Power Players

The future of energy is greenand smells like oil. Whatever the political fights, our demand for juice is rising fast, and Inc. 5000 companies are ready to meet it.

- Bill Saporito

To witness the future of energy, drive about 25 miles from Baltimore to West Friendship, Maryland. Turn onto a dirt road that leads to a 100-year-old farm, past rusting tractors, a pit of burning scrap wood, and a pond, and you're there: a 6.25megawatt solar energy installation on 23 rural acres. Chaberton Energy (No. 34) designed the 15,000solar-panel array on land it leases from the farmer.

Chaberton is a leader in a field that's come to be known as community solar: small-scale green energy projects for groups that couldn't otherwise build their own. After Chaberton secures the land and the permits, it designs and then sells a shovel-ready package to an investor, in this case Greenbacker Renewable Energy. Loyola University in Baltimore buys part of the output of this installation, and the rest goes to the grid, where consumers lacking rooftop solar can buy renewable energy on a subscription basis. The family that owns the farm will earn lease payments for 40 years and get free electricity, explains Chaberton founder Stefano Ratti: "This is a big deal for them; it's a piece of their heritage."

To witness a different future of energy-one that looks a lot more like its past-drive into the Permian Basin, in far-out west Texas, to a location that requires exact GPS coordinates. That's because you run out of street addresses pretty fast in the 86,000 square miles of scrub and rangeland that surround the cities of Odessa and Midland. This is fracking country, where thousands of pumpjacks suck oil from the ground. It's also where Evans Industrial (No. 410) has built a fast-growing company by constructing parts of the network of pipes that transport all that crude, first to collection stations and then to ever bigger pipelines on the way to refineries and your local service station.