Compensation Overview

New Leaf Energy is seeking a Project Developer to support our growing New York region. This position will be filled out of our Troy, NY office. We value in-person collaboration and offer a hybrid work environment.  Hybrid employees work in the office at least two out of every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and are free to work from the office or from home on other days.

About the Role:

The Project Developer’s ultimate priority is to originate and develop buildable, profitable multi-megawatt clean energy projects in New York. Your core responsibility will be to begin project development activities on dozens of sites, which means negotiating agreements with landowners, managing projects and project teams through the entitlement and interconnection processes, and otherwise moving development assets through New Leaf Energy’s development process until they are ready to finance and build.

You will build and nurture internal and external stakeholder relationships as part of the development process, including the project team, internal coordinators, landowners, local government representatives, utility contacts, and policy makers.  You will work closely with our Policy and Business Development lead for New York, and be a regional expert in the company. You must either already possess or quickly develop fundamental market knowledge in order to create and execute a successful project development plan.

Position responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Develop renewable energy storage projects at the megawatt scale, from origination through financial close;
• Meet or exceed annual volume targets.  Those volume targets will be the result of a project development plan on which you and your manager will collaborate, but the general expectation is that the company will close multiple projects that you develop, generating at least $5MM of direct profit each year;
• Manage origination and lead generation through quarterly prospecting planning, campaign identification, and lead follow up, independently and by managing others;
• Generate proposals, quotes, and formal RFP responses as needed by the market;
• At the project level, development areas that you will either coordinate among the project team or own directly include:
  • Site control
  • Initial system design
  • Utility interconnection
  • Entitlement/permitting
  • Incentive program or other policy program participation
  • Anything else necessary to prepare a project for sale, including support as necessary for our internal engineering and finance teams through the last pre-sale stages of development.
• Work independently on pipeline management, and also collaboratively with teams throughout the organization;
• Maintain accurate information about your projects in New Leaf Energy’s systems of record;
• Work with legal, finance, and executive teams to support contract term negotiation and conclude tasks in order to close transactions;
• Work with engineering teams and use finance modeling to identify the most appropriate technical solution to achieve value and quality goals;
• Gather market intelligence and expand relationships with local and regional governments, agencies, and utilities to deeply understand the development environment, continuously refine that understanding, and use it to adjust strategy;
• Represent New Leaf Energy at marketing events such as trade shows and industry events.

Desired Qualifications:

While no one individual will possess them all, the successful candidate will bring many of the following experiences, skills, and attributes. If you’re unsure of whether you meet enough of the qualifications below but believe that your experience and skill set is a good match for this position, we invite you to apply!

• Strong knowledge of the storage and renewable energy industry; or, if not, equivalent knowledge and experience in a similar and/or adjacent project development context;
• Successful track record in a complex sales or project development environment, preferably in energy storage or renewable energy. By “complex sales” we mean commercial-scale or larger projects developed from scratch to construction-ready which have long sales cycles, are subject to numerous external forces that can impact schedule, value, and risk level, require relationship building on all fronts to pave the way, and successful navigation to get to project sale;
• Ability to filter through lots of information to figure out what matters, and to prioritize truly promising opportunities from less promising ones;
• Ability to both lead and follow within cross-functional teams, and to be a great teammate;
• Understanding of key quantitative business concepts, including both probabilistic thinking and financial metrics;
• Ability to spend time in-person with customers and travel frequently in assigned territory (20-50% travel);
• Bachelor’s degree required; MBA or other advanced degree preferred.

Compensation

New Leaf Energy compensates all employees in three ways: market-competitive base salary, plus above-market variable compensation, plus an equity-like program such that all employees experience the benefits of ownership. We use a data-driven and transparent methodology to calibrate compensation that is externally competitive and internally equitable, guided by the New Leaf Energy compensation manual, which is available to all employees.

The base salary for this position is $123,000.Total compensation for this position, however, is primarily driven more by our generous project incentive plan, which compensates developers through a profit-sharing mechanism on successfully developed projects. The program is generous and industry-leading, and we’re glad to go into more detail in the interview process.