Clean Power Hour

Rising electricity demand and prolonged outages are pushing the Tennessee Valley to rethink how it builds and operates the grid. Where do solar, batteries, and community-scale microgrids fit? In episode 374 of the Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague welcomes Gil Hough, Executive Director of the Tennessee Solar Energy Industries Association (TenneSEIA), for a conversation following the organization’s 20...

Solar and storage are moving into a new phase, and this week's Clean Power Hour Live covers the technologies, policies, and market shifts shaping that transition. Tim Montague and John Weaver break down the latest developments across solar, batteries, wind, grid infrastructure, and electrification. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has signed legislation supporting virtual power plants and...

A battery only earns its keep when it can connect to the grid and get to work. What does it take to turn better battery technology into a viable energy project? In episode 373 of the Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague speaks with Dr. Simon Engelke, founder of Battery Associates and Battery MBA and host of the Battery Insiders podcast. They explore the technology, economics, and expertise needed to sca...

Grid storage is growing faster than the industry expected. EVs accounted for more than 70% of global battery deployment in 2025, down from almost 80% in 2024, according to the IEA.  On this CPH Live, Tim Montague and John Weaver unpack stationary battery storage growth and follow the batteries to two places: 230 GW of data center interconnection requests and a solar plus storage copper mine in Con...

How do you take a 365 kW commercial solar project from a customer conversation to steel in the ground? In this episode of the Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague goes behind the scenes of a 365 kW commercial solar project for Griffin Beverage in West Branch, Michigan, with Jordan Rhyne of Countryside Energy and Kyle Sinclair of Sinclair Designs & Engineering. The project brought together domestic-c...

What if your solar system could earn far more by powering AI compute than by selling electricity back to the grid?   In this episode of Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague talks with Karl Andersen, founder and CEO of Lektra, about a different approach to the growing power demands of AI. Lektra places GPU servers alongside distributed energy resources such as solar and batteries, turning homes, business...

America may need more than 230 GW of new power capacity through 2030. Regulated utilities are expected to deliver only about 93 GW. So where does the rest come from? Tim Montague takes that question to Sylvia Leyva Martinez, Director of North America Utility-Scale Solar at Wood Mackenzie, on a crossover with her show Interchange Recharged. They work the gap from opposite ends of the industry: util...

G&W Electric's vanadium flow + flywheel microgrid matched a full year of frequency regulation revenue in under three months  Vanadium flow batteries rarely anchor a commercial microgrid, but G&W Electric built one around a solar, battery, and flywheel system at its Bolingbrook, Illinois headquarters. John Gounaris, VP of Global Marketing, and John Pederson, Principal Staff Engineer an...

Speed to power: Bala Ramamurthy of Critical Loop on cutting grid connection from years to days with modular microgrids.  Speed to power is the problem Critical Loop was built to solve. Bala Ramamurthy is the founder and CEO of Critical Loop, a California modular microgrid company that brings megawatts to industrial facilities and data centers when a utility interconnection is years away. Before en...

Section 232 tariffs are reshaping solar module pricing across the United States. Tim Montague and co-host John Weaver sit down with returning guest Chris Lettman, a solar module supply chain and technology expert with Imperial Star Solar.  Chris explains why the new policy works as a price floor, not a simple tariff, setting a minimum import price plus a 15 percent tax on cells, wafers, and module...

Clean energy company culture is what separates good solar EPCs from great ones, and Mynt CEO Derek Hansen has a name for how he builds it: inspire, empower, support. Company culture in the solar and storage industry gets talked about far less than it should, and this episode makes the case for why that needs to change.  Derek Hansen is CEO and co-founder of Mynt, a vertically integrated developmen...

Solar asset management inside a 35-year ownership model: CJ Colavito and Jay Smith of Standard Solar explain what it actually takes to own distributed generation projects for decades, from evaluating tracker and inverter reliability to redesigning inverter specs around eventual failure. In this episode of Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague sits down with CJ Colavito, General Manager of Integrated Proj...

The Federal Communications Commission's new ban on foreign-produced solar inverters left the industry without clear answers on warehoused stock, firmware updates, and grid cybersecurity risk.  On this episode of The Clean Power Hour Live, hosts Tim Montague and John Weaver break down the foreign inverter ban alongside new Section 232 solar tariffs that set a 38 cent per watt minimum price on...

