As if CU and CSU didn’t have enough rivalry, next year they will have competing energy experts that have faced off before. And much like the usual result between CU and CSU on the football field, it’s the CU energy expert that whooped the CSU staffer.

In this case, we’re referring to CU’s new scholar of conservative thought, Steven Hayward, and CSU green energy “lobbyist” and former one-term governor Bill Ritter, who squared off in a debate on green energy’s economic potential in 2011.

On Hayward’s appointment, per the Boulder Daily Camera:

Hayward, a Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in Ohio, will begin his one-year appointment in the fall.

Hayward holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School. He has been the F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he was principal author and project director of the AEI’s “Energy and Environment Outlook.”

Hayward has been a visiting lecturer in the Government Department of Georgetown University and is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy. He has also served as a Bradley Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

The visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy is a three-year pilot program supported by private funds. More than 20 donors have raised $1 million to support the program.

Longtime Peak readers will remember that Hayward and Ritter faced each other in a nationally televised debate on the topic: “Clean energy can drive America’s economic recovery”, where Ritter got whooped worse than Cherry Creek’s swim team did against Missy Franklin. 

And that was before the collapse of Solyndra and Abound Solar, so that’s saying something.

We put together a brief highlight reel of that debate at the time. You check it out after the jump: