Energypreneurs

If Australia tried to meet the storage in its long-term grid plan with home batteries alone, Glenn Drover worked out you would need to install about 1,000 Powerwall-sized batteries every working day from now until 2052. I did the sum the other way round: the same storage is already sitting in about 1.4 million electric cars. Glenn is company secretary of the Yarra Energy Foundation, which built wh...

In 2006 Grant McDowell had a shady roof in Marrickville and an idea: put the panels on a solar farm somewhere sunny, and match that energy to your house every half hour. He patented it in 2007. Eighteen years later, Plenitude in Italy is advertising it on TV as Adopt a Panel. Households pay €3 or €5 a month for a share of a solar farm in Sardinia, and their energy is free whenever they use power w...

Can you leave the grid? A couple of houses in the middle of Townsville already have. But Steve Blume, who has been banging on about load duration curves for forty years, thinks almost nobody will — because you can't buy 99.99% reliability at home at any sensible price. He calls the grid the Medicare of energy. We talk about why Australians started buying EVs the moment fuel prices jumped, why the...

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Western Australia sends almost a billion tonnes of iron ore offshore every year. Ray Wills wants it to leave as green iron instead — and to make that, he says, WA needs about 500 gigawatts of energy. Its grid today is around 10. That sounds insane. Ray's answer: it is only insane on an Australian scale. China installed more than 90 gigawatts of solar in a single month last year. So we talk about w...

Clearbot started because its founders watched people on big diesel boats trying to fish rubbish out of rivers with pool nets — polluting more than they were collecting, with a man half over the side reaching for the trash. So they built the electric version: remote-controlled, solar-charged boats that hold up to three tonnes of rubbish and water hyacinth, with no fuel, no engine noise and nobody l...

Australia now has around half a million home batteries, thanks to the federal Cheaper Home Batteries program. Almost none of them can be dispatched. Glenn Dahlenburg puts it at 90 to 95% that no retailer can control, because customers don't want anyone else touching their battery. Glenn spent twenty years at the edge of Queensland's grid, and most recently built Energy Queensland's ~$300 million b...

By the early 2030s, the aggregated battery capacity of Australia's EV fleet is expected to exceed Snowy Hydro 2.0. Not approach it — exceed it. And unlike Snowy, it's already being paid for, by people buying cars. Portia Rooney has spent three years working on bidirectional charging in Australia, and went to Europe and China on a Churchill Fellowship to see what everyone else is doing. Her focus i...

Simon English has spent 15 years inside Australia's electricity distribution networks, and he's been asking them an awkward question: what actually counts as an outage now? With hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, he reckons around a quarter of a million households no longer notice when the grid goes down. In the 2022 Brisbane floods his was the only house in his cul-de-sac with pow...

In the last year, Karim's 40-year IT company hired zero entry-level graduates. Every job junior coders used to do, AI does now. Karim and I studied high school together in Dhaka in the late 1970s. This episode I recorded driving him through Manila in a Tesla, and he joined the second half over a free one-hour video call from Dhaka. Neither one of those things existed outside Star Trek when we grad...

Disconnecting your house from the gas network costs you about $250. The gas companies say the real cost to them is $900. Somebody has to cover the difference, and Ben Potter has been watching the argument about who. Come and talk energy with me.  Ben spent a quarter of a century at the Australian Financial Review and has covered the energy transition for most of the last fifteen years. We get into...

Australian wholesale power can trade anywhere from minus $1,000 to $23,000 a megawatt-hour, and it re-prices every five minutes. Marija Petkovic models what happens to that market as ten gigawatts of batteries arrive in it. Come and talk energy with me. We get into why the spreads open as renewables come in and close again as storage is built — and why Marija thinks that's the market working exact...

Reah Sy has spent two decades building communications strategy for some of the world's largest institutions — ADB, the IMF, and multinational corporates. She's seen the shift from TV and print to social media, from reactive crisis comms to always-on reputation management, and now to an AI world where the line between real and fake is disappearing. We talk about what it takes to build a voice when...

