Mr. Stephen Gates serves as Chief Operating Officer of the Critical Minerals and Advanced Materials Platform, bringing over 20 years of experience in renewable energy, infrastructure development, and large-scale project execution.
He is the founder and president of Neighborhood Power Corporation (NPC), where he has led the deployment of distributed solar and infrastructure systems across residential, commercial, and industrial markets, including major U.S. commercial installations and large-scale distributed generation projects. He previously co-developed one of the largest residential solar installations in the United States at Hummingbird Ranch in Simi Valley, California. Mr. Gates also brings deep expertise in infrastructure finance and structured investment modeling, with a focus on leveraged project financing, capital deployment, and long-term asset performance across complex infrastructure portfolios.
Within the Critical Minerals platform, he leads operational execution, infrastructure development, and U.S.-based processing scale-up, aligning engineering, capital structure, and deployment strategy into a unified execution framework. He has maintained a more than 20-year strategic partnership with Mr. Don Nissanka, built through joint leadership of international energy and infrastructure initiatives. This long-standing collaboration has developed strong global relationships and cross-border execution capability across project origination, financing, and stakeholder engagement.
Together, this partnership forms a foundational pillar of the platform’s global connectivity and delivery capacity within the critical minerals and strategic materials supply chain.
