Jeremy Leggett

Social entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett is founder and Chairman of Solarcentury, the UK’s largest solar solutions company, winner of multiple awards for innovation and sustainability, including the 2006 Sunday Times / Microsoft TechTrack 100 R&D Award. He is also founder and Chairman of SolarAid, a charity set up by Solarcentury (2006-present), and a founding director of the world’s first private equity fund for renewable energy, Bank Sarasin’s New Energies Invest AG (2000-present).

He was a member of the UK Government’s Renewables Advisory Board from 2002-6. While on the faculty at Imperial College, he worked with the oil industry, among other things researching oil source rocks, funded by BP and Shell among others. He has also worked as an environmental campaigner, for Greenpeace International (1989-1996), during which time he won the US Climate Institute’s Award for Advancing Understanding.

He has recently been appointed a CNN "Principal Voice," and described by the Observer as "the UK's most respected green energy boss." His critically-acclaimed books "The Carbon War" and "Half Gone" cover climate change and peak oil.

In the 1980s, while at Imperial College, he set up VERTIC (the Verification Technology Information Centre), and served part-time as its first executive director for four years (1985-1989) during the tail end of the Cold War.