Mayo Shattuck’s “Green” Payday Friday the 13th of April was a green day for Mayo Shattuck. His 2006 payday of $20 million in compensation was reported by The Daily Record, The Baltimore Sun and The Baltimore Business Journal.

Let’s discuss a different type of “green” and a merger from which we could really benefit. In Sunday’s New York Times, the author of “The World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman, wrote a seminal piece entitled “The Power of Green”. He starts with a prognostication that America post George W will “want to get its groove back”. He writes, “We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order….I have an idea. It’s called ‘green’.”

Maryland could have benefited if the FPL merger had gone through and Shattuck had
been influenced by FPL so that we could have had a utility/power production company in Maryland that gets green. With the FPL merger in the rear view mirror, perhaps Mayo Shattuck should learn from Friedman and focus on the other “green”.

In regard to the upcoming presidential election, Friedman writes,”We don’t just need the first black President. We need the first green president”. Until then, more CEO’s of energy based companies need to join the green initiative.

Shattuck has done a masterful job of turning Constellation Energy into what Enron could have achieved had not greed overtaken green with collusion among the investment bankers, lawyers, and the boys. However, it is time to show a new leadership – a green leadership.

Other CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have committed themselves to the green revolution. Lewis Hay III, CEO of FPL, suggests that the Federal government put fees on corporations for carbon emissions. FPL is the number one producer of wind power in the US and has investments in concentrating solar plants. It is the big leader among large utility companies for renewables as part of a power production portfolio that also includes the emitting fuels.

Under CEO Jeffrey Immelt’s direction, GE's Ecomagination initiatives for environmental technologies are perhaps the most high-profile example of a growing boom in alternative energies and so-called green technologies. Mayo Shattuck and Constellation have missed the boat to be leaders but it isn't too late to be an influential follower.

Friedman defines the monumentality of the task ahead, “Most people have no clue – no clue how huge an industrial project is required to blunt climate change. Here are two people who do…” Robert Socolow, an engineering professor, and Stephen Pacala, an ecology professor, head the Carbon Mitigation Initiative at Princeton, a consortium focused on solutions for the climate issue. Through a combination of clean power technology and conservation, Pacala states that, “we have to get rid of 175 billion tons of carbon over the next 50 years – and still keep growing”. Pacaal and Socolow have come up with a pie chart of 15 wedges that if phased in over a 50 year period would avoid 175 billion tons of carbon.

Indulge me as I isolate several of those wedges that Constellation Energy Group and Mayo Shattuck could impact with the following actions:

• Replace 1,400 large coal-fired plants with gas-fired plants
• Add twice today’s nuclear output to displace coal
• Increase solar power 700-fold to displace coal
• Cut electricity use in homes, offices and stores by 25%
• Install carbon capture at 800 large coal-fired plants

In 2007, Maryland will join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a regional consortium with a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 10% in 2019. The green initiatives coming out of the Maryland Assembly this past session are a promising portent of more to come: The Clean Cars Act, the increased support for the solar industry, to name two.

It is time for Constellation Energy’s lack of initiative towards environmental stewardship to come to an end. Their opposition to the Healthy Air Act in Maryland was reprehensible.

And for a really green idea, how about tying Mayo Shattuck’s options to carbon reduction - $10 million for every billion tons in carbon avoided…and a 50 year vesting schedule….that’s a green payday and an honorable legacy.

Labels: Constellation Energy, FPL, Mayo Shattuck

  11:46 AM •