Peter Davidson

Entrepreneur, Environmentalist, Investor, Parent, Public servant

Peter W. Davidson is Co-founder and CEO of the Aligned Intermediary (AI), an investment advisory group created to help large scale, long-term investors (LTIs) channel significant amounts of institutional capital into resource innovation investments – clean energy, water, waste – across the planet. To date, seven LTIs have agreed to deploy a billion dollars of capital through AI-identified transactions. Prior to AI, Davidson was the Executive Director of the Loan Programs Office (LPO) at the U.S. Department of Energy. Appointed to that position by President Obama in May 2013, he oversaw the program’s more than $30 billion portfolio of loans and loan guarantees, making it the largest project finance organization in the U.S. government. Among the many clean energy projects supported by his office were the first new nuclear power facility to be built in the U.S. in 30 years and the nation’s first-ever commercial-scale offshore wind facility. Before LPO, Davidson was the Executive Director of New York State’s economic development agency, the Empire State Development Corporation. Before entering government service, Davidson founded and/or managed six media companies serving the rapidly-growing Hispanic market, including ownership of el Diario/La Prensa, New York City’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, as well as three Univision-affiliated TV stations. Since 2001, Davidson has also been chairman of the JM Kaplan Fund, a family foundation with over $150 million in assets. Under his leadership, he has redirected the foundation’s grantmaking focus towards environmental conservation, urban green space and sustainable transportation. Earlier in his career, Davidson was an executive in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley & Co. He holds a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. For the past 25 years, Davidson has lived in Brooklyn, NY, where he also serves on a number of boards of local Brooklyn institutions

Bringing the expertise and rigor of the financial markets to bear on the deployment of both new low carbon energy technologies and the deployment of traditional renewable energy into "risky" emerging market economies.

There is a great deal of capital that exists in the world to further the deployment of low carbon energy and grid solutions. What has been missing is the finance mechanism to bring this concessional capital off the sidelines. That now exists through the work we are doing at the Aligned Intermediary.

Baseball, Finance, Low-carbon energy

This is my first TED conference. I am very excited to be a part of it.

Searching for ancient ruins on the bottom of the sea through diving in the nuclear powered NR-1 nuclear submai