power players
Fervo Energy adds former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, other leaders to board
As it prepares for a highly anticipated IPO, Houston-based geothermal power provider Fervo Energy has added four heavyweights to its board of directors.
The most notable new board member is Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and Spring-based HPE, and former U.S. ambassador to Kenya. She joined the Fervo board as lead independent director.
One of the other high-profile new board members at Fervo is Jessica Uhl. She was chief financial officer of Shell from 2017 to 2022 and spent a little over a year as president of GE Vernova, a GE energy spinoff. She is a former board member of GE, Goldman Sachs and Shell. Today, Uhl advises investment firms on energy matters.
Another energy industry veteran, Trey Lowe, also joined the Fervo board. Lowe is senior vice president and chief technology officer at oil and gas producer Devon Energy, a Fervo investor that’s moving its headquarters from Oklahoma City to Houston. Before Devon, Lowe worked in the U.S. and Norway for Houston-based energy technology company SLB.
The fourth new director at Fervo is Robert Keehan, who spent 37 years at professional services firm PwC. He most recently was PwC’s chief global auditor and earlier was a partner in the firm’s energy practice.
Keehan and Uhl will serve as independent directors, which are non-executive governance and oversight roles, while Lowe is a non-independent director, which is a more hands-on role.
With the four new directors, Fervo has seven board members.
The arrival of the four new board members comes at a monumental time for Fervo, a provider of utility-scale geothermal energy:
- The company filed for an IPO earlier this year. According to Axios, Fervo submitted its paperwork confidentially.
- It secured an oversubscribed series E round of $462 million last year.
- The company’s 500-megawatt Cape Station geothermal plant in Utah is expected to start supplying its first clean energy to the grid by the summer of 2026. Fervo recently lined up $421 million in debt financing to build Cape Station.