With reporting by Aaron Tilley
It's always a challenge to find a new set of nominees for Forbes' 30-Under-30 list in energy. This despite the fact that the "energy industry" is quite likely the biggest in the world. According to the International Energy Agency, keeping the people of the world supplied with energy in all its forms costs about $1.7 trillion a year. (That's double what we spent in 2000.) The vast majority, about $1.1 trillion, is tied to the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, while roughly $250 billion a year goes towards renewable energy -- up from $60 billion in 2000. Another $130 billion a year goes toward improving energy efficiency.
Despite the world investing four times more in "dirty" energy than "clean," only five of our 30 work in the oil and gas business. Why is that? It's a fair question, and one posed by our esteemed judge William Macaulay, the chairman of private equity giant First Reserve, who has over three decades invested tens of billions of dollars into energy extraction and infrastructure companies.
Why so few oil and gas guys? It's a fair question. Foremost among the reasons is this: big oil companies that regularly invest billions of dollars on grand, complex projects do not rely on 20-somethings to make decisions. There are no doubt hundreds of incredible talents at the big oil companies, but in compiling this list we (and our panel of esteemed judges) are not just looking for young people with impressive job titles but for those who have shown entrepreneurial spirit and inventiveness.
That's why among the few oil execs on the list this year you'll find Grayson Lisenby, the CFO of natural gas driller Rice Energy, who helped the company raise $1.1 billion even before its $900 million IPO last year (co-founder Derek Rice appeared on last year's list).
Outside of oil and gas, most of the members of this list have helped found renewable energy companies -- and are working to capitalize on brilliant ideas, often without much financial capital.
These include 24 year olds Hahna Alexander and Matt Stanton, who cofounded Sole Power to commercialize their invention of an energy-harvesting shoe insert. With every step, the force of the heel hitting the ground transfers energy to crank a tiny rotor, which induces an electrical current into wire coils, which charges a lithium-ion polymer battery pack on the shoelaces. A 15-mile walk can charge a smartphone.
And then there's Xiaodi Ren, a chemist at Ohio State, and the other cofounders of KAir Energy Systems, which is commercializing a potassium-air battery that offers exceptional energy efficiency and three times the capacity of leading lithium-ion batteries at an expected cost of less than $90 per kWh. This "air-powered" battery discharges by chemically reacting potassium with oxygen. The design won the $100,000 clean energy prize from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2014.
A big trend within the 30 Under 30 list this year is the large number of people who have created inventions and founded companies with the objective of saving or conserving energy, rather than creating it. This approach is especially close to the heart of another one of our judges: Amory Lovins, founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and one of the world's top experts on energy efficiency (his home near Aspen uses only a tiny amount of energy).
Among the standouts in this area are Sam Shames, 22, cofounder of Embr Labs, which is commercializing Wristify, a bracelet that actively heats and cools in order to help the wearer be comfortable and help buildings reduce the need for HVAC systems.
Another one is Shyam Gollakota, 29, an assistant professor at the University of Washington, has a vision for a smartphone of the future that never needs charging thanks to his innovative sensors that glean their power by absorbing tiny amounts of energy from the fog of ambient radio waves (from TV stations, cell towers, Wi-Fi) all around us.
We even have some on the list who may at first glance appear to have only a tenuous connection with energy. Katie Anderson, 29, is the founder of Save Water Co., which has already saved half a billion gallons of water by fixing and retrofitting water systems in apartment buildings around Houston. The energy connection? Without water there's no energy. And not just hydropower. It's vital to oil and gas fracking, with millions of gallons used for each well. And oceans of it are used to irrigate corn that's turned into ethanol. By one estimate, the energy industry uses as much water as flows down the Mississippi.
Another water innovator is Deckard Sorensen, 25, who has attracted more than $6 million in funding to his company NBD Nanotechnologies. He is working to unlock the secrets of the Namib Desert beetle, which has a shell that collects water vapor, allowing it to gather 12% of its weight in water every day. The goal is to mimic the beetle's shell to create coatings that both attract or repel moisture.
To see more about these and the rest on our list, check out this slideshow. And please help us begin the search for next year's list by leaving your nominees in the comments section.
