Navisun Narratives: CEO Jason Spreyer on electrons, empowerment, and expanding partnerships

At Navisun, our team is at the core of who we are. Over the coming months, we’ll be highlighting the individuals that make our company what it is and lead us toward a cleaner energy future. 

We chatted with Navisun CEO Jason Spreyer about his experience in the energy industry, how his background in accounting and finance shapes his approach to leadership, and his views on how utilities can contribute to the clean energy transition. 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself to get started? 

I’m a homegrown Bay Stater, having been born and raised here in Massachusetts, where I still live. Though I’m a CPA by trade and spent my early career in public accounting, I’ve worked in the energy industry for over 20 years — despite ending up here by accident. I landed a role with Calpine in their accounting department while they were expanding eastward. It was a great opportunity to learn a lot about the energy space and understand how the economics of the energy industry worked. I was there in the late 1990s as deregulation in the electric industry took shape, which provided me the opportunity to gain experience in market evolution, development, the risks and the IPP model overall. 

After Calpine, I joined InterGen, where I got exposure to international markets. We worked in Mexico, the Philippines, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and beyond, in the utility scale IPP business. From there, I went to Veolia which provided me exposure to district energy systems across the US (a form of distributed energy as a solution), and then ultimately to Brookfield Renewable. 

I started off as the CFO of the US business, but on my first day of work, my boss sat me down and explained that my job had changed since I accepted the role. Not only would I serve as the CFO, but I’d also work on the strategy and repositioning of the development organization within the United States and participate in a team charged with building out a brand new utility in Texas as part of the Competitive Renewable Energy Zones (CREZ) initiative. There, we were awarded a project to build transmission infrastructure to bring wind energy from Western Texas to the eastern part of the state, where the majority of the load exists. I, along with other team members from Brookfield, were asked to work with our partner, Isolux, to build a brand-new utility. Over five years, we worked together with the local team in Texas to build that utility from zero to an approximately $1-billion business — that set me off for a great 13 years at Brookfield! 

For a period of time I was part of the leadership of Brookfield’s global electric utility group focused on transmission and distribution level investments. This opportunity provided a great foundation to expand my knowledge on utility mindsets, investing and economics that has served me well as I have advanced in my career. One of my exciting projects was in remote Colombia with a local utility that Brookfield had acquired. I spent a large portion of 2012 working there with local leadership on developing strategies to enhance financial performance, position for growth and establish an alternative thought process following the privatization of the business and integration with Brookfield. Eventually, I ended up in business development, where I had the opportunity to develop strategies in the retail energy, distributed solutions and energy storage space.  This experience prepared me well for my time at Summit Ridge, where I served as the executive vice president of business development before coming to Navisun in February 2024.  

My career has been filled with stretch assignments. I’m a big proponent of giving people the chance to develop their careers, enable them in their assignments and to support their growth. Sometimes, all you need is someone to invest in you — that opportunity can be what guides you onto the path that takes you to your next career point and ultimately closer to what you want to achieve in your career. 

What has kept you in the energy space? How does your background inform your unique perspective on the industry and decarbonization?

The energy space is an ever-changing environment. An electron itself is kind of boring; when you think about our business, we’re generating electrons for sale. You can’t even see them! You only see the byproduct. In that sense, energy can seem boring.  But when you consider the policy, the regulatory environment, the project development process, the local context, and everything else that goes into the energy system, you can see that it’s constantly changing. Nothing is the same across the country — the dynamic nature of the market is really what kept me here. It’s a fast-paced, uber-competitive industry, and the challenge has kept me engaged and interested. There’s an added benefit as well of being able to contribute to something that is better for the environment and better for local communities, and to do so in a tangible way. 

What does successful leadership look like to you? How have you embodied that ideal at Navisun, and how are you positioning Navisun as a leader in the energy space?

A leader has a clear vision with clear goals and works as part of a team in a shared success model. They enable their organization to execute on plans and grow and learn together as a team. And they empower their team members to take charge of their own projects and make decisions. 

