Blog post

The Green Giraffe Energy Blog

Energy Blog, 12 June 2017

Jérôme Guillet, Managing Director of Green Giraffe, introduces the new Green Giraffe Energy Blog.

As some of you might remember, I had a prolific sideline a few years ago writing about energy issues on blogs and newspapers (“Fix Gazprom’s Fatal Leak”; “Liberal markets create an addiction to gas”; “The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind”). Green Giraffe has been keeping me rather busy in recent years, but the itch to write has never gone completely away (and indeed one of my jobs with Green Giraffe has been to prepare, review or edit some of the major documents we prepare as a company, such as information memoranda and intelligence reports).

With the energy transition now well under way and moving in new fascinating directions, the time is right to take a more active role again in commenting and discussing some of the issues the sector is going through – the transformation of utilities, the move to tenders for renewable energy price regimes, smart grids and changes on the demand side, industrial consolidation, and the dramatic fall in prices. My first story, to be published in a few days, will discuss the future of the Hinckley Point nuclear project in the context of falling offshore wind prices, at the intersection of several of the above topics.

Energy is a complex topic, whose intricacies cannot always be explained easily. It is, by nature, a heavily regulated industry where lobbying and outright propaganda play an important role in shaping the politics behind both the mundane and the strategic decisions that underpin it. My goal will be to shed some light on various aspects of the ongoing energy transformation, explain some of the decisions taken and some of the trends that we can see and some that are not obvious yet but will soon prevail. The point of view is that of someone who is now working only in renewables, but has also worked in the oil&gas sector and the traditional power sector for many years and is familiar with how these work. It is also that of someone who has looked at energy projects from the point of view of financiers looking to actually fund their construction, and will underline the importance of finance for the economics and politics of the sector.

I have the advantage of not working for a large company (even if we do have a few of these as clients), so I will be quite free to discuss quite candidly topics that might be seen as too sensitive by other industry players, and hope that these articles will thus be read with interest – and attract lively discussion. They will be posted on the website of the company and linked to on our LinkedIn page.

I look forward to what should be a fun adventure!

Jérôme Guillet co-founded Green Giraffe in 2010 and was a Managing Director until 2021.