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Energy Changemakers Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Energy Changemakers
As the energy grid faces unprecedented changes, local energy solutions are increasingly needed. Hosted by Elisa Wood, an experienced energy journalist, The Energy Changemakers Podcast brings you into the heart of these transformations. Each episode features in-depth discussions with industry leaders pioneering the move toward a decentralized grid. From technological innovations to policy changes — discover actionable insights to help your company leverage emerging opportunities. Join us at The Energy Changemakers Podcast and be part of the conversation that shapes our energy future.
Latest Episodes
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- 1 weeks ago15 min
When the Grid Can’t Keep Up: A Partner Perspective Podcast
Data centers get most of the attention, but they aren’t the only facilities stuck waiting on the grid. Manufacturers, campuses and other large energy users face the same problem: utility connections that can take four years or more.In this episode, sponsored by Ameresco, Elisa Wood speaks with Greg Caplan, Senior Vice President - Federal and Utility Solutions Business Development at Ameresco. They discuss the new Ameresco and Energy Changemakers report, When the Grid Can’t Keep Up: Why Large-Load Developers Are Becoming Their Own Power Suppliers.Greg explains why power has moved from a line item on the budget to the thing that decides where and when a facility gets built. He describes how onsite generation can serve as a “bridge and a blend.” It powers a site and earns revenue years before the grid connection arrives. He also covers how to size a system that starts at 5 MW and grows to 300 MW without overbuilding, and what Ameresco’s work on military microgrids teaches about serving mission-critical commercial loads.
- 2 weeks ago38 min
How Data Center Backlash is changing the Energy Game
70% of Americans say they don't want a data center in their town. How did one of the best-funded industries in the world lose the story so badly, and what does it mean for local energy?Elisa Wood welcomes back Rich Miller, who has covered data centers for 25 years and founded Data Center Knowledge and Data Center Frontier. Rich now writes the Substack Data Center Richness. He explains how secrecy, NDAs, gigawatt-scale projects, and a wave of AI anxiety turned data centers into a national villain, and why governors who once cheered them on are now pulling back.Then the conversation turns to the opening for distributed energy. Hear how developers are shifting to government-backed sites, tent-style and modular builds, and smaller networks of 5 to 10 megawatt facilities. Learn how Sunrun and SPAN plan to put compute nodes in homes, how Google is funding virtual power plants with Voltus and PG&E, and why a startup called Resilience Energy wants hyperscalers to pay for rooftop solar and batteries. Rich also flags the biggest disconnect between the two industries: the rush toward on-site power.Subscribe free to the Energy Changemakers newsletter at energychangemakers.com.
- 4 weeks ago45 min
John Berger Is Back — and Betting on Solar’s Biggest Blind Spot.
John Berger has won big and lost big. He founded Sunnova out of his Houston apartment in 2012 and grew it into one of the largest residential solar companies in the country, before it ended in bankruptcy. Now he’s back as CEO of Otovo, betting that the next big solar business isn’t installing panels but keeping them running.In this far-ranging conversation with host Elisa Wood, Berger explains why installation and service are two different businesses, what it means for a solar system to be “orphaned,” and why he built a company that avoids heavy debt and policy exposure. He also shares why he wishes the Inflation Reduction Act had never been so politically visible, why data centers and oil producers are turning to behind-the-meter power, how Otovo is using AI to run service operations, and whether humanoid robots could soon be working in the field.Plus: Europe as a “sleeping giant,” balcony solar, and what eating glass has to do with entrepreneurship.Subscribe to the Energy Changemakers newsletter free at energychangemakers.com.
- Sep 30, 202658 min
The DER-Utility Standoff—and a Way Out
Utilities and distributed energy companies often talk past each other, and each side blames the other for the stalemate. Navneet Trivedi, co-founder and COO of Vrinda Inc., has spent more than three decades working with over 100 utilities in eight countries, and he calls himself an "energy transition realist." In this episode, host Elisa Wood talks with Navneet about why utilities behave the way they do, why he called New York's REV initiative flawed when everyone else was celebrating it, and his proposal to change the relationship. If batteries, microgrids, and other DERs make customers more resilient, Navneet asks, should responsibility for reliability, and the pay that comes with it, be shared between the grid and distributed resources? It's a candid conversation from someone who loves utilities and wants them to change. Check out Vrinda's latest white paper: https://energychangemakers.com/resource-library/grid-utilization/
- Sep 17, 202642 min
The Grid Isn’t Ready for Robots on Wheels
Autonomous vehicles are more than cars without drivers. They’re “robots on wheels” — and they will need enormous amounts of electricity at the grid edge.In this episode of the Energy Changemakers Podcast, host Elisa Wood talks with Mike Calise, CEO of EV charging company Tellus Power, about why the rise of autonomous fleets could make microgrids and distributed energy a strategic necessity.Calise sees two massive transformations colliding: the electrification and automation of transportation, and a power system already confronting soaring demand from AI and data centers. Microgrids could help bridge the two by generating and managing electricity close to where autonomous vehicles operate — while bidirectional charging allows the batteries inside those vehicles to become grid assets rather than simply new loads.The conversation explores a real-world example at Oakland Unified School District, where 74 electric school buses can act as dispatchable batteries, returning energy to buildings or the grid when the buses are sitting idle. It also looks ahead to robotaxis, delivery vehicles, drones and other forms of “physical AI” — and what it will take to power them as they scale.Calise calls it a collision between the multi-trillion-dollar energy and transportation industries. At the center of that collision may be one of distributed energy’s biggest opportunities yet: using microgrids, storage and vehicle-to-grid technology to power the machines emerging at the edge.
