PODCAST · business
Energypreneurs
by Sohail Hasnie
Energypreneurs is a podcast that brings solar power, electric vehicles and battery technologies to young entrepreneurs. Sohail Hasnie, our host, is a firm believer that the solution to climate change lies in these technologies, which will also fundamentally change the way we think about electricity and transportation—on road, on water and even on air.Over the last 35 years, Sohail has applied technology and innovation in many large infrastructure projects across Australasia. As a staff of the Asian Development Bank since 2001, he has developed large investment projects with solar power, battery, and electric vehicles across Asia.
Episodes
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Why Did Pakistan's Citizens Build 20 GW While the Big Projects Stalled | Ep 270 | Danny Kennedy [Re-edited]
A few years ago Pakistan had about two gigawatts of big wind and solar projects at an advanced stage. None reached financial close. Meanwhile, as Danny Kennedy puts it, its citizens "went up to the border and bought truckloads of panels" and installed 20 gigawatts themselves. Danny co-founded...
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E361: 500 Gigawatts. Western Australia's Grid Is 10
Western Australia sends almost a billion tonnes of iron ore offshore every year. Ray Wills wants it to leave as green iron instead — and to make that, he says, WA needs about 500 gigawatts of energy. Its grid today is around 10. That sounds insane. Ray's answer: it is only insane on an Australian...
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Why Were the Clean-Up Boats Polluting the River? |Ep 277| Sanyuktha, Clearbot [Re-edited]
Clearbot started because its founders watched people on big diesel boats trying to fish rubbish out of rivers with pool nets — polluting more than they were collecting, with a man half over the side reaching for the trash. So they built the electric version: remote-controlled, solar-charged boats...
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E360: Nobody Can Dispatch 500,000 Batteries
Australia now has around half a million home batteries, thanks to the federal Cheaper Home Batteries program. Almost none of them can be dispatched. Glenn Dahlenburg puts it at 90 to 95% that no retailer can control, because customers don't want anyone else touching their battery. Glenn spent...
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Bigger Than Snowy 2.0, Parked in Our Driveways | Ep 338 | Portia Rooney [Re-edited]
By the early 2030s, the aggregated battery capacity of Australia's EV fleet is expected to exceed Snowy Hydro 2.0. Not approach it — exceed it. And unlike Snowy, it's already being paid for, by people buying cars. Portia Rooney has spent three years working on bidirectional charging in Australia,...
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E359: What Counts as an Outage Any More?
Simon English has spent 15 years inside Australia's electricity distribution networks, and he's been asking them an awkward question: what actually counts as an outage now? With hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, he reckons around a quarter of a million households no longer notice...
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E358: Why Has a 40-Year Tech Company Stopped Hiring Graduates?
In the last year, Karim's 40-year IT company hired zero entry-level graduates. Every job junior coders used to do, AI does now. Karim and I studied high school together in Dhaka in the late 1970s. This episode I recorded driving him through Manila in a Tesla, and he joined the second half over a...
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E357: Who Pays When the Gas Network Dies?
Disconnecting your house from the gas network costs you about $250. The gas companies say the real cost to them is $900. Somebody has to cover the difference, and Ben Potter has been watching the argument about who. Come and talk energy with me. Ben spent a quarter of a century at the Australian...
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E356: Why More Storage Means Worse Returns
Australian wholesale power can trade anywhere from minus $1,000 to $23,000 a megawatt-hour, and it re-prices every five minutes. Marija Petkovic models what happens to that market as ten gigawatts of batteries arrive in it. Come and talk energy with me. We get into why the spreads open as...
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E355: Adapting to the Noise — What 25 Years in Communications Taught Me
Reah Sy has spent two decades building communications strategy for some of the world's largest institutions — ADB, the IMF, and multinational corporates. She's seen the shift from TV and print to social media, from reactive crisis comms to always-on reputation management, and now to an AI world...
