Jon Powers: Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. I’m the co-founder of CleanCapital and serve as President Obama’s Chief Sustainability Officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. And today we are joined by someone I have respected in the industry for a long time. Someone who was doing renewable renewables well before renewables were cool. Paul Curran, who’s the CEO BQ Energy. BQ is a brownfields and landfill developer. They’ve done amazing, in hundreds of megawatts in wind and solar. In full disclosure, CleanCapital, we acquired them last year. And really are working together to scale up the work they’re doing. And you’re going to hear from Paul how that space is. It’s unique, so you really have to know what you’re doing, with the potential to solve the climate crisis. And utilize this otherwise sometimes underutilized, if not impossibly utilized land that are brownfields and landfills, could be a critical piece of that solution. So as always, you can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. And I hope you enjoy the conversation. Paul, thanks for finally joining me at Experts Only. Paul Curran: It’s a great pleasure to be here. As you know I’ve been a big fan of the podcast for a long time, and it’s really kind of fun to finally get on as a guest. Jon Powers: Well, excited to have you. And I think, when I always look back at your career and your trajectory in this space, you were doing renewables well before renewables were cool. And really helped lay the groundwork for some of the growth we’ve seen over the last decade and a half in this space. For folks that don’t know, you grew up and got degrees in engineering from Columbia and Marist College, why were you interested in being an engineer? Paul Curran: I tried to keep my politics out of the office, but I was going to college during the time of Jimmy Carter. And also during the time of Three Mile Island. And other energy things were really top of mind the first time we all started thinking about alternate energy, and the natural gas bubble and so forth, and it really grabbed me. So I started studying energy back in the late 70s and early 80s, and it really was a kind of mission filled thing. It made an awful lot of sense to me. Energy efficiency was just a logical thing to look at and so forth. So I got passionate about it and I loved it. Jon Powers: And before getting into the renewable space, you were in the sort of traditional energy space, working for the Texaco and Chevron. And if I remember right, you actually at one point were stationed overseas, right? Working these issues? Paul Curran: I was. Yes and no. I started in altered energy and then the country kind of shifted a little bit. And so I started out working in the alternate energy division of Texaco, which sort of was co-generation, energy efficiency, clean coal kind of stuff, that sort of thing. And then almost accidentally we wound up building a wind farm inside of one of our oil refineries in Rotterdam. I was in charge of the European division at that time of altered energy. I was presented this project. Nobody told me I was supposed to say no to it. So we built it and it worked out to be a really successful project. I wanted to do more of it. And it was time, my kids were at the right age, where I wanted to come back to the States. And really it was making the big leap into starting up my own company, really with that business plan of building wind farms. I knew that there were a lot of brownfields, closed oil refineries, that kind of thing. My first trip to Buffalo actually, where I first met you, there are two closed oil refineries right near Buffalo. And I went up there saying, “Okay, maybe one of them is windy.” And so we went around doing that kind of thing. Got back into this format of BQ Energy really when we came back to the States. And it was difficult at first, but worked out really well. Jon Powers: Yeah. So for folks that don’t know BQ Energy, you founded it in 2002. And it really focuses on sort of brownfield development. I really want to dive into with you in a second. But coming back from Europe, what gave you the confidence that you could start your own company and get this going? Paul Curran: Oh, confidence is a difficult word when you start your own company as you know. Jon Powers: Yeah. It’s true. Paul Curran: It’s a hope and a prayer. And we were comfortable that we had a good business plan. I started up saying that we had built this one wind farm inside of an operating oil refinery in Rotterdam. I knew that there were a 180 closed oil refineries in the United States. So a big market in my mind that you could go look for, most of them are coastal. They get the oil in and out, and get the products in and out. And I thought, “Well, coastal probably means windy.” So it seemed to make sense. Working on brownfields and landfills makes sense in a lot of ways. A lot of people think that wind farms are ugly. And that was a real blocker for the technology as it came forward. Closed oil refineries just happened to be uglier. So it makes a lot of sense from a community acceptance point of view that if you’re trying to build these wind turbines in a place that’s already ugly, that that wouldn’t be an issue. The other thing is that oil refineries historically have used a lot of electric power and the power lines never come down. So if you have an old brownfield in your town, the utilities don’t come in and take out the power lines. They’re hoping somebody’s going to do something to use the power lines eventually. And those power lines can take the power out. So really from a community point of view, we looked at brownfields and landfills as something that you could put wind farms in with minimal impact and a lot more acceptance