Energy Changemakers Podcast

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.

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.

Wildfires, record heat, and a grid under more strain than ever have turned “resilience” from a buzzword into one of the fastest-growing categories in energy technology. Host Elisa Wood talks with Julia Hamm — who spent nearly 20 years growing the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) before becoming a partner at The Ad Hoc Group — about how resilience became its own market, the AI cameras and wildfire-spread software utilities are deploying today, why microgrids are still an emerging (not mainstream) resilience play, and why the length of the utility sales cycle remains startups' biggest obstacle. They also discuss why Julia launched the Power Resilience Forum to keep this conversation from being crowded out by the AI and data-center load-growth story dominating the industry right now.

Plug-in solar — widely known as “balcony solar” — is one of the fastest-growing entry points into clean energy, and it is finally gaining a legal foothold in the United States. In this episode, host Elisa Wood talks with Stephan Scherer, co-founder and CEO of CraftStrom, who spent roughly a decade in the European plug-in solar market before bringing the technology to the U.S.
The conversation unpacks what plug-in solar actually is, how small systems can offset a meaningful chunk of a household's electricity bill for a fraction of rooftop-solar costs, and why the technology sidesteps the interconnection agreements and “soft costs” that make traditional residential solar expensive. Scherer addresses the two big safety debates head-on — line-worker protection and grid export — and explains the certifications, anti-islanding shutoffs, and “zero-export” approaches that underpin safe deployment.
They also explore the technical breakthroughs that made plug-in solar practical (lightweight bendable panels, integrated Wi-Fi monitoring, simplified installation), the economics and payback math, the addition of plug-in batteries and virtual power plants, and the wave of state laws — now five enacted — reshaping access for homeowners and renters alike.

The grid is straining under AI-driven demand, aging infrastructure, and climate-fueled weather events — and Robert W. Cross believes the answers already exist. The harder question is whether the industry can come together to deploy them. In this episode, host Elisa Wood talks with Cross, founder of Cross Consulting and principal at the cleantech design studio Outfit, about why distributed energy may be the relief valve utilities need, why storytelling is the industry's most underrated tool, and what he's building at The Great Transformation 2026, a curated, single-track summit in Bend, Oregon (July 8–10).
They dig into the collision between an "irresistible force" — distributed energy resources — and the "immovable object" of the legacy utility model, the gap between feasibility and bankability, and why Cross is intentionally designing his event to create constructive professional conflict. It's a candid conversation about scale, finance, policy whiplash, and the case for getting builders, bankers, regulators, and dreamers into the same room.
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