Talking Renewables on Television

It’s been a few years since I was a guest on Judith West’s TV show, “Getting Your Money’s Worth” — see below.

The PR firm I hired tried to get me on as many television and radio programs as possible, and, I have to say, they were incredible.

The fun for me was how wildly different all these experiences were.  Ms. West, bless her heart, knew very little about energy, and essentially nothing about renewables.  Presuming her audience was constituted similarly, I tried to keep this extremely simple.

Other interviews were quite intense, and got fairly far into the weeds in terms of technology and economics.

Some were very short, just a couple of minutes, but one went on for the better part of two hours.  I had a guy call me a few weeks after that one, asking something extremely specific about electricity pricing, and when I prefaced my answer with, “Well, I’m no expert….,” he interrupted. “Oh bull****, he laughed. “I rented a car in Cincinnati and dropped it off in Pittsburgh, and you were on the radio almost the entire time.”

Call-in shows in remote parts of the country, of course, add a new dimension. Though the hosts are congenial, the callers, who apparently aren’t screened, are sometime quite hostile.  One guy called me a “cockroach” because of my pro-mitigation stance on climate change.

Here’s my conversation with the perfectly lovely Judith West.