The year 2021 has been a banner year for Leyline Renewable Capital. We developed partnerships with a number of clean energy developers, hired more staff to take on our increasing workload, and interviewed and connected with climate change leaders across the United States. While it is hard to summarize a year's worth of work in one article, several highlights stand out.
New Partnerships
This year, we partnered with Momentum, Purpose Energy, Save Solar, American Power Ventures and Ductor. These partnerships enabled capital for projects in stand-alone energy storage, energy storage paired with solar, rooftop solar, utility-scale solar and poultry waste anaerobic digestion. The following are a sample of projects Leyline financed:
We look forward to deploying more clean energy projects using our capital in the year ahead.
Connection with Climate Thought Leaders
In 2021, Leyline interviewed some of the leading renewable energy thought leaders. Our readers enjoyed our interview with Jigar Shah, director of the loan program at the U.S. Department of Energy, who highlighted how the loan program focuses on the debt side of the development equation and is complementary to Leyline's capital. Leyline also talked with leaders who spend their time looking at the future of different clean energy technologies. For example, Ben Lowe from Roland Berger noted new grid scale and longer duration storage deployments. Deanne Barrow from Norton Rose Fulbright talked about the excitement around green hydrogen and how it may overcome cost as an obstacle to its near-term future outlook.
Some of our interviews discussed unique business models to deploy clean energy. For example, Antlia's Sam Pollan seeks to build a standardized, tradable green hydrogen credit by decoupling the environmental benefits of green hydrogen from the product itself. Matt Stanberry of Highland Electric purchases electric buses and leases them to school systems, with the largest contract to date with Montgomery County, Md. Finally, Amanda Li with Banyan Infrastructure built a platform that systemizes all the complex deal structure and lending information and takes away the time-consuming process of dealing with contractual documents and manual data collection for distributed infrastructure projects.
New Additions to the Leyline Team
Leyline added a number of staff to its team this year to handle our increasing volume of work. We welcomed Jay Modi as our new chief financial officer (CFO). He came to Leyline with more than 12 years of renewable energy corporate finance experience at large public companies and start-up organizations. Joshua Schaff came aboard as the managing director of origination. He is accomplished in capital structuring across renewable and conventional power, energy and infrastructure projects, with nearly 20 years of experience in finance. Janson Mao is Leyline's new director of structured finance. Janson is a corporate transactional attorney, specializing in project finance, project development and M&A transactions in the renewable energy industry. We also welcomed two new associate directors: Vipul Devluk joined the Leyline team after a decade of work at EDP Renewables, and Barbara S. de Vasconcelos joined us following time at Marathon Capital. Geoff King rounded out the finance team as the new manager of FP&A and treasury, after a decade of experience with financial modeling, structured finance and credit. The accounting team also welcomed two new hires - Libby McCravy as the accounting manager and Adam Swain as a senior staff accountant. All of these key hires will help the organization with capital structuring.
Sherrie Bridgers came aboard as our new executive administrator/office manager, and we welcomed Melissa French as our new relationship manager. Finally, the remaining new hires included Zach Lucy as a technical services associate, Grace Carter as an ESG & special projects analyst, Andrew Slaughter as a financial analyst and Tiara Dorsette as a development analyst.
We also continue our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion, and our efforts were recognized in our honorable mention in the Cleanie Award in the Champion in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Corporate category. Our equity, diversity and inclusion (ED&I) reports provide quarterly progress on our work.
2022 Priorities
As we look to 2022, our goal is to structure new investment deals that help developers maximize the development cycle value. We will continue to provide non-dilutive capital for technologies we financed in the past, such as solar energy, renewable natural gas and battery energy storage - all while maintaining a finger on the pulse of new emerging technologies. Finally, we will explore new innovative partnerships and target our work in certain geographic areas, all while keeping ED&I at the forefront of our work. We wish everyone a happy holiday season and are grateful to each of you for engaging with the Leyline team.
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