The Great Energy Transition

Mark Townsend Cox is founder and partner in NEF Advisors, LLC, a clean energy consultancy based in New York City. This emerged from the first US based renewable energy hedge fund, the New Energy Fund LP, investing in public and private equities focused on the emerging sustainable energy technology market. The fund was launched in December 2004, although the first steps in his move to sustainability came much earlier. His initial experience of renewable energy came as a teacher in Nigeria in 1979 when he asked his class of 8-year-olds to make solar ovens and he built a 10-foot parabolic solar dish. In 1980 he attended Sandhurst and became a Lieutenant, platoon commander, in the Third Battalion, The Parachute Regiment, in the British Army. He was awarded a Mention in Dispatches (MID) and cited for a Military Cross for his role in the Falklands conflict. In 1983 he joined de Zoete & Bevan, a stockbroker in the City of London, which subsequently became Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW). Mark came to the US in 1987 and worked on the international equity sell side as a salesman, analyst and head of desk for various investment advisors including Credit Agricole and Swiss Bank. In 1998, he became a portfolio manager at Pinnacle International Management LLC based in New York, where he raised new assets and started to invest in renewable energy companies. In 2002 the Pinnacle portfolio held the leading position for 5 year returns in both Nelson's "World's Best Money Managers" and in Money Manager Review's rankings. In 2004 he founded the New Energy Fund, LP which took lead investment positions in new concept technologies, such as base-load, "on-demand" solar power that, fascinatingly, works at night and during cloud cover, cheap hydrogen production technologies and non-food biofuels. Today, he continues to pursue economically disruptive sustainable technologies such as breakthroughs in electrical storage, green ammonia and cellulosic hydrolysis.