Vanguard Renewables 10 Years On

March 12, 2024

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by Jim Lane and John Hanselman (Biofuels Digest) “In this period of a very, very short timeframe over several months, back in 2012. for a series of completely disassociated reasons. I had a whole bunch of kind of folks coming to me and talking about anaerobic digestion.”

So begins John Hanselman in telling the origin story of Vanguard Renewables, which has become a most interesting and successful company, and is now celebrating it’s 10th anniversary. There have been so many projects and advances, we’ve spoken many times, so we’re relaxed as Hanselman leans into the origin story.

The Origin Story

“One was a technology company that wanted was looking for funding, and was really interested in providing a front milling attachment for anaerobic digesters around the world. I, of course, said what’s an anaerobic digester?”

It was a common thing, years ago, a technology that millions known about today in the United States was little known, except to select technologists and some farmers, back then.

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I think Germany had something like 9,000 digesters, you know, roughly the landmass of New England. Every landfill had one every, every municipal transfer station had one, wastewater treatment plants and you just start seeing these vessels everywhere.

“I came home and said, Geez, you know, how is it that we can be so far behind on this new type of renewable energy? I went out and did a bunch of chatting with folks talk to a bunch of my friends at MIT talked around. And one of the the early entrants into the market, Harvest Power, had started here in Massachusetts, just up the road in Waltham. So spent some time talking to them. They were they were laboring at the time. They were on the bleeding edge of the of the energy transition world. And so I think they got caught kind of long in a marketplace where you’d probably didn’t want to be in. It was quite redlined by the investment community.

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decided I needed to go find some patient capital, Having raised venture and private equity, money and strategic investment, really what we wanted to do was find some impact funds, some family office money, that will be willing to take a long view. We were incredibly fortunate to be introduced to Vision Ridge Capital. Vision Ridge was our first and only investor until Blackrock acquired us in 2022.

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“We met with them when I was in the British Virgin Island, with Sir Richard Branson. He was hosting a Caribbean Renewable Energy Conference, and we’ve done a bunch of solar in Puerto Rico. And he said, you know, let me introduce you to George Polk, who runs my Carbon War Room and also Reuben Munger of Vision Ridge.

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And went out bought a couple of digesters in Massachusetts that had been built under the the net metering protocols. And these things were smaller, kind of not anything that we would build these days. But we bought them as our learning laboratory, took them apart, rebuilt them.

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... actually ended up picking a Canadian/Austrian company as our as our engineering group to help us with our newest prototype. ... About that time is when the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard showed up. God bless them, our world changed forever. “

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We ended up partnering with Dominion Energy out of Richmond, and we built I think over $850 million worth of digesters some like for the 550 different vessels. You know, it was it was lightning speed, and, and really fun. And for us being able to go on farm and talk to our farm partners and create a very different relationship with them, you know, paying them for manure, which if you’d asked a dairyman 20 years ago, even 15 years ago, someone’s going to pay you for your manure, they would have laughed in your face. So pretty cool. inversion, based on recognizing the fact that it’s not waste, it’s just a misplaced resource.

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What we were really is an organic solutions company that happened to make renewable energy, bedding for animals organic fertilizer and renewable CO2.

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Knowing that we were creating this solution that that was going to actually not just decarbonize Vermont and reduce their reliance on fossil fuel, but also removing all of the phosphorus that was going out onto the fields on this farm that was then running down into Lake Champlain where I had spent all my years swimming as a kid. That was pretty mind blowing day.”

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Those new connections — like a neural network newly expanded by new synapses — make it possible to do new things, sometimes the extraordinary things that create value, sometimes the human things that address something more important than the money.

So, Starbucks and Vanguard, joined not only by two supply-chains now connected — but connected in other ways that can have extraordinary outcomes.

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Values drives habits, habits drive actions, actions change the world

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Then COVID came.

John thought back to those times. “We had 50 or 60 employees out in the field. We wanted to keep them safe.

“The supply chain was completely broken. And we were starting to get raw milk coming into our digesters, which we’ve never seen before. We’ve seen expired milk that already been processed coming in, but we had raw milk that was being dumped by the dairy manufacturer, because they had no cafeterias, no restaurants. All of their large bulk processing, which is half of most of those plants, all of a sudden was gone. They were overloaded with milk.

“This isn’t about the digester, the milk would have been great for us to put through the digester, and make energy. This was edible. This was food that people, at that moment, needed more than anything.

So here’s where something about Vanguard comes into clear relief, and not coincidentally, something about Starbucks — which as you might imagine uses a lot of coffee, and even more milk.

“We went on this crazy mission, to go back to the dairies, to tell them to stop sending us the raw milk. We were going to raise money, and we reached out to Dairy Farmers America, and Starbucks and many other folks. We raised money to bottle that milk and we gave it away. READ MORE