Greg H. Kats
Coalition Founder & CEO
Author of Greening Our Built World: Costs Benefits and Strategies
Greg is a widely recognized leader in the clean energy, green building/city, and decarbonization movements. As Founder/CEO of the Smart Surfaces Coalition (SSC), Greg leads the organization and manages Coalition growth including its expansion in India and Europe, fundraising and client development, development of the benefit-cost analytic engine, and development of carbon credit funding.
The Smart Surfaces Coalition work is now the largest urban cooling and decarbonization project in the US, working across a dozen large metro areas including over 35 million people. The MacArthur Foundation is funding SSC to scale-up Smart Surfaces work in India.
Greg previously served as Managing Director of Good Energies, a multibillion-dollar global clean energy PE/VC fund. He served for six years as the Director of Financing for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, where, among other roles, he was Founding Chairman of IPMVP—building it into the global energy and water efficiency design and verification standard enabling off balance sheet financing and more than 100 billion dollars in building upgrades. Greg received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alliance to Save Energy. He has also been central to scaling the green building movement, including in his role in designing and scaling LEED, Green Communities—the leading green low-income design standard, and the World Bank’s global green design standard. Greg received the first U.S. Green Building Council Lifetime Achievement Award. Greg chairs CarbonStar, the first international standard for measurement and specification of CO2e in concrete. He is a founder of both the American Council on Renewable Energy and the country’s first green bank. He is a lifelong Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects.
Greg is the author of Going, and of Greening Our Built World: Costs, Benefits, and Strategies, about which the former Editor in Chief of Science, Don Kennedy, wrote: “Everyone who is serious about climate change should get this book.” Greg served on the National Academy of Sciences board for strengthening U.S. global competitiveness. He earned, concurrently, an MBA from Stanford University and an MPA from Princeton University, was a Morehead Scholar at UNC, and is a Certified Energy Manager. Greg has served on a dozen clean energy/decarbonization corporate boards. Roof solar PV powers his family’s home and car.
