Nana Menya Ayensu is an energy infrastructure investor and technology commercialization executive, with over fifteen years of experience delivering new energy solutions in the US and globally. He fuses deep technical rigor and financial expertise to make innovative energy infrastructure investable and actionable.
He served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President on Climate Policy, Finance, and Innovation, where he led a suite of activities to accelerate the deployment of modern, clean, affordable, and resilient power systems in the US, Africa, and Europe. This included efforts to tackle commercialization and deployment barriers for new energy solutions, modernize the electric grid, chart new pathways to address AI and cybersecurity-related challenges in energy, and develop strategic capital solutions and multilateral partnerships.
Prior to that, Nana was a Partner at Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, where he built and invested in first-of-a-kind, technology-enabled infrastructure platforms, such as grid-edge flexible data centers and shared wireless networks. He also spent nine years at GE. This included financing renewable & thermal power projects, modeling power markets, and developing strategies to unlock new classes of investments at GE Energy Financial Services. Also, as part of GE Global Research’s Edison Program, he led technoeconomic model development for energy storage technologies in order to guide GE’s product management, venture investing, and business development activities.
He continues to work closely with companies, governments, investors, and others on energy transition finance, project development, and technology growth strategies. Nana has an S.B. (Hons) in mechanical engineering from Harvard University and a M.S. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University.