Exceptional people drive extraordinary outcomes

Tom Buttgenbach, PhD, is the visionary technologist who revolutionized the U.S. energy sector by building gigawatt-scale clean energy plants that repeatedly set new records for scale, cost, and performance. This required an entirely new approach to thinking about energy.

Tom is a world-class physicist and systems architect whose synthesis of cross-domain knowledge has enabled major contributions across physics, astronomy, quantum electronics, and energy. He entered the sector after two PhDs at Caltech, management consulting at McKinsey, and a year on Wall Street working in the semiconductor industry. During this time, he identified photovoltaics as the first chip technology to enter energy—and their trajectory toward becoming the cheapest form of power.

He then founded Avantus and proved this thesis at scale. He built one of the most profitable solar and storage platforms in the United States and delivered a series of record-setting projects—the largest operating solar plant in America, the first solar plant to beat fossil fuel prices, and one of the world’s largest solar-plus-storage facilities—securing $10B+ in project financing, and creating a clean energy pipeline capable of powering 20 million homes. In the process, he demonstrated—against the wisdom of the time—that solar could evolve from intermittent generation into high-capacity-factor, dispatchable power.

But that experience revealed a deeper problem: the industry was structurally fragmented. If the entire system were redesigned from first principles today, solar could become baseload power—and the clear choice for new generation. Tom approached this as a complex systems problem: First-principles thinking, systemic optimization, and the cross-pollination of physics, engineering, and economics to realize a new vision: a world powered by abundant, reliable, near-free energy.

1AP is the next step in this work. Surrounding Tom is a team of elite engineers, software and systems architects, and project builders with industry-leading execution records. Together, they bring deep technical expertise in power-systems, a new vision for how to build and productize infrastructure, and the best project execution capability in the market.

Their mission: To make solar the primary power source for the future of global infrastructure.