Utah Business proudly presents this year’s cohort of our Leaders of the Year award. These 12 honorees represent accomplishments of Utah’s business community in 2024 and were selected by the Utah Business editorial team.
Luigi Resta
President | rPlus Energies
Luigi Resta was in the middle of a walkabout in his home state of California, considering how to move forward with his career in renewable energy, when he got a call. It was 2018 and he’d been let go from his previous job about three months earlier.
The call was from Christian Gardner, CEO and chairman of Utah’s Gardner Group. He wanted to invest in Resta’s plan to build large-scale renewable energy. The two would launch rPlus Energies the same year.
“It was a time of reflection to create some clarity and vision in what I wanted to do in my life going forward in the renewable business,” Resta says of 2018. “I wanted to find an investor that was a family office in real estate development because I figured there were a lot of similarities with that and renewable energy.”
Six years later, the company is making its mark across the state, and 2024 was a whirlwind. In February, rPlus Energies — now with 65 employees and projects in 20 states — announced an investment of up to $460 million from Sandbrook Capital. In July, it secured over $1 billion in construction debt financing for the 800-megawatt (MW) Green River Energy Center in Emery County. In September, the company broke ground on the project, which will provide energy to the whole state and have an economic impact on every county in Utah, Resta says.
The Green River Energy Center will be one of the largest solar-plus-storage facilities in the nation.
For Resta, a major part of the project’s appeal is the way the center will provide renewable energy to rural Utah as well as jobs and economic benefits. While there were 25 workers on site as of December 2024, Resta projects the number of employees will grow to more than 500 before construction is completed ahead of March 2026. The solar-plus-battery facility will complement work that other power generators have been doing across the state, he says, as well as help provide economic diversity, opportunity and educational perspective.
As of 2024, Resta has been working with renewable energy for 20 years, but his formative experiences were on his family’s organic farm in Northern California. Community is a big part of how he approaches work, he notes, and rural areas are of particular interest to him for their potential to help shape energy practices.
“I’m really attracted to the communities that are multi-generational, rural,” Resta says. “And this would include Utah, where true sustainability exists.”
Tapping into this potential and strengthening the economy across the state is part of Resta’s vision for making Utah a renewable energy leader.
“It’s domestic energy,” he says. “We’re really excited that this project will help provide power to the state and [its] citizens … for use and consumption here.”