SunCast

A strong brand should do more than make your company recognizable. It should help your people understand what the company stands for, who it serves, and how to make better decisions as the business grows. Aimee Tuck has spent more than 25 years helping clean energy companies do exactly that. She is the founder of Corbae Creative and author of Powerful Branding, a remarkably practical workbook that...

What if the difference between winning support and losing your audience isn’t better data, but knowing how to tell the story? In this episode, the tables are turned once again. SunCast host Nico Johnson is the guest this time, joining as a featured communications expert alongside some of the industry’s most respected voices in policy and strategic communications. Recorded live at the CHESSA Energi...

After more than two decades working in clean energy and 11 years behind the mic at SunCast, Nico Johnson has had a front-row seat to an industry that looks radically different from the one he entered. For this anniversary episode, Nico is joined by his business partner, Josh Beck , who shares the load in both questions and responses as they reflect on what changed, what surprised them, and what th...

Could the land beneath your solar project help finance the next one, without giving up equity in your company? Laura Pagliarulo, CEO and co-founder of SolaREIT™, returns to SunCast to share what six years of financing solar and battery real estate have taught her about how developers grow without overextending themselves. Her company has financed real estate beneath projects representing nearly $8...

If robotic automation is becoming inevitable in utility-scale solar, where does that thesis run into the realities of actually building a power plant? That's the question behind today’s episode. We start with Nick de Vries, CTO of Silicon Ranch , to ask what an owner actually wants from automation. Nick's answer sets the standard: the technology matters only if it improves safety, quality, repeata...

What does it actually take to build a company someone else eventually wants to buy? For Jason Kaminsky and kWh Analytics, the answer was 11 years, three major pivots, a transition from COO to CEO, difficult layoffs, plenty of capital, and learning when to stop chasing good ideas so the company could execute on the right one. Jason returns to SunCast after kWh Analytics' acquisition by Beazley to u...

Data centers need enormous amounts of power, and apparently they need it fast . What if some of the outrageous sums of money they’re willing to spend to get that power went directly toward putting solar and batteries on homes and businesses? That’s the idea Barry Cinnamon wants to pressure-test in today’s Tactical Tuesday on SunCast. Last week, Barry compared the dramatically different costs of so...

Buildings consume an enormous amount of energy. We have plenty of technologies that could make them perform better. So why is the real estate industry often so slow to adopt them? Dermot Sweeny has spent decades confronting that problem from the architect’s side. When he couldn’t convince clients to try a radically different approach to office design, he bought an older building and proved it hims...

In Australia, residential solar and storage can be installed for about $2 a watt. In the U.S., a comparable system can cost more than twice that. Why? Barry Cinnamon was curious enough to go to Australia and investigate. What he found challenges the simple explanation that America's solar price gap comes down to permitting, labor, and other “soft costs.” Australia offers a useful counterfactual: w...

When Charlotte Meerstadt put solar on her Amsterdam home, the numbers made sense. Then Charlotte moved to the U.S. and rented out the apartment. The solar panels kept doing exactly what they were supposed to do: producing cheap, clean power. But, while the tenant received the lower utility bill, Charlotte still owned the panels and had no clear way to capture the savings her asset was creating. Th...

Germany has turned plug-in solar from a fringe idea into a mainstream energy product found in millions of homes. And the biggest lessons for the U.S. aren't really about solar panels. They're about making solar easier. In this Tactical Tuesday, CraftStrom Co-Founder and CEO Stephan Scherer shares what nearly a decade in the European plug-in solar market taught him about how a new energy category a...

The best technology does not always win. Sass Peress has spent nearly four decades learning why. Since entering solar in 1988, he has built companies, introduced new technologies, sold hundreds of thousands of solar products, backed ideas that worked, backed at least one that did not, and learned firsthand what separates an exciting invention from something customers will actually buy. One of his...

While many solar companies are fighting to stay afloat, Exact Solar is flying. After growing 23% and then 50% in the previous two years, the Pennsylvania installer says it's up another 73% so far this year. That kind of growth in this market raises an obvious question: what are they doing differently? Aaron Nichols joins Nico once more to unpack the answer, and it isn't just one clever marketing t...

