Sustainability Legend Gil Friend Joins Board of Directors
The Blue Planet Energy ‘ohana is pleased to announce we recently added sustainability legend Gil Friend to our Board of Directors. For nearly 50 years, Friend has championed sustainability initiatives and for 30 years has helped some of the world’s best-known brands, from Hewlett-Packard to SunPower, focus on and deliver triple bottom line success. He is perhaps best known as the founder and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc., a leading strategy consultancy for forward-thinking companies and cities, and as an inaugural inductee to the Sustainability Hall of Fame (along with Amory Lovins and other luminaries). The Guardian named him “one of the top ten sustainability voices in the U.S.”
The Blue Planet Energy ‘ohana is pleased to announce we recently added sustainability legend Gil Friend to our Board of Directors. For nearly 50 years, Friend has championed sustainability initiatives and for 30 years has helped some of the world’s best-known brands, from Hewlett-Packard to SunPower, focus on and deliver triple bottom line success. He is perhaps best known as the founder and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc., a leading strategy consultancy for forward-thinking companies and cities, and as an inaugural inductee to the Sustainability Hall of Fame (along with Amory Lovins and other luminaries). The Guardian named him “one of the top ten sustainability voices in the U.S.”
Friend credits his participation in Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game” as a young adult with shaping the course of his landmark career. In 1974, he co-founded the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a pioneering not-for-profit organization dedicated to equitable environmental and economic development in communities across the country. He served in California Governor Jerry Brown’s Office of Appropriate Technology to shepherd the development of innovative, viable programs for state agencies, and as the first Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of Palo Alto, where he shepherded the most aggressive municipal climate action plan in the U.S. Friend advised then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and served as a judge and mentor for the Cleantech Open.
“The renewable energy revolution has been underway for decades, but it’s been invisible to most people,” Friend noted during our video interview below. “In recent years, we’ve hit the inflection point. The exponential curves are turning up sharply, the price/performance curves are turning sharply.”
In looking to the future of clean energy, he added: “It’s not just a matter of renewables and energy storage, but how we configure the systems – how we move from large, centralized, slow-to-react systems to smaller, localized, agile, and flexible systems, which is exactly the sweet spot of Blue Planet Energy.”
Get to know Gil and learn more about why he’s excited to join our team in the video interview below.
