Ronal Larson - Former Professor (E.E. at Georgia Tech) and former Principal Scientist at SERI (now NREL)

Dr. Ronal Larson (PhD from the University of Michigan) is a retired  former Professor (E.E. at Georgia Tech) and former Principal Scientist at SERI (now NREL).  His U.S. solar energy activities began in 1973 as the first IEEE Congressional Fellow, working on the first two solar bills passing the House Science Committee (and then the full Congress).  His fellowship continued for an extra year with the (now-disbanded Congressional) Office of Technology Assessment. After SERI, he worked in 1982 and 1983 as Chief-of-Party for a USAID solar energy project in Sudan.  As a past Chair of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES), he was earlier responsible for its Membership and Strategic Planning Committee activities. He was co-editor of an ASES White paper on the economics of renewables, an MIT Book on Commercialization of a range of Solar Thermal systems, and a 2003 ASES hydrogen policy paper.   For its first eight years of existence, he served as Secretary of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society (CRES - an ASES Chapter, which he helped co-found), where he still works on state regulatory and legislative policy issues and renewable energy education..  He has been active in several dockets at the Colorado Public Utility Commission – this past year mostly emphasizing energy efficiency – on behalf of an NGO, Ratepayers United of Colorado (RUC). He has built a solar “Zero energy” home (built around the University of Colorado’s 2002 national-winning Solar Decathlon house) and was active in the July 2006 ASES Conference, held in Denver, which emphasized climate recovery.   A principal current activity is developing and promoting the concept of sequestering CO2 through charcoal additions to the world’s soils (now called “biochar” or “terra preta”).   Here he is a volunteer with a biochar-oriented group helping the new Colorado “Collaboratory”, which will host the first North American Regional Biochar in Boulder in August, 2009.  In 2007, he was appointed by the Colorado Senate Majority leader to the Colorado Senate Bill 91 Task Force – a renewable energy, policy-oriented group.  Dr. Larson currently serves on two Boards of Directors for Colorado renewable energy companies and a “Colorado green jobs” steering committee.   Through his renewable energy consulting firm, he has traveled extensively – mostly in developing countries – and often on charcoal-making stoves.

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