Jeremy is a social entrepreneur and writer. He founded Solarcentury (1998-2020), a solar developer that helped lead the solar industry to exponential growth. He was CEO through to breakeven, then Chair, then a Board Director through to acquisition by Statkraft. Solarcentury’s awards include a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation and a Best Company to Work For Award. He also founded and chaired SolarAid (2006-2020), an international charity set up with a levy on annual Solarcentury profits. SolarAid’s awards include a Google Global Impact Award and a BITC Unilever Global Development Award. Jeremy’s latest project is Highlands Rewilding, a developer on the frontier of the embryonic nature-recovery market.
An Entrepreneur of the Year at the New Energy Awards, Jeremy was the first Hillary Laureate for International Leadership in Climate Change, has won a Gothenburg Prize, was the first non-Dutch winner of a Royal Dutch Honorary Sustainability Award and won a US Climate Institute Award for Advancing Understanding. In June 2025 he won a Blue Planet Prize and invested the entire $500,000 prize fund in Highlands Rewilding. After taking a D.Phil in Earth Science at the University of Oxford (1975-78), he began his career teaching and researching earth history at the Imperial College of Science and Technology (1978-1989).
He was founder and first CEO of the Verification Technology Information Centre (VERTIC), an arms-control think-tank aiming to contest the common Cold War view that arms-control treaties could never be verified (1985-1989). He served as founding Chairman of the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a think-tank of financial and policy analysts aiming to align the capital markets with international climate policy targets (2010 -2018). His books include The Carbon War (2000), The Energy of Nations (2013), and The Winning of The Carbon War (2016).