Green Jobs: Vivint Solar CEO Joins SolarCity, Plus CPF, Plug Power

Tanguy Serra is brought in to Solar City to lower operations and customer acquisition costs.

Eric Wesoff April 23, 2013

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

We recently reported that solar financier Vivint Solar's CEO Tanguy Serra had "stepped down as CEO" and would remain with the company as an advisor.

Alex Dunn replaced Serra as CEO. Vivint was recently acquired by Blackstone for $2 billion.

Well, we've just learned from a reliable source that the departure of Serra was less than cordial, and that Serra is headed toward an operational role at Vivint competitor and recently public SolarCity (SCTY).

SolarCity also named Jimmy Chuang as VP of Structured Finance and former equity researcher Aaron Chew as VP of Investor Relations. Chew will frame SolarCity's financial performance, strategy and growth prospects to analysts and investors. Chuang joins SolarCity after holding developer and financier roles at GCL Solar Energy, Fotowatio Renewable Ventures and MMA Renewable Ventures.

Plug Power (PLUG), a struggling fuel cell vendor (the only kind), has added a new board member, Johannes M. Roth, who specializes in asset management, risk management and alternative investments. Plug Power, despite having sold hundreds of fuel cell systems for forklifts, is currently trading at $0.15 and is out of compliance with Nasdaq's minimum bid price rule and faces delisting. It is also offering itself for sale.

Clean Power Finance, a provider of residential solar financing and solar sales software, named Rajiv Ghatalia as chairman of its board of directors.