How Green Hydrogen can Decarbonize Hard-to-Abate Sectors - Jacob Susman Flashcards
Today’s episode is the third in our series on hard to abate sectors, those sectors with some of the most significant greenhouse gas emissions and where decarbonization depends on scalable, cost competitive technologies. In this episode, I’m talking with Jacob Susman, CEO and co-founder of Ambient Fuels, a developer of green hydrogen projects.
I happened to show up in Spain in 1999, right at a time where that country’s energy sector was deregulating and joined a big American company there called AES, where I learned the trade of independent power development and thankfully had a real forward-thinking boss at the time who said, this wind energy stuff looks like it might be for real, Jake, why don’t you go give that a try and see if you can figure out a business for us? So that’s about almost 25 years ago and with a couple of stops in the middle at Goldman Sachs and then building my own wind development company called OwnEnergy, which we then sold to EDF Renewables, part of a big French energy conglomerate, and then started Ambient fuels about two and a half years ago.
06/12/23
21/02/24
Beginning my career in gas fired development and then moving on to wind development and solar development, a little bit of storage, gave me the foundation in project development overall what makes a good devco and how to deploy capital in an efficient way into a devco. I had learned a formula in having built a wind devco of my own and then just got really fortunate that a friend turned me on to electrolyzers and green hydrogen.
I could have gone back and built another wind devco or another solar devco, but what was really interesting to me was tackling a hard challenge. And there’s a third of the CO2 that we need to abate that we cannot do through electrification. And these are industries like refining and fertilizer and shipping and aviation and long haul trucking, cement, steel, all these industries, there’s certain parts of their process or their whole process overall, you just can’t decarbonize it with wind and solar.
And I said, “Well, let’s go find the molecule that fits the playbook, that enables these sectors to decarbonize, take on a really hard challenge and see if we can build a great devco in the green hydrogen sector.” And that’s what we’re doing at Ambient Fuels.
So there’s people who operate these plants and there’s the equipment developers and there’s banks and others who are financing them. What does the infrastructure developer or project developer do?
It is probably more art than science, but it really amounts to putting the pieces together of a project on the desktop or on paper and most importantly in a set of contracts that then lend themselves to a non-recourse project financing so that one can then go on and build and operate that infrastructure asset.
So the types of tasks you’d be taking on would be figuring out the feasibility of a particular project or securing the rights to the land where you’re going to build the project. Maybe you need a permit, maybe you need to connect it to the electrical grid. You almost always need a fuel source or a renewable resource. And then you get into some of the more commercial aspects. So you’ll eventually have to find an anchor tenant, an offtaker, you’ll sign some engineering, procurement and construction contracts and then you’ll go finance it and build it.
So let me unpack a few of the pieces that are jargon to some. Just now you mentioned offtaker. Can you just lay that out for us?
Almost all infrastructure projects rely on - in order to achieve success - is a fixed revenue stream for some many years preferably that will then lead to a certain amount of capital being comfortable enough that revenues will come into that project that they will then provide the capital to go build it. So the offtaker, or in most industries you would call them the customer, is really the linchpin to a lot of contracts. So in my wind farm development days, that was in the early days, most typically a utility who would sign up and say, “I’ll take a 100% of your output for 20 years, deliver it at the plant gate at a fixed price.” And then I could take that contract straight to the bank and go start building. Or more recently in the hydrogen sector, it could be, say, an ammonia producer or a refinery or any number of different industrial clients who use hydrogen in their process, again, who would sign up to a long-term contract that really gives us a license to go build.
it’s a pre-commitment from a buyer that says if you build it, I will come and I’m going to sign on the bottom line to say that that’s the case at a fixed price for a period of time. That de-risks the project, reduces the risk to the developer and they can get better financing or maybe any financing.
Some other key aspects of it would be obviously the credit profile of that buyer, some of the contractual terms, in other words, what binds them to necessarily show up and take the quantity at the price that they promised, and any number of thorny contractual issues. So that is often the hardest part about getting a project off the ground. In my opinion, also often the most enjoyable.
So hydrogen is an element, so we all know hydrogen is actually hydrogen, but it’s called green hydrogen, gray hydrogen and blue hydrogen, different flavors of hydrogen. Can you just walk us through the difference between those three?
