Betting on Renewables To Make the Electric Industry’s Google

If you have not read the piece right below this one, maybe do that first.

Above, “Mad Money” interview with David Crane, CEO of NRG, one of the nation’s largest electricity producers.  Crane is considered a forward leaning visionary in the normally gray and hidebound utility space.  While taking an aggressive posture in renewable development, planning for a 90 percent reduction in carbon pollution by 2050 – Crane still imagines that fossil fuels will play a role in mid-century.

I predict in 5 years he’ll be mainstream. In 10, he’ll look conservative.

Joe Nocera in the New York Times:

NRG, Crane told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer, is the country’s fourth-largest polluter. “We emit 60 or 70 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year,” he said, mainly because a third of its power is generated by coal-fired plants. “I’m not apologetic about that because, right now, owning those plants and operating those plants are critical to keeping the lights on in the United States.”

But then he quickly added, “We have to move away from that.” And he has, reducing the company’s carbon footprint by 40 percent in the decade that he’s run the company. And, on Thursday, as The Times reported, he committed NRG to reducing its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050.

These are terribly ambitious goals, but Crane is not some pie-in-the-sky dreamer. Although he sees climate change as an “intergenerational issue” — a way of ensuring the future for our children and grandchildren — he is also a pragmatic man running a publicly traded company. He firmly believes that the technology exists to make his ambitious goals possible, and that the real problem is the refusal of the rest of the power industry to adapt and change.

Crane likes to say that when he first started hearing about carbon emissions, he didn’t view it all that seriously. “To be frank,” he said in that same Aspen presentation, “I thought this is just the next pollutant that we have to deal with.” But once he got religion — and realized, as he put it, that power producers like NRG are “the biggest part of the problem” — he was determined to make his company a leader in reducing carbon.

More “Mad Money” – an inteview with First Solar Executive James Hughes: