STEVE TABER
Co-founder and CEO
Mr. Taber is an entrepreneur and startup CEO with broad experience in the renewable energy industry. He has been an industry leader in innovation, in the areas of design & technology, business models, marketing programs, and financing techniques.
Under his leadership, Princeton Energy Group has developed wholesale-side renewable energy projects in Greece, Turkey, Mexico and the US. Mr. Taber led the group’s development of retail-side energy efficiency projects and won energy resource supply contracts with several utilities and public agencies in the United States. Mr. Taber pioneered the use of tax-exempt financing for municipal energy efficiency projects, anticipating by several years the now-popular “prepaid PPA”.
Mr Taber is currently Chairman and Acting CEO of Gravity Power LLC, a TechCo with an innovative and powerfully disruptive technology for grid-connected energy storage. He is leading a restart and recapitalization of the company and preparing for a full commercial rollout.
Mr. Taber is the co-founder of Nordic WindPower Ltd, manufacturer of an innovative wind turbine generator, and served as CEO through its first six years of activity. Nordic started as a Princeton Energy Group project and was later spun off into a separate company. Under his leadership, Nordic negotiated and closed Series A and B rounds of private equity funding with Goldman Sachs and other investors, achieving a 2x increase in shareholder value during the five months between Series A and B. Mr. Taber recruited a world-class management team and board of directors and built a strong company culture which emphasized teamwork and high morale. He and the operations team organized a robust international supply chain, shortening lead times and reducing costs while maintaining tight control of component quality. Under Mr. Taber’s leadership, Nordic WindPower generated favorable public relations, including a listing by CNBC as #28 of the top 100 low-carbon pioneer companies worldwide. Mr. Taber holds patents on significant innovations in wind turbine controls and wind turbine architecture.
Mr. Taber is also co-founder and General Partner of Taber Chaitin Associates, a group practicing architecture, landscape architecture, land planning, and property development. The firm was a pioneer of comprehensive energy efficient design of buildings and urban systems. Under his leadership Taber Chaitin Associates won a national competition to develop and design a research park at Washington State University. Mr. Taber also led a multi-disciplinary team which won a national competition to develop renewable energy resources and promote economic development in northern Nevada.
Mr. Taber has been a leader in the development of public policy for energy use. As Chairman of the Professional Advisory Group to the California Energy Commission, he won industry-wide consensus in support of regulations for responsible energy use in buildings. As Committee Chairman of the CC/AIA, Mr. Taber led an influential early policy-making activity, which called for incentive-based utility programs and internalization of environmental costs, principles that have since become central to national and state energy policy. Mr. Taber was one of the founding principals of Pacific Environment, a non-profit corporation which has led the environmental community in habitat protection and sound ecosystem management in the former Soviet Union and around the Pacific Rim. He served as Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee to the California Board for Energy Efficiency.
Mr. Taber studied at Princeton University, received the Master of Architecture degree Phi Beta Kappa from U.C. Berkeley, and studied in Great Britain as an English-Speaking Union Fellow