For Matt Kearns ’89, an interest in renewable energy got its spark back at Williston

After more than three decades in renewable energy, Matt Kearns ’89 is excited about the future of the industry. “The fundamentals driving clean energy growth are strong—and growing stronger,” he says.

As a principal with a New York–based renewable-energy developer, Kearns’ confidence is based on two converging trends: 1) Power demand is skyrocketing thanks to the construction of new data centers and other sources of energy demand, and 2) Renewable energy—specifically large-scale solar installations coupled with battery storage—often remains the most cost-effective way to meet that demand. “Solar is often the cheapest available source of new electricity,” says Kearns, who has worked in the renewable-energy field since graduating from Colby College in 1993. “And solar-and-battery projects can be installed a lot faster than other forms of power generation.”

Kearns sees these dynamics playing out in projects across the country.  For example, a southeastern solar project his company is developing is transforming the site of a former coal power plant into a facility that, beginning in 2027, will power some 50,000 local homes and businesses. In the Midwest, his company is developing several solar projects as supplements to existing natural-gas power stations, one of which is using remediated coal-mine land. “There is a lot of of data center activity in the area,” says Kearns, “but what we’ve been focused on is working with the community to site the solar carefully and work through the questions that people have.”

The importance of acknowledging the complexity of large projects is a lesson Kearns first learned as a member of the environmental council at Williston. A day student from Amherst (his father was a philosophy professor at Amherst College, his mother taught music at Hampshire), Kearns helped launch a newspaper recycling program on campus. “The school gave us a little garage where we could store paper, and then we had to get it to the recycling facility. It was really poorly conceived, but the intent was good,” he recalls. “It was my first brush with taking on environmental challenges and then understanding that solving them is not as easy as you think.”

Today, living in Falmouth, Maine, with his wife and two teenage boys, Kearns sees that lesson as a throughline in a three-decade career that has included consulting, licensing, and development of hydropower, wind, and solar projects. “Everything I do now is about trying to tackle energy challenges across U.S. markets in a way that is affordable for ratepayers. Safe, affordable, available at a price that works—these are criteria that matter,” Kearns says.