ADAGE

In recent months I’ve been working on a project for ADAGE, a joint venture between the French engineering company AREVA and the U.S. firm Duke Energy.  ADAGE made a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative last September to build 10-12 fifty megawatt biopower facilities in the U.S. by 2014, and I’ve been working with the ADAGE team on carbon, policy and sustainable development issues.  Reed Wills, the company’s President, is a long time friend and colleague.  He was a Penn Energy student back in the 1980s, and was instrumental in developing the Grays Ferry Cogeneration project in the early 1990s when he worked for O’Brien Energy.

I finalized the first phase of my efforts in a presentation to the company in late March, and we’ve now begun Phase II efforts.  I’m especially excited that a former UN colleague – Ghazal Badiozamani – will be joining me in this phase.  I first met Ghazal in the Division for Sustainable Development, and we worked together on projects in Iran and Colombia.  Ghazal is one of those remarkably talented people (Stanford & London School of Economics background, & fluent in both Farsi and Spanish) — & you can you imagine how valuable such skills were for those projects.  More recently she was with the UN’s Forum on Forests, and is now at the Wharton School – so her contribution on this biomass project will be just as important!