Another way to name green hydrogen is electrolytic hydrogen or hydrogen made from an electrolyzer, which is a piece of equipment that basically separates water into hydrogen and oxygen, but that process is extremely energy intensive. However, if you use renewable energy, carbon-free energy, then you have created green hydrogen or carbon-free hydrogen. So that is basically the core of our work as green hydrogen developers. We seek out, as we were talking about earlier, certainly the customer, but also the source of the renewable power that will be put through that electrolyzer to then separate that water.
Renewable power is the most important raw material. The cost of hydrogen is easily 3/4 dependent on how well you buy your renewable power.A lot of times in these industries we get fixated on the CapEx of the actual equipment, which is still incredibly important for a variety of reasons, and I don’t mean to downplay that, but so much of it here is riding on how you buy your power.
Can you help contrast green hydrogen with other forms of hydrogen?
The most common way of making hydrogen today in the economy is referred to as gray hydrogen through a steam methane reformer. These are typically owned by large industrial gases companies, although sometimes they are also owned by the actual user of the hydrogen behind the fence as they say. The primary input there is as the name suggests, methane or natural gas. So you can imagine the amount of CO2 emissions that comes off of generating this form of hydrogen with methane, which is why green hydrogen is such a wonderful solution for industries like ammonia and refining from a decarbonization perspective.
Blue hydrogen is a competitor to us ‘cause it is a decarbonizing solution in that you go through that same SMR-driven (steam methane reforming) process used to make gray hydrogen, but at the end of that process you capture the CO2 that comes out of it and you store it in the ground or maybe you’ll do something else with the CO2. But in so doing, you haven’t eliminated the amount of CO2 that gets generated, but you’ve reduced it a significant amount.
Is it fair to say that gray hydrogen is the most mature, blue hydrogen, second most, and then green hydrogen’s earliest?
I think that’s fair. There’s some nuance though to it. First part, on blue hydrogen is that we are talking about storing massive amounts of CO2 underground. That is a project development exercise in and of itself. It requires establishing a pretty major cavern. Also, first capturing the CO2, then moving it into that cavern, then making sure that CO2 stays down in that cavern and continuously proving that it’s not leaking out. So there’s some significant challenge to both developing the blue hydrogen projects and some science and some tech to confirming that the CO2 is truly being captured.
The other thing I would say is that yes, I guess the green hydrogen, the electrolyzer technology is the newest in question. However, it’s been around for 30, 40 years. It’s fairly proven as well. And we’re at that point in the industry where it’s less about establishing that a certain type of technology works or doesn’t work, it’s more about driving the cost down and innovating as far as the amount of energy that’s required in order to make those electrolyzers go.
Can you say a few words about what that technology race looks like right now to reduce the cost of electrolyzers?
There’s certainly some rare earth minerals like platinum for example, that go into these electrolyzers and that’s not cheap or easy to get to. So there is a pretty major effort underway to try to reduce some of those rare materials that are required or use different materials. Probably the most significant effort though, it’s just overall around system efficiency, which particularly relates to how much electricity do I have to put into the electrolyzer in order to get a certain amount of green hydrogen out? As it’s the primary cost driver for the ultimate cost to the green hydrogen.
Let’s talk about the market for green hydrogen. I know one of the big ones is ammonia, which uses right now a lot of gray hydrogen. So is that a big market for green hydrogen as well?
Yes, ammonia is a major area where there’s a conversion opportunity. In fact, we’re working with a couple of ammonia producers presently who would like to replace their supply of gray hydrogen with a certain amount of green because either they’re required to in their home jurisdiction or they see a market opportunity where they can charge more for the product because it’s the clean and green kind.
But it’s also useful to talk about the current case versus the future case. What I mean by that is that the current industries that use gray hydrogen, predominantly the petrochemical complex and fertilizer production, pale in comparison to the amount of potential new industries that can adopt hydrogen overall. When you think about what shipping or aviation or long haul transport, steel, cement and all the different industrial uses where you can use hydrogen to create heat instead of methane, which is the most common. These are all brand new sectors where hydrogen has little or no penetration today. The ammonia industry, while very important, is just one piece of these new industries that we believe will emerge and begin to use hydrogen very soon.
One of the big uses of ammonia is in fertilizer, so there you’re swapping it one for one, but then also shipping is a potential market for ammonia where that’s not currently used as a shipping fuel in a large scale.
