Canadian Solar adds new seats to board of directors and independent directors

Canadian Solar Inc., one of the world’s largest solar power companies, has increased the size of its Board of Directors from five to six directors and appointed Lauren C. Templeton as an independent director, thereby increasing the number of independent directors to five. The Company also appointed Karl E. Olsoni as a strategic adviser to its Board of Directors. Both appointments are effective Jan. 1, 2020. The appointments follow a search process conducted as part of Canadian Solar’s ongoing focus on shareholder value creation and Board composition and diversity.

Meet Lauren Templeton

Templeton is the founder and President of Templeton & Phillips Capital Management, LLC, a global investing boutique located in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She is also an independent director and member of the Audit Committee of Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, a financial holding company engaged in property and casualty insurance and reinsurance and associated investment management, and its publicly-traded subsidiary, Fairfax India Holdings Corporation.

She serves on a number of non-profit organizations, including the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton World Charities Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust. She also serves on the Board of Trustees at the Baylor School, the Board of Trustees at the Bright School and the Board of Overseers at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Templeton is the former President of the Southeastern Hedge Fund Association, based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is also the co-author of “Investing the Templeton Way: The Market Beating Strategies of Value Investing’s Legendary Bargain Hunter”, which has been translated into nine languages. Ms. Templeton holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Economics from the University of the South, Sewanee.

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Meet Karl Olsoni

Olsoni is currently an Operating Partner with Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure fund manager investing in clean energy infrastructure in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. He is also a Partner with the kRoad group of companies which invest in battery storage, waste transformation and e-mobility. He previously served as Managing Director of the Clean Energy and Infrastructure team at Capital Dynamics where he and his partners raised and invested approximately $1 billion in clean energy infrastructure projects in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Olsoni has more than 30 years of international energy sector experience. He was formerly Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of PPM Energy Inc. (now Iberdrola Renewables/Avangrid), a US-based energy company, and Chief Financial Officer of Koch Materials, Inc., a unit of the Koch Industries, Inc., which marketed heavy petroleum products in the United States, China, Mexico and Brazil. Before that, he spent 16 years with the Southern Company where, among other things, he was part of the original management team that built the Southern Company’s independent power and merchant energy business (Southern Energy, Inc., later Mirant, Inc.) into one of the largest independent power producers in the world. Mr. Olsoni holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from George Washington University and an MBA from the College of William and Mary.

— Solar Builder magazine

[source: https://solarbuildermag.com/news/canadian-solar-adds-new-seats-to-both-board-of-directors-independent-directors/]