of the technology, than you would otherwise see on agriculture land. Or out in pristine areas of mountain ridges and that kind of thing. And it did work out. Jon Powers: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to dive deeper into that, the development side. But just for a second, I want to paint a picture for the audience on when we’re talking about what a brownfield is. People know what a landfill is, I think that’s pretty self-explanatory. But a place like Buffalo, New York where Paul and I met and where I am today, is a place that had a really strong industrial base historically. On our lake was a massive steel manufacturing facility, one of the biggest in the world at the time, Bethlehem Steel. And it is a pristine part of the lakefront that has been now untouched, had been for decades. Because as Bethlehem Steel went under here in Western New York. And no one could do anything on those sites because the environmental impact of what was buried, the challenges of it. And now I’m going to paint a picture of where we are today, and I’m going to talk about how we got there. But just flying back into Buffalo last night from California, you fly over the coast of Lake Erie and there’s these beautiful wind farms, sistered up to some solar systems that are there. You have development happening on the ground, big manufacturing coming back in and warehouses going into those sites. But as you said, they had the infrastructure in place to, I don’t want to say plug and play, but to plug those power systems in. Talk about sort of developing that steel wind project really in a place where folks were not familiar with what the opportunity held. Paul Curran: No, there weren’t. And it’s really a source of pride, but if you look at the city seal, the crest of the city of Lackawanna, New York, which is adjacent to Buffalo. It was a local saint who was legendary in the area. And behind him there was a smokestack from the steel plant. That was what they were proud of and so forth. Today, if you look, the smokestack’s been replaced and it’s a wind turbine. Which is really cool. At the time we started, very few people knew what a wind turbine looked like. There were lots of stories about how much noise there might be and other impacts. But the city of Lackawanna was really looking to change themselves. And the mayor at the time was a retired plumber. He was a good Polish American who was looking to do good stuff for his city. And we really worked well with him. He wanted to bring change. His vision of that site was basically to clean it up so that new businesses would look at it as an ideal place and an attractive place to be coming. It was pretty much known as the abandoned steel plant. When we got there, it had been closed for about 20 years. And what he wanted was, new business coming on would look at it as a kind of a green energy sort of incubator. And that is what’s happened. The wind farm’s been up for about 15 years now. Jon Powers: For sure. Paul Curran: Most people around Buffalo, they know it was a steel plant, I suppose. But most of the younger people, the thing you can see, from around Buffalo from your office or elsewhere, is there’s the wind turbines. And people have gotten used to them and people take pride in them, which we think is really cool. Jon Powers: Yeah. They don’t even know today that there’s solar there. I think people know that it’s a wind area. Paul Curran: No. Jon Powers: And if you drive down Route 5, which we do multiple times a week. Passes the area, you really get an interesting dichotomy between that side of the road where there’s been work done on the brownfield site to bring wind and bring solar. And literally if you look left, the old steel factory, much of the skeleton is still there. And actually just a few years ago it had a massive fire. And it really looks like it’s really a sad site. But it shows what, with the right vision, the right commitment, the right investment, and I think the patience to implement these things, you can do with a site like that. Paul Curran: And Jon, the fun part of it is that… Not fun, but you could replicate that situation hundreds of times around the United States. There are a closed steel plant… The Rust Belt got its name because there’s old infrastructure in the Rust Belt. When we look at opportunities, I tell people often that if you give me any city in the country, I can find a brownfield or a landfill within a hundred miles of it pretty easily. And so reusing that type of site, it’s a success story now. It’s been 15 years and people don’t even think anything but that’s a great idea for it. And replicating that is something that we’re looking at every day elsewhere. Jon Powers: Yeah. Yeah. I’m want to talk about that scale. Before we get to that, I just want to paint one more picture for folks. You and I went to a ribbon cutting not too long ago at a site that you had been working on for years. Which was supposed to be a nuclear waste facility, but is now a brownfield. And that community for decades did not know what to do with this facility. And they couldn’t farm it. It’s in an agriculture community. There’s so much they couldn’t do. And can you talk a little bit about what you guys were able to build there? Paul Curran: Sure. Typical there again, the community approached us. West Valley, New York, which is about an hour east of Buffalo. It was a nuclear fuels reprocessing center. It was designed to be one in the 70s. Once you design one of those facilities and sort of begin to start it up, you’ve condemned the land for a long time. Because nobody wants to live near a nuclear fuels reprocessing center. And so the town supervisor came to us and said, “We’ve got all this land, we’ve got all these power lines that run in and out. Is