Former NRG Energy CEO David Crane
By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
NRG Energy shed David Crane in 2015, blaming the company’s financial struggles on the former CEO’s decision to dive head-first into renewable energy and focusing on how consumers wanted to get their electricity instead of focusing on propping up the old centralized utility model.
Turns out, maybe Crane had a point.
Reuters reports the company is now eliminating more than half its power plants to focus more on the retail side of the business. As new CEO Mauricio Gutierrez told the wire service:
NRG started as a generation company that moved into retail and some people still think of NRG in terms of (power plants). But when you think about NRG in the future, I invite you to think about the company in terms of the number of customers we serve.
Stop focusing on polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants. Move to a more consumer-friendly model. Perhaps throw in renewable energy as the catalyst for keeping customers happy and on board with NRG Energy. Hmmm….we feel like we’ve heard that before.
Oh, right. We did. From … David Crane, who could have saved Gutierrez and the rest of the NRG Energy braintrust three years of wheel-spinning had they just allowed him to complete his transformation of the company beyond his 2015 expiration date.
But they didn’t, and now here they are.
Now Gutierrez says the company is finally on the right track, telling shareholders in a letter (again from Reuters):
“When I became CEO, it was clear we were trying to be too many things to too many people,” Gutierrez said in a letter to shareholders on Wednesday. He wants to grow the retail business, especially in the Northeast where NRG still has more generation than it needs to serve customers.
So let us get this straight – you entered in the middle of someone else’s transition from a power-plant purveyor to consumer-focused energy company, decided he was trying to be “too many things to too many people,” and are now … transitioning from a power plant purveyor to … a company that is consumer-focused.
And hilariously, Gutierrez’s interview appeared a mere two hours after NRG Energy just signed a deal to do three big solar farms with food distribution giant Sysco. So there’s that.
Somewhere, David Crane is laughing his face off (and probably crying a little. But mostly laughing.)
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