In the instance of shipping for example, there are a few different pathways that people are considering for decarbonization and moving away from the heavy bunker fuel that most ships use today. There’ve already been a number of ships that have been either converted or new ships that have been ordered to run on liquified natural gas. So that’s one pathway. Another pathway that many are considering includes methanol, and that’s a chemical that you can make with green hydrogen as well. And then as you mentioned, there’s this concept of shipping via green ammonia. Other factors: Where do I get the fueling? Can I use my existing ships or do I have to order new ships?
And also the truing up of the global certification programs and restrictions and regulations. Am I able to call this green ammonia in one market versus in another market it might not be considered as such? And then lastly, and maybe most importantly are the safety considerations that certain shipping fuels at least today are deemed to be more challenging than others in terms of using them for shipping.
Ammonia in particular, it being toxic, the risk of leakages that create safety hazards is not trivial.
What about on the fertilizer side there? Is there a willingness to pay for green hydrogen among fertilizer producers or ultimately their customers?
I think is worth establishing of regulatory demand versus voluntary demand. And the analogy in the States and the renewable power industry and the runup of wind and solar power, we had both a cost reducing incentive. In those industries there was a production tax credit or an investment tax credit, but we also had a demand driver in the form of a renewables portfolio standard in something like 30 states. And you really need both of those in order to get these industries to their full potential. So far in the ammonia sector and in green hydrogen overall, we have half of that story in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act and it’s Section 45V which establishes a tax credit for low carbon hydrogen, which is great. We’re all thrilled about that. We do not, however, have an equivalent yet in the US to that renewables portfolio standard that I mentioned.
There are a couple of states that have a clean fuel standard, which is helpful. We need a lot more. So there’s a long answer to your question, but in other jurisdictions, like in Europe for example, there are regulations. There is that top-down demand driver that says, thou shalt run your ships or your airplanes with green fuels by some date certain, and that sends very large companies running around with a fair amount of expediency going out and trying to figure out how to meet those mandates and targets. So we love that regulatory demand. We need more of it here in this country as well.
Let’s talk about some of the other applications. Aviation is another one where there’s exploration on using green hydrogen.
here’s where I can introduce now the second concept of voluntary demand as well, because anyone who’s flown on some of the better airlines these days will have seen at least one video that says, we’re going to get all of our fuel from sustainable sources by some date certain. We love that. I love the concept of these airlines following through on those commitments. A lot of times they’re a little ways out, 2030 or beyond, so we need to tighten those up, we need to bring those in. But it’s still an example of voluntary demand of good corporate citizens saying, we’re going to green up our fuel supply. And the airlines have really been out in the lead on this and we applaud the efforts that many of them are making. Particularly the European airlines now have some of that regulatory demand combined with the voluntary bit. It’s not just to protect their brand and live up to their sustainability commitments that they’ve made to their stakeholders, but it’s also because European governments have said.
It’s probably a good moment to just pause and say, well, what happened to the Electrify Everything movement and the reason why we’re not seeing battery technologies in either shipping or aviation taking anywhere near the excitement that you see in road vehicles is because of the massive energy density benefit you get from hydrogen, which means you can store it in a more compact way and it’s lighter than using battery applications for shipping or aviation.
It’s an excellent point. I’ll use it also to highlight one of the key reasons that I decided to come into this sector in the first place. This was the hardest challenge that I could find in decarbonization because we’ve got a third of these CO2 emissions abatement that we need to achieve that we cannot get through electrification. There’s certain processes like flying planes or like sailing ships that really don’t make sense to electrify. The energy density reason is probably the most important one. Think about the size of the battery you’d have to put in a ship’s hold in order to power that ship for any reasonable distance versus what are often referred to as drop-in fuels.
So it’s that opportunity to decarbonize these sectors that really are pretty hard to electrify that really attracted me. And it’s that energy density challenge that you mentioned that I think creates the opportunity for green hydrogen in particular.
So what about trucking? Now, trucking is in between passenger vehicles and shipping or aviation, and I know that there’s some movement in the trucking industry to explore hydrogen as a fuel instead of batteries or maybe in addition to batteries. What’s your take on that?
Trucking is one that has folks scratching their heads a little bit, and it’s an overused term, but it comes down to a real chicken and an egg challenge. You don’t just need the fancy truck that runs on the hydrogen to fuel those vehicles. You also need the fueling network nationwide or even international for that matter, and you need whole new manufacturing lines to build the trucks. And you have a lot of folks pointing in each other’s direction saying you go first. No, you go first. Build me the network and I’ll retool all my trucks or vice versa. So that’s one where frankly we haven’t… We believe in it long term. As opposed to electrifying long haul trucking, we think green hydrogen will be the way to go, but it’s taking a while and we think it will take quite a while longer.
