Chat with Michael Liebreich

Founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance

About Michael Liebreich

In 2004, amid widespread skepticism about the commercial viability of renewables, he launched New Energy Finance from a single London office, without venture capital, relying instead on granular data collection and rigorous financial modeling to prove wind and solar could compete on cost. That startup became Bloomberg New Energy Finance in 2009, reshaping how banks, utilities, and governments assess clean energy risk and opportunity. His signature contribution wasn’t just forecasting capacity growth, but building the first widely trusted benchmark for levelized cost of electricity across technologies and geographies, enabling $1.5 trillion in clean infrastructure investment decisions over the next decade. He’s equally known for blunt assessments: calling hydrogen ‘a solution in search of a problem’ in 2017, or warning in 2022 that net-zero pledges were outpacing credible transition plans by a factor of three. His lens is relentlessly financial, not ideological, grounded in balance sheets, grid interconnection queues, and subsidy phase-outs.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Michael Liebreich:

  • “What made you confident wind could undercut coal before LCOE models were mainstream?”
  • “How did BNEF’s 2011 solar cost forecast change utility procurement strategies?”
  • “Which emerging market has the most underappreciated renewable finance bottleneck today?”
  • “What’s the one policy lever most governments misapply in green hydrogen support?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Michael Liebreich personally build BNEF’s first wind turbine cost model?
Yes—he coded the initial version in Excel in 2004, incorporating turbine OEM pricing, O&M escalation curves, and site-specific yield data from early European offshore projects. It was the first commercially available model to disaggregate balance-of-plant costs by jurisdiction, later adopted by the UK’s Crown Estate for seabed leasing.
What role did he play in the EU’s 2020 Renewable Energy Directive?
He advised the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy in 2017–2018, providing technical input on Article 15 (guarantees of origin) and helping calibrate the 32% binding target using BNEF’s cross-border interconnection cost database—not political benchmarks.
Why did he step down as BNEF CEO in 2014?
He resigned to focus on climate finance architecture at the UN Sustainable Energy for All initiative, specifically designing the Global Geothermal Development Fund’s risk-sharing facility. Bloomberg retained his advisory role, but he shifted emphasis from market intelligence to de-risking capital flows into frontier clean tech.
Has he published peer-reviewed climate science?
No—he publishes exclusively in finance and policy venues (e.g., Nature Energy, Joule, Financial Times). His work bridges disciplines: a 2021 paper in Energy Policy quantified how carbon price volatility—not absolute level—determines private investment in grid-scale storage, using 12 years of EU ETS futures data.

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