- Sep 2, 202641 min
The Case for Electric Cooperatives in the Microgrid Era
What if the model to solve many of our biggest electricity problems already exists—we've just never used it to its full capacity? In this episode, Keith Taylor, a UC Davis institutional economist, makes the case that America's 800-plus co-ops are a form of "latent community capacity" hiding in plain sight. Keith proposes federating cooperatives so that they compete in the microgrid era, and what a Lake Tahoe utility crisis reveals about who really gets served when data centers come knocking. It's a hopeful, practical conversation about doing "policy from below."Look beyond the market and the state. Drawing on Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's insight that "there are no panaceas," Keith argues we systematically overlook the civic economy — a third leg of the stool alongside the market and government — where cooperatives operate on logics of service at cost rather than profit.We already have energy democracy. The U.S. has more than 800 electric cooperatives serving roughly 42 million Americans, generating about $42 billion a year in revenue. Of those members, some 8,000 serve as elected board directors — a political economy of its own that's ready to be leveraged, not built from scratch.Co-ops are often more efficient, not less. Investor-owned utilities serve about 30 households per mile of line; the average co-op serves about 7 — yet co-ops deliver comparable rates. In the 1930s, IOUs claimed lines would cost $2,000/mile; co-ops innovated the cost down to under $650/mile. Keith sees the same pattern today in broadband, where a South Carolina co-op (Carolina Connect) is stringing fiber for ~$15,000/mile against incumbent telco estimates of $200,000–$300,000/mile.Small doesn't mean weak — they federate. Individual co-ops stay locally controlled but pool into federations for financing (CoBank, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation, and USDA's Rural Utilities Service together hold over $300 billion in assets), insurance (Federated Insurance), and white-label marketing (Touchstone). Keith's vision: a "microgrid federation" that makes co-ops a trusted vendor for communities building distributed energy.The Tahoe warning. A pocket of ~50,000 Californians around Lake Tahoe is served by the Nevada grid — and as Nevada's data-center demand grows, that region may be dropped in about 18 months, facing spot-market rates and rolling blackouts. It's a concrete example of customers losing out to data centers, and of why platforming alternative institutional models matters.Policy parity works. Co-ops have lagged on renewables largely because of incentive structures — they were historically excluded from renewable subsidies and often exempt from state renewable portfolio standards. When the Inflation Reduction Act's "direct pay" provision finally gave them parity with IOUs, co-ops rapidly expanded their renewable and distributed-energy portfolios.Start local, start now. Keith's call to action is bottom-up: engage your co-op's board and member-relations staff, join a member advisory committee, or run for the board. Where there's no co-op, look to public utility districts, community choice aggregators, or form a new association. As Ostrom put it: "We can, so we must."
- Aug 19, 202643 min
The Wild, Weird & Wonderful History of Solar
Most people in solar assume the industry started with the trade-show boom of 2006–2007. It didn't. It started decades earlier, in the logged-over hills of Humboldt County, California, where back-to-the-land hippies were hacking a self-sufficient life out of the wilderness — powering their homes off car batteries, micro-hydro, and windmills just so they could keep the lights on and play a little music.Host Elisa Wood sits down with filmmakers Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, whose two-hour documentary Solar Roots: The Pioneers of PV traces how an expensive military, space, and petrochemical technology found its way into the hands of ordinary people — and, in doing so, became a real industry. It's a story of catalog salesmen, off-grid homesteaders, cannabis-funded land deals, conservative ranchers won over one panel at a time, and a scrappy magazine that connected them all. Along the way, Jeff and Jason make the case for why solar has already won the price war, why the remaining fight is cultural, and why this history had to be captured now, while its pioneers are still here to tell it.
- Aug 5, 202642 min
How Customers Are Reshaping the Grid
From homeowners to businesses to AI data centers, customers are investing in distributed energy for their own reasons — and collectively rewiring how the entire electric system evolves. Recorded live to open The Great Transformation conference in Bend, Oregon, host Elisa Wood sits down with three people who aren’t just watching this shift — they’re shaping it: Cameron Brooks of Think Microgrid, Greg Castle of Schneider Electric, and Mike Grenier of Elexity.The panel digs into the data center power boom (a reported 114 GW of behind-the-meter generation in the pipeline — roughly 20% of U.S. peak load), why falling battery prices are flipping "two yeses out of ten" into "eight," the "Frankenstein microgrid" phenomenon, and how flexible interconnection deals in New Jersey and the Google–Voltus capacity agreement point toward a grid that’s built from the outside in. It’s a candid, optimistic conversation about ownership, resilience, and scaling what already works.
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About Energy Changemakers Podcast
As the energy grid faces unprecedented changes, local energy solutions are increasingly needed. Hosted by Elisa Wood, an experienced energy journalist, The Energy Changemakers Podcast brings you into the heart of these transformations. Each episode features in-depth discussions with industry leaders pioneering the move toward a decentralized grid. From technological innovations to policy changes — discover actionable insights to help your company leverage emerging opportunities. Join us at The Energy Changemakers Podcast and be part of the conversation that shapes our energy future.
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