During the past two years, TotalEnergies assistant general counsel Cynthia Redwine Martinez has become one of the leading renewable energy law experts in the U.S.
But it didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen by accident. The path she took started a couple decades ago as the daughter of a glass-ceiling-smashing, highly respected Houston lawyer who became the first general counsel for Rice University.
The second mile-marker occurred when she was a college intern at King & Spalding in Houston where she saw the lawyers working on a lot of energy projects, especially involving liquified natural gas.
“It was like an epiphany – I had never even considered energy before,” she said. “I suddenly realized [that] this industry I’ve entirely taken for granted literally makes the world go round and permeates nearly every aspect of life.”
Next came law school at the University of Texas where she read An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore her 1L year, which is when she first “became concerned about our impact on the environment and interested in renewable energy.”
The same year, Martinez co-founded the Texas Journal of Oil, Gas and Energy Law.
“At that time, oil and gas was virtually synonymous with energy, but I lobbied my co-founders to name the journal the ‘Texas Journal of Energy Law’ – omitting the ‘Oil, Gas and’ – to accommodate other energy sources,” she told The Texas Lawbook. “We eventually settled with including ‘and Energy’ in the title.”
As a young lawyer at Vinson & Elkins, Martinez published “Recent Developments in Solar Energy” in the journal and did a presentation on solar energy at the journal’s symposium.
Fast-forward more than a decade later. Her reputation in the world of renewable and solar energy law is nearly unmatched.
From the fourth quarter of 2019 to the end of 2021, Martinez has been a lead lawyer in nearly a dozen major clean energy acquisitions and joint ventures involving offshore wind operations and solar projects.
“ ‘Busy’ is an understatement,” she said. “But I truly enjoy the work we are doing at the leading edge of the energy transition, so most of the time it doesn’t feel like ‘work.’ What I enjoy most about the deals is the close partnership we have with the business leaders – understanding the strategy and the goals from the business’ perspective and then bringing our unique perspective as business lawyers to drive those results.”
Recognizing Martinez’ role in energy transition, the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Houston Chapter and The Texas Lawbook announce that Martinez is one of two finalists for the 2022 Houston Corporate Counsel Award for Senior Counsel of the Year for a Large Legal Department (21 or more attorneys).
Premium Subscribers: Click Here for a Q&A with Cynthia Martinez, where she discusses the biggest challenges facing renewable energy today and identifies life and career mentors.
ACC Houston and The Lawbook plan to honor the finalists and announce the winners May 19 at the annual Houston Corporate Counsel Awards event at the Four Seasons Hotel.
Martinez played a “critical role in launching and scaling TotalEnergies’ renewable energy businesses in the U.S. in 2021,” according to TotalEnergies General Counsel Elizabeth Matthews, who nominated Martinez for the award.
Matthews said Martinez was the legal department lead in TotalEnergies’ “year of break-neck growth in the renewable energy businesses in the U.S., establishing TotalEnergies as a major player in renewable energy.”
The transactions Martinez has handled during the past 18 months “propel TotalEnergies toward its goals of 30 gigawatts of renewables by 2025 and net-zero by 2050,” she said. One gigawatt can power up to 750,000 homes.
“At the beginning of 2021, Cynthia was the only lawyer supporting TotalEnergies’ renewable energy activities in the U.S. and by the end of the year she was leading a team of five attorneys,” Matthews said. “Early in the year, Cynthia closed two major transactions which marked TotalEnergies’ entry into the large-scale solar market in the U.S. and the growth of its solar project pipeline to three gigawatts.”
Kristin Seeger, a partner in the Houston office of Orrick, said Martinez is “calm under pressure and inspires confidence in her team.”
“One of Cynthia’s strengths is being able to view transactions in their entirety and anticipate issues and risks that are material to her company and then proactively address them and work with outside counsel to address them,” Seeger said. “She is effective in dealing with both other attorneys she works with and the business teams on her transactions.”
By all accounts, Martinez is the renewable energy law expert she is because of the strategic decisions she made in her career.
“In my 15 years practicing law, there hasn’t been a clear path in renewable energy, and a lot of the time I worked on other businesses, developing a breadth of legal expertise which I draw upon every day,” she said. “But nothing has ignited my passion in the same way as renewable energy.”
Martinez was born and raised in Houston. She said she had “the best parents a kid could ask for, a big brother to pave the way for me and every opportunity to learn and experience things that sparked my curiosity.”
Her father, William Redwine, is a physician. Her mother, Shirley Redwine, was a lawyer at Baker Botts who became the first general counsel for Rice University.
“I grew up listening to my parents discussing their days at the dinner table and was inspired by observing my mom thriving in her successful and interesting career,” she said. “She is far and away my primary role model, both professionally and personally.”