Chris Koczaja grew LightWave Solar to 30 million dollars by refusing to chase every deal. This is the discipline that got him there. Chris Koczaja is the CEO of LightWave Solar, a residential and commercial solar and storage installer in Nashville, Tennessee, now in its 20th year in business.  In this conversation, Tim Montague asks Koczaja what actually separates a good solar company from a great...

Enhanced rock weathering pulls carbon dioxide from the air using crushed rock. Jim Mann, CEO and founder of Undo, explains how the process works and why the technology scales fast. Undo turns rock dust into permanent carbon storage and sells credits to Microsoft and British Airways at $350 a ton, a price Mann expects to halve within years. The atmosphere holds 1.7 trillion tons of legacy CO2, and...

Dual-use solar financing in action: Sunrise Solar's Richard Stoltzfus built a 700 kW behind-the-meter array for Harbor Sales Company. The build stacks a USDA REAP grant with a Maryland MEA grant and drives the customer's levelized energy cost to near zero. A 700 kW behind-the-meter solar array now offsets 70 percent of the electric load at Harbor Sales Company, a plywood and sign-panel d...

Georgia is the second-largest data center market in the country, and its grid is straining under load growth no one predicted five years ago. Michael Chanin, CEO of Cherry Street Energy, joins Tim to break down how behind-the-meter solar and storage are stepping in, why utilities need private capital to keep rates in check, and what a multi-gigawatt data center outside Savannah means for the regio...

The U.S. needs 400 GW of new capacity over the next two decades. Michael Grasso, CEO and founder of Grid Rails, tells Tim Montague that roughly twice that much flexible capacity is already plugged in, and explains why only 20% of eligible devices are enrolled in virtual power plant programs today. Data centers, EVs, heat pumps, and new construction are pushing U.S. electricity demand up by roughly...

Wildfire smoke from Canada cut solar production across New England by as much as 40 percent, according to ISO New England, a loss of 2,500 megawatts at peak hours compared to the forecast.  Tim Montague and John Weaver dig into that data, including John's own project numbers, on the Clean Power Hour Live. They also cover a massive BYD battery storage deal in Abu Dhabi, a new gas car ban in Ch...

Power generation is changing fast. As utilities struggle with interconnection delays and growing electricity demand, businesses are looking for faster, more reliable ways to secure power. In this episode of Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague sits down with Walt Jordan, Chief Revenue Officer at dGEN Energy Partners, to explore one of the least talked-about emerging technologies in distributed energy: l...

America's electric grid wasn't built for AI, electric vehicles, battery storage, or the rapid growth of renewable energy. So how do we modernize a system that was built and started in the late 1800s and early 1900s, more than a century ago? In this episode of Clean Power Hour, Tim Montague sits down with Zaid Ashai, CEO of Nexamp, the nation's largest community solar developer, to d...

What does it take to turn next-generation solar technology into a bankable commercial product? Swift Solar is closing the U.S. heterojunction and perovskite tandem solar cell gap. Dr. Gunter Erfurt, managing director at Swift Solar and former Meyer Burger CEO, joins Tim Montague and John Weaver to explain why U.S. module capacity sits near 50 gigawatts while domestic cell capacity trails at 5 giga...

Community microgrids saved lives during a PG&E shutoff in Humboldt County. Lisa Cohn of Microgrid Knowledge has tracked every project getting built in America right now. She tells you what separates the ones that succeed from the ones that fail, and what you need to know before entering this market. Community microgrids are among the fastest-growing segments in solar and storage, and among the...

Solar carport installation costs can swing by 12 cents per watt before a single panel goes up. Kyle Sinclair, CEO and co-founder of SDE (Sinclair Designs and Engineering), James Strizki, Project Manager and CFO of GenMounts and Renewable Energy Holdings, and Matt Boyce, a PE licensed in 27 states and Principal Engineer at Engineered Solutions, join Tim Montague to break down exactly how carport pr...

CATL unveiled its TENER Sodium energy storage system at Intersolar Europe in Munich, rated for 15,000 cycles to 70 percent state of health at room temperature. CATL frames that as a 25 to 30 year service life, and it takes only 34 modules to stand up a one gigawatt-hour site. That single specification changes how commercial storage professionals price, propose, and finance battery projects. Tim Mo...