This week at the UT Energy Symposium, Bill Cannon will give a talk titled "Adapting from grid to cloud"
William Cannon is Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Environment & Infrastructure Group for Sumitomo Corporation of Americas (SCOA), a global trading and investment company and Fortune 500 company. With his over 20 years of experience in the development, acquisition, sale and financing of thermal generating assets, renewable energy assets, nuclear assets, regulated utilities, water projects, ports and other infrastructure assets, Mr. Cannon is primarily responsible for overseeing business development and asset management within his group. Under his leadership, Mr. Cannon’s team finds projects to develop, acquire, finance and ultimately own and operate in wind, solar and other renewable assets throughout the Americas. Mr. Cannon also focuses on water and waste water treatment projects and low emission gas-fired projects in the Americas.
SCOA has a portfolio of 9 projects with a combined capacity of 785 net MW and an equity investment value of over $1 billion.
Prior to joining SCOA, Mr. Cannon was with Rothschild, the international M&A advisory boutique, in the Power, Utilities and Infrastructure Group. There, he covered the renewable energy and infrastructure sectors working on mergers and acquisitions and capital raises. Mr. Cannon started his career at Fieldstone advising clients on project finance and acquisitions and divestitures of power projects.
Abstract: Utilities and power generation was forever the epitome of boring - stable earnings and dividends that came like clockwork. Deregulation came along and suddenly many different companies were generating and selling electricity and for over 20 years, no one cared. Renewable energy came along in the late 1980s but it was expensive and something only in California. But about 10 years ago two important changes started to occur: renewable energy became comparatively cheaper and at the same time customers began to demand green electricity. But these historic supply and demand changes were still implemented through the old utility business model. Fast forward to today and we are the precipice of monumental changes to the business model of the delivery and consumption of electricity. Distributed generation, batteries, smart meters, microgrids, hydrogen, electric vehicles, and other new technologies will come together to form platforms like V2G, B2G, smart cities that will ultimately create what is now being called the energy cloud. The challenge today is to identify which emerging trends are permanent and how to compete in this ever changing landscape.
The UT Energy Symposium meets every Thursday during the long semesters. Come early to attend a networking session before the talk: refreshments will be served at 4:45 p.m. in the POB Connector Lobby outside the auditorium.