Mark Hartney

Partner, Breakthrough Energy Ventures

Dr. Mark Hartney has been involved in technology innovation throughout his career – in research and development roles, successful start up companies and as a federal program manager. Mark is a Partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is based in Lisbon, and supports both the European and Global funds. He has led investments and serves on the board of companies doing direct air carbon capture, carbon mineralization, decarbonizing industrial heat, power grid optimization and hydrogen transport and supply and focuses primarily in energy generation and industrial decarbonization at BEV.

Prior to joining Breakthrough, Mark served 7 years as the CTO and Applied Energy Division Director at SLAC, a DOE National Lab at Stanford University. The Applied Energy Division runs several programs for the DOE and California Energy Commission on distribution grid management and analysis as well as renewable and EV integration issues and battery and solar technologies. Mark was also a Precourt Energy Scholar with the Stanford Precourt Energy Institute and provided mentoring and advice to early stage startups as an advisor at Cyclotron Road at LBNL and the TomKat center at Stanford.

From 2009 to 2012, Mark served at the Department of Energy as one of the founding program directors of ARPA-E where he led efforts in carbon capture technology, (the IMPACCT program), as well as a number of other projects in wind technology, energy efficiency, biofuels and lighting.

He has also served in business and technical management roles at several companies, including Flextech, Silicon Image and dpiX; and has held staff positions at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), MIT Lincoln Labs and AT&T Bell Labs.

Mark is a graduate of MIT (B.S. and M.S.) and earned his Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley, all in chemical engineering.