Redwine, now retired, said she knew her daughter was going to be a lawyer “as soon as Cynthia learned to talk.”
“Cynthia had opinions, and she was prepared to stand up for her position,” Redwine said. “By the time she was in elementary school, she had a strong sense of justice. Cheaters and wrongdoers set her off. She couldn’t let them get away with it.”
Martinez said her first love as a kid was horses. In fact, she is still “horse crazy.” She spent much of her childhood when not in school “doing manual labor at the stables in our neighborhood, compensated by the – intoxicating to me, at least – smells and sounds of horses and precious minutes in the saddle.
“I was proud of my reputation as hardest-working of the ‘barn rats,’” she said.
Martinez was in high school when she initially thought law school was an option.
“It seemed like a way to fast-track my way into an interesting and challenging career, rather than working my way up from an entry-level role in a company,” she said. “Patience has never been one of my strengths.”
After graduating from Georgetown University in 2004 and UT Law School in 2007, Martinez spent three years doing business transactions at V&E, where she raised her hand to work on any renewable energy deals.
“There just weren’t many to be found at that time,” she said. “I did get to work on turbine supply for Boone Pickens’ ambitious Mesa Wind project.”
In 2011, Martinez took “a huge risk and pay cut” when she left V&E to move to Austin to become the solo general counsel at Meridian Solar.
“I envisioned growing with the company, but ultimately the [engineering, procurement and construction] business succumbed to market pressures,” she said. “If you’ve worked in the solar industry long enough, it’s not unlikely that a company in your past may not still be around or that you will have experienced a bankruptcy or two.
“It’s like a badge of honor. Solar-coaster street cred.”
Martinez kept adding to her business bona fides, including an M.B.A. from the Texas McCombs School of Business in 2014.
In January 2018, France-based Total – widely viewed as one of the seven global energy super-majors with $184 billion in revenue and more than 105,000 employees in 2021 – hired Martinez to support its transactions team.
Martinez’ transition, so to speak, to renewable energy at Total started in the fourth quarter of 2019 when she received a call from headquarters in Paris seeking her assistance on the first joint venture the energy giant would undertake with Hannon Armstrong, a Maryland-based investment firm that focuses exclusively on climate change efforts.
The first assignment was to work on the acquisition and finance portfolios of distributed solar projects developed by SunPower.
“That was when I first learned that TotalEnergies would be acquiring solar in the U.S. – other than its shareholding in SunPower – and I felt that my decision to come to TotalEnergies in anticipation of the launch of the U.S. renewables business would prove to be a smart move,” she said. “I had no idea how quickly the U.S. renewables businesses would scale from that point forward.”
In March 2021, Total gave Martinez the title “assistant general counsel – renewable energy.”
“At that point nothing really changed for me, except that I got to transition my former job to someone else, which was a huge relief because the renewables work was taking off like a rocket ship,” she said.
In May 2021, Total changed its name to TotalEnergies to emphasize its new commitment to cleaner sources of energy.
Martinez oversees a legal team of five lawyers, including former Allen & Overy senior counsel Simon Hayes, who she recruited because of his extensive experience in both offshore wind and solar energy.
The deals have been coming fast and furious for Martinez.
In January 2021, TotalEnergies announced a joint venture with 174 Power Global, a wholly owned Hanwha Group affiliate, to purchase a pipeline of 12 utility-scale solar and energy storage projects with 1.6 gigawatts cumulative capacity.
A month later, TotalEnergies acquired the development pipeline of an additional 1.4 gigawatts of solar projects and 600 megawatts of battery storage assets, all located in Texas and wholly owned by TotalEnergies.
Cynthia Martinez with TotalEnergies US General Counsel Elizabeth Matthews
“Cynthia led the legal work to further develop and finance these projects, all of which are expected to come online between 2023 and 2024,” Matthews said. “This work represents hundreds of millions of dollars of investment. Cynthia also closed $1.5 billion in construction financings to effectuate the construction of these solar plants and secured commitments for future tax equity financings.”
“She persevered through challenges and dynamic conditions both inside and outside of TotalEnergies,” the general counsel said. “Her work is enabling TotalEnergies to pave the way of the energy transition and it is deserving of recognition.”
Seeger, the Orrick partner, said Martinez’ ability direct her team and outside counsel toward successful transactions is impressive.
“Cynthia and I worked on a transaction over a holiday that required long hours and late-night phone calls across many different time zones,” Seeger said. “Through it all, Cynthia was not only dedicated to the project but always upbeat and energetic. That type of energy is contagious and helps motivate a team during difficult transactional moments.”
Martinez said the recent acceleration of energy transition may have caught others off guard, but not her.
“Renewable energy is something I’ve been thinking about and working on for so long, and all of a sudden, it seems like the world finally took notice,” she said. “Now we’re off to the races.”