Businesses like Coca-Cola, Google and Walmart are increasingly looking to buy or produce more green energy as a way of reducing their carbon footprints, creating a potentially lucrative market for companies like NRG. This week, for instance, Ikea announced it had bought a second wind farm in the United States, part of its goal of, by 2020, producing as much renewable energy as the company consumes globally.

“We are working with these companies on putting solar panels all over their facilities, and it’s helpful for them to know that we’re heading in the right direction,” Mr. Crane said.

In addition, Mr. Crane said that he was mindful of the growing pressure from younger Americans and investors to decrease dependence on fossil fuels. A report this week commissioned by Ceres, a Boston advocacy group that focuses on the economic risks of climate change, concluded that investments in large fossil fuel and nuclear plants had a higher chance of causing financial harm to utilities than investments in renewable sources, in part because of proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulations for power plants and the falling costs for large-scale wind and solar installations.

“If divestment from fossil fuel companies becomes the issue that preoccupies college campuses around America for the next decade,” Mr. Crane said, “I don’t relish the idea that year after year we’re going to be graduating a couple million kids from college, who are going to be American consumers for the next 60 or 70 years, that come out of college with a distaste or disdain for companies like mine.” He added that renewables were the segment of the power sector showing the greatest growth.

NRG’s group of conventional power plants is among the nation’s largest, which makes it a major source of carbon dioxide emissions. Cutting their emissions by 90 percent would keep three billion metric tons of carbon out of the atmosphere, or about the amount created by providing fuel and electricity to seven million homes from now to 2050, the company said.