BREAKING: Energy Department hires Charlie Gay to lead the SunShot Initiative

Gay brings with him over 40 years of experience, including heading NREL in the 90’s and serving on SunPower’s board of advisors.

August 23, 2016 Christian Roselund

Charlie Gay is head of the DOE's Sunshot Initiative. Yesterday, Sunshot awarded $30 million in funding for 13 projects. Below is a list of the awards and the projects they are supporting.

With a rotation of acting directors following the departure of Minh Le, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SunShot Initiative has been without a permanent leader for a year. Today that changed, with the DOE announcing that Charlie Gay has been hired as permanent director of SunShot, replacing Acting Director Dr. Rebecca Jones-Albertus.

Gay brings with him more than 40 years of experience in solar, starting as an engineer designing solar power systems in the 1970s. Most recently he has advised a range of research and development (R&D) organizations, including the Stanford TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, DOE’s Cylcotron Road, and the National Science Foundation’s i-Corps program.

Along the way, Gay served as director of DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) in the mid-1990s. He has also served as president of Siemens Solar, president and Chief Operating Officer of ASE Americans (formerly Mobil Solar) and chairman of the advisory board at SunPower, as well as president of Applied Solar at Applied Materials.

In 2013, Gay was named to a list of the 25 most influential people in the power generation industry over the last 25 years by the magazine Power Engineering.

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