Jeremy Leggett – Keynote Speaker

Biography

Jeremy Leggett is founding director of Solarcentury, an international solar solutions company. He is also founding chair of SolarAid which builds solar lighting markets in Africam, a charity funded with 5% of Solarcentury’s annual profits.

Leggett chaired Carbon Tracker, a climate-and-finance think tank analysing climate risk in capital markets. He was the first winner of the Hillary Laureate for International Leadership in Climate Change (2009), won the Gothenburg Prize (2015), and was the first non-Dutch winner of a Royal Dutch Honorary Sustainability Award in 2016. He has been described by the Observer newspaper as “Britain’s most respected green energy boss”.

Leggett is author of four books, the most recent of which is The Winning of The Carbon War, an account of what he sees as the “turnaround years” in the dawn of the global energy transition. His other books are The Carbon War, an eye-witness account of the climate negotiations in the 1990s; Half Gone, an account of the interaction between oil depletion and climate change; The Solar Century, a vision of the solar revolution; and The Energy of Nations: Risk Blindness and the Road to Renaissance.

In his first career, Leggett researched earth history, funded among others by BP and Shell, at Imperial College. Here, he won the President’s Prize of the Geological Society and was appointed a Reader at the age of 33. He also set up the Verification Technology Information Centre (VERTIC), and served part-time as its first executive director for four years.

He resigned from Imperial College to become a climate campaigner with Greenpeace International. Leggett then led Solarcentury as CEO from 1997-2006, Chairman from 2006-15 and a board director from 2015 to present.