America needs more power. Data centers are accelerating demand, utilities are planning billions of dollars in new infrastructure, and households will ultimately help pay for much of it. But what if we invested some of that money in the households themselves? Ari Matusiak, co-founder and CEO of Rewiring America, makes the case that homes can become a meaningful part of America’s energy infrastructu...

En Latinoamérica, la oportunidad no siempre está donde se anuncia más capacidad, sino donde existe una combinación real de demanda, capital comprometido y capacidad de ejecución. Nico Johnson conversa con Juan Manuel Carbajosa, Director de Ventas para Latinoamérica de Shoals Technologies, y Mario Gomez, Presidente de TCI GECOMP. Juntos aportan dos perspectivas complementarias para entender el merc...

Good companies don't automatically get noticed. And doing good work isn't enough to ensure that customers, investors, journalists, communities, or increasingly AI systems understand why your company matters. Melissa Baldwin has spent more than 20 years exclusively in energy and climate communications. As Senior Vice President at Tigercomm and host of the Scaling Clean podcast, she's had a front-ro...

Solar construction has always depended on experienced crews adapting to whatever the jobsite throws at them. But what happens when the industry needs to build more projects than its best crews can possibly cover? Cody Houser has spent much of his career on the other side of that problem. Before becoming Director of EPC and Constructability at FTC Solar , he spent eight years running his own constr...

Australia has spent years ahead of many markets on the distributed solar adoption curve. Now it is giving the rest of us an early look at what happens when millions of those systems move from installation into decades of ownership, maintenance, repair, replacement, and eventually recycling. Daniel Lazarus, co-founder and CEO of Industrias Services Group, has built his company around that second ac...

Utilities used to plan around relatively predictable demand. That assumption is disappearing. In this opening keynote from Intersolar & Energy Storage North America Midwest, Nico Johnson sits down with 3 utility executives; Bria Shea of Xcel Energy, Andy Plenge of ComEd, and Brice Sheriff of Ameren Illinois to examine what happens when electricity demand can arrive faster than the infrastructu...

Pepper Construction has survived the Great Depression, World War II, multiple recessions, and a global pandemic. As the family business approaches its 100th anniversary, its next challenge is not simply surviving another disruption. It is pursuing new opportunities without losing the culture, discipline, and sense of responsibility that carried it this far. Jake Pepper is part of the fourth genera...

After building and selling multiple companies, Marc Lopata has learned that the decisions that shape a business are rarely the ones people celebrate. They're the small decisions, made consistently over time, that ultimately determine whether a company lasts. In this conversation, Marc shares the operating philosophy he's developed through decades of building companies, leading teams, and mentoring...

We know how to build power. Every day, the clean energy industry builds more of it. But there's another kind of power that's far more difficult to generate—and arguably even more important. The kind that determines whether an industry continues to grow regardless of who's in office. The kind that shapes public opinion before a project is ever proposed. The kind that makes policymakers think twice...

Few people have had a front-row seat to the evolution of the modern solar industry quite like Jeff Spies. Over four decades, Jeff has helped shape the industry as an engineer, educator, trainer, and founder of Planet Plan Sets, working alongside installers and EPCs to solve the technical and permitting challenges behind thousands of solar and storage projects. That perspective gives him a unique v...

Plug-in solar has the potential to change far more than how or where we install solar panels. I believe it could fundamentally change who gets to participate in the energy transition. I recently sat down with Stephan Scherer, Co-Founder and CEO of CraftStrom, who's spent nearly a decade helping pioneer the plug-in solar market—first in Europe, and now here in the United States. Stephan didn't simp...

The most expensive mistakes on a solar project usually aren't made during the install. They're made long before anyone arrives on site. Greg Smith has spent nearly two decades helping installers avoid those mistakes. As one of the solar industry's most respected trainers and educators, and the author of a practical guide to energy storage, he's helped thousands of professionals understand what it...