by Sara Peters

Fifty years after receiving a Princeton diploma, one engineering alumnus is still at the vanguard, breaking new ground and blazing new trails. Peter Cartwright '52, chairman, chief executive officer, and president of Calpine Corp., brought his war stories back to campus, relating how his independent energy company took the natural gas industry by storm and became the world's largest producer of geothermal energy.

Peter Cartwright

Mr. Cartwright spent 19 years in the energy industry working for General Electric. However, during the late 1970s, he and some of his coworkers began thinking that the time was right to strike out on their own.

In response to the petroleum crisis of the mid-70s, Congress enacted the Energy Security Act of 1978 and the Energy Tax Act of 1978. The Acts created favorable tax legislation and research and development credits to stimulate domestic fuel production. Similar legislation followed, creating a fertile environment for new start-ups in the energy business.

Mr. Cartwright said that he and some of his coworkers decided that the wave of the future for power in the United States was natural gas.

The time was right, and in 1984 they founded Calpine Corp. (The name "Calpine" is derived from "California," where the company is located, and "Alpine," for the Swiss company that gave them their start, Electrowatt.)

Mr. Cartwright compared starting a new business to skydiving.

"You keep thinking 'it'll be wonderful when the parachute opens.' I don't know if our parachute ever has completely opened, but we seem to be floating safely to ground anyway."

By 1988 the company owned one megawatt of power.

"We celebrated everything in those days," Mr. Cartwright said. "So we said, 'Why don't we shoot to have 1000 megawatts by the year 2000?' And we had enough champagne to make it seem feasible to do that."

They had no idea at the time how far they would surpass that seemingly lofty goal. The company now has 13,000 megawatts of power, roughly enough to power 13 million homes. The new goal is 70,000 megawatts by 2005.

"We've gotten to the point where we believe this stuff even without the champagne," he said.

Tomorrow's entrepreneurs listen to Peter Cartwright

The challenge, he continued, lies in maintaining an entrepreneurial attitude. Calpine has grown by rewarding creativity, embracing risk, and aiming for growth.

The company is expanding to Europe, having completed acquisition of a plant in England in August 2001.

To stay at the cutting edge, Calpine continues to do research on energy efficiency, and leads the world in the geothermal energy business. Unfortunately, geothemal energy is only commercially feasible in California and there is little opportunity to expand the geothermal business.

Mr. Cartwright also said that companies in the energy industry must be conscious of environmental and social concerns. For example, certain regions of Alaska known to have supplies of natural gas are habitats of endangered wildlife or are traditional lands of the native Aleut or Inuit people.

"There is a lot of gas out there without going into this area of contention," Mr. Cartwright said.

Despite limits to the natural gas supply, Mr. Cartwright believes that natural gas will be a very important fuel for another 40 years at least.