PITTSBURGH — Robert “Bo” Wholey is a Pittsburgh native with a well-known last name, and he grew up working at the family’s seafood store in the Strip District. But in their youth, he and his brothers also began their own seafood delivery service, showing an early flair for business. Wholey ended up moving out of state for college and then found his way to New York City and started a career as an investment banker and private equity executive. In 2017, he became CEO of Long Ridge Energy & Power LLC, a formerly publicly traded company that built from scratch a large natural gas power plant on the site of a shuttered aluminum plant in Hannibal, Ohio. Long Ridge, whose headquarters have long been at Southpointe in Washington County, has now moved to new digs in the Strip District.
What led you to leave Pittsburgh?
I grew up in Pittsburgh and every Saturday worked in my family’s fish market in the Strip District. In high school, I determined I didn’t want to pursue that as my career path, even though it was a great experience. So I went to Babson College to study business, and then I decided I wanted to go to New York and become an investment banker. You got to choose which industry you wanted to cover as an investment banker, and I chose energy because I liked the people the most, and I thought that sector wasn’t going anywhere.
You came back to the Pittsburgh region after a few decades.
About eight years ago I started Long Ridge with (infrastructure investment firm) Fortress, and one of the reasons I did that was that private equity was becoming very crowded, and I always wanted to get back to starting a business, actually growing and operating a company.
How did you start it?
We purchased a brownfield industrial site along the Ohio River, a little bit south of Pittsburgh, and it used to be the site of one of the largest aluminum smelters in the U.S. The reason that we bought that site is we thought it was begging to have a power plant there. Any time you have an intersection of gas lines and transmission lines, that’s typically a good spot to build a power plant. It’s arguably better than any spot in the entire U.S. Up until that aluminum smelter closed down 10 years ago, it was using as much power as the entire City of Pittsburgh. So a lot of that infrastructure was already in place.
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