The Story of Altus: The Founding of a Clean Power Company

Gregg Felton first experienced solar energy in grade school, when he and his classmates baked cookies in a solar oven during a field trip to Central Park. Now Felton is the CEO of Altus Power, the largest owner and operator of commercial-scale solar in the United States. We are proud to present Altus Power’s journey so far, introduce our team and partnerships, and provide you with Felton’s vision for Altus’s future.
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When Felton got involved with Altus in 2013, the solar industry was “still quite young,” but it was becoming clear that the price of solar modules and other components “would come down fairly dramatically in a way that would allow this business to compete” with grid power, he says. “And the source of energy being from the sun was a bonus to being price-competitive with traditional sources of electricity.”

Felton knew the demand for and interest in solar power was there, and Altus was able to secure partners in the shared mission of delivering clean electric power to the U.S. “We’ve been fortunate over the years to partner with some incredible firms that have been able to facilitate our growth,” Felton explains. Blackstone, for example, is an ongoing capital partner to Altus, and CBRE provided the company with natural expansion opportunities. “Whether it be Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Canadian Pension Plan, CBRE, we’ve surrounded ourselves with incredible strategic and financial partners,” Felton says.

One milestone on the Altus journey came in December 2021, when Felton and the Altus team rang the opening bell on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the company going public. “We went public not because we had to but because it seemed to us that the benefit of going public would really help to elevate our brand,” Felton recalls. “The industry is still quite young, not well understood, and we thought it was pretty incredible to be the first public company serving the commercial solar sector. That day was an awesome day.”

Currently, Altus is a 100-strong organization serving clients in 25 states — with a domain expertise that allows us not just to build new projects but to acquire existing ones, as we did in our January 2024 bilateral acquisition of 84 MWs of commercial-scale solar arrays from the independent energy trader Vitol. “We’re picking up new customers, and we can increase our density within markets and allow our team to service more efficiently more assets and more locations,” Felton says. “Our customer list is growing, including the largest real estate owners in the country. … We’re very proud to have assembled all of these constituencies together to achieve the mission that we’re on, which is to bring clean energy to every part of this country and ultimately, perhaps, internationally.”