I’m really excited about today’s show. I’ll be joined by Jerry Bloom a prominent energy attorney who was actively involved in restructuring California’s energy market. He chairs the energy practice at Winston and Strawn. He is based in Los Angeles and has worked on energy projects in the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, Australia, the Philippines, and China.

But first I have some news I’d like to share with you.

The Positive Polarity Report – where we recap the week’s biggest stories about electrons turning green

Colorado’s Renewable Portfolio Standard has survived an attack by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has ties to the coal industry. They filed a suit in federal court claiming that Colorado’s renewable portfolio standard (or RPS) was unconstitutional because it was essentially a regulation on out-of-state companies. If that were true it would interfere with interstate commerce. The claim was that since the RPS required Colorado utilities to obtain a percentage of their power from renewable sources and since Colorado was a net importer of electricity they were in effect regulating out-of-state electricity producers.

Happily, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of Colorado’s RPS. Colorado was the first state in the U.S. to adopt an RPS by popular vote. It has created thousands of jobs and the Colorado wind industry has brought in $7.8 billion in investment. Twenty nine states in the U.S. have an RPS. Seven of those, Hawaii, California, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Connecticut and Oregon have RPS requirements of 25% or greater. There are more than 72,000 solar jobs and 12,000 wind industry jobs in those seven states.

If your state doesn’t have an RPS or it’s under attack by coal lobbyists take a few minutes to call your state legislators and let them know how you feel.

For more details on this story please check out a post on morningconsult.com by Rhone Resch , President of the Solar Energy Industries Association. I’ll put the link in the show notes.

Featured Guest – Jerry Bloom, Chair of Energy Practice at Winston and Strawn

I spoke with Jerry Bloom at the Solar Power Finance and Investment Summit in San Diego this spring where he moderated a panel on the State of the Solar Industry and the Road Ahead. He helps clients develop renewable energy infrastructure projects and guides developers through the financing and permitting process. That must take an enormous amount of patience which could explain why he was such a good sport about it when we were three or four minutes into the interview and I realized I hadn’t hit record. I had to ask him to start all over again.

JB: It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t worry about it. Is that what you want what I was doing?

DB: That was perfect.

JB: But I can’t say it again.

DB: No it will be excellent this time too.

JB: My name is Jerry Bloom, I’m the chairman of the energy department globally for Winston and Strawn and head the energy practice globally for the law firm and specialize in alternative energy, renewable energy, combined heat and power, cogen and regulatory policy as well as project development and finance.

DB: Okay. Well I really enjoyed your panel today and one of the things you were talking about was how the demand for green energy is really changing from the time when it was all based on RPS standards forcing utilities to purchase it. Now it’s coming from a different direction, so can you tell us a little bit about that?

JB: Sure, so I think the trend that we’re seeing is probably the most exciting development in terms of the future of renewable energy that I’ve seen in the 35 years that I have been pr...