Factor This

Tell us what you think of the show! Clogged interconnection queues and an inefficient permitting process have the attention of federal policymakers. At last. But even big recent wins leave much work to be done. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Order 2023 is a positive first step, advocates say, despite its favoring utility interests. Siting guidelines for transmission and clean ener...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. This week’s episode features Reuters correspondent Nichola Groom, who sh...

Tell us what you think of the show! On a quest to find the cutting edge of the energy transition, Utah is unlikely to be the first stop. It may not even make the itinerary. A Republican governor and supermajority legislature lead the state. Rocky Mountain Power, a historically conservative, vertically integrated utility, supplies most of its electricity (and the biggest source is coal). But the Be...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. This week’s episode features Bloomberg energy and environmental policy r...

Tell us what you think of the show! In the year since the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged clean energy manufacturing, rarely does a week go by without a new solar factory notice. Rich incentives have led to unprecedented investments. But making solar panels is really hard. Not only does it require a lot of energy, but complicated global supply chains leave profit margins razor thin. And exist...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. This week’s episode features The Hill energy and environment reporter Ra...

Tell us what you think of the show! A simple mention of the word can send shivers down a developer's spine. Interconnection . It's the bogeyman of the energy transition. Long delays and steep upgrade costs can doom projects before they ever get off the ground. The interconnection slog may be the single biggest threat to national and local clean energy and climate goals. And the people cr...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. This week's episode features Reuters correspondent Valerie Volcovic...

Tell us what you think of the show! Kyle Udseth helped media giants like DIRECTV and Netflix craft their customer experiences. Now, he's working to scale a new national player in residential solar and storage with that same focus. After stints with Sunrun and Sunnova, Udseth founded Pineapple Energy believing that the crowded field of residential solar providers was still ripe with opportunit...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. This Week in Cleantech - July 28, 2023 1. Solar Manufacturing in the US...

Tell us what you think of the show! Battery storage deployment is surging to fill the gaps left by intermittent renewable energy resources. And, sometimes, those gaps extend days beyond what lithium-ion can handle. For the past six years, Form Energy has positioned itself as the company to solve for the multi-day challenge. What started with splashy renderings and nearly $1 billion in fundraising...

Tell us what you think of the show! This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.  This Week in Cleantech - July 21, 2023 1. How Biden's climate law...

Tell us what you think of the show! Green hydrogen could be a key tool to meet climate goals. It could also make things a lot worse, if we get this one critical step wrong. The U.S. is developing rules for green hydrogen incentives as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and the options are up for grabs. The Biden administration faces pressure from developers, trade groups, and environmentalists o...

Tell us what you think of the show! Amanda Li found herself in the thick of the arduous and disorganized project finance lifecycle. It was 2014, and she had been hired as Generate Capital's first employee. Li was responsible for all aspects of the deal: originating and underwriting, closing, portfolio management, you name it. Each stage had its own litany of documents, and required endless ho...

Tell us what you think of the show! The U.S. solar industry is primed for significant growth in the coming years, emboldened by big federal incentives and even bigger demand for renewable energy. But asset owners are increasingly talking about extreme weather, underperformance, and labor shortages as growing risks to solar’s growth prospects. These are some of the uncomfortable issues in oppositio...

Tell us what you think of the show! In the spring of 2016, Jeff Bishop was developing wind projects when he came across an analyst chart that caught his eye. Battery storage, the analysts forecasted, would follow a similar cost curve as solar. Costs would plummet as deployment ramped up to support a grid ever more dependent on intermittent renewable energy resources. Bishop quit his job by the sum...

Tell us what you think of the show! Praise for the solar industry's meteoric growth often shines on developers and their multi-gigawatt pipelines and portfolios. Seldom does the limelight extend to the construction crews putting steel in the ground. But clean electrons aren't generated by hope, targets, and schematics. It's the engineering, procurement, and construction firms that a...

Tell us what you think of the show! For more than 20 years, Adam Browning was solar's biggest cheerleader. There was 165 MW of interconnected solar in the U.S. in 2002 when Browning founded Vote Solar. The organization quickly evolved into the industry's preeminent advocacy group. When he stepped down as executive director in 2021, that figure stood at 122 GW. Today, Browning has his sig...

Tell us what you think of the show! Hurry up and wait. We launched the Factor This! podcast one year ago — May 9, 2022 — to share a fresh and introspective account of the Auxin Solar tariff petition. It's been a dark cloud hanging over the solar industry ever since—delaying projects and dampening enthusiasm around the Inflation Reduction Act. May 2023 , for better or worse, was supposed to re...

Tell us what you think of the show! Agrivoltaics -- solar PV paired with livestock or crops -- make for rich marketing materials. Good luck finding a developer brochure free of grazing sheep. But the project segment is far more than a kitschy niche. While the concept is well-understood in Europe, the U.S. is still finding its way with agrivoltaics. Early iterations lacked scalability due to added...

Tell us what you think of the show! A decarbonized grid, powered primarily by solar and wind, will require a lot of energy storage. Lithium-ion batteries, while the technology du jour, won't come close to solving the impending problem on their own. The long-duration energy storage dilemma is multi-pronged: today's market structures don't adequately reward energy storage of longer th...

Tell us what you think of the show! The news from Entergy Louisiana may have required a second reading. And a third. The utility wants to go (really) big on solar. Why now? Entergy Louisiana asked state regulators in March to approve 3 GW of new solar resources. That's on top of its request from a few weeks earlier for 225 MW of new solar, which would have nearly doubled the state's exis...

Tell us what you think of the show! More than a decade since John Berger founded Sunnova… the company is one of the largest residential solar and storage providers in the country. That would be enough for a lot of people. But success hasn't stopped Berger from pushing the envelope. He recognized early on in his career, from his time at Enron and then the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission,...

Tell us what you think of the show! A new era of cleantech innovation is here. And it’s a good time to take stock of what’s in the pipeline. Green hydrogen, circular economies, and next-gen batteries are at the heart of “Cleantech 2.0.” These innovations could take the clean economy to new heights when paired with fresh federal incentives for fighting climate change. Alok Sindher, a partner at the...

Tell us what you think of the show! How do you measure the impact of someone like Dan Shugar? He's been a mainstay in the solar industry since the early days. Before the solar coaster defined the twists and turns of the evolving industry. He led PowerLight to a $335 million dollar acquisition. Helped grow SunPower into the behemoth it is today. And was the CEO of solar module manufacturer Sol...