Australia's electricity regulator just cut wholesale prices 10% — because solar and batteries have penetrated the grid so deeply that supply is outrunning demand. In Southeast Asia, people are still paying 80 US cents a kilowatt-hour for diesel-generated power, with 40% of some island populations having no electricity at all. Mark Lister has worked on clean energy transition across both worlds. We...

Chris Cooper co-founded Orchestra Technologies, software that models and operates commercial and industrial energy projects — solar, batteries, EV charging, virtual power plants. More than 35,000 projects have run through it. His argument is uncomfortable for anyone selling battery revenue. The speculative front-of-meter income — frequency services, wholesale arbitrage — gets cannibalised as more...

Is the electricity grid really becoming optional? In this episode, Sohail Hasnie explores how rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and vehicle-to-grid technology are changing the relationship between households and the traditional electricity grid. Using Australia, Hawaii and Pakistan as examples, the discussion examines self-consumption, battery storage, virtual energy networks, grid "death spirals...

For three and a half years we've charged our car from an ordinary power point. Two kilowatts — about a kettle. Thirty-two thousand kilometres, roughly four megawatt-hours, less electricity than one Australian house uses in a year. I set off this morning thinking seven-kilowatt home chargers should be restricted. By the end of the drive I'd changed my mind, and the reason is the three hours of free...

Matt Rennie said something that stopped me. The entire growth of Australia's grid — two to three gigawatts a year — is going onto rooftops, between 10am and 4pm. That leaves the other eighteen hours as a separate problem, and nobody has solved it yet. Then it got sharper. When his team asked a California control room what EV uptake was doing to the network, someone said it was like watching transf...

John Mather has worked in electricity markets in more than a dozen countries. He started at PowerGen in 1990, weeks before privatisation, when the UK was inventing the first electricity market anyone had built. He was in the room for the Longford gas crisis in Victoria. So when he says the two nuclear plants Britain is currently paying EDF to build will be white elephants by the time they commissi...

Many of the home batteries Australians are buying under the federal scheme won't pay for themselves. Jon Sibley says so plainly — and he's not against them. He designed rebate programs for a living, and bought one himself in 2017. If the numbers don't explain why 450,000 households have done this, something else does. We buy what our neighbours have, what governments put money behind, what becomes...

Everyone knows greenwashing. Helen Neal is more worried about its opposite — green hushing, where companies making real climate progress stay silent because the risk of getting a claim wrong now outweighs the benefit of talking at all. A 20-year communications specialist who once brought the first EVs into Europe, she's sharp on why "business sense" beats "moral duty," where greenwashing actually...

Bruce Nordman spent decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on demand flexibility. He returns with an argument that cuts against most of what the industry is building: the grid should stop at the meter. Everything behind it — solar, batteries, water heaters, EVs — belongs to the customer, coordinated by one mechanism: price. Not aggregators. Not cloud platforms. Not utilities micr...

One in three Australian homes now has solar on the roof. Nobody built a power station to make it happen — millions of households just did it themselves. That's the largest distributed energy build in history, and it started as a rounding error. In Brief 03, we distill hundreds of expert conversations into one argument: solar didn't win on policy or ideology. It won because it got cheap, then kept...

Back in 2018, Ozzeir Khan ran an experiment at the Asian Development Bank: could AI predict GDP better than the bank's PhD economists? It came remarkably close. The economists' verdict — if you can't explain it, it's no good, even if it's right. Eight years on, that argument is over. We talk about what generative AI is doing to document-centric institutions — development banks, law firms, investme...

Most energy retailers earn more the more you use. Octopus Energy built its business on the opposite idea — that a utility should help you spend less. Eric Davids, who leads US strategy, explains how: "plunge pricing" alerts at 50–70% off when renewables are abundant, EV tariffs that cut peak demand 42% and save around £650 a year, and the striking claim that a simple behavioural nudge, at scale, c...