Jules Kortenhorst

Jules Timotheus Kortenhorst (Oss, 3 February 1961) serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Rocky Mountain Institute, a global energy transition organization based in the United States. Kortenhorst is a recognized leader in the global energy transition, whose earlier spanned the public and private sectors. From 2006 to 2008 he was a member of the House of Representatives of the Dutch Parliament on behalf of the Christian Democratic Appeal.

Biography[edit]

Jules Kortenhorst studied general economics (MA) at Erasmus University Rotterdam and business administration (MBA) at the Harvard Business School in the United States. He worked for McKinsey and was employed by Shell from 1986 to 1994, including as the first general manager of Shell in Bulgaria. After 1994 Kortenhorst worked for some time in the United States and from 1997 he was involved as CEO or Chairman in a number of private equity-backed companies based in The Hague. During this period he helped build out ClientLogic as a leader in outsourced call center operations as the CEO for international operations.

During the 2006 parliamentary elections, Kortenhorst was ranked 41th on the candidate list of the CDA, just enough to be directly elected. He served in parliament on fiscal affairs committee and worked on innovation policy.

Kortenhorst left the Chamber on January 23, 2008 to become the founding CEO of the European Climate Foundation, an organization that promotes climate and energy policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. In 2011, Kortenhorst stepped down as director of ECF to return to work as an entrepreneur. In September 2013 he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Rocky Mountain Institute.

CEO of Rocky Mountain Institute[edit]

As Chief Executive Officer of RMI, Kortenhorst has worked to scale the Institute’s impact in accelerating the global energy transition towards a clean, prosperous, and secure low carbon future. He has also enhanced the Institute’s management, financial, and operational capabilities, and its global visibility in supporting the transition to a sustainable energy future. From 2013 to 2018, Kortenhorst oversaw a threefold increase in total staff, to more than 200, and annual revenue to $42 million.

RMI's programmatic focus has evolved to include more than 50% of its work outside of the United States over the same time period. RMI’s programs include the Electricity transition in the US, Energy Access work in Africa, Caribbean Island energy transitions, work on energy efficiency in the built environment, on the mobility transition in the U.S., China and India, and on the reduction of methane leakage in the oil and gas sector. RMI has recently also created the Energy Web Foundation and the Business Renewables Center.

Board affiliations[edit]

Kortenhorst has a number of affiliations and board positions:

Member of the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), a diverse group of leaders from public, private and social sectors that aims to accelerate change toward low-carbon energy systems to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius.
Member and current co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Energy.
Member of the board of directors of Keystone Tower Systems, a company that has developed an automated wind tower production technology.
Supervisory board member of Stedin Group, an electric and gas distribution utility in the Netherlands.
Supervisory board member of Energy Web Foundation, an open source, scalable blockchain platform specifically designed for the energy sector’s regulatory, operational and market needs.
Member of the advisory board of the Oxford Martin School – Programme on the Post Carbon Society.
Member of the sustainability advisory board of AirBnB.

Personal[edit]

Kortenhorst is married to Lisa Searl Vetter, who was a classmate at Harvard Business School, and has four children, Alessandra, Jules, Winston, and Rainier. Former chairman of the Dutch House of Representatives, Rad Kortenhorst, is a great-uncle of Jules Kortenhorst.

References[edit]

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