The Green Giant

Former U.S. assistant secretary of energy sparks innovations across science, strategy and finance.

DAN REICHER ’78 |

NIGEL JAQUISS ’84 |

KELLY MCGLINCHEY ’12

| PHIL LANGLEY ’59

| ANDY SIGLER ’53, TU’56

| ANDREW PERLOFF ’93

REICHER—THE GO-TO ENERGY expert who has advised Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama—can’t get the light to work. The fixture is flickering above the dining room table in his Piedmont, California, home. “A career in energy,” he says with a smile, “and I can’t figure out this light.”

It’s a career that began on a dreary Hanover morning in April 1979. Reich- er, then a senior biology major, stood in President John Kemeny’s Parkhurst Hall parking spot. President Jimmy Carter had just named Kemeny chairman of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Reicher desperately wanted to work for the commission that would investigate the partial nuclear meltdown. “President Kemeny drove this little blue Fiat,” says Reicher, “and had a cigarette hanging from his lips.” When Kemeny pulled up, Reicher asked for a job. “President Kemeny said he’d get back to me.” And he did. A few months later Reicher was running

the commission’s photocopy machine. He later became a legal assistant to the group. It was just the beginning of a varied career that included stints as U.S. assis-

tant secretary of en- ergy, a wind company executive and a Stanford professor. Thirty-five years after making photocopies, Reicher stands out as one of America’s most prominent energy players, a man who was on the short list to become President Obama’s secretary of energy in 2008 and again in 2012.

He has risen to this level thanks to his innovative and comprehensive approach. “If we want to make progress on clean energy, we have to make progress on technol- ogy, policy and finance,” says Reicher, who earned his law degree from Stanford. “My whole approach has been to integrate these three key areas.”

It helps that he has worked in each: Reicher has spent a good part of his career in Washington, D.C., but he also cofounded the Hanover-based private equity firm New Energy Capital and served recently as Google’s director of climate and energy initiatives. Today Reicher is the executive director of Stanford’s Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance, which has offices at both the university’s business and law schools. The center’s name reflects Reicher’s interdisciplinary approach, initially cultivated, he says, by Dartmouth’s liberal arts curriculum.

His goal is to bring both cash and strategy to the sci- ence. “You can develop a great low-carbon technology,” Reicher explains, “but if you aren’t able to finance it or secure supportive policy, you won’t make progress. Solar cells have been around for 60 years but still provide only a tiny percentage of our energy today.” The technology behind fracking dates back to the 1940s, he adds, but only recently has it been utilized on a large scale to produce natural gas. “The technologies must work well at scale and also be cost competitive with current energy sources. This is very different from creating the next app.”

For all the media’s doom and gloom about climate change, Reicher remains upbeat. He sees it as both “a crisis and an opportunity” for businesses to do good and do well. “Entrepreneurs and investors from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to Shanghai are increasingly seizing these oppor- tunities. The planet and our pocketbooks will be better off for it,” he says. “And we’re always inventing. Refrigerators used four times the electricity in the 1970s. Now we also have LED light bulbs in our homes.”

Reicher points to the bulb above his dining room table. The flickering has stopped, and the light shines on.

The interim CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy says investors are becoming increasingly interested in the field. >>>>

“There is an increasing public perception that clean-energy technologies offer a chance to both do well and do good.”

KEITH chapman, adv’12, works in tech PR in San Francisco. He has written for the Chicago Tribune and The Boston Globe.