President, Head of Strategy

Jim has over 15 years of renewable energy experience as a C-suite executive with an extensive background in solar development and has been at the forefront of the Energy Transition since the beginning of the utility scale solar market. His companies were the first to recognize interconnection (2012) would be the binding constraint that differentiated renewable project investment opportunities and that the same phenomenon would exist in cloud infrastructure (2018.) He's been credited with standardizing key best practices that drove down PPA prices 70%+/- while maintaining above average project yields and built several of the largest solar parks in the world. Before joining Copia, Jim was the CEO and Co-Founder of Birch Infrastructure which developed renewable and cloud infrastructure projects including 800 MWs of signed PPAs and a portfolio of hyperscale data center campuses in various stages of development, including  300 MWs reaching commercial operations. Prior to Birch Infrastructure, Jim was the Chief Development Officer at sPower and led development operations and strategy, culminating in the sale of sPower to AIMco/AES for $1.6 billion + debt. During his tenure at sPower, the company grew from 26 FTEs to over 100, and raised $4.8+ billion of institutional capital across a renewable energy portfolio of over 7.5 GWs, with over 2 GWs achieving commercial operations in that time. Prior to sPower, Jim was a Co-Founder of Silverado Power, a pioneer in utility scale solar development, where he signed 400 MWs+ of PPAs from 2010-2013 and sold the Company to Fir Tree Partners which subsequently merged with sPower in 2013. Jim began his career in renewables at Recurrent Energy and helped develop their initial wholesale solar portfolio and sign their first wholesale PPAs. Earlier, he originated structured short-term fixed-income products for Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Debt Capital Markets group contributing to various landmark public-private instruments developed to stabilize collapsing debt markets (2008), new policy on short-term fund management, and origination of complex warehousing facilities for financial companies.  

Jim studied Finance at Santa Clara University.