Interchange Recharged

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...

Tesla built the world's biggest lithium-ion battery ahead of schedule. It's an important milestone for the technology, and Tesla itself.  But is it coming at a cost to smaller players in the industry? This week on The Interchange, we'll talk about how Tesla's battery supply constraints are hitting downstream installers and developers. We'll bring GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector on the show to...

Dan Shugar lives, breathes and bleeds solar.  "If you cut my wrist, pure silicon comes out," he exclaimed in an interview with Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch, as part of the  Watt It Takes interview series .  This week, Shugar steps behind the microphone to talk about turning his passion for PV into deals and acquisitions worth over $1 billion. Shugar has a sto...

We've spent a lot more time lately looking at the structure of U.S. power markets. Why? Because they're about to get shaken up. It's already begun. In this episode, we'll look at how renewables are upending wholesale power markets today -- and what we can do about it. We'll examine the issue from a few different angles. How the growth of renewables is depressing power prices: Wood Mackenzie's Praj...

This week: a conversation with Andrew Birch, the co-founder and CEO of Sungevity. For those who’ve been following the wild ride in solar, you’re going to want to listen to this conversation. Sungevity was once one of the biggest residential solar installers in the U.S. – until it filed for bankruptcy protection at the beginning of the year. In this interview, Andrew Birch talks candidly about how...

Still looking for a scary costume for this Halloween? Here's a terrifying idea: Dress up like an "attack vector" or an "advanced persistent threat." This week's topic of conversation is a combination disaster movie and cat-and-mouse political thriller -- encompassing extreme weather, hacking and political espionage. We're talking security threats to the electric grid with  Dr. Paul Stockton ,...

Two unproven startups just raised a combined $65 million to test out real-world use cases of blockchain in energy: Grid+ and Power Ledger. Blockchain for energy is starting to get traction, and there's actual money flowing into the space. So what do these companies actually do?  In this episode, Shayle Kann talks with Scott Clavenna about the ideas, strategies and risks behind each of these s...

This week, we’re unveiling a new podcast collaboration between Greentech Media and Powerhouse, called "Watt it Takes." Watt It Takes is produced and recorded live at Powerhouse, a cleantech incubator and seed fund in Oakland, CA. Each month, a founder of a top clean energy company shares the personal story behind the company they’ve built. Our first episode features Dick Swanson, founder, and form...

Thought that controversial grid resiliency report ordered by Energy Secretary Rick Perry was only an intellectual exercise? It didn't take long for the Department of Energy to put it into action -- in exactly the way that critics feared when the report was first announced. Last week, Perry asked federal energy regulators to consider new rules that would value coal and nuclear plants with 90 days o...

There’s a paradox in energy. While new technologies are accelerating faster than ever, the adoption of those technologies by incumbents remains slow. This presents a captivity problem for startups, particularly in electricity. They need incumbent utilities to reach customers and integrate new technologies at the grid edge –- but this reliance significantly slows progress, creates tension, and pote...