Spotlight: Jeremy Leggett of Solarcentury
By James Kanter
International Herald Tribune
August 31, 2007

LONDON: Jeremy Leggett knows it's not easy being green. In the late 1980s Leggett turned his back on a glittering career in oil exploration to join Greenpeace as the group's scientific adviser on climate change - much to the derision of his colleagues in industry. Seven years later, Leggett abandoned Greenpeace, disappointed by the group's inability to influence the debate over global warming. Now he heads solarcentury, a company he founded nine years ago to help other companies embrace solar energy.

"I consider that the environmental movement has failed," Leggett said during a recent interview on the roof of his company headquarters, on a busy street near the Waterloo train station in London. "We may have done some damage limitation," Leggett said of his years at Greenpeace, "but I don't feel there was a single point of substantial victory on climate change." Leggett, 53, started his professional life with the aim of earning enough money to have a plusher lifestyle than his parents. To the frustration of his father, an environmentally minded biology teacher, Leggett used his doctorate from Oxford to advise oil and natural gas companies on prospecting.

"I was a creature of the oil industry," said Leggett, who also became a lecturer at Imperial College, London, training the petroleum geologists and engineers of the future. The turning point for Leggett was in 1988, when he read articles in scientific journals modeling the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming. During his career with Greenpeace, Leggett crisscrossed the world attending dozens of climate conferences to lobby against the influence of "the carbon club," Leggett's term for the oil companies and groups promoting coal that pressured governments to block a global treaty to cut emissions.

Leggett chalked up some notable victories, at one point joining forces with the leaders of small island states to focus attention on rising seas that threaten the existence of countries like Tuvalu. But his faith in the potential of nongovernmental organizations to influence events was eroded, he said, as he saw recommendations by scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change watered down by lobbyists. Leggett's greatest disappointment was failing to persuade the $2 trillion insurance industry to start divesting its holdings in fossil fuel companies and to channel capital into solar energy. Leggett had thought he could persuade the insurers that the best way to curb losses from increasingly violent storms and floods was to hasten the end of the fossil fuel era.

Leggett founded solarcentury in 1998 to instigate fundamental changes in energy markets. These days Leggett has a staff of about 60. His company helps other companies integrate photovoltaic cells into roofs and walls. Sales in 2006 were £13.8 million, or $27.7 million. Clients include Gazeley, a unit of Wal-Mart Stores that builds and leases vast warehouses. Nick Cook, development director at Gazeley, said huge companies like DHL were increasingly demanding installation of photovoltaic systems. Leggett's company also is working with British property developers like Berkeley Homes to build solar cells into the roofs of new houses.

Leggett acknowledged that he still had work to do on his own company's carbon footprint. Solarcentury's offices are poorly insulated. The photovoltaic panels on his office roof supply only a small fraction of the electricity used by the company. He envisions moving into a new headquarters wired for solar and renewable energy, "but we have to hit our growth plans first," he said.

Some of Leggett's peers fault him for exaggerating the potential of solar power, particularly in cloudy Britain. For Leggett "to suggest that solar panels erected in the U.K. can make a major difference and enable us to retire a large number of thermal power stations is misleading," said George Monbiot, a visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University and the author of "Heat," a book on climate change. "I honestly don't think I've hyped it," said Leggett, referring to solar. The real problem, he added, is that "too many people still don't believe that grown-ups get their energy this way."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/31/business/wbspot01.php