blake gotcha.

Chad Farrell:

Blake comes to Encore with a 15 year track record at Morgan Stanley as an investment banker. Really highly fluent in all things finance. And so, our finance-

Jon Powers:

Full transparency, Blake’s one of my favorite people in the industry, that’s how I met you guys.

Chad Farrell:

Awesome. Glad to hear that he actually is a Bucknell grad as well.

Jon Powers:

Oh he is?

Chad Farrell:

So we go all the way back. Yeah.

Jon Powers:

What is it? The Bisons, right?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. He was a year below me at Bucknell. Lots of mutual friends and obviously we’ve become a lot closer in adulthood here. But-

Jon Powers:

So what is the 2020s going to look like for you guys?

Chad Farrell:

Sorry, 2020-

Jon Powers:

What do the 2020s look like moving forward? You’re a decade in, what’s the next decade look like?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. So I mean, obviously again, we’re kind of waiting to see what the next two, three, four, five months look like. But taking that variable out, we are interested in growing the team. I think we’ve established a fair-

Jon Powers:

How many other team now?

Chad Farrell:

There’s 12 of us.

Jon Powers:

Oh, great.

Chad Farrell:

12 of us on the team with, right now one intern, sometimes we’ll have two or three. Right now one. Yeah, I think it’s growth, right? It’s how do we capitalize on the work that we’ve done in the past? The reputation that we’ve earned. All of our projects are referenceable. How do we, again, systematize the platform so that more people can come in and essentially do more work. It’s the same stuff, it’s the same process, there’s just going to be more of us doing it. So I think we’re interested in establishing a presence in some of these other markets, at-

Jon Powers:

Some organic growth, moving to New Hampshire, Maine, geographically to start to… You’re not jumping to Seattle?

Chad Farrell:

No, we’re going to be focused on the Northeast. That’ll include Pennsylvania, maybe some other states south of us. There may be a couple of flyers that we’ll take. For example, we’re looking at a 12 megawatt portfolio in Western North Carolina, somewhat randomly, but there’s… Our chief development officer is from that area and has some connections there and so we’ve been able to feeling decent about that opportunity. So, but largely it’s the Northeast focus. We’re going to absolutely… Storage is a big part of our future plans. We’re of the mind that if you’re just a solar development company, in five years I think you’re out of business. I think you’ve got to really, and especially in advanced markets like Vermont, we can’t do much more solar until we unlock the potential that is energy storage. I’m talking both short term, lithium ion kind of stuff, and longer term where we’re involved in a large, long duration project that we’re pitching here in Vermont with a group called Highview Power, based in London, who have a liquified air storage technology. Again, long duration, 50 megawatts, so big projects.

Chad Farrell:

So we’re not just going to be a solar developer. We’re going to be solar and storage energy services provider. We will be looking to raise additional capital, again TBD as to when that was going to be occurring.

Jon Powers:

Oh, you got my emails.

Chad Farrell:

I think, yeah. I think we would have been looking at that later this year. We may have to push that back a little bit, but.

Jon Powers:

Before we wrap up, I do want to hit on one thing, which is, we’ve talked about this in the podcast in the past. Pollinators, we talked before about sort of the drive in Vermont to ensure that there’s pollinators on these sites. Just talk for a second about why you guys see this as a benefit and how it’s working for you.

Chad Farrell:

So I think this comes back to our status or our mission, basically, and our vision. Which is to use business as a force for good. And we try to think about the impact of our work from more of just a financial perspective. As B Corp, we’re always thinking about the triple bottom line. So, what kind of social benefit are our projects providing, or our work, and what kind of environmental benefits? I think the environmental benefits are a little easier to quantify, but with the example of pollinators, I mean it’s a big need, right? I mean, our food security kind of depends on getting this turned around and getting these pollinators back to a more healthy status. It’s interesting.

Chad Farrell:

We’ve done pollinators on a number of our projects here in Vermont and I’ve got a good anecdote for you. One of the projects in Hinesburg, Vermont, we had some neighbors there that were less than thrilled that we were using this site for a 2.1 megawatt solar array. We worked them through it, we built a berm, we visually screened it, we got them there. And we let them know we’re going to be planting pollinators. Well, two years, maybe it’s three years now, we heard from others in the town that their gardens are now just flourishing, the apple tree that hadn’t delivered apples in years was now just, they were falling off the tree. Their gardens, their vegetables, everything, so much better because they’ve got this thriving pollinator population right next door.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, Rob Davis from Fresh Energy told me about a story about in Minnesota, that farmers are actually rotating their crops around some of these places. Because it just makes sense.

Chad Farrell:

It’s awesome, yeah.

Jon Powers:

So I always end the podcast with a final question. If you went back to yourself, coming out of Bucknell and could sit down and have a beer with yourself, what piece of advice would you give?

Chad Farrell:

Yeah, that’s a great way to close. I think I would have told myself to chill out a little bit, I don’t know.

Jon Powers:

It’s good advice.

Chad Farrell:

Seriously, I look back and what I did in my early twenties, yeah it ended up being, I think, applicable to the rest of my career. But there are so many instances where that’s not the case and I think it’s so important, and I’m going to impart this with my kids, is you really got to love what you’re doing. You really got to be emotionally and intellectually invested in what you’re doing. You got to have a passion for it. So maybe you got to take 20 years, 22 through 25, or whatever that number is because I mean, let’s face it. Not many people make their career between 22 and 25. Some people do, but-

Jon Powers:

Mark Zuckerberg, other than that.

Chad Farrell:

Yeah. Find something that you really love. And if you’ve got to… Hopefully they can afford to be able to do that. There’s obviously financial implications there, but to really just develop a passion, follow that passion, and watch yourself just thrive.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. I love it. Well, good. Chad, thank you so much for joining us.

Chad Farrell:

Awesome, Jon. This has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. I want to thank specifically Lauren Glickman for helping us set this up. She actually helped me start the podcast years ago. And Carly Battin, our producer. For those who are joining us, please go to cleancapital.com to get more episodes. And as always send me folks that you think would be good guests and I hope you’ll continue listening.

Jon Powers:

Thanks for listening in today’s conversation. Find more episodes on cleancapital.com, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We look forward to continuing our conversation on energy, innovation, and finance with you.