Brendan McCartney ’08 is using his finance background to help accelerate the shift to clean energy
A leading developer of wind, solar, and energy storage across the United States, Apex Clean Energy is on a mission to accelerate the country’s shift to renewables. Working at utility scale—think power plants, not rooftop panels—the Charlottesville, Virginia-based company finances, designs, builds, and operates facilities that are on track to displace some 690 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and generate enough electricity to power 3 million American homes. After a finance career that has included investment banking and security trading for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Brendan McCartney ’08 became increasingly drawn to the clean energy market and joined Apex three-and-a-half years ago. He and his wife, Jillian (and their Great Dane, Marleigh!), now live just miles from where they both studied at the University of Virginia. We recently caught up with him to find out more about working on the cutting edge of the renewable energy transition.
Your academic and professional background is in finance. What brought you to the green energy industry?
After studying economics as an undergrad at University of Virginia, I worked in investment banking for four years in New York and London. Over the course of that time, I started to develop a specialty in infrastructure—things like airports or toll roads or shipping companies. And one of the things I worked on was an offshore wind project in Germany in the North Sea. I had no prior experience in wind, and I was like, “Wow, this is pretty fascinating. I’d like to do more of this.” I knew I wanted go back to school at some point, and when I did, I found an international finance program at Johns Hopkins that allowed me to do quantitative work in economics with a focus on energy and the environment. It was perfect. I was doing a lot of energy economics and international markets stuff, energy in the Middle East, energy in Latin America, natural gas markets, things like that, and I was interested in combining these things with the functional skill set I had from investment banking. I wanted to work in the renewables space, because I see it as the energy of the future.
What’s your role at Apex?
I’m part of the finance team. My roles and responsibilities involve raising capital, along with business planning and strategy, and investor relations. We set budgets and goals, and that could be anything from a 12-week cash forecast to a 10-year corporate model where you’re doing blue-sky thinking. What drew me to the company is that it really lives by core values of sustainability, integrity, and entrepreneurship. We’re aware that we’re coming into communities as an outsider, and we have a responsibility to be a good partner.
Do you feel a sense of urgency about the work?
I’m not a doomsayer type of person, but there’s a term “tipping point” in conservation and biology, where once the Earth crosses a threshold, you can’t recover back to where it was before. It’s kind of scary, but we can’t treat things as business-as-usual anymore. We need to get more electric vehicles on the road, we need to think about the power demands of artificial intelligence. One of the nice things when I was in grad school, the curriculum was pretty evenly balanced between the energy side and the environmental side. We exist in an ecosystem where one thing affects another. There are always many different factors to consider, and this is what makes the clean energy sector interesting. At the end of the day, we’re all working towards one goal, and that’s protecting our planet and trying to leave it in a better place by creating a lower-carbon future.
What are some of the big challenges?
Our company works within a very complicated grid system. We are what’s called an IPP, an independent power producer. We do not own the transmission lines or the power lines that connect to your house. We’re upstream at the power-generation side. One of the unique aspects about the grid is that energy supply and demand must be 100% matched at all times. Every time you turn on a light switch or a washing machine, there has to be a power source ready to meet that demand. So we work closely with the utilities: “OK, what’s the impact to the whole system if we connect a project to your grid?” In Texas, for example, which is a really strong market for renewables, things have reached a point where the amount of power we’re generating is too much for the grid. There’s something that we call congestion, which is an electrical engineering term, where there’s so much resource being connected that power has to be curtailed. The wind resource is out in West Texas—Odessa and Midland—whereas the load centers are in East Texas—Houston, Dallas, and Austin. More transmission needs to be built to connect the two, and you can’t just create this capacity overnight. This is one of the biggest bottlenecks to the growth of renewables in every region of the country.
Any exciting projects in the pipeline?
There’s one in New England called Downeast Wind, up in coastal Maine, north of Acadia National Park. Maine is a very beautiful place, and to help keep it that way the state has set a goal of getting 80% of its power from renewable sources by 2030. Downeast will help by generating 126 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 37,000 homes. Throughout the design and build process, we’ve worked closely with residents, landowners, ecologists, and the state to be supportive of the local economy and to expand and protect natural habitats. For example, we take a construction break for the blueberry harvest, which is enormously important economically in the region. We started construction last November, and we’ll finish around the end of this year.
How did Williston help prepare you for your work?
My favorite subject was always history, any sort of history: World Civ, U.S. history, Comparative Politics with Mr. Fay. I took honors math classes freshman, sophomore, and junior years, but as a senior I had a little crisis of confidence, so I didn’t take AP Calc. I dialed it back and took regular calculus. I’m going to be a history major, right? It turned out to be a great decision, because a little way into the year, Ms. Anderson, my calc teacher, said, “You’re better at this than you think you are. I think you should consider majoring in [economics] in college.” It gave me confidence, and I took math classes at UVA and I loved them. Now most of what I do today is work with numbers.