Tod Hynes
Director of Alternative Energy
Citizens Energy Corporation,
Boston, MA

Wind energy in particular and alternative energy in general became Tod’s focus. Technical, scientific knowledge is crucial, but not sufficient, to what he does. He needs skills in analysis, relationship building and negotiation, along with flexibility, creativity, and—he will tell you—strong, clear communication.

Tod directs business initiatives in alternative energy at the Citizens Energy Corporation. Citizens Energy (founded by Milton alumnus Joseph Kennedy ’71 in 1979) uses market opportunities to help the poor and needy acquire life’s basic necessities, such as heat and medicine. Citizens uses revenue from innovative commercial enterprises to finance millions of dollars into Citizens’ charitable programs in the United States and abroad.

“I’ve always worked, and I’ve always been entrepreneurial,” Tod admits. During the summer after his first year in high school, he earned his diving certification and started a business cleaning boats and diving for moorings. “I started working at a marina when I was 12, and then also at a restaurant when I was 14,” he says.

Tod has always loved science. “I took every science course I possibly could at Milton—marine biology, astronomy, you name it,” he said. “Six of us from my class even started the Physics II course my senior year.”

Playing football was something he loved, too. He was named All-Independent School League in both his junior and senior seasons and All-New England as a senior. The opportunity to play football—and as it turned out, hockey, as well—was a factor in his college decision. At MIT, he reasoned, he would get a great and challenging preparation for a career, and also play interscholastic sports for four more years. (While at MIT, he was captain and MVP of the football team and named a District Academic All American.)

Concentrating in business at MIT’s Sloan School while also acquiring a strong science background, Tod dove into a series of jobs and ventures. One by one, these business experiences refined his sense of what he liked, what he did well, and what concerned him. His focus on site research, during an internship for a Canadian commercial real-estate company, taught him that he liked the development process; he liked creating something new and tangible. Start-up ventures were ubiquitous at MIT during his years. “At least half the people in my fraternity worked for a Web site design firm,” he said, “which lasted until it yielded to the growth of outsourcing. I joined an earlier stage, MIT-grad founded company with a plan to apply the direct sales model to Web sites.” Even though this business failed, Tod learned some hard facts about the direct sales world. He also learned that he enjoyed working on an idea: the focus groups, the teamwork, the business and strategy development. He learned the basics about start-ups: the financing, building the staff, burn rates, early stage, and then growth experiences. “You can really start whatever you want,” he found out.

“All the while,” he says, “I was involved in an active process of reading, thinking and writing about what I’d like to do over the long term. I kept coming back to the idea that environmental issues, global warming, had to be one of the biggest issues in my lifetime. Why weren’t more people and companies focused on this at the time? Here’s why: Oil was twenty dollars a barrel.

“Energy was at the root of almost every climate issue, so I concentrated my courses to learn everything I could about how different energy sources and markets work. I ultimately saw wind energy as a desirable option and opportunity.” Tod started an alternative energy company during his senior year—“a consulting and engineering company for distributed power generation.” Then came the lessons in the effects of public policy: Changes in state policy offered organizations the same services that his company had been providing, only free of charge.

That led him to shift toward wind-farm consulting (developing large wind farms), and to some initial connections with Citizens Energy. Ultimately, he joined the staff at Citizens to help launch and develop their wind energy development business. His first responsibility was moving forward an early-stage wind project in upstate New York. Land rights and wind data were set, but Tod took the 4,000-acre project through permitting, final site layout, more detailed wind assessments, environmental studies and reviews, and public meetings in four towns (two counties). Now, with Citizens, he expands the organization’s ventures to new and much larger opportunities, in the U.S., in Canada and in South America. Citizens partners with Native American tribes in the U.S. and First Nations in Canada. For example, the Cree Nation of Mistissini is a partner in one of Tod’s projects, to be located over 40,000 acres in northern Quebec. Traversing the site by snowmobile and snowshoes, Tod meets with the local communities, hires local workers, establishes meteorological towers, and assesses the existing infrastructure to support the project as it moves along. Tod’s company has made a bid to Hydro-Quebec for a 500 MW (~$1 billion) wind project, and once Hydro-Quebec contracts to buy that power, Citizens can execute the final stages of development.

For Citizens, Tod is also looking at other alternative energy opportunities: biofuels, solar energy, Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects, and general energy efficiency, among others. He’s been active, since college, in the Boston Climate Action Network, and he co-chaired the energy committee for the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Conventions (cerc04.org), which helped “green” the Democratic and Republican conventions in 2004.

“It’s a very active process,” Tod says, “to think about the lessons gained from experience and apply those lessons going forward. I’m always learning. But this work creates a fulfilling job, one that—right now—allows me to balance a career, and making a living, with other things that are important to me.”

Cathleen Everett

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