Stephen Fernands and the paper route that never was

Before Stephen Fernands had a global energy business, he considered a paper route. Customized Energy Solutions was still a living-room enterprise, and the first client was proving elusive. Delivering newspapers would at least bring in money. Rochelle, his wife, argued that the extra job would consume the effort the business needed. He stayed with CES. The newspapers would have to find another ride.

That small domestic decision makes a useful entrance into a career usually described in megawatts. Fernands founded CES in 1998. Its work now reaches from competitive electricity markets in North America to rural enterprise projects overseas. Through the changes in geography and scale, a practical question keeps returning: how do you turn access to energy into something a person can actually use?

A red wagon before the power markets

Fernands grew up on Cape Cod with an early appetite for commerce. As Rochelle tells it, he picked blueberries, persuaded his mother to bake a cake, and sold it around the neighborhood from a red wagon. At sixteen, he owned and operated a tourist bike rental shop, having bought it from its previous owner. The entrepreneur arrived well before the energy consultant.

Yet his route into the industry took a detour through missionary training. After studying economics at Penn State, he attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He and Rochelle initially imagined ministry work in the Middle East and North Africa. A business career eventually offered him a different way to pursue an interest in economic development.

There is something pleasingly unceremonious about the eventual doorway: a temporary job at PECO. Pennsylvania's electricity market was opening to competition. Fernands worked with independent producers trying to understand the new arrangements, then left to advise market participants himself. A temporary assignment had introduced him to a problem with a much longer shelf life.

His education supplied useful tools. He holds a BS in economics from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA in finance from Drexel. But the opportunity itself was rooted in a specific moment: customers and suppliers were being asked to operate under unfamiliar rules. Someone had to make those rules intelligible, and then help people act on them.

The business hiding in the rulebook

A change in electricity regulation can sound abstract until somebody has to send an accurate bill. CES's early work included MarketIQ, retail billing support and tariff consulting. Each addressed a fairly plain difficulty: an opening market does not automatically come with an instruction manual that everyone can follow.

Fernands built around the work between the power station and the customer. His professional focus has included retail competition, demand response, supply procurement and generation development. Software became a way to put that expertise into repeated use. The company could help a client understand a market and provide tools for participating in it.

The distinction matters to his story. Advice can end when the meeting ends; market operations continue after everybody has gone home. CES established its round-the-clock Market Operations Center in 2007. The company gradually took on more of the execution that follows a commercial decision, alongside the analysis that helps make it.

By its twenty-fifth anniversary in July 2023, CES reported more than 330 people worldwide and monitoring and control of over 300 US generation assets. Those figures describe the organization at that anniversary. They also mark the distance from a founder hunting for a first customer to a business responsible for ongoing operations.

A year on the other side of the map

For Fernands, entering India involved more than opening an office. In 2010, he and Rochelle took their three children to Pune for a year. The move gave the family time in the country where CES was building a business. A market expansion became a change of address, school routines and daily surroundings.

That decision sits comfortably beside the bike shop and the temporary job. In each case, he moved closer to the work. India brought the question of electricity access into sharper focus, alongside the more familiar questions of market participation and software. Building a business internationally also meant learning what different customers and communities needed from it.

The India Energy Storage Alliance became another part of that expansion. In CES's 2023 anniversary account, Fernands connected the alliance's beginnings eleven years earlier with his aim of reaching underserved populations. Storage and energy access appeared together in his explanation of why the company had grown beyond its original territory.

The connection is practical. A supply of electricity must work when people need it, and its economics must survive ordinary use. In a large market, that can involve scheduling and commercial rules. In a village, it can involve equipment, maintenance and whether anyone can earn enough from the power to keep buying it.

The mill has to earn its keep

At COP28 in 2023, Fernands described a microgrid project in Jharkhand. The question was how a system could sustain itself in a community without electricity. CES introduced agricultural processing equipment to provide a productive anchor user. More useful activity could increase demand for power and create income with which to pay for it.

He also described battery problems identified in CES's microgrid research, along with supply-chain and maintenance challenges. Such details can seem small beside the promise of universal electricity access. They are the details a project has to live with after the opening ceremony is over. A battery that fails is a very effective critic of a business plan.

CES CARES carries this interest into projects across India, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria and Peru. Its work joins clean energy with equipment, skills, finance and market connections. The portfolio includes food processing, irrigation and textiles. That combination keeps the conversation close to the businesses people can run, rather than stopping at the installation of a connection.

The initiative's Zambia roadshows bring technologies to rural entrepreneurs for demonstrations and business matching. In Meghalaya, its work includes energy-enabled Eri silk spinning. These are distinct local activities, with their own customers and constraints. What connects them is the effort to make an energy investment useful in someone's working day.

The view from the front desk

Another view of Fernands comes from Rich Williams, the concierge at CES's Philadelphia office building. Williams had hoped to visit India after an invitation from CES technology director Javed Shaikh. When that plan fell through, Fernands arranged a trip for Williams and his girlfriend, Phyllis.

The visit brought Williams into contact with the Indian team and CES CARES. It also introduced him to hotel staff whose standards of service impressed him. He returned thinking about how to improve his own work. A trip given as a personal kindness had become a professional exchange between people whose work involved welcoming others.

“They make me feel like I'm a valued member of their team.”

Rich Williams, building concierge

Williams's recollections include invitations to company Christmas parties and everyday conversations with Fernands. They offer a useful measure of a founder's manner: how someone experiences the company from the desk downstairs. A visitor sees the presentation; the concierge gets years of ordinary arrivals.

Other colleagues describe opportunities that began with Fernands taking their abilities seriously. Alan Ackerman came from pharmaceutical sales and joined CES in 2007. He credits Fernands with seeing how his ability to explain complex information could transfer to energy. Ackerman went on to lead a 24-person market intelligence team.

Harveyetta Stone's introduction was equally personal. After a family bereavement prevented her from attending an interview, Fernands rescheduled it. She joined when CES had thirteen associates. Within two years, he created a benefits manager role and offered it to her. These accounts put names and specific decisions alongside the headcount figures.

Still interested in what comes next

Fernands's Christian faith is an explicit part of how he discusses business. It appears in CES's mission and in his community commitments. He serves as treasurer on the board of Seeds of Hope Ministries; Rochelle also serves on its board. The couple live in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and have three children.

In February 2026, his conversation with Jack Doueck on The Energy Insider brought the commercial and access sides of his career together. The episode described a company with more than 360 employees, managing about 500 assets totaling 30 gigawatts. Its discussion of CES CARES included support for eighty entrepreneurs in Zambia.

His advice to newcomers was to stay curious, learn from knowledgeable people and build skills useful to their organizations. He also addressed using AI for research without surrendering judgment to it. After decades in an industry shaped by changing rules and technologies, he was still talking about how to learn.

The paper route is a good place to leave him. It captures the uncertainty that a later company milestone can flatten out: a founder trying to make the next month work, and a partner making the case for persistence. Fernands kept building. The work now includes helping other entrepreneurs find a way for their own equipment, electricity and effort to pay.