Tanuj Deora
MBA 2006
MBA 2006
“My HBS training and experience has prepared me for exciting roles across the private sector, in government, and at a nonprofit.”
Growing up in rural Massachusetts and later earning the rank of Eagle Scout in Texas, Tanuj Deora (MBA 2006) has had a lifelong appreciation for the outdoors and our natural environment. “The Earth is our home, and we have a responsibility to be good stewards of our home,” he says simply. “I care deeply about the well-being of fellow citizens of the world, and one of the biggest issues we’re collectively facing is the threat from climate change.”
The clarity of that commitment has guided Deora’s career path over the years, including stints at Horizon Wind Energy; heading up Colorado’s state energy office for Governor John Hickenlooper; and most recently, serving as EVP and chief strategy officer at Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA), a nonprofit offering research, education, and collaboration services to help various stakeholders work with utilities to integrate solar, storage, demand response, electric vehicles and other distributed energy resources.
“SEPA’s membership includes 1,100 organizations, with just over half being US utilities, the rest being technology solution providers, government agencies, and other industry experts,” he explains. “We study innovation in the power sector to create frameworks and case studies for grid modernization. Our members are then able to apply best practices as appropriate for their service territories, accelerating the transition to a clean energy future.”
That might mean designing and helping to implement a community solar model that allows those who aren’t able to put solar panels on their home to subscribe to a much larger project—“a condominium approach to a solar energy project,” Deora explains. Having studied the execution of similar projects, SEPA can help other interested entities manage the multitude of necessary details to make it happen, such as site selection, finance, sales, marketing, and accounting.
Through most of 2018, Deora worked with Puerto Rican policymakers, its electric power utility, and other stakeholders to help the island work towards its resilience, consumer empowerment, and environmental goals in the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. “Puerto Ricans are looking to improve performance of their power system through modernization and decentralization while attempting to settle the utility’s massive debt,” he says. “But the favored approach of using customer- and community-owned microgrids while privatizing the utilities operations will be financially challenging; reconciling these two approaches will require real creativity and cutting-edge innovation in utility business models.”
Deora notes that the Energy Club had a very different focus when he was a student at HBS: “We would beg and plead to get one speaker on one panel to talk about so-called alternative energy,” he recalls. “Now the annual symposium is five times that size, and it’s mostly about renewables and energy storage.
“If you had asked me when I was at HBS if I saw myself as an executive at a utility-focused think tank, I wouldn’t have known what to think” he adds. “But I feel incredibly fortunate to have been able to contribute to the transformation of an industry at the foundation of our economy and civilization. My HBS training and experience has prepared me for exciting roles across the private sector, in government, and at a nonprofit. It’s great to see how current students are getting increasingly engaged in addressing the challenges we face to achieve a sustainable energy future.”