The big difference about shipping and aviation is there’s many fewer fueling stations you need and they’re quite predictable ‘cause these are all predictable routes, whereas with trucking, as you’re noting millions of miles.
That’s exactly right. And I think there’s also a fair amount of entrepreneurial franchise types of models within the trucking industry getting all of that coordinated so that everyone is moving to the same places where there’s guaranteed fueling is yet another complication.
Let’s pivot away from these transportation sectors and talk a little bit about some other sectors in the industrial space like steel and utilities. Those are also areas where one hears about green hydrogen. What’s your take on those?
Steel in particular is another one of these areas where there is regulatory demand coming out of primarily Europe, so it does attract us. Steel is one of the more commoditized commodities. So yes, some industries or some companies and participants in the sector may be willing to pay a premium, but it’s going to be a pretty modest premium.
Steel producers we’ve spoken to have said not a penny over, and then they’ll give us a number that’s pretty darn low and hard to hit. So I would say that the regulatory demand is useful there, but still not enough to overcome that commodity nature of that industry yet. In a bid that we put in recently to a steel company we weren’t terribly far off either, so that was pretty encouraging. But there we’re seeing a number of industrial heat applications where there’s some part of an industrial process that you really just can’t electrify. Where we’re not only able to say we can provide you a lot of value with a green hydrogen fuel source instead, but it may actually help some other aspect of that plant’s operations. Maybe it enables part of that plant to not run as hot and so therefore not degrade in as short a period of time. Or it might mean the excess oxygen that we produce can be used in other parts of that process.
So there’s some neat operational benefits that a lot of those industrial heat users can get by engaging with green hydrogen producers.
I think utilities is another one that we have our eye on for the medium and long-term. A very high proportion of our power generation in the US now is on natural gas and hydrogen is obviously a gas. And so as more infrastructure is built up to deliver hydrogen and as more R&D takes place in the next generation of power generation equipment that can run on hydrogen, we think a lot of that gas plant may one day be replaced by green hydrogen, but today the efficiencies aren’t awesome. If you think about going from wind or solar power through electrolysis and then basically back into power generation, power to power, it’s not the world’s most efficient process today. With all that said, we are pretty encouraged by some great discussions we’re having with a few utilities right now who have said, I have a feeling I’m going to be doing hydrogen on a large scale in a few years. Let me do a small commercial scale project with you guys. So if I were to compare them, I am probably more bullish sooner on utilities than we are on long haul transport or even steel for example.
This was actually my next question is of all of these different applications you’ve given some hints as to where you think the opportunities are most exciting or maybe the riskiest or least exciting in the short run. What’s your top few? If you give an outlook on where you think green hydrogen is going to be most widely adopted in the coming, I don’t know, 10 years.
In my business school, they definitely taught us not to tell all your trade secrets. I will say that the ones that you highlighted earlier on are some of the most exciting. So we’re seeing a lot of activity around ammonia, shipping, aviation, and then as I mentioned just now, a good bit in industrial heat and utilities. We think steel and long haul trucking are a little bit further down the curve.
Where are you and where’s the market in terms of the deals that have been signed? The construction that has begun?
So we are installing tens of gigawatts of new renewables capacity in the US every year, maybe hundreds or certainly over a hundred in certain years. And that compares with less than 300 megawatts of operating electrolyzers around the world today. So in terms of the operational scale up of this industry, I would say it’s still in early stages. And when you talk to a lot of the manufacturers of the electrolyzer equipment, we’re thankful that a lot of our partners have a gig or a couple of gigawatts worth of production capacity available now and are planning to scale that up five, six sevenfold in the short term. But there’s also relatively modest amount of manufacturing capacity of the electrolyzers installed in the field today. And there’s another chicken and egg to some degree, you need a certain amount of projects to move forward because they have these offtake agreements that we were talking about earlier to motivate the manufacturers to build new manufacturing. But we’re starting to see those dynamics spool to life and pick up and pace.
But I would say probably the big scale up moment maybe starts around 2028 is my guess. And you’ll see us add a couple hundred megawatts a year around the world for the next two, three, four years, and then I’m expecting something that looks more like a spike towards the end of the decade. And in terms of the evolution of the tech or really the cost down, that comes with the manufacturing scale up and that’ll be a function both of the innovation that we do expect to see around materials, around efficiency, but it’ll also just be a function of people building more manufacturing, getting better on the logistics and the delivery. The area where I’ll fight my own corner as the developer here, we have some very sophisticated design engineering efforts underway in our company, and we think it’s really critical to have a mix of people from backgrounds both on the renewable side because renewable power is really important, but more than half our people come from industrial gases, oil and gas, midstream agricultural chemicals.
