Spruce Power Holding Corporation Announces Leadership Changes; Chairman Of The Board Chris Hayes Appointed As President & CEO
Chairman of the Board Chris Hayes Appointed as President & CEO
Dr. Audrey Lee joins the Board of Directors
Spruce Power Holding Corporation (NYSE:SPRU) ("Spruce" or the "Company"), a leading owner and operator of distributed solar energy assets across the United States, today announced that Chris Hayes, Spruce's Chairman of the Board, will succeed Christian Fong as President and Chief Executive Officer, effective April 12, 2024. Additionally, Dr. Audrey Lee has joined the Board of Directors.
"The Board is confident that Chris is the right leader to take Spruce to the next stage of its evolution and develop avenues of growth. Chris brings a wealth of experience to his role as CEO, including sustainable infrastructure investing, entrepreneurship, and technology. Chris has a long history of creating valuable intellectual property and a successful track record in generating returns for investors. He was most recently the founder and managing partner of Alturus, which develops, owns, and operates sustainable infrastructure projects for the Fortune 1000 and a pioneer in leveraging an energy-as-a-service (EaaS) platform for decarbonization. He was also a founder and managing partner at Altenex, which was acquired by Edison International (NYSE:EIX) in 2015," said John Miller, Chair of the Nominating & Corporate Governance Committee and the newly appointed Lead Director of the Board. Mr. Miller added: "On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Mr. Fong for his contributions to Spruce and wish him all the best in his future endeavors."
Commenting on his new role, Mr. Hayes said, "I am honored to take on the role of President and CEO. Given my familiarity with the company, I am confident this will be a seamless transition." With respect to his priorities, Mr. Hayes stated, "We are focusing on several exciting initiatives. This includes leveraging our core capabilities to enhance our organic growth strategy by utilizing our technology platform and scale to leverage our existing 75,000 home solar assets and customer contracts into a proprietary managed service platform that other solar asset owners can utilize and in doing so, create new, recurring revenue streams for Spruce. We have several additional exciting growth avenues, and my initial focus will be to identify and execute the best opportunities to drive organic growth."
Mr. Hayes continued: "As part of our strategic move forward, I am pleased to announce that Dr. Audrey Lee will join our Board of Directors. Audrey is a clean energy executive with 20 years of experience in the private and public sectors. She is a strategic leader pioneering the next generation of energy solutions with expertise at the intersection of technology, product, and market development. We are excited to have her as part of the team and look forward to her contribution." Currently, Dr. Audrey Lee is the Senior Director of Datacenter Energy Strategy at Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). She succeeds director Christian Fong, who has stepped down from the Board as part of the above transition.