there something you can do to build up our tax base? And also kind of change the reputation of the town a bit?” We took a look at it. It’s actually one of the least polluted sites we’ve ever worked on, in the sense that it doesn’t really have an environmental footprint. It has an environmental reputation, if you will, because of what went on there and so forth. So it is a brownfield in the sense that it is impacted by the previous industrial activity that went on there. But it worked out to be a great success story. Again, the town was looking for redevelopment of the property. NYSERDA actually who owns the property, went along for the ride at first. But the town really drove it. And NYSERDA loves the idea now. It’s been really a showpiece for them as to how to redevelop government owned property as well. That site is owned by NYSERDA. We needed to get the sign off from the Nuclear Fuels Regulatory Commission, and a bunch of really other DEC agencies as well, all of whom love the idea. It’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a site that a lot of people go past. But it really is showing the capability of repurposing brownfields. Jon Powers: Yeah. So the complexity of doing these deals, when you think about doing a clean energy project in general, there’s some complexity to building up even from a greenfield site. But what you guys have done so well at BQ is understand the nine-dimensional chess you’ve got to be able to play to get… Whether it be the EPA… For folks who don’t know NYSERDA New York, it’s a New York state, basically the energy regulatory group. It’s not NYPA, which is utility, but it does a lot of the policy setting and so forth for the state. But being able to play that nine-dimensional chess to move forward on these types of projects. As you’re talking to your team as they’re looking at these, how do you coach them on how to approach a new opportunity? And how do you engage with all the key stakeholders? Paul Curran: Sure. Stakeholders, we speak a little bit of a different language in the sense that we worry about the site first. We worry about the property. It’s very common that we get a call from a coal company that has mine land that they’re not going to be mining anymore. We’ve gotten calls from people that own coal-fired power plants that they’re shutting down, but they have a lot of land. And really what we try to do is to focus first on the site. Is there enough land? Is this the type of thing that we can structure a transaction? Is the owner clearly on board with this type of thing? So our main focus, unlike some other projects where they’d be looking for the transmission grid first. We generally have the transmission grid with us because it’s been something where they’ve been using electric power beforehand. But we’re worried about the environmental footprint. How much land can we reuse? Generally speaking, it’ll sound strange, but we generally have an easier path of permitting our projects than most projects that are going to be put on agricultural land or open farmland. Only because the agencies themselves are typically a big fan of this. The folks at the New York State DEC were enormously supportive when we tried to do the wind farm and the solar fields out at the project you alluded to before. Simply because they’re in charge of repurposing brownfields, but they’re also in charge of getting more renewable energy into the mix. So they realized that this was a perfect reuse. Most environmental permitting people are really fans of beneficial reuse of brownfields. They don’t want just have them sit there, they want them to be cleaned up and certainly repurposed. Everybody that’s in this field gets wary about public access. So digging into a brownfield, is that something you want to put a park on where children might play and so forth? Generally not. But solar and electrical infrastructure is really a perfect reuse of this type of property. Jon Powers: Yeah. You’re not putting a playground on a landfill, right? Paul Curran: No. And you shouldn’t. Jon Powers: Yeah, exactly. So we’ve painted a picture of Western New York, which I this is, I think, very, very telling because I live here and this is how we got to know each other. But there is a massive nationwide opportunity here, and BQ is leading the way in places like Ohio and Texas. Is there a sense or has there been any research done on what type of impact we could have in the brownfield space by adding even just solar in terms of scale? Because I mean, you guys have done hundreds of megawatts now. Paul Curran: We have. Jon Powers: And we’re really just getting started. We’re really just getting started. Paul Curran: We absolutely are. The EPA has a database with several hundred thousand possible sites where you can do this. And every place we go, we see new communities have never heard of it before. And we rarely… Well, let me put it the other way. We built several dozen projects now. I’ve never had somebody come back to me and say, “It was different than what you said.” There was an impact that we didn’t realize was going to happen by doing this. Every project we’ve done, including Lackawanna, West Valley and so forth, people understand what’s going to happen beforehand. And afterwards they realize, “Well, duh, that was a good idea.” So the replication possibility is great. If you took every landfill in New York state and every single village community and so forth in New York State has one, they put their trash for decades in those landfills. If you took every one of them, you could get up to 15 gigawatts of power, which is probably about as much as… Jon Powers: Just in New York. Paul Curran: Just in New York. And that’s… Jon Powers: In New York. Paul Curran: Just in New York. And that’s about how much