Category: Opinion

October 27 2015

McCrone: Paris – This time the private sector is playing the good cop

Angus McCrone, Chief Editor Bloomberg New Energy Finance   Climate change conferences, by repute, go as follows: scientists issue grim warnings, NGOs shout out grimmer ones, bureaucrats in stuffy rooms debate the wording of paragraph 38b on page 84, heads of government fly in and take the credit for agreements, or “accords”, that sound important […]

September 29 2015

Liebreich and Blanchard: Thinking about energy – the lure of laziness

By Michael Liebreich, Chairman of the Advisory Board and Charles Blanchard, Head of Gas Analysis Bloomberg New Energy Finance   Forecasting oil prices, as I have noted before, is hard. You build huge data sets of supply curves and stocks; you create complicated demand models; you overlay geopolitical analysis at the deepest level of granularity you […]

August 18 2015

Liebreich: An energy sector transformed must be an energy sector reformed

Michael Liebreich, Chairman of the Advisory Board Bloomberg New Energy Finance Twitter: @MLiebreich   That the world’s energy system has begun a grand transformation to a cleaner, more local future is no longer a controversial statement. The transformation may be furthest advanced in electricity, where renewable energy has made huge strides in the past few […]

July 30 2015

McCrone and Liebreich: Yieldcos – two big questions

By Angus McCrone, Chief Editor and Michael Liebreich, Chairman of the Advisory Board Bloomberg New Energy Finance   One of the big stories in clean energy in recent times has been the emergence of the “yieldco”. In the past 30 months, 15 quoted US and European renewable power ownership vehicles have raised a total of […]

June 29 2015

McCrone: Waking up to 25 years of bewildering change in global power system

Angus McCrone, Chief Editor Bloomberg New Energy Finance   In Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper, the hero – a health food shop owner – wakes up after 200 years in a deep freeze. He is taken aback by many things in the world of 2173, not least as a doctor puts a cigarette in front […]

May 27 2015

McCrone: Electricity demand – the blue whale in the room

Angus McCrone, Chief Editor Bloomberg New Energy Finance As an eight year-old schoolboy, I learned that a judicious flick of a fountain pen can produce a lavish trail of dots of blue ink – done purely for artistic reasons, I assure you. A grown-up version of this was tried by US artist Jackson Pollock during […]

April 27 2015

McCrone: Upbeat Summit hears of the “age of plenty but also competition”

Angus McCrone, Chief Editor Bloomberg New Energy Finance   The barometer has been rising at Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summits. In 2012, the pressure reading signalled that there would be a role for renewables but that it would be constrained by politics and would be as second-fiddle to cheap gas. In 2013, it indicated that […]

March 31 2015

Henbest: Fix the EU ETS, and carbon markets can be serious business

Seb Henbest Bloomberg New Energy Finance Twitter: @SebHenbest   What do the following have in common: New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Quebec, Alberta, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, California, Beijing, Guangdong, Hubei, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Tianjin, Tokyo, Kyoto, Saitama and 28 countries in Europe? The answer is, […]

February 24 2015

Young: Summit 2015 to focus on the “four pillars” of the electric utility

William Young, Director of Summit Bloomberg New Energy Finance Twitter: @wr_young “So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.” So said Francis Bacon, the eminent Seventeenth Century scientist and philosopher and, according to one […]

January 27 2015

Liebreich: 10 predictions for clean energy in 2015

Michael Liebreich, Chairman of the Advisory Board Bloomberg New Energy Finance Twitter: @MLiebreich   For the last two years, I have drawn on Russian imagery to illustrate the state of the clean energy industry. In 2013, it was the battle of Borodino: the clean energy sector had suffered a bruising time, but it had survived […]