Travis Nels
MBA 2013
MBA 2013
“I love learning about an evolving, dynamic industry and being an active participant in its change.”
After eight years of serving in the Air Force, NATO, and the Air National Guard, Travis Nels (MBA 2013) was accustomed to addressing large, complex issues relating to national security. “Officer training broadens your thinking—you’re a small cog trying to see where you fit into this big machine,” he says. “Coming into HBS, I was looking for something similar in the sense that I wanted to address big, complex issues that could have a wide impact.”
Nels hadn’t been thinking of energy as a potential career focus, but a handful of cases that popped up in his finance and operations courses piqued his interest. After graduating from HBS, he signed on with NextEra Energy Resources in Florida, where he oversaw a portfolio of wind and solar projects located throughout the United States and Canada. That role offered nonstop exposure to the sort of general management experiences he had only recently been discussing in the HBS classroom. “The projects I was able to plug into were brand new to the company and presented a whole slew of challenges, from cross-border issues to wildlife studies,” says Nels. “It was a great way to get my feet wet and learn about renewables, which provided a springboard into the wider field of energy.”
That opportunity presented itself in 2017, when Nels joined the AES Corporation, a global power company operating in 15 countries. Currently head of financial planning and analysis at AES’s corporate headquarters in Washington, DC, Nels and his team of six provide the data and forecasts integral to the senior management team’s decision-making process.
“Financial planning and analysis is a function that exists across sectors, obviously,” says Nels. “What’s interesting about the role in the energy field is how market forces such as government policies, customer preferences, pure economics, and a whole slew of technology developments are shaping the industry.”
“For so long, economic growth was correlated with demand for power,” adds Nels. “Now, that demand is decreasing, which is good from a social and environmental perspective, but it requires a navigational shift for some of the larger, legacy players in the market.”
It’s a challenge that motivates Nels, who cites exposure to both senior management and his own team as energizing factors in his day-to-day experience. “My team is awesome—sharing opportunities with them for leadership and development is very rewarding and fun,” he says. “On the other side, being in the room with the CEO, CFO, and chief strategy officer, hashing out foundational questions for this organization, is very different from what I’ve been exposed to previously in a professional capacity.”
Now that he’s based in Washington, DC, Nels hopes to get more involved in the policy discussion surrounding how energy is produced. He’s also interested in veterans’s issues, having served in the Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve from 2011 to 2017, and sees a natural fit between a sector experiencing a large number of retirements and a group that doesn’t always have access to employment opportunities. “There are so many ways to be involved,” says Nels, a Carnegie New Leader and Abshire-Inamori Leadership Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I love learning about an evolving, dynamic industry and being an active participant in its change.”