Who’s Who in Green: Quayle Hodek

Quayle Hodek is the 29-year-old founder and CEO of Renewable Choice Energy, a Colorado-based company that provides hundreds of clients with wind-powered electricity. Quayle has long been active in the renewable energy markets and helped create the Green-e Certification Program, an independent consumer protection program that offers certification and verification of renewable energy and greenhouse gas mitigation products. He’s also one of EarthFirst.com’s Top 25 Hottest Guys in Green.

Quayle has led Renewable Choice Energy to great success, so it’s no surprise that he’s been named among Red Herring’s “Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 35”. A dot-com veteran, Quayle has long been driven to run businesses based on a fundamental belief system. As a child, Quayle flew over Costa Rica and witnessed firsthand the kind of destruction that is happening to the environment – he was shocked at the deforestation. It’s something that stayed with him for a long time, and once he found his path as a businessman he knew that it would be in an industry that would help the world.

How does Renewable Choice Energy work, exactly? It’s simple: they purchase wind energy credits from wind farms in states like South Dakota, Kansas and Minnesota and sell those credits to consumers. Basically, the credits are a guarantee that the wind farms will produce energy and feed it into the grid on the consumer’s behalf, and Green-e has verified that no two credits represents the same electricity on the grid. It’s a great way for companies and individuals to make up for the amount of non-green electricity they use. The service is affordable for regular folks, too – a typical residential customer might pay about $15 per month for credits worth 750 kilowatt-hours, which is enough to power a typical home for 30 days.

Renewable Choice Energy has seen some incredible growth in the three years since it was founded, counting among its clients major corporations like Honda, Toyota, Whole Foods, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Warner Brothers, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s and Sprint. The Whole Foods account alone has the environmental impact of taking 60,000 cars off the road.

As the world increasingly turns toward green energy, Quayle will continue to be a leader in the wind-powered energy market. As he told Red Herring, “Wind power is like organic food. You have to pay a little more for it, but you know it’s better for the environment and for you. In the United States consumers pay around eight to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. To ensure all your electricity comes from wind power costs about 2 cents more.”

He’s definitely got the drive to keep on going. Of what prompted him to start Renewable Choice Energy, Quayle said, “Life is too short to do something that is not truly inspiring and truly meaningful.”

Quayle Hodek’s Green Score: 12,643

Last week’s Who’s Who in Green: Al Gore

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