We’re close to embodying that ideal at Navisun — I try to give the team goals and give them autonomy while also ensuring they know I am here to support them in any way they need. Every company needs people who are empowered to make decisions and can step up in the future to be our leaders. Particularly as Navisun grows, empowering the team is something I try to prioritize to ensure our future success. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time making our workflows smoother to make sure we can execute our projects and deliver the type of impact we say we can. Essentially, if you want your business to stay operating smoothly, you have to take care of the house you already have before you can add onto it and make it bigger. Everything we do leads into our future success at growing our business. Landowners and other potential partners want to see a company that’s already successful, takes care of their existing asset base, and delivers on the promises they make. We spent a lot of 2024 working with the team in getting Navisun’s house ready so that we’re well-positioned to execute on our self-development and co-development growth strategy, expand our partner base and execute more efficiently in 2025 and beyond. 

What role do you see utility companies play in the energy transition? How might they work with developers to deploy clean energy? 

Utilities play a key role in the energy transition, whether it be through developing interconnection processes and strategies, customer management, program implementation, consolidated billing and many other touch points between them and developers and owner/operators. It is important for Navisun, and the industry as a whole, to find ways to collaborate and work with utilities to come up with solutions for these challenges. At Navisun, we find it best to listen and try to understand the issues the utility is dealing with to come to a solution. Collaborating amongst each other is the best path to tear down the walls between us and to work together on the energy transition.

We have been successful working with utilities in Maine on interconnection-related issues, whether scope, real estate and/or execution. Our teams have come together to find solutions that meet the needs on both sides. Further, Navisun has experienced billing and collection issues due to data communication issues between our billing service providers and the utility. In these cases, we collectively got together to determine the challenges on all sides, the steps that each can take and crafted a plan to resolve the issue and begin collecting cash.

Ultimately, to be successful and make meaningful progress in the energy transition all stakeholders need to come together to work towards solutions, including utility companies and developers. Here at Navisun, we are taking that collaborative approach in our development, construction and operations to make for a more productive relationship.

A big part of Navisun’s success involves partnerships — how do you build these relationships? What makes Navisun a trusted, reliable partner?

Partners like to work with others that are transparent and engage to achieve common goals. We work together with our partners throughout the development, construction, financing and operating process and collectively we navigate any problems that arise as a partnership rather than a solo agent. Collaboration is at the heart of our operations; we aim to work with our partners as though we’re an arm of their organization rather than a separate entity. We lean heavily on our core beliefs of working with partners within a shared success model to achieve common goals. 

We focus on partnering with organizations that share our values and beliefs. We’ve historically worked with smaller companies, and that’s worked for us; while that might not always be how we operate in the future, we want to continue developing our relationships and expanding our capabilities to really show who we are as a partner through our past experiences and our demonstrated use cases.

You’ve been in your current role for close to a year now. What are you most proud of accomplishing in that time? What goals do you have for your next year with Navisun?

I’m most happy about developing the relationships with the team and the company culture. I have a team that works together and is increasing their communication and collaboration. They’ve improved so much in the transparency department; that transparency really allows people to work together more efficiently and present a more timely and effective work product. When organizations buy into the shared success model, they know we’re all in this together — we work together as a team to accomplish a common goal. You get a lot more buy-in and engagement when your team cares about the work they do, and that improves the overall workflow and results. 

We’ve also fostered a really healthy environment with lots of fresh perspectives and different backgrounds. Everyone is engaged in improving things and asking questions, and that leads to a lot of really great discussions. We’ve had to think a lot harder and improve collaboration, and our team is better for it. We’ve also built great relationships with our partners and our parent company OMERS, where we’re truly working together to succeed. 

In terms of my goals for the next year, I’m actually interested in turning the calendar to see all of the effort we put into 2024 and how that translates into our success in 2025. Business is never going to be smooth sailing, but we’ve built the infrastructure that will let us navigate any issues we encounter as smoothly as possible. The investment we have made in performance management, redefining our growth strategy, enabling our teams and prioritizing planning and proactive behaviors will position Navisun for great things in 2025 and beyond.  

What inspires you to want to come to work every day?

I have fun working with people, tackling problems, and working as a team. 

I’m a big team sports guy — I played baseball for a long time — and I’ve always enjoyed when everyone works together for a common goal. Even though I stopped playing long ago, I didn’t lose my competitiveness. I didn’t lose often when I was on the field, and I don’t intend to lose in the workspace, either. The energy industry satisfies my competitive juices.  

Are you a landowner or developer interested in learning more about working with Navisun? Contact us here.