Jeff Bishop '04 on clean energy and clear communication

Like many Rice University alumni, Jeff Bishop ’04 landed an internship that shifted his career focus.

The electrical and computer engineering alumnus said, “It was 2002, and I joined the Leadership Rice Mentoring Experience. Only one international opportunity was listed: Andy Karsner, a Rice alumnus, needed someone to work on wind farm development in Morocco. That summer experience made a huge difference in my life.”

Before his internship, Bishop had completed two years at Rice and felt drawn to multiple areas. The wind farm experience and his interactions with Karsner helped him realize that careers in renewable energy would lie at the intersection of all his interests: technology, business, finance, policy, commercial and regulatory.

“I fell in love with clean energy that summer, but there were few post-graduation opportunities in those areas back in 2004,” he said.

Instead of pursuing a different career direction upon graduation, he successfully secured a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to explore renewable energy failures in Uganda and Botswana, and spent a year after college in those two countries. In 2006, he moved into a company focused primarily on wind energy.

“I rode the clean energy wave for about 20 years,” said Bishop. “I love how full-circle things have gone. Now all the major oil and gas companies have figured out they have to get into clean energy. Andy Karsner, my first renewable energy boss, is now on the board at Exxon. Seeing how quickly the energy industry has changed in the last 20 years is very encouraging.”

Bishop is the CEO and a co-founder of Key Capture Energy, a utility-scale battery storage independent power producer. 

Read the rest of his story in the ACTIVATE Engineering Communication Program website. A few more of my favorite highlights from this profile include:

“Houston knows energy,” said Bishop. “Clean energy providers deploy similar large infrastructure projects to the traditional oil and gas projects, running to the hundreds of millions of dollars. Oil and gas people have transferable skill sets and we need their experience, their processes, their lessons learned. Some of my best team members are those with really heavy oil and gas backgrounds.”

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SpoCo: Improv Comedy = Speaker Training

“I was at Rice in the early 2000s, when several engineering courses began working with Tracy Volz in the communications lab to integrate presentations into each syllabus. The first time you speak about something technical, it is not going to go well. It takes a lot of practice in order to achieve a smooth delivery. Embedding presentations in the engineering classes was immensely helpful because it forced us students to become more comfortable explaining complex ideas to varied audiences.

“In addition to the required course presentations, I was in Spontaneous Combustion, Rice’s best (only) improvisational comedy group. That really helped develop my communications skills and has helped make me a popular panel speaker at conferences. Improv training teaches you to say, ‘Yes, and…’ to build off of current contributions and create these really dynamic conversations.”

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When his company was purchased and challenged with a pivot, Bishop used many internal conversations to help shape Key Capture Energy's new roadmap.

Internal Communications Pave the Way for a Pivot

“Strong internal communications don’t begin with a perfect Powerpoint presentation. They begin with conversations and sketches. . Through an iterative process, we changed the road map based on feedback from people at every level of the company. Everyone bought into the plan and the major blocks were defined. The team leads are taking the individual pieces and running with them.”