Ren Gaffney (she/they) currently serves as General Counsel at Convergent Energy + Power, a developer whose mission is to make the electrical grid cleaner, more reliable, and less expensive by leveraging state-of-the-art energy storage and distributed solar generation. As General Counsel, Ren oversees and manages all legal decision-making, legal risk allocation, and compliance functions of the business. Ren has over 12 years of experience in the fields of power generation, transmission, and infrastructure development, project & structured finance, M&A, securities regulation, impact investing, and economic development. Ren has advised on over $2.9 billion of closed transactions across four continents. Prior to Convergent, Ren was Deputy General Counsel and Head of Power and Infrastructure Advisory for West & Central Africa at the CrossBoundary Group. Ren’s first in-house legal role was Assistant General Counsel for TerraForm Power, a publicly traded strategic investor in renewable generation. While an associate at Skadden Arps, Ren’s pro bono representation included a successful asylum application on the basis of LGBTQ identity, as well as acting as lead counsel, in partnership with the Williams Institute, for a consortium of international human rights experts in authoring an amicus curiae brief to a regional court in sub-Saharan Africa to challenge the anti-homosexuality law of one of its member states. Ren has lived and worked in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malaysia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, the UK, and the US, for investment facilitation and power companies, nonprofits, the U.S. Department of State, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the World Bank Group. Ren holds a juris doctorate from Georgetown University Law Center, an MA in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and a BA in International Relations and Philosophy from Wellesley College. Ren was a founding Steering Committee member of Trans Legal Advocates of Washington (TransLAW).