Interchange Recharged

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...

In the four decades since congress passed the 1974 Trade Act, there have been 75 cases when U.S. industries used the law to argue that imports caused them injury. The list of aggrieved industries is wide-ranging: footwear, CB radios, mushrooms, lamb meat, clothespins and steel. And now, solar. Over the years, the International Trade Commission has ruled in favor of petitioners roughly half the tim...

We're having a bit of a moment for "resiliency" in the U.S. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have forced a conversation about climate resiliency for coastal communities. Meanwhile, the Energy Department has made grid reliability and resiliency central to its mission. This brings us to an important resiliency tool: microgrids. Microgrids became a major part of resiliency plans in New York, New Jersey, Co...

It's difficult to keep up with cost and performance trends for technologies like batteries and solar PV. It's particularly hard for regulators and policymakers, who often rely on outdated analysis. The latest example comes from California, where the California Independent System Operator is using three-year-old data on battery and solar costs as it evaluates alternatives to a natural gas peaker pl...

We are getting a clearer picture of the Energy Department's direction under Secretary Perry. In the four months after Perry requested special report on threats to baseload power plants, we saw an unprecedented number of prebuttals from groups worried that it would assist in President Trump's mission to revive the coal industry. We finally got the end result last week. While some environmental grou...

What makes Elon Musk tick? What will the grid look like in 2030? This week, we (re)answer both of those questions. We're featuring a couple of our favorite podcast segments for your summer listening enjoyment. First up, a 2015 Energy Gang interview with Ashlee Vance, a Bloomberg reporter and author of the book, Elon Musk: Tesla, Space X and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. Vance gives us an intim...

It’s been 10 years since Google shifted its attention from bits and bytes toward the world of therms and electrons. It started with a wide-ranging investment and R&D initiative, called RE See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

That nuclear revival that many people hoped for? It’s not looking so good. The latest blow came last week, when two South Carolina utilities backed away from a half-completed nuclear project in the state, after already spending $9 billion. Nuclear is struggling, particularly in the U.S. In the second half of the show, we'll talk with Jessica Lovering, the director of energy at the Breakthrough Ins...

While venture capitalists swoon over startups devoted to making people click on ads and stare at their phones longer, they’re decidedly less interested in solving more difficult real-world problems -- like transforming the energy sector. Yes, we’ve been talking about this downward trend for years now. And there are still a number of venture firms actively pursuing opportunities in energy decarboni...

We’re back in familiar territory on the podcast this week. Once again, we are revisiting Mark Jacobson’s famous -- some might say infamous -- 100% renewable energy scenario. This week, we’re rounding out our previous conversation with Professor Jacobson by turning to Dr. Christopher Clack, the lead author of a critique of Jacobson’s modeling, which was published in the Proceedings of the National...

In April, Energy Secretary Rick Perry requested an analysis on whether renewable energy poses a threat to baseload power plants and the broader health of the grid. Last week, an early draft of that highly-anticipated report was leaked. It concluded that renewables are not destabilizing the power sector. The leaked version pointed to a natural gas glut, aging power plant fleets and flattening deman...

Not long ago, energy nerds were pondering the feasibility of 20 percent renewables on the electric grid. We're long past that. Today, the conversation is centered around 100 percent renewables economy-wide -- thanks largely to a body of work developed by Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues. Since 2009, he's argued that 100 percent renewables is not only feasible, it's desirable. Bu...

Over the last 18 months, blockchain has evolved from an obscure concept in cryptocurrency circles into a mainstream corporate tool for "disrupting” entire industries. If you don’t have a blockchain strategy, you are not innovating hard enough. People love throwing around the term. But wait, what is it again? And why is it relevant to energy? In this week's episode, we'll get some context from GTM...

What happens when the most important market signal for energy storage gets stripped away virtually overnight? That’s what happened earlier this year when the regional transmission operator PJM put in place new rules for storage as a provider of frequency regulation. Between 2011 and 2015, hundreds of megawatts of storage were put in place to balance the grid in PJM territory. A strong market signa...

Utility executives poured into Boston from across the country this week for the Edison Electric Institute’s annual conference. They talked about everything from crazy national politics to rate design to artificial intelligence and the future of workers. We brought our recording gear and tracked down some top names in the industry. In this episode, we hear what's on the minds of utility executives....

There are two stories playing out in solar today. One of them is decidedly negative. The other is extraordinarily positive. And they're both unfolding at the exact same time. In this week's podcast, we detail the different stories playing out in solar. We'll weave reflective conversation together with excerpts from Shayle's keynote address at last month's Solar Summit. In part one, the brutal year...

Here we go again. America's solar industry is in the midst of yet another trade dispute. In late May, the U.S. government officially accepted Suniva's request to review the impact of imported cells and modules on domestic solar manufacturers. If trade officials request tariffs and minimum prices at the levels suggested by Suniva, it could set industry equipment pricing back to 2012 levels and inst...