Name Stephen Probyn | Died 2008, Toronto, Canada | |
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(Alfred) Stephen Probyn (1951–2008) was one of North America's foremost authorities on green energy and the independent power industry. Probyn was best known as a financier, entrepreneur, regulatory expert, and advisor to governments on energy and environmental policy.
As founder and Chairman of The Probyn Group of companies, Stephen Probyn pioneered long-term financing and investment essential to the "greening" of large-scale electrical power development in North America, the Caribbean and Europe; launched the first public companies to specialize in renewable energy in Canada and the U.K.; and advanced public opinion and government policy favourable to a new era of sustainable energy technologies. In less than 20 years, he was responsible for the funding of some $3.5 billion in environmentally sound energy infrastructure — predominantly, windpower, biomass (wood waste), biogas (landfill gas) and hydroelectricity. He was also an early proponent of carbon markets, believing the trade in Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and other types of carbon offsets to be the most efficient means of distributing the "pain or gain" of environmental compliance. By 2003, as soon as the regulations for this new market were being put in place, one of the renewable energy companies under his leadership became one of the largest sellers of RECs in the United States.
During his early career on the staff of Britain's Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher and, then, of senior federal and provincial ministers in Canada, he was immersed in the carbon-based politico-economic issues of the 1970s and early 1980s. These issues ranged from the decline of England's coal industry and the global shock of the OPEC oil crisis, to Canada's National Energy Program, which he helped to dismantle.
In 1986, he left politics for the energy industry itself. He wanted to be part of the transformations in the carbon economy and power markets that he saw as essential for an electricity-dependent world to have both a sustainable environment and economic growth in the new millennium.
Stephen Probyn's strategic aim was a "green" industrial revolution, stimulated by consumer demand in a free market system to achieve global expansion and 21st Century growth. Among The Probyn Group "firsts" in power and the environment are:
Throughout his business career, Stephen Probyn remained an indefatigable public policy activist in speeches, interviews, television documentaries, newspaper columns and published articles. In addition to his numerous executive and corporate board appointments, he volunteered in public service and not-for-profit organizations in such positions as:
Writing in the late 1990s, in an unfinished book he called Green Capitalism, Stephen Probyn summed up fundamental beliefs that made him a true originator in the power sector and inspired his public service to the end of his life:
Real politics, politics that matter, are always about ideas … Every era has its own big ideas. … The theme of this book is that the environment is the next big idea … If you want to change the world, you must first change the way it thinks.