Chris Grea­cen has worked on pol­i­cy and hands-on imple­men­ta­tion of renew­able ener­gy from vil­lage to gov­ern­ment lev­els. As co-direc­tor of the non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion Palang Thai he helped draft Thai­land’s Very Small Pow­er Pro­duc­er (VSPP) poli­cies, which account for over 1200 MW of renew­able ener­gy on-line and addi­tion­al 3700 MW with signed PPAs as of March 2012. He con­duct­ed dozens of stud­ies on renew­able ener­gy and pow­er sec­tor plan­ning and gov­er­nance in Thai­land, includ­ing a gov­ern­ment-com­mis­sioned study that helped shape Thailand’s design of its feed-in tar­iff program.

As a World Bank con­sul­tant he has worked since 2008 with the Tan­zan­ian Ener­gy Water Util­i­ties Reg­u­la­to­ry Author­i­ty (EWURA) to draft guide­lines and rules for Tanzania’s Small Pow­er Pro­duc­er (SPP) pro­gram, which stream­lines deploy­ment of renew­able ener­gy mini-grids for rur­al elec­tri­fi­ca­tion and grid-con­nect­ed renew­able ener­gy to aug­ment Tan­za­ni­a’s nation­al grid.

With the Bor­der Green Ener­gy Team (BGET) he has led instal­la­tion of 13 pico-hydropow­er projects with remote com­mu­ni­ties in the Thai-Bur­ma bor­der area, as well as lead­ing the con­struc­tion of dozens of solar elec­tric sys­tems for remote med­ical clin­ics in east­ern Bur­ma. His PhD dis­ser­ta­tion from the Ener­gy and Resources Group (ERG) at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia at Berke­ley focused on micro-hydro­elec­tric­i­ty in rur­al Thai­land. He also has a BA in Physics from Reed Col­lege with a the­sis on solar pho­to­volta­ic semi­con­duc­tor physics. He has worked on renew­able ener­gy projects in Nepal, India, Bur­ma, Cam­bo­dia, Chi­na, Guatemala, Microne­sia, North Korea, Tibet, Van­u­atu, Viet­nam, and on Native Amer­i­can reservations.