Nicholas
Speyer

Somewhere in New England, the lights stay honest

At any hour, in any of the major power markets that stitch the North American grid together, a few hundred renewable and battery assets are deciding when to sell electricity, when to hold it, and when to bid into a capacity auction. Nicholas Speyer's company is the one telling them what to do. SYSO Technologies, the Boston-based firm he co-founded in 2019 and now runs as CEO, operates more than 4.5 gigawatts of solar, wind and storage on behalf of the people who own it. That is roughly the output of several large power plants, except it is scattered across 300-plus sites and every major ISO/RTO market in the United States, with a foothold now reaching into Canada.

Speyer's pitch is unglamorous and, in clean energy, oddly rare. The world is awash in companies that develop projects, finance them, or manufacture the hardware. Far fewer want the 24/7 job of actually running those assets inside the byzantine rules of wholesale electricity markets, where a missed bid or a misread regulation is money left on the table. SYSO was built, in his words, on the premise that asset owners have untapped revenue potential. The company exists to go get it.

The market is rewarding the discipline. In March 2026, SYSO closed a $7 million extension of its Series B, bringing the round to $15.5 million. The lead was Kimmeridge, through its carbon solutions strategy, with continued backing from New Energy Capital and a fresh check from MassMutual Ventures. Since the round's first close in August 2024, the platform has more than doubled. One investor called SYSO the clear leader in its space; another praised its operational maturity. For a company that mostly stays out of the headlines, those are loud words.

Twenty years of plumbing for the energy transition

Speyer came to the power markets from the engineering side, not the trading desk. He earned a B.S. with honors from the University of Michigan, then an M.S. in Energy Resources Engineering from Stanford in 2007. What followed reads like a tour of every layer of the clean-energy stack. At SourceOne, a Veolia company, he founded and directed a carbon management practice, years before "decarbonization" became a word executives said in meetings. As President and COO of Greenwich Energy Solutions, he built a technical team and stood up energy efficiency and infrastructure businesses across New York City and the tri-state region.

Then came five years at BlueWave Solar, where he led the technology platform behind its Solar Loan and Community Solar lines. That platform went from a concept on a whiteboard to a market leader serving several thousand paying customers and a roster of energy asset owners. Each stop taught him a different part of the same lesson: clean energy doesn't fail for lack of panels. It fails in the unsexy gaps between hardware, finance, regulation and operations. SYSO is his attempt to close those gaps for good.

Why being fast is the best hedge he knows

Ask Speyer about the policy chaos that keeps clean-energy founders up at night, and he reframes it as an argument for speed. With tariffs pushing prices up and federal incentives wobbling, he watches developers scramble to lock in equipment before the rules change. His read is counterintuitive: uncertainty is a reason to move faster, not to wait. "If I'm in a position to be investing in projects, being fast does help mitigate some risk," he told New Project Media, "because we don't know what's going to happen."

It is a trader's instinct wrapped in an engineer's calm. He expects record-breaking years for new solar capacity even amid the noise, partly because all that safe-harbored equipment has to go somewhere. "Folks are going to need to get those ITC bucks put to work," he said. His view of his own company is just as plainly stated: SYSO's job is to support every distributed and utility-scale solar, storage and wind asset it can reach. The thesis hasn't changed since 2019. The gigawatts just keep adding up.

He is candid, too, about the broken bits of the system he operates inside. On the structure of the ISO-New England market, he describes a design built to solve the "missing money problem" by giving projects a financeable revenue stream, and notes how much harder life gets in the absence of that price lock. It is the kind of detail that only someone living inside the market rules would bother to mention, and it explains why owners hand him the keys to their assets in the first place.

A grid with the fossil fuels taken out

SYSO's stated vision is blunt: a power grid without fossil fuels. Speyer's contribution to that goal is not a slogan but a switchboard. The company has built a NERC-CIP Low Impact Network Operations Center and offers round-the-clock support, treating the operation of clean assets as a serious, always-on discipline rather than a set-and-forget afterthought. The bet is that as data centers and electrification drive power demand higher, the owners of renewable and storage assets will increasingly need someone obsessive about squeezing every dollar and every kilowatt-hour out of them.

Speyer took the CEO seat following the company's first chief executive and co-founder, Chris Gosline, whom SYSO still honors as part of its founding story. The hand-off didn't slow the company down. If anything, the years since have been defined by the disciplined, unflashy execution his investors keep praising. He is the rare founder who seems genuinely content to be the backend of someone else's clean-energy dream, the operator in the control room while the world looks at the panels on the roof.

That is the strange specific worth holding onto. There are louder names in climate tech, with bigger logos and splashier launches. Nicholas Speyer built a company whose entire value proposition is that it works quietly, correctly, at three in the morning, in a market most people will never understand. The grid he wants to build runs on that kind of patience.