Mel Jones
President & CEO
Sterling Planet
As one of Sterling Planet's founding partners, Mel Jones has helped chart the company's progress since its inception. First as Executive Vice President of Business Development and Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Jones has focused much of his energy on developing the infrastructure for this unique partnership-based enterprise. His 20 years of electric utility experience have been instrumental to Sterling Planet's early success. Mr. Jones is now President and Chief Executive Officer at Sterling Planet.
Mr. Jones has played a key role in creating strategic partnerships with utility companies, environmental organizations, green product manufacturers, and other strategic partners. One of his most significant achievements thus far has been a utility partnering program — the Green America Program™ — and related strategies for green energy marketing rollouts. Mr. Jones has been true to Sterling Planet's aim of partnering with utilities, having developed relationships with all three categories of electric utilities — from large investor-owned utilities to municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives.
As an advocate for renewable energy development, Mr. Jones has dedicated many hours to building credibility for the renewable energy business. He has been a featured speaker over the past year at more than 12 conferences, including national renewable energy summits, venues of public service commissions in several states, and environmental sessions.
One of Mr. Jones' earliest achievements at Sterling Planet was development of a strategic partnership with the Environmental Resources Trust. Together with ERT, Sterling Planet has begun to recruit large commercial customers for participation in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Green Power Partnership. Companies who join this initiative agree to convert a significant portion of their energy to green energy. ERT's brand, which carries the banner of the Environmental Defense Fund, Audubon Society, and other highly respected environmental groups, brings credibility to Sterling Planet as a capable partner in the growing renewable energy business.
Prior to his co-founding of Sterling Planet, Mr. Jones' core area of expertise has been information technology solutions for the electric utility industry. As a Vice President at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), he established a Global Nuclear Solutions business built around a unique re-engineering tool that combined artificial intelligence and Electricité de France software into an IT solution for reducing operating and maintenance costs at electric generating plants. Another EDS role was to lead the evaluation of merger/acquisition strategies for utilities worldwide facing restructuring and privatization issues.
Mr. Jones also demonstrated his entrepreneurial talents at NAC International, where he established an Information Technology and Management Consulting division focused on delivering IT and management consulting solutions to the emerging deregulated energy market and nuclear power industry. In addition, Mr. Jones focused on delivering IT solutions to electric utilities as Executive Vice President at Empower Group.
These positions followed Mr. Jones' experience as a 19-year employee of Southern Company (one of the world's largest investor-owned utilities and electricity producers), where he advanced from engineering programmer analyst to Southern Electric International executive in charge of exporting IT solutions to other utilities.
Mel received his Bachelor of Science degree in statistics from the University of Georgia.