Rob Bishop is an energy efficiency consultant, researcher, teacher and advocate. He has been over forty years of experience, and has been named “Hall of Fame” and Life Member of Carbon and Energy Professionals New Zaland (ref).
There is abelief that 10,000 hours of experience are needed to gain expertise in a subject area . Rob has over 60,000 hours of increasing experience in energy efficiency.
Rob was a mathematics prodigy from a young age (for example demonstrating a new type of complex number system, using LN(-1) instead of SQRT(-1) as the complex operator). In high school, he was awarded the prizes for outstanding physics student as well as outstanding math student, and recorded the highest semester grade average ever achieved at the school. He was awarded a National Merit Scholarship to his choice of university,
and attended and graduated from Harvey Mudd College (rated #1 U.S. undergraduate technical university) “with distinction”.
Subsequently, he attended Stanford University as a Thermosciences Fellow, where he received his Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering at the age of 22. Graduate studies were focused on heat transfer and thermodynamics, and solar heating systems.
Since then he has worked in either research or engineering practice in energy efficiency, building science, or renewable energy. In 1985 he moved to New Zealand, and in 1990 he was recruited to be a Research Scholar at Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado USA, working with Amory Lovins documenting how to deliver deep (~90%) energy savings, cost effectively, in cooling, air-handling, and heating systems.
In 1993, he and his wife Shelley Hood incorporated Energy Solutions Ltd. in Wellington, New Zealand. This has delivered energy saving projects, energy audits, energy management and energy research services since then. Rob has delivered many types of energy mangement training, sharing the best information with hundreds of students and practitioners across New Zealand.