Posts Tagged by Stephen Lacey
Stephen Lacey at ClimateProgress.Org – Making a Statement
| September 7, 2011 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
When I met Stephen Lacey at Renewable Energy World a few years ago, I recall one of the first things he told me about his organization. “We advocate for renewables and against nothing,” he explained. I clarified, “So you don’t take positions counter to Big Oil, Coal, Nuclear, etc?” I asked. “Exactly.”
Well, that was the “old Stephen,” I’m happy to report. The “new Stephen” has a gig at ClimateProgress.Org, and trust me, these people call ‘em like they see ‘em. Here’s a recent piece based on materials acquired by Bloomberg News, showing how Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, and numerous other corporations paid tens of thousands of dollars to write legislation for lawmakers that would repeal carbon pollution reduction programs in various states around the U.S.
When I spoke with Stephen a few months ago, he seemed very happy; he has the kind of exuberance that a dog experiences when it’s let off its leash. My hearty congratulations. And this new-found freedom will pay off very handsomely for the world of energy journalism; we’re all the better for your job change, my friend.
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Financing Renewables – The Gap Between the Interests of Venture Capitalists and Institutional Investors
| September 17, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I don’t know how many readers check out Stephen Lacey’s podcasts on Renewable Energy World, but they’re absolutely terrific. Here’s a post I just wrote on this week’s episode, covering the gap between the interests of venture capitalists and those institutional investors and banks. I also mention the role of government in the migration to renewables, and what the gentleman pictured here would have told us to do.
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Power Transmission is a Real Problem for Renewable Energy
| August 24, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Politics |
I like to post articles on Renewable Energy World, as they have pretty decent traffic among people interested in a wide range of clean energy topics. Today, I commented on Stephen Lacey’s piece Is the Transmission ‘Problem’ Real? in which I indicated that he’s correct: to some degree, the argument that the grid needs to be upgraded in order to accommodate more clean energy is specious.
I go on to mention that I’m more interested in renewables on a national or continental scale. And, while I’m aware that Bill McKibben and thousands of other smart people see a future dominated by individual energy farmers, each, putting his unused electrons back onto the grid, I question whether this adequately addresses the matter of scale. With our growing population of energy-hungry consumers, utility-scale renewables appears to me to be the only way to get this done.
And this is where transmission really is an issue. As we know, renewable resources are localized: the sun shines hottest in the southwestern deserts, the wind blows hardest in the plains, the mountains have the best geothermal resources, etc. A significant upgrade to the grid — preferably to high-voltage DC — is required to make this happen.
Yet, as usual, the difficulty here is almost exclusively political. In particular, we’re being told that, for legal reasons, we can’t have a national high-voltage grid. And unfortunately, the US Supreme Court didn’t help the cause in its recent ruling, either.
I really don’t understand the problem. We have national pathways for the transportation of automobiles, railway cars, natural gas, etc. Can someone provide a reason — other than sleezy politics — that we can’t use our crystal clean eminent domain laws to get this done? There should be nothing new or scary about this.
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Renewable Energy World
| December 9, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
In my quest for a well-balanced presentation of clean energy in my upcoming book, I just spoke with someone whose work I’ve admired for quite a while — Stephen Lacey of Renewable Energy World. We discussed the subject of media, and the optimum approach to developing and distributing unique content in a space that’s changing every minute.
I think of Stephen the way I do PBS’s Charlie Rose: a guy who can conduct an intelligent conversation on hundreds of different subjects. And as I told him, the aspect of his publication that I find most striking is its bandwidth; there are so many things happening every day on this front, and these people never seem to miss a single one — nor do they simply regurgitate junk news from other sources.
Stephen has invited me to blog on his site, and I’ll certainly be taking him up on that offer. Right now, I plan to confine my remarks there mainly to business-related subjects – perhaps offering tips for his readers on the commercialization of renewable energy business ideas: raising capital, public relations, SEO, Web 2.0 marketing, positioning, branding, sales channels development, and so forth. These are topics that don’t seem to be treated with as much depth and frequency as some other aspects of the migration to clean energy, and I hope they’ll find some resonance with his readers.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to their excellent (and free) newsletter, there’s no time like the present.
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Biomass in the News
| October 19, 2009 | Posted by Craig Shields under Biomass |
Stephen Lacey does a wonderful job in his podcasts for Renewable Energy World, and, I think, covers a multitude of subjects comprehensively and fairly. This week, he pointed out that feed-in tariffs (incentives for utility customers to put renewable energy back onto the grid) have been effective around the globe in spurring on the development of a great number of different technologies. He went on to note that biomass thermal is a viable, commercially ready technology, and deserves same set of incentives that are according to solar, wind, etc.
The federal government abandoned algae-based biofuels in the mid-1990s, but seems to have come around on the issue. The Department of Defense recently gave Solazyme several multi-million dollar contracts to supply jet fuel. Solazyme grows algae in the dark, feeding it with a variety of biomass stocks, and converting the sugars to oil.
The company claims that this process is 1000 times more efficient than growing algae in sunlight. But isn’t it hard to really fall in love with renewable energy technologies that wind up burning hydrocarbons? If we’re going to do this, isn’t it better to concentrate our efforts on technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, etc. that don’t involve carbon emissions? I really don’t see where the passion for biomass comes from.