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E355: AI Won't Take Your Job. The Person Next to You Using AI Will.
This is a different episode. Reah Sy has spent two decades building communications strategy for some of the world's largest institutions — ADB, the IMF, and multinational corporates. She's seen the shift from TV and print to social media, from reactive crisis comms to always-on reputation...
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E354: Australia Cut Electricity Prices 10%. Southeast Asia Is Still Running on Diesel.
Australia's electricity regulator just cut wholesale prices 10% — because solar and batteries have penetrated the grid so deeply that supply is outrunning demand. In Southeast Asia, people are still paying 80 US cents a kilowatt-hour for diesel-generated power, with 40% of some island populations...
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E353: Only One in Ten Batteries Joins a VPP. Here's Why
Chris Cooper co-founded Orchestra Technologies, software that models and operates commercial and industrial energy projects — solar, batteries, EV charging, virtual power plants. More than 35,000 projects have run through it. His argument is uncomfortable for anyone selling battery revenue. The...
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E352: The Grid is Becoming Optional | Energypreneurs Briefing
Is the electricity grid really becoming optional? In this episode, Sohail Hasnie explores how rooftop solar, home batteries, EVs and vehicle-to-grid technology are changing the relationship between households and the traditional electricity grid. Using Australia, Hawaii and Pakistan as examples,...
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E351: My EV Charger Is a Kettle
For three and a half years we've charged our car from an ordinary power point. Two kilowatts — about a kettle. Thirty-two thousand kilometres, roughly four megawatt-hours, less electricity than one Australian house uses in a year. I set off this morning thinking seven-kilowatt home chargers…
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E350: All of Australia's Grid Growth Is Going on Roofs. What Fills the Other 18 Hours?
Matt Rennie said something that stopped me. The entire growth of Australia's grid — two to three gigawatts a year — is going onto rooftops, between 10am and 4pm. That leaves the other eighteen hours as a separate problem, and nobody has solved it yet. Then it got sharper. When his team asked a...
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E349: Zero Wholesale Prices for Twelve Hours a Day. Then What?
John Mather has worked in electricity markets in more than a dozen countries. He started at PowerGen in 1990, weeks before privatisation, when the UK was inventing the first electricity market anyone had built. He was in the room for the Longford gas crisis in Victoria. So when he says the two...
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E348: Batteries Aren't a Financial Decision. So What Are They?
Many of the home batteries Australians are buying under the federal scheme won't pay for themselves. Jon Sibley says so plainly — and he's not against them. He designed rebate programs for a living, and bought one himself in 2017. If the numbers don't explain why 450,000 households have done…
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E347: Green Hushing: Why Companies Hide Their Climate Wins
Everyone knows greenwashing. Helen Neal is more worried about its opposite — green hushing, where companies making real climate progress stay silent because the risk of getting a claim wrong now outweighs the benefit of talking at all. A 20-year communications specialist who once brought the…
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E346: The Grid Ends at the Meter
Bruce Nordman spent decades at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on demand flexibility. He returns with an argument that cuts against most of what the industry is building: the grid should stop at the meter. Everything behind it — solar, batteries, water heaters, EVs — belongs to the...
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E345: The Cheapest Electricity in History | Energypreneurs Briefing
One in three Australian homes now has solar on the roof. Nobody built a power station to make it happen — millions of households just did it themselves. That's the largest distributed energy build in history, and it started as a rounding error. In Brief 03, we distill hundreds of expert...
