Interchange Recharged

Coal has taken center stage publicly within the Trump Administration. But solar is the real innovation star behind the scenes.  This week, we're talking with Charlie Gay, the director of DOE's solar technologies office, about all the activity happening in the agency. We'll discuss the solar power plants of the future: advances in power electronics; the normalization of energy storage; new way...

Would electricity work during a zombie apocalypse? Does Elon Musk own Amazon or Uber? Are electric vehicles better for the environment? These are questions that people are asking Google — and we're going to answer them. This week on the  Interchange , what our collective search history tells us about our perception of Elon Musk, electric vehicles and zombies. Plus, we'll have the results...

Like fantasy sports? Listen to our deep decarbonization draft.  In this episode, Shayle and Stephen choose their rosters of nine technologies to decarbonize the global economy. The goal: find the best resource mix to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.  After they battle it out, listeners decide who has the best team of technologies. Vote in our Twitter poll . Here are...

This week on  The Interchange , a listener tries to convince his office building owner to install solar: "he's open to the idea, but we're struggling with the question of who pays," says Daniel from Menlo Park, California. This conundrum gets to the heart of C&I solar's complexity. We'll address the landlord-tenant split that plagues commercial solar — and the broad range of fin...

The solar industry is talking about battery storage almost as much as solar these days. On this week's  Interchange , we're addressing the shift toward storage in residential solar. Sunrun, a top installer, is at the forefront of the trend. In California, the company is adding storage to 20 percent of rooftop PV systems — and it believes other states will soon catch up.  Sunrun&nbsp...

Europe was once the world's biggest solar spender, until the region's PV market fell into a structural decline after subsidies were pulled back. Now Europe is on the upswing once again — this time, with far less government spending.  As European countries embrace competitive auctions, the Old World of solar is getting new attention. The region is expected to install 10-17 gigawatts a year thr...

Shell, the world’s sixth biggest oil and gas company, just published a future "sky" scenario that's getting a lot of attention.  That potential future: By 2050, renewables could overtake oil, gas and coal as the primary energy source; by that date, it could be “impossible” to purchase a new internal combustion car; and by 2070, there could be 10,000 carbon capture plants operating g...

Blockchain is largely untested compared to its potential. We know it’s likely transformative — we just don’t know exactly how. There are hundreds of potential applications in the electricity business. Which ones will win out? To kick off this week's show, Shayle, Scott and Stephen will examine different pathways for the technology. We'll answer: Of all the scenarios for the future of blockchain in...

Out of the 122 startups (and counting) that GTM Research is tracking in the energy-blockchain space, 22 are focused on peer-to-peer energy trading. Sharing electrons directly with peers sounds cool, but why do it in the first place? Would it help the grid? Will it be a catalyst for more distributed energy? Or is it just a novel application? In this episode of  The Interchange , we're explorin...

Gina McCarthy isn't happy watching Scott Pruitt dismantle the climate plan that she helped President Obama build. But she doesn't think Pruitt will be successful. "They've made a lot of announcements, they haven't made a lot of progress," she said in an interview on  The Interchange  podcast. McCarthy predicted that EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt will keep getting "slapped back" by legal...

Last year was a tough one for many U.S. solar companies. For the first time, America's solar market saw a decline in growth and solar employment. What gives? In this podcast, we're going to walk through the sector-specific factors that threw solar off its axis in 2017.  Some of the questions we address in this episode: Residential customer acquisition: why is it getting so much harder to find...

Since 2015, large corporations have signed deals for more than  7 gigawatts  of renewable energy.  As activity picks up, these companies are grappling with increasingly complex deals. They're no longer just thinking about renewable energy credits or average consumption over the year; they're now looking at matching wind, solar and hydro supply directly with their on-site demand in a...

Ryan Hanley is convinced that the distributed electric grid will create vastly more economic, security and societal value than today's centralized system. Over the course of his career as a civil engineer -- working at Pacific Gas & Electric, SolarCity, Tesla and now Advanced Microgrid Solutions -- Hanley has worked to understand and extract that value.  "A macro theme that...

