Former BloombergNEF Leader Rob Glen Joins Banyan Infrastructure in Reshaping Project Finance
Rob Glen is known in the clean energy industry for his many contributions to the success of BloombergNEF (bnef.com) and his following work as a strategy advisor helping promising climate-tech companies to secure their first customers and funding sources. Banyan Infrastructure now welcomes Rob as Senior Director of Business Development for Funds and Developers to advance the company’s engagement with those two key industry segments.
Rob will be attending RE+ 2025 in Las Vegas alongside the rest of the Banyan team — we welcome you to reach out to meet him in person. In the meantime, join us as we learn more about Rob, his ambitions for Banyan, and the role of digitalization in expanding access to capital for clean energy.
Tell us about the start of your career
I began my career as a policy journalist, working for National Journal on trade, tax and other — sometimes very arcane — issues in Washington, D.C. It was a rewarding start to my professional life, with amazing exposure to influential policymakers and the satisfaction that comes with a byline.
But as time went on I got the itch to get a job on Wall Street. I found capital markets both intriguing in their complexity and an attractive path for moving from observer to participant. I was lucky to meet the CEO of Prudential Financial’s securities subsidiary and mention what I was trying to do. I landed a position on his staff in New York, and over the next thirteen years transitioned through roles in strategy, government affairs, and investment banking, the last of which got me to San Francisco during the final years of Dot Com 1.0.
When the 90’s tech boom ended, so did many jobs in tech banking, including mine. But rather than move back to New York, I decided to do something entrepreneurial around subscription-based services like market research and data analytics. Like journalism and banking, these are essentially knowledge-based businesses, just with a different business model. I reconnected with an enterprise tech-focused firm called The 451 that I’d used as a banker and was hired to sell their amazing product to Wall Street.
When did you begin working in the clean energy sector?
While at The 451, I noticed an opportunity to do for cleantech what we did for bankers. As I learned, Michael Liebreich was already selling data and analysis to clean energy investors and companies with his London-based company, New Energy Finance. So, to create my own luck again, I reached out to Michael via the company website. I joined New Energy Finance in January 2008 as the only San Francisco-based employee, long before remote work became the norm.
When we were acquired by Bloomberg in December 2009, I moved into Bloomberg’s pier building on the Embarcadero and — while still the only NEFer on site — I suddenly had three hundred Bloomberg colleagues by my side. Working for what became BloombergNEF, I had the luxury of having a lot of smart people around to school me on the policy, technology, and financial vectors of the clean energy sector. I also got to work with clients and other industry stakeholders around the world.
When the world came to a halt during the pandemic, my experience at Bloomberg put me in a good position to do something entrepreneurial again, and I started a consultancy called Acanthus Climate Ventures. At Acanthus Climate Ventures, I won work by referrals with companies across gridtech, clean transportation and energy asset management.
One more recent client was a prospective roll-up of commercial and industrial solar assets. I thought the general partners of that company needed a platform to automate their financial workflows, so I put together a meeting with Banyan. The conversation ended up piquing my interest well beyond the opportunity for that prospective customer. I'm excited to have joined Banyan full time to make meaningful contributions to the future of renewable infrastructure finance.
What interested you the most about Banyan Infrastructure?
Banyan’s push for standardizing data management and business processes in the project finance industry was particularly intriguing to me. I knew instinctively that there was strong growth ahead for the company. Meeting COO Amanda Li can be an inspiring experience for anyone, and she definitely did the job for me when we got together the first time. Her passion for driving project finance industry change and the authenticity she brings as a change agent told me a lot about the company. I was able to discern further in subsequent meetings with other members of management, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.
What do you hope to accomplish at Banyan Infrastructure?
There’s still so much opportunity for Banyan to bring value to the investors and owner/operators that are our core market participants. I’m eager to help there however I can.
But I’m also looking forward to playing a role in the company’s marketplace and advisory initiatives. As BloombergNEF and its parent company have become for their client constituencies, Banyan has the potential to be a hub for transactional activity in the markets it serves as a technology infrastructure provider. The Banyan team comes with a diverse skill set that tees us up to capitalize on current and future growth opportunities.
It’s been fun to start working with such talented people, and I’m looking forward to helping them succeed wherever they think I can be useful. Of course, I anticipate collaborating very closely with Amanda and her co-founder, CEO Will Greene, to leverage the combination of experience they bring in clean energy finance and software company building. They’re really an extraordinary pair!
Where are the biggest opportunities you see for our industry?
The clean energy sector is obviously experiencing some policy transition strains, and I agree with our more insightful pundits that the economic impacts could be negative for certain companies and their employees. But what I love about our space is the powerful nature of growth in demand for decarbonization across the economy, whether it’s in generating electricity, electrifying transportation, reducing waste in textiles and apparel, or making our built infrastructure more energy efficient.
The forces of innovation in those and other areas of the economy are a marvel to behold. They’re producing benefits in real-time. I’m an optimist perhaps, but history is our friend here. Whatever the policy environment, providers of capital aren’t going away, and I’m really interested to see how they leverage their creative chops to make deals happen.
For project developers and owner/operators, there is obviously the much touted growth in power demand led by the datacenter expansion. There is also the continuing expansion of EV charging networks and energy efficiency improvements throughout the built environment that will certainly continue to drive growth. All of that needs to be financed, whatever the policy environment. Deals might take longer, and the mix of investors may shift a bit. But this is a good time to have capital to put to work.
Where can folks connect with you?
I’ll be at RE+ 2025 this September, and I’d love to connect with anyone interested in learning more about Banyan or simply having industry shoptalk.
Folks can reach out to me here to meet in person, or to schedule a call after the event.