Barrett Green (BSCE 90) has led negotiation and transaction teams for Entergy Corp.
When Barrett Green (BSCE 90) entered the University of Mississippi in the mid-1980s, his goals were to complete the Naval ROTC program and become a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. As fate would have it, achieving that milestone was only the first step of a stellar career that spans almost three decades.
A native of Franklinton, Louisiana (a small town just south of Tylertown, Mississippi), Green is vice president of commercial operations for Entergy Wholesale Commodities. At the headquarters in Houston, Texas, he oversees the regional company’s sales and marketing.
“I run the revenue function for the nonutility division of Entergy Corp.,” Green said. “I also do a lot of strategic and transactional work.”
Among his most gratifying professional achievements with Entergy is having led the negotiation and transaction teams for the sale of Entergy’s part of the Gulf South pipeline and the energy trading operation, valued at $2 billion.
“I helped develop Entergy’s strategy to exit the merchant business and the resulting ‘decommissioning’ transactions, where Entergy is selling shutdown nuclear plants to companies in the decommissioning business,” he said. “The largest of these, Indian Point, also has a value around $2 billion.”
Green’s decision to attend Ole Miss was based on a combination of family legacy and opportunity.
“My parents met and married at Ole Miss, but I also got an NROTC scholarship and Ole Miss had an NROTC unit,” he said.
James G. Vaughan, F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering, and the late Kenneth A. Stead Jr., who was an assistant professor of civil engineering, stand out in Green’s memory of Ole Miss engineering faculty.
“Dr. Vaughan’s knowledge of the mechanics of materials/materials science and his practice of making people really think by giving you too much information,” he said. “Dr Stead was such a character. I always remember his comment: ‘I took three points off for the units conversion error, but if you do that in real life, the building will fall down.’”
Vaughan said he remembers Green as “an excellent student.”
“Barrett was academically talented, but he was also just an all-around nice person,” Vaughan said. “I always knew that he would be successful in whatever career he decided upon.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1990, Green went on to earn his Master of Engineering Administration degree from Virginia Institute of Technology in 1994 and Master of Business Administration from Northwestern (Kellogg) in 1997.
“Real education is not about the ‘content’ knowledge or information you may currently hold in your head,” Green said. “It is about learning how to learn, something you can do continually and independently. At any given time in my career, more than 50 percent of what I was using was material I did not know five years before.”
In the Navy, Green was the project manager for the declassification project where the U.S. government first officially acknowledged that it had lost a nuclear weapon. He later participated in Entergy’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina, including rebuilding the corporate planning model from scratch because the company could not access the servers where the primary server was stored in the aftermath of the storm.
Green is married to the former Janice Caroline Sanders. The couple has a son, Carter, who is a senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, and a daughter, Sanders, who is a freshman at Colorado College. Green’s hobbies include hunting, fishing and “almost anything outdoors.” He also volunteers with The Woods Project, a nonprofit that takes inner-city youth camping and to do other outdoor activities.