Laura Zapata: Solar Power as Carbon Offset, Economic Driver

Zapata makes it clear she finds it funny that she is running Clearloop. Her 16-year-old self, she says, would never have imagined she’d be CEO of a renewable energy company.

“I did not see myself as an environmentalist.”

Instead, as “an immigrant and daughter of immigrants”, she saw her role at Clearloop as an opportunity to represent people with her experience in the room where decisions are made.

Born in Colombia, she moved to Memphis with her family when she was 10 to escape the growing violence and a severe recession that saw the country’s unemployment rate climb above 20%. That experience of untethering from the familiar and boldly venturing into a new place, she suggests, emboldened her to make the geographic and professional leaps that eventually brought her back to Tennessee and Clearloop.

After graduating high school and participating in the Memphis Challenge, a leadership development program for students of color, Zapata attended Dartmouth College, which she chose in part because it “was far away”. Since completing her degree, she has moved several times to distant places, largely on instinct with only a general idea of what to expect, sometimes without either a job waiting for her or the personal connections to help her. But taking those risks and putting herself out there keeps paying off.

Her first move, to Washington, resulted in a staff position with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). Within months, she was his deputy press secretary. In 2013, she became Communications Director for Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-TX) during his first term.

In 2014, after three years on Capitol Hill, she was ready for her next move, this time to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she submitted her resume to Uber. The company, which was experiencing rapid growth, hired her into its communications and public affairs division.

Two years later, she quit Uber to serve as the Ohio press secretary for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Following Clinton’s loss, she returned to California and took on the lead communications role for the newly launched Uber Eats.

But politics still beckoned. After just over a year, she heard that former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen had announced his run for Senate. Zapata again cold applied — and was hired — for a job as communications director of his campaign.

Bredesen lost the election, but he liked what he saw in Zapata. A serial entrepreneur, Bredesen had made millions as the founder of the insurance company, HealthAmerica Corp. In 2011, he launched Silicon Ranch with $500,000 of his own money to establish the first company focused on bringing solar power to the South. By 2018, he saw an opportunity to affordably connect smaller companies to the growing market for solar power — and he wanted Zapata to make it happen.

“I think my story is more about trying things out and being curious and interested in just figuring things out,” she says, “The path was not entirely linear, but it was on purpose.”

Launched in 2019 and acquired by Silicon Ranch in 2021 to operate as a subsidiary, Clearloop currently has projects underway in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Zapata expects to establish projects in Alabama and Missouri as well. All are in communities that meet the company’s three assessment criteria:

1. There has to be enough sunlight.
2. Local power must be sourced from among electric grids most heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
3. The community must be ranked on the Distressed Community Index, a well-established analysis of the economic health of zip codes with a population over 500.

Clearloop knows its market — the heaviest concentration of such communities is in the South — and Zapata understands the impact that an investment in solar can have on those communities.

When she and her team propose a project, they don’t push the clean-energy-as-climate-change-solution message that resonates in many urban areas and academic circles. Not being rooted in the environmental movement, it is much easier for Zapata to instead promote the other benefits: In addition to new, higher skilled and higher paying jobs, a solar farm can increase local tax revenue, which can be used to improve local roads, educational facilities, and emergency services — all of which can make the community more attractive to new businesses.

“To really just break it down into its infrastructure, economic development pieces has been really rewarding because it makes it much more real for people in their own backyard as opposed to whatever national conversation that’s happening,” she says.

When asked what she’ll do next, Zapata responds like someone deeply immersed in the work at hand. She’s looking no further than the projects in the pipeline and the ones she wants to get started and needs to complete before existing tax credits expire, projects she says will be operating for the next 40 years.

“The fact that those projects will be online for longer than my family has been in this country is incredibly meaningful and powerful for me,” she says. “These were some real problems, and very few people get to see infrastructure being the solution for the problem that they’ve helped address. I’m just really proud of that work.”