NY Times hires LA Times energy reporter Penn

Ivan Penn, who has covered the energy industry for the Los Angeles Times for the past two-and-a-half years, has been hired by the New York Times to cover the alternative energy industry.

Penn joined the LA Times in July 2015. He will remain based in Southern California for the New York Times.

Before joining the Los Angeles paper, he worked for the Tampa Bay Times for covering utilities, energy and consumer issues.

In 2014, Penn won a Gerald Loeb Award in the beat reporting category for stories on the proposed Levy County nuclear complex and the broken Crystal River nuclear plant.

Penn’s reporting included a three-month-long economic analysis that compared the project with a comparable natural gas facility, using thousands of pages of state and federal records. The reporting showed that a natural gas facility would be cheaper than the Levy plant over a 60-year period and under virtually any scenario. After the stories ran, Duke Energy permanently closed the Crystal River plant and halted construction on the Levy complex.

Penn has also won a 2014 National Headliner Award, Society of American Business Editors and Writers Awards and several Green Eyeshade Awards from the southeastern U.S. chapter for the Society of Professional Journalists. His honors also include selection as a 2005-2006 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2013 Knight boot camp fellow on energy and climate at MIT.

He is a University of Maryland graduate who began his career at the Miami Herald. He also worked at the Baltimore Sun.