These types of industries where the design engineering of the plant itself down to every last technical piece with a heavy focus on safety, that’s also where you get a lot of your innovation. Is doing the design well, and then making that process repeatable.
So I’m guessing as a result of supply-side policies, we’re going to see accelerated production here in the US and in Europe.
The whole world is watching the US right now around green hydrogen, particularly for the reason you mentioned of those supply side incentives that we have. I’m just back from a conference with a lot of green hydrogen and green ammonia players, this was in Atlanta, and I would say less than half the attendees were based in the States. So there’s a lot of focus on this market, again for the supply side, but in terms of the demand, I would follow where you think those contracts are going to get signed. And to the degree that Europe is in the lead right now, maybe with California with a little bit of regulatory demand as well, those are the places that you’re likely to see a lot of the end product land, at least for the foreseeable future. But then I guess I would also caveat that, so it’s all over the map in answering your question, but the industrial heat players that we talked about earlier, in our case, the ones we’re engaging with are here in the States.
I think as they start to see these other operational benefits that they can get in their projects or in their manufacturing facilities beyond just the cost to the energy, you might see more of an uptick in the US contracting in US building as a result. So a lot of the production of the green hydrogen will happen here, I think still for a while a lot of the usage is going to happen offshore.
And where’s China in all this? China has become a leader in wind and solar both in part due to their own industrial policy, are they leaning into green hydrogen or are they sitting this one out so far and saying, let’s see what happens? Let’s let Europe and America spend their taxpayers money and then we’ll be fast followers if it turns out to be promising.
They are certainly leaning in. It’s been interesting to watch the dynamic between wind and solar in China because wind is primarily an internal market for China. They haven’t really sold their wind turbine generator equipment very much in the US, and I can’t think of any large Chinese owner operators of wind farms here in the States. Whereas, a lot of the solar module productions taken place in China has been directed to the US market, and there are some Chinese owner operators here.
Some people ask, well, will electrolyzers go more the wind route or the solar route? We’re betting wind. First of all, there is a lot of electrolyzer manufacturing that’s getting started in China now. We’ve received some quotes ourselves recently from some Chinese vendors at incredibly attractive prices. I won’t comment on where those machines stack up in terms of efficiency or quality or the guarantees that the vendors are willing to put forth behind that equipment, but it still, in our case, hasn’t been enough to turn us off the scent of some of the other markets where we do plan to buy our electrolyzer equipment.
So assuming some other developers will have a similar reaction to ours, I wouldn’t be surprised if you ended up having a lot of electrolyzers produced in China and used in China, as opposed to those landing in this market but we’ll see.
Let’s talk a little bit back to Ambient Fuels and your business model. I saw that Generate Capital recently invested $250 million in your business, which seems impressive to me. I don’t know if that’s a big number to you having been in the energy sector for a long time. There’s lots of zeros in the energy sector.
Oh, it’s quite large. We’re very, very thankful and we’re having a great experience with our Generate partners so far.
Imagine a developing company with a portfolio of those projects under development at various stages, and clearly a project gets at an earlier stage that’s maybe feasibility, mostly desktop, very little dollars have to go into that. But as projects get more serious and they need heavy engineering studies and interconnection studies and permitting studies and lots of legal, these start to be six and seven figure checks pretty quickly. And then you have to put over top of that the cost to maintain the platform. So the exceptional people, the systems and the software, people flying around and marketing costs. So our mantra as developers is to advance the project as much as you can, de-risk it as much as you can on as little capital as possible on the route to getting that commercial outcome, and then maintaining your corporate costs in check. Not going crazy until you have a certain number of projects that are rolling off the assembly line as it were.
And in that regard, our relationship with Generate is super. They have a very strong appetite for their capital to go into our electrolyzer assets as they roll off the assembly line, but they’re terrific supporters and champions of us in all that corporate and project development effort as well.
And are they helping to connect you to other parts of the ecosystem as well given their connections that they have through this market?
