Jérôme à Paris is a French investment banker specialising in large scale energy projects and was a regular contributor on energy topics in the early days of Daily Kos – the main US liberal political blog – and also founded the European Tribune to focus on European issues. Nowadays he focuses on financing renewable energy projects and writes occasional blogs to counteract widespread public misunderstandings of renewable energy often propagated by oil and nuclear industry interests. Key themes include the death of baseload and the growth of microgeneration, storage, and international electricity distribution grids.
But mostly, its about the political and economic interests at play. The past year has seen both a terrible political backlash against renewables (and climate policies more generally) and a relentlessly negative mood music about the sector, making it sound like nobody is investing in the sector, even though the industry keeps on breaking records. It’s been difficult to write anything mildly positive or just sensible about activity in the sector when it risks simply being drowned out by these negative perceptions and ignored.
The negative context has been driven by headlines focused on the offshore wind sector (some projects abandoned or delayed in the US, the UK “round 5” auction getting no bidders) and generated by high profile decisions, mostly by oil&gas players, to reduce their exposure to the sector and do so rather noisily. This has naturally bee.