power. I didn’t look this morning, but that’s probably about how much power New York is using right now. So if you took that nationwide and looked around and so forth, where could we do this? The possibilities are enormous. Now, you can’t build on every landfill. Not every landfill is appropriate for various reasons and so forth. But the impact of doing this is great. We were on the call yesterday with a new group in Ohio that’s interested in influencing some policy issues there, and so forth. They don’t want to put solar on agricultural land. And they’re getting quite a bit of pushback from farmers who don’t want to give up their land for this type of purpose, even though it might be economically preferred. But I think when they talk to us, and we talked about how many brownfields there are in Ohio. Again, the numbers are staggering and I think it’s a popular concept. There are some states that incentivize this, but not that many. And we’re not very big in lobbying. We’re working actually, now that we’re in the CleanCapital family, we’re learning a bit more about that. But I think it is something where policymakers and local officials are learning more about the possibilities and the positive impact overall of doing it. Jon Powers: Well, as we talk about scale, I think we haven’t hit on this, but for folks not familiar CleanCapital did acquire BQ last year. It’s been a really beautiful partnership for us. We are excited about not only the track record that Paul and his team have shown over the years, but the potential of continuing to scale this. And as someone who believes in the aggressive approach we need to take to solve the climate crisis, this is a perfect way to really not just put great projects in the ground, but to utilize land that otherwise is unusable at the time. So Paul, talk for a second about before we get in… I’m going to talk about the partnership a little bit, but I want to go back to the politics side of this. Because what you’re doing is such a bipartisanly supported effort. There are people that may not like some of the renewable side of what we’re doing, but you’re working with coal executives, you’re working in the state of Texas, you’re working in some rural areas in Ohio that aren’t known as Democratic bastions. And you are getting support by leaders on both sides because of the impact. Paul Curran: We have some great projects in West Virginia. And widely supported. We’ve got a lot of projects in Republican areas. It was funny, I met with a coal executive down in Appalachia in Southwestern Virginia a year or so ago. And he bluntly said, “I hate what you’re doing, but I realize this is the right thing to do.” In the sense that he would like to mine more coal on his properties forever. I’m not the one telling him he can’t. But he realizes that reusing the areas that have been previously mined for doing this kind of thing just makes an awful lot of sense. And we see that a lot. As I say, we don’t talk about our partners, but we’re working with a lot of coal companies. And when they’re ready, they’ll make their own announcements that they’re doing these types of projects. And I think it’s something which, it’s not shifting energy policy in the sense that if these companies want to diversify, that’s great. The amount of coal that will be used in the market is not something we’re impacting. We’re just giving them alternatives for land that they’ve previously mined. Any incentives now from the federal government under the Inflation Reduction Act, give them an extra impetus to do that type of thing. Jon Powers: And creating jobs. I mean, you’re creating a new opportunity and a new transformational industry in a region that needs it. Paul Curran: And Jon, one of the things that we wind up doing is working in a lot of disadvantaged communities. Up in Waukegan, Illinois, and in South Houston, Appalachia, as I mentioned and so forth. These are areas that have a tremendous amount of poverty. So we’ve instituted with local community college job training programs, we’ve supported them. And what we want to do is that people who go through these programs can kind of work on the construction gigs. Then they’ve got the training, they’ve got the experience, and then they can move on to other construction or operations facilities as they go forward and so forth. So we’ve realized that being an incubator for that kind of stuff, training people as we go along, is just a necessary part of our business model. So it’s something that we’ve been doing quite a bit. Jon Powers: Yeah. That’s great. So the recent passage last year of the Inflation Reduction Act, along with the parallel passage of the bipartisan infrastructure. But we talk a lot on this show, about how it is a monumental platform of investment. And really is going to help tee up a lot of private investment to continue to move in this space. Specifically in those pieces of legislation, the work that you do, how has that been incentivized? What are some of the challenges that came out of it? And what are some of the opportunities that it creates? Paul Curran: Well Jon, as you know, the investment tax credit was sunsetting or declining over time previously. And what they did was they said, “Okay, we don’t want that to happen. We want it to be stabilized but also increased.” And increased for projects that are using American equipment of course. But also projects that are in lower and middle income communities, which many of ours are. Projects which are in what’s called Energy Communities, which are generally brownfields. Which is where we are. So we went from a situation where we were looking at a declining tax rate, investment tax credit basis of say 26% or 22% for our projects going forward. And now many of our projects are getting 