A Clean Commitment

AES co-founder Roger Sant gets a rush from aiding the environment

March 20, 2007

Roger W. Sant, the 2006-07 recipient of Dickinson College's Benjamin Rush Award.

You can have your energy and conserve it, too.

That has been the philosophy of Roger W. Sant, co-founder and former chairman of global energy giant Applied Energy Services (AES) Corp. Sant is the 2006-07 recipient of Dickinson College's Benjamin Rush Award for Humanistic Values in Corporate and Government Life.

As the Benjamin Rush honoree, Sant, who retired from AES a year ago, will discuss global warming and the best way to minimize its negative effects. He will present a free lecture, "Addressing Climate Change: A Least-Cost Strategy," at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in the Great Room of the Stern Center.

If you have a preconceived notion of what a former leader of a mega-sized energy conglomerate will say about global warming, Sant may surprise you. Companies need to clean up their acts with or without mandated regulations, Sant says, and can't expect to achieve long-term success by focusing solely on the bottom line.

When it comes to balancing the cost of doing business with easing stress on the world and its inhabitants, "My philosophy is to err on [the side of] doing something for society," Sant says. "We all have to take on that responsibility. But then there is only so far you can go before you need regulations. Volunteerism will only go so far."

U.S. companies can succeed even when competing with counterparts based in countries such as Mexico and China, which have fewer environmental restrictions, Sant says.

Environmental regulations important

"You have to beat them in other ways," he says. "We've long since accepted that the Clean Air Act is important for our citizens." Sant also supports the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which calls on companies in participating nations to commit to reducing greenhouse gases by either reducing emissions or, if predetermined emission caps are exceeded, buying credits from companies that pollute less than their allowances.

Sant co-founded AES in 1981. He was the company's chairman from 1981 through May 2003, and a director until his retirement in March 2006. He also was president from 1981 to 1986 and CEO from 1981 to 1993. During Sant's tenure, AES grew from a small start-up with $1 million of venture capital and six people with the dream of starting a new nonregulated power industry, to one of the world's largest global power companies with operations in 27 countries on five continents, 30,000 employees worldwide and annual revenue of approximately $10 billion.

Social responsibility

When Sant retired, AES President and CEO Paul Hanrahan praised him for "bringing electricity to people throughout the world in socially responsible ways, notably in places where people had never before had the benefit of reliable and affordable electric power."

Sant says those places include regions in Pakistan, Kazakhstan, El Salvador, Brazil and India. "We were always looking to do things beyond what the contract called for," he says.

AES, for example, built a school for girls in Pakistan and participated in a feed-additive alteration program in India that made the massive cow population less flatulent.

"Methane is a really potent greenhouse gas," says Sant, adding that his company even found ways to harness small amounts of energy emitted from cow manure.

Tree-planting program a success

Sant's business acumen extends far beyond bovine droppings. He is credited with having led the way in delivering electricity in an environmentally responsible way. In the late 1980s he made AES one of the first companies to voluntarily take steps to help counter the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming by sponsoring the planting of 50 million trees in Guatemala and preserving thousands of acres of rain forest in South America. And the company's initial project in Houston used a nontraditional approach to reclaim gypsum from its waste stream and sell it to a nearby company to make wallboard—a set of arrangements that, according to AES, had never before been done in the United States.

Before he co-founded AES, Sant was a senior official at the U.S. Federal Energy Administration, where he was the assistant administrator for Energy Conservation and Environment. Sant founded the Energy Productivity Center, which is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, was a finance professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and co-founded a chemical-instrumentation company, Finnigan Instruments.

Sant has not backed away from his environmental and social commitments. He is chairman of The Summit Foundation and the Summit Fund of Washington; chairman of the executive committee and member of the Smithsonian Institution Board of Regents; and serves on several boards of directors, including the World Wildlife Fund (which he chaired from 1994 to 2000) and the Anacostia Waterfront Corp. His son Alexis and daughter-in-law Chrissie Duerksen Sant graduated from Dickinson in 1992.