In 2009, Sara Ross and her husband bought a dilapidated farmhouse in Massachusetts, intending to turn it into a net-zero home. Solar was an important part of the plan. And then came the price tag: $81,000 in cash. Their local solar installer had no financing options at that time. Ross cobbled the money together, but she became obsessed with the buying process: "How are other members of our family...

Nothing can stop solar's growth trajectory -- except maybe solar itself. This week, we have a deep discussion on the future of solar photovoltaics. Solar is exploding around the world, but have we grappled with the technology and market limitations that could stop the next order of magnitude in growth for PV? On this week's episode of The Interchange, Shayle Kann sits down with...

Nancy Pfund is perhaps the most recognizable venture capitalist in the clean energy space. Before she raised multi-hundred-million-dollar funds at her firm DBL Partners and made early investments in the likes of Tesla, SolarCity, Off Grid Electric, PowerLight, NEXTracker and Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Pfund had to start somewhere. "In college, I didn't know what a venture capitalist was -- I wa...

The Breakthrough Institute was founded on the idea that traditional environmentalists were wrong about how to protect the planet. Back in 2004, the co-founders called for ending the "politics of limits" pushed by environmental groups. Rather, they saw economic growth, technological innovation, and human ingenuity as the most important tools for environmental progress -- not necessarily r...

Blockchain is coming to the energy industry in a big way. We're at the beginning of a fierce hype cycle, when new startups are emerging weekly to tout their Initial Coin Offerings and tokenization platforms for energy trading. Utility executives are grappling with yet another distributed technology that proponents say will demolish the traditional power delivery business. Still having a...

The Trump Administration just imposed 30 percent tariffs on imported solar cells and modules. How much will it stunt solar growth in America? Will it spark a broader trade war? There are a lot of questions about the impact. In this podcast, we’re giving you the answers – or, as many answers we have, just a day after the decision. This week, we'll bring together our teams from  The Interc...

Grid nerds have spent the last few months whipped into a frenzy over Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s hastily-written plan to prop up aging coal plants in the name of grid resiliency. And then, last week, federal energy regulators rejected it. Secretary Perry’s team couldn’t come up with the basic legal argument needed for FERC to consider the proposal. The door is not fully closed, however. Regulato...

When President Trump took office, U.S. coal was in a state of decline. Between 2007 and 2016, coal production and consumption each fell by more than a third, and mining jobs fell from 125,000 to 75,000. Trump promised to reverse that trend. Did his deregulatory agenda work? In 2017, U.S. coal production grew by 6 percent. That increase, however, came from a factor unrelated to Trump Administration...

We spend most of our time talking about other companies. For our first podcast of the year, we're turning the tables and reflecting on GTM. In this edition of  Watt It Takes , Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch interviews GTM Co-Founder Scott Clavenna about the origins of our company, the challenges of being a startup in the cleantech world, and our recent acquisit...

Three months after Hurricane Maria, there are still large swaths of Puerto Rico that don’t have power. It took two months to get half the island’s residents power again -- and hundreds of thousands of people are still without grid access as the holidays approach. After a slow start, there are mainland crews there working day and night to restore electricity. They've been making progress, but the s...

Energy storage has arrived.  This year brought numerous record-breaking battery projects, dozens of acquisitions and partnerships, and over a dozen utility integrated resource plans that factor storage. Within a decade, the U.S. storage market could be 25 times bigger than it is today -- swamping natural gas peaker plants, and enabling a vast array of new grid applications. In this...

Something feels different. In the last two years, there’s been a material shift in the way renewable energy and other distributed resources are discussed. For so long, believers of wind, solar, batteries and microgrids have focused on targeted government support. But direct subsidies and mandates are diminishing in importance. One example: utility-scale solar in the U.S., which was once almost exc...