Republican Army veteran and renewable energy developer joins state treasurer race

UPDATED at 3:30 p.m. on Monday, March 11, 2024 with comment from Nathan Sandvig.

With the filing deadline looming Tuesday, the first Republican has stepped into the race for state treasurer. 

Nathan Sandvig, a U.S. Army veteran and renewable energy developer, filed to run for the Republican nomination for treasurer with the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office on Sunday evening. 

So far, he’s running unopposed for the nomination, which will be decided in the May 21 primary. In 2022, he ran for the Republican nomination to represent Oregon’s 6th Congressional District, but garnered less than 4% of the vote, losing to businessman Mike Erickson. This appears to be his first bid for a statewide position. 

Sandvig said he decided to run for state treasurer out of sense of service, to give voters a Republican candidate and because of his background in managing renewable energy investments as the Treasury moves away from fossil fuels.

“I saw this opportunity, and I think a healthy two party system is a good thing,” he said. “I saw as a Republican that there’s not anyone representing a Republican in this race.”

The treasurer oversees state investments, including the $94 billion Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund, or PERS, and manages public banking and savings programs, including the Oregon College Savings Plan and OregonSaves, a retirement plan for self-employed workers. In the future, the Treasury is likely to be selling many of its fossil fuel investments. The Legislature just passed the COAL Act directing the agency to unload coal-related holdings, and the current treasurer, Tobias Read, has launched a plan to make PERS’ investments carbon neutral by 2050.

Sandvig lives in Neskowin on the Oregon Coast and is a business developer for the Portland office of the Connecticut-based energy company Avangrid Renewables, according to his candidacy filing. Avangrid oversees several wind, energy and thermal projects in Oregon.

He attended the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, recommended by the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, and former Arizona Congressman Sam Coppersmith, a Democrat. He earned a bachelor’s degree in military history and systems engineering at the academy and earned a master’s degree in project management from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., according to his filing. 

It says he has certificates in governance from the College of William and Mary in Virginia; in  forestry management from Yale University in Connecticut; and economic evaluation and investment from the Colorado School of Mines. 

From 1998 to 2005, he served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Bosnia-Herzegovina, before beginning a career in the renewable energy sector, his filing states. He worked for a decade as a project developer at several of the largest renewable energy companies in the U.S. before directing U.S. growth for the London-based multinational electric and gas utility National Grid, according to his profile on LinkedIn. He was vice president of Rye Development, a company developing hydroelectric dams and storage projects to power large data centers. He left to return to the Army for about two years as a major in the U.S. Army Reserves Civil Affairs Command to help with renewable energy projects. 

“I’m somewhat of a unicorn. I believe in climate change, and I have been doing something about it for two decades,” he said.

Two candidates are currently running for the Democratic nomination: state Sen. Elizabeth Steiner of Portland and Jeff Gudman, a former city councilman from Lake Oswego who previously ran as a Republican. Steiner, a family physician and instructor at Oregon Health & Science University, has served as co-chair of the powerful budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee in the Legislature for the last five years and is considered a frontrunner. 

Read, who has been treasurer for nearly eight years, is running for secretary of state.