Very much so. Just to say a quick word on some of the hydrogen derivatives, we’re not only making a pure stream of green hydrogen, but in some instances we will partner with a technology company to help us make sustainable aviation fuel or green methanol or green ammonia. And especially in the instances of these e-fuels, often they require a CO2 input. And so a number of the Generate portfolio companies produce a biogenic form of CO2 where we have opportunities to partner. There are other companies in the Generate family that produce the renewable power that we need, so we’re able to tap that resource. But honestly, probably the best of all has been the terrific team at Generate, and then also the terrific teams that these sister companies. They’re people to brainstorm with, they’re people to get ideas and connections from.
For those of your listeners who are thinking about starting their own devco one day, definitely make sure that if you bring in a capital partner, make sure they’re a true value add, they’re the type who like to roll up their sleeves and help you advance your business.
So let’s talk about that for just a minute, and then I’ll ask you more broadly for advice since we’re tipping into that. So how would one know how to distinguish that?
It’s a really good question. Not to pick on the bulge bracket, private equity and infrastructure firms, but there’s probably a better chance of finding generalists when you work with folks in those companies or maybe people who’ve spent most of their career doing energy deals broadly, for example, that’s still pretty broad. Whereas what we love about the partners who we’ve selected and Generate, and also our seed round partners which was led by SJF ventures, in both instances they have experience with this kind of company in this sector doing things that are very analogous to what we’re trying to do. Particularly in our case, we found investors who appreciate the idea of swimming into a new market that hasn’t even really been created yet. Where the rules are still being written and where they have comfort with that from the get-go.
We’re trying to figure out how to optimize the use of the tax credits and tax losses that we will have in our projects. Well, our partners at Generate have been involved in lots of that in companies that are in other industries, but where a tax credit is a tax credit and a tax loss is a tax loss. So we can get access to their experts to really help us optimize that in our business. And I just would caution folks to bring your actual challenges to the investors you’re considering and ask how they’d handle it and see if they have a good answer.
I think folks who haven’t dealt with the startup and startup funding underestimate, just because they don’t know yet the value add beyond the funding that these companies provide in terms of advice and connections. So I think you’re reinforcing that insight.
If I can say another word, because I was one of the fortunate or unfortunate, one of the first developers to access venture capital markets with my first company. And what I’ve found over the years is sometimes investors, rather entrepreneurs, game is the wrong word, but play a game to some degree of just trying to get the highest valuation and they think that’s the pathway to success. “Oh, I only had to sell this amount of my company and I got all this capital.” Guess what? If it’s just capital, if you’re not really expecting to see any value add, that dynamic is likely to come back and bite you in the rear. And I would trade a little bit of valuation in exchange for a real value add investor seven days a week because what you’re going to be working in either scenario.
So let’s turn to my final question, which is about career advice. So someone who’s thinking about getting into this space or whether it be green hydrogen in particular or energy or the other portions of renewables that you’ve worked in, what advice do you have for them? You’ve worked yourself from the banking side, from the development side, where do you think that the most promising opportunities lie? And what advice do you have for people to educate themselves about them?
So let me take those serially. In terms of how to suss out the best opportunities, I think especially folks who go to business school like to think that there’s a framework or a model that can get you the answer to anything. And I think too often, don’t rely on their own gut and their own instinct, and you can do that to your detriment. Don’t follow the masses into the next thing, but if you’re out there in the field working on a deal or working on a consulting project or you’re working your way up through a big corporate and you spot an opportunity, just because people in that company may not support you chasing that thing at that time doesn’t mean it’s not a good opportunity. And so really be on the lookout, trust your gut because you’ll have the analytical capability to go get the research, do the analysis, and figure out if it’s a real opportunity. So I would say my broad advice is follow your gut a lot more than most people probably do.
In terms of career advice, I ended up admittedly at first by luck, in the power development sector. I guess luck comes to the well-prepared so I had put myself in Spain, gotten financial training so that when I got in front of somebody who had the ability to give me a job, they could see that I had the ability to handle it. So maybe a combination, but mostly luck and then just stuck with it. So that would be my other piece of advice, is you can develop a unique or unusual track record or rather skillset, then in the early years you may sometimes question do I want to be this pigeonhole? Do I want to just be good at this narrow thing? But you’ll find that over time if your instinct was right in going into that area combined with sticking with that narrow set of skills and know-how and experience that you’re building up.
In my case, I’m now 20 something years into the renewables development industry and holy smokes, people trust me to not do dumb things anymore as I once did because I’ve been through it all. And so really stick with it, I guess would be my line there.
