Meet Rudy Roy | Climate Tech CEO
We had the good fortune of connecting with Rudy Roy and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Rudy, what is the most important factor behind your success?
The first thing I’d want people to know is that the climate industry that I work in is generating the biggest wealth creation opportunity of all time. The climate story is a hopeful one– one where we can produce 25 million new jobs in the nation if we electrify the economy by 2035 and simultaneously transition away from fossil fuels. By stabilizing the planet’s climate, we can create stable high-paying jobs more inclusively, including more jobs for women and marginalized communities. I see climate change requiring a World War II type mobilization effort to decarbonize at an extremely rapid pace.
Specifically, we build a digital marketplace that helps optimized clean energy and storage farms match with companies, cities, landowners, and many other partners. We vertically integrate the information that’s required to plan new clean energy farms that provide *additionality* (projects that wouldn’t otherwise have been added to the grid if the matches didn’t happen).
By having an end-to-end platform enabling every aspect of these projects’ early lives, we can ensure the best projects go on to construction in the areas of the country that need them the most. That sets us apart from other software providers. We’ve been able to build an electricity grid digital backbone to catalyze the construction of so many of these new clean energy projects–and we’re proud of that.
Building a fast-growing enterprise software company is never easy, but doing so in an industry dominated by traditional construction and power-grid mindsets was quite the challenge. We’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by mission-driven team players who have consistently gone the extra mile to help serve our clients, patiently working with them as they adopted this wave of digitization.
The stone age didn’t end because the world ran out of stones–and the electricity industry will switch to efficient digital platforms well before spreadsheets and broker phone calls become defunct. Those shifts are difficult, but with the right people rowing in the same direction, we can ensure a digital and decarbonized energy future will be here in 10x less time.
What should our readers know about your business?
Staying aligned with the mission to bring clean energy to one billion more people has been the most important factor behind our success.
We mobilize really talented people to create and scale technologies that make clean energy accessible to a much broader audience. Those people have solved hard problems in the trenches with us because of how important our mission is, and how they can make tangible impacts to accelerate the construction of the new workhorses of our electric grid: clean energy farms. We’ve created one of the industry’s largest clean energy databases, and we steadfastly believe that we can’t get the decarbonization the world needs this decade without digitizing the transactions of the clean energy industry. There simply aren’t enough people to get the deals done via traditional means in time for the planet to stabilize.
We’re living in unprecedented times, with President Biden ushering in a new clean energy era by signing the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate bill in American history. The impact of this cannot be understated: the domestic solar market will nearly triple by 2027. Yet right now we are still living through the worst energy crisis our nation has seen in nearly 50 years, with high energy prices and a shortage of supply. Our mission is more important than ever today: there’s a lot of work to be done to digitize the transactions that bring online more risk-optimized, clean and resilient power infrastructure.
We’ve all seen how marketplace platforms have hyper-scaled and disrupted other industries, becoming household names. We’re building a hyper-scaling marketplace platform to disrupt the electricity grid, to make sure that our grid is built more equitably with less environmental impact.
As we bring clean energy to one billion more people, we won’t just write a climate story, we’ll write a story of drastically improving public health in our cities. Power infrastructure is intrinsically linked to public health. Rebuilding the nation with clean power will mean people, especially those who have been historically underrepresented politically, will be able to live with clean air without asthma-causing particulate matter and climate-warming pollution. That matters to us and to our long-term success.
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I love how Jonathan Gold ate his way through Pico Blvd and really understood the back stories of the cultures behind the food establishments. There are so many stories about the many migrations to LA (from all around the country and around the world) that can be discovered from the cities’ restaurants, and no one quite knew LA’s restaurants like Jonathan. [So the spots I’d take them around to are any on that list: https://www.laweekly.
The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
As we launched and scaled HST, Santanov and I have had so many mentors, advisors, partners and friends and family that have helped and encouraged us when climate wasn’t considered a popular industry to work on.
Some of the world’s most disruptive companies were built during economic downturns, and we dedicate this shoutout to all of our friends, family, and team members past and present who’ve helped us rapidly scale during the the COVID and climate induced pressures of this era.
Website: www.hstpowers.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rudyroy/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/hstcleanenergy
Nominate Someone: ShoutoutLA is built on recommendations and shoutouts from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
