Speed Drive

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Taking the brakes off clean energy development is Linea Energy’s winning edge

“Energy touches everything. It is also affected by everything. It is the best job in the world for the intellectually curious. You can learn to solve problems you never knew to ask about in the first place.” That’s how one of the most innovative independent renewable developers of utility, scale, wind, solar, and power plant-sized battery storage describes their passion for the industry.

As a young company, Linea Energy is making inroads in the clean energy transformation sector by speeding up the development process. “We recognize that renewables have to be economic, that they have to be resilient and support a resilient grid, and we're working tirelessly to solve those problems,” said Cassidy DeLine, the company’s CEO.

Cassidy DeLine

DeLine has been in renewables since 2008, with a front row seat to the emergence of utility-scale solar development in the U.S., which looked very different then from how it looks now. “We're working on 600 megawatt (MW) projects now, and there's gigawatt-scale projects, so the energy industry has come quite a long way. It’s been exciting to be there for that full journey.” DeLine’s teams have commercialized over 9 gigawatts (GW) of solar, including multiple industry-setting financing and energy offtake structures.

“We sell the energy to corporate buyers, to utilities, or directly to the grid,” she explained. “Linea is only about a year and a half old, but this is the third renewable developer I've helped to build so I know we’re doing the right things. We are on the right path.”

With the support of EnCap’s Energy Transition team, the financial backing behind Linea, which has invested over $2 billion of capital and has had four monetization events that pulled in over $1 billion of total transaction value, Linea has the strategic and financial muscle to build, own, operate, and trade energy products from EnCap’s portfolio of renewable and energy storage assets.

In a relatively stable industry with a crowded development landscape, Linea is pushing boundaries, rethinking the development process and analysis needed to improve it. For one, they are disrupting the order of development to increase flexibility when it comes to offtake agreements.

“We are at the beginning of an unprecedented growth in energy demand, driven by electrification and data center demand. Linea is well suited to serve that demand given our geographically and technologically diverse portfolio. However, we are also prepared to use more mature strategies that thermal energy has used for many years to have a full toolkit when it comes to managing our risk position in energy that we're selling so that we're really maximizing value,” DeLine said.

Unlike clean energy developers that focus on a single technology, Linea is building a markedly diverse portfolio of wind, solar, and grid-scale storage. That expansive pipeline combined with their project development prowess is creating a more valuable and risk-resilient portfolio and organization while solving tough energy transition challenges such as making the energy grid cleaner.

At a time when the renewable energy industry is encountering capital constraints, having access to financing has sweetened Linea’s market timing. The ability to buy projects gives them flexibility and gives them the runway to come up with creative solutions rather than, as DeLine put it, “trying to fit something into a box that it doesn't fit into.”

Ensuring a perfect fit for any project in the industry requires close and effective partnerships. “We have a very heavy emphasis on mapping and data and Esri’s Arc GIS is an incredibly important tool for us,” she said. “Another major pillar in the suite of technologies we use is SiteTracker, which helps us manage our rapidly growing portfolio with scale. We also have a very important partnership with First Citizens Bank, who has led our corporate loan facility and is an incredibly important and constructive partner for us.”

Linea’s strong growth ambitions are only matched by the results they’ve already achieved. They developed a 5 GW pipeline in fewer than two years, demonstrating impressive speed in development and execution. By 2026 they anticipate having 1 GW built, followed by the addition of a gigawatt each year through the end of the decade. Their strategy blends greenfield development with acquisition. “We found that our focus on people has been really helpful in M&A because sellers recognize that we can move quickly,” DeLine noted. “We're agile, we're good problem solvers, and that's been helpful.”

DeLine stressed that the company is very intentional about the culture they are building. Even with the most novel technology there remain many problems only people can solve. “With power plants, particularly renewable power plants, it’s never evident that it's actually going to happen and get built,” she admitted. “There's about 100 hurdles along the way, and it takes people that will find a way to go around, over and through those hurdles.”

Central to building that culture is a different view of values, going beyond their traditional definition and concentrating on virtues instead. “A value is something you believe, and a virtue is something that you put into action and think about what the formative actions for those values are,” DeLine said. “Our values are purposefully scrappy because to be a good developer you do really have to be scrappy. You must be voraciously curious. You must look for yes when the answer is no, and you have to find a way to get things done.”

Given the nature of Linea’s work, it’s unsurprising that the company has a robust commitment to environmental stewardship in the communities in which they work. In addition to doing a great deal of environmental work on every site they develop, they have a fierce focus on external community development as well as creating a working environment that sparks imagination, passion, and mutual support.

“Our company name comes from the Latin term for ‘lineage.’ We think that the place that you work – just like your family or the university you went to – should shape you in a positive way. And it's the responsibility of your colleagues to make sure that happens. We believe in the collective elevation of our team and leaning into that.”