40% investment tax credits, which you do the math, for one of these larger projects can be an enormous boost. And for some of the projects that we have in lower and middle income communities, we’re actually exceeding the 40%, going up into the 50% and 60% range of investment tax credits. Those really become rocket fuel for what we’re doing. Somebody asked me yesterday, how did that change our business model? It hasn’t changed our business model one bit. We’re still doing exactly the same thing we were a year ago. Which is important because we can point to all of the projects we’ve done historically in the communities that you’ve said. And now that people are realizing that these things can be economic in their own communities, it really helps enormously. So it hasn’t changed what we do, but it has changed the popularity of what we do, and the number of projects we’re looking to do. We foresaw our business model growing enormously. That’s why we started talking with CleanCapital a year ago. And fortunately we we’re ahead of the curve on that score. Jon Powers: Yeah. And that’s why this partnership’s so beautiful. I view the IRA and the legislation the same. It’s not about changing the business model, it’s about accelerating what we’re doing. And continuing to really get more projects in the ground with better financing. And I’m a full believer that this next decade is the decade that we have to solve the climate crisis. And at least if we’re not getting those projects in the ground by 2030, we’re never going to hit any of the goals that we’ve laid out as a country, or a world. So Paul, just for the final question I want to ask. Well, first of all, before the final question, looking at the partnership side here, how has working with CleanCapital helped you guys? And what has that relationship been? Paul Curran: Jon, as I said, we weren’t necessarily looking for money, which will sound strange. We were looking for heft. And the heft really was, we saw that no matter what, our business was going to grow. And so we could cherry-pick only a couple of projects a year. Or we could let it grow kind of organically. When people called up, we could do the projects that we wanted to and so forth. So we were going to grow because the market was going to ask us to grow. And we needed to be having some have heft of working with a platform that would allow us to really focus on what we’re great at. We’re great at working on brownfields. We’re great at working with brownfield owners. We’re working on developing projects, and we’re really good at that. What we spent a lot of time on, unfortunately, were financial matters. HR issues, and all these types of things, that were just dragging us down and so forth. Working with CleanCapital, we really are able to take the best of both worlds. Working with people that you trust and people that you like is always good advice in the world. And I think, we knew that going in. I’ve told you, I can say it publicly. We turned down more lucrative offers simply because we wanted to make sure that what we did after we did a transaction like this, that we would be able to continue to do exactly what we do, and do it more effectively. And that’s what we’re looking for. There are things that CleanCapital does, you go out and raise a lot of money. We help whenever we can. There’s things that we do in terms of talking to new customers and so forth, and we bring in people like yourself, or Tom Byrne, or others to just help us with those. So it’s a very good fit, and it makes a lot of sense for what we were looking for. Which was a financial backstop, if you will, that would give us the heft that we needed to address market conditions. Jon Powers: Yeah. And what it did for us in the CleanCapital side, it made us really rethink how we were growing. And as you know, we’ve all had our growing pains. But I think we’ve recognized the potential of doing more in this and finding partners like BQ that we can help give rocket fuel to. And for folks that aren’t familiar, we’re doing things like shared services, as Paul mentioned, on things like policy and marketing, etc, to help everyone optimize what they’re doing and scale quicker. So Paul, listen, you’ve always been one of my favorite people in the industry. And now that we’re all part of the same CleanCapital family, it’s fun to be able to work hand in hand with you on stuff. If you could go back to Paul at Marist College and you’re about to graduate and sit down and have a beer. And give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be? Paul Curran: You know Jon, you learn earlier than when I was doing my MBA at Marist, right and wrong. You learn that in probably first grade or second grade. And most people learn from the parents. And that message of do the right thing is probably the most important thing to go through and so forth. Every day we get stuff coming through here where there’s an easier way to get something done. But, figure out what’s the right thing to do and stick with that, and you’ll be okay. Jon Powers: Love it. Well Paul, thank you so much for being part of the CleanCapital family and being on the podcast today. If folks have ideas or projects that could fit the BQ model, I mean, we meet developers all the time. They might have rights to a landfill but don’t know how to do it, but BQ can. Please reach out to us at cleancapital.com or at BQ as well. And we’re all one family and we’ll share those leads and have conversations. So Paul, thanks to you, the BQ team and the CleanCapital team, Colleen Young is our producer, always helping us put on a great show. And you can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. And I look forward to continuing the conversation. Paul Curran: Great, thanks Jon. Jon Powers: Thanks so much.