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A US federal court just ruled the IRS acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” manner on solar and wind safe harbor rules, shaking up project timelines for developers racing toward the July 4, 2026 deadline.  Meanwhile, at the Shanghai Solar Show (SNEC), energy storage claimed more floor space than solar panels for the first time,...

Solar & storage pioneers Solar Design Associates share 50 years of firsts on the Clean Power Hour. They put solar on the White House in 1979 and built the first community solar garden in America. Haskell Werlin and Steven Strong trace solar’s fall from $16 to $1 per watt, explain why the battery cost curve...

Community microgrids and virtual power plants are two of the most misunderstood concepts in clean energy, and the gap between them is where billions of dollars in grid value are being left on the table. Craig Lewis, Founder and CEO of the Clean Coalition, returns to The Clean Power Hour to break down how community-scale...

Energy resilience for homeowners is the mission behind Energy Access Innovations, a multi-brand clean energy company building an end-to-end ecosystem for solar and battery storage. Nicole Tomasin, Chief Commercial Officer at EAI, joins Tim Montague to explain how the company serves the consumers the rest of the industry ignores, including DIYers and rural markets. Battery...

Silicon solar is approaching a hard physical efficiency ceiling at 30%. Perovskite tandem solar is the only proven path through it. Joel Jean, CEO of Swift Solar, explains the technology, what the Meyer Burger acquisition brings, and where tandems sit on the road to commercial scale. After seven decades, silicon solar is closing in on...

A new report from Clean Energy Associates found that some solar module factories in their first year of production are hitting yield rates as low as 30%. That means 70% of modules coming off certain lines require rework before they ship. The finding applies directly to US manufacturers, most of which are still in early...

Community microgrids are functionally illegal in most of the United States, yet climate-driven outages are getting worse. Cameron Brooks of Think Microgrid explains why wires laws block resilient grid solutions and what it costs us to keep burying lines instead. Burying power lines costs $4 million per mile in Colorado and up to $9 million...

American solar manufacturing is getting a reboot. Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy and formerly of Shoals Technologies, sold 1 GW of product in Q1 of this year alone. In this episode, he walks Tim Montague through his vertically integrated factory in Portland, Tennessee, and names exactly why utility-scale solar equipment is quietly failing at...

Solar racking is one of the lowest-cost line items on a DG project and one of the highest-risk failure points. Kyle Sinclair, Co-founder and CEO of SDE (Sinclair Designs and Engineering), joins Tim Montague to explain how USA-made steel and 4-day commercial engineering turnarounds are solving the lead time and logistics failures that slow commercial...

LG Energy Solution plans to bring over 50 gigawatt hours of annual battery manufacturing capacity online in the US by the end of 2026 across five facilities (MI, IL, AZ, OH, GA). The company also projects a 15% cost reduction on its next-generation cells by 2028. Tim Montague and John Weaver dig into that story...

San Diego pays the second-highest electricity rates in the United States, trailing only Hawaii, and peak-hour pricing from 4 pm to 9 pm runs up to triple morning rates. In this episode, Tim Montague sits down with Rod Matthews, President of Brevian Energy, a North County San Diego developer focused on solar, battery storage, and...

Eighty-five towns across New York state sit under battery storage moratoriums right now, and two of three Westchester County towns where Joe Tassone Jr. built successful battery projects in 2020 have since banned the technology outright. In this episode, Tim Montague sits down with Joe Tassone Jr., partner at onCORE Origination, a site origination firm...

John Weaver calls California’s daytime pricing shift the story of the year. Battery demand has pushed wholesale solar prices from negative five cents per kilowatt hour up by 4.2 cents, adding around $10,833 of revenue to solar asset owners in a single five-minute period. Tim Montague and John Weaver break down what this shift means...

One large solar company reported less than 1% of its field employees were women. The solar industry overall sits at 25 to 30% women across all roles, but the construction side drops to an estimated 1 to 3%. Riley Neugebauer, founder of Solar for Women, joins Tim Montague on the Clean Power Hour to talk...

Solar modules once cost $8 per watt. Geoff Greenfield bought his first panels from a classified ad in Home Power magazine. Twenty-six years later, he leads an EPC division building 67 MW projects and negotiating 100 MW contracts. In this episode of The Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Greenfield to trace...

A 10-person, three-month estimating process. Compressed into 12 hours by a single AI agent. That is what Jesse Anglen, co-founder of Ruh AI, is building for construction and solar companies right now. In this episode of The Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Anglen to break down what a digital workforce actually...

US battery manufacturing capacity is set to hit 145 gigawatt hours by the end of 2026, enough to cover 100% of domestic grid storage demand. Tim Montague and John Weaver break down this milestone and seven more stories on this Clean Power Hour Live. This live episode covers battery manufacturing economics, solar panel technology shifts,...

Billion-dollar weather emergencies hit the United States every 19 days. In the 1980s, they came every 90 days. The grid is still running, but communities are paying the price when it fails. Elisa Wood, founder of Energy Changemakers and host of the Energy Changemakers podcast, joins Tim Montague on The Clean Power Hour to explain...