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E344: Why Development Banking Is About to Be Disrupted Like Consumer Banking Was
Back in 2018, Ozzeir Khan ran an experiment at the Asian Development Bank: could AI predict GDP better than the bank's PhD economists? It came remarkably close. The economists' verdict — if you can't explain it, it's no good, even if it's right. Eight years on, that argument is over. We talk…
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E343: How a Text Message Replaces a Power Plant: Octopus Energy
Most energy retailers earn more the more you use. Octopus Energy built its business on the opposite idea — that a utility should help you spend less. Eric Davids, who leads US strategy, explains how: "plunge pricing" alerts at 50–70% off when renewables are abundant, EV tariffs that cut peak…
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E342: Your Car is the Next Power Plant | Energypreneurs Briefing
There are 200 cars parked outside right now. Each carries a 60–80 kWh battery. Together, that's a small power station sitting idle. That's Vehicle-to-Grid — and it's closer than most people think. In Brief 02, we distill hundreds of expert conversations into one argument: your EV isn't just...
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E341: A $22,000 Battery That Pays for Itself in Four Years
Australia's home battery market is booming — but the gap between the sales pitch and the lived reality is wider than most people think. Christina Li works at the frontline of battery adoption, with visibility across customers, retailers, installers, DNSPs and VPPs that very few people have. We…
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E340: Your Dung Is Our Dough: The Fuel Cell Anyone Can Make
Nick Abson made pop videos for Queen, then children's puppets, then built Europe's largest fuel cell company, which was later killed off. At 79, his argument is that a community could build its own fuel cell and run on nothing but its own waste. His figures are unverified, and the units aren't...
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E339: The Zero Marginal Cost Drive: Arguing with Tesla's AI
For almost a decade I've been convinced electricity will end up free — free the way the internet is free. Last week I charged the car for nothing at a shopping mall, same as I would from my own solar, and drove north out of Manila. The trip cost nothing at all. Fifty minutes on where that leads,...
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E338: Bigger Than Snowy Hydro 2.0 — If We Can Unlock It
Australia's aggregated EV fleet capacity is expected to exceed Snowy Hydro 2.0 by the early 2030s. The government spent $12 billion on Snowy Hydro. The EV battery potential is sitting in driveways across the country — for free. But only if we can enable bidirectional charging. Portia Rooney spent...
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E337: Convert, Don't Replace: 4 Million Trucks Can't Wait 50 Years
Ben Hutt runs Janus Electric — converting big diesel prime movers to electric for the same price as a diesel engine rebuild. In North America alone there are four million of these trucks. It would take the OEMs 50 years to manufacture that many new electric replacements. Conversion is the only...
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E336: Copenhagen Flooded Three Times. Here's How They Fixed It — And Who Paid.
Stella Whittaker spent four years doing a PhD on one question: why is it so hard to raise money for climate adaptation — the part of the climate crisis that's already happening? Her answer is in this episode. And it starts in Copenhagen, where three extreme flooding events in a row caused…
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E335: Why Does Energy Get More Expensive When Renewables Are the Cheapest Ever Created?
Skip Bowman is an organisational psychologist who started interviewing energy leaders for a book on green leadership — and kept running into one question he couldn't answer: why does energy get more expensive when renewables are the cheapest ever created? Three years later, the answer became a…
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E334: Energy's WhatsApp Moment Is Coming — Tim Ryan Returns
Two weeks after a dropped call cut our first conversation short, Tim Ryan is back — fresh from Race for 2030's Consumer Grid Summit with 40 of Australia's top energy minds. In this conversation: why VPPs are "a shell game" for businesses trying to control your battery, the NMI number sitting in...
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E333: "The Duck's Gut Is Being Eaten" — Australia's Consumer Energy Revolution
Tim Ryan has spent decades thinking about energy markets — and he talks about them the way most people talk about sport. In this conversation we get into the Cheaper Home Battery Program's 450,000+ installations, why "self-consumption" isn't selfish, and why the old rule that electricity can't be...
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E332: Building a City With a Soul: Inside Indonesia's New Capital
Bambang Susantono has had three careers that would each be a full life's work — Vice Minister of Transportation for Indonesia, Vice President of the Asian Development Bank, and then the founding head of Nusantara, Indonesia's new capital city. In this conversation he explains why Nusantara…
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E331: We Don't Need Subsidies Anymore. We're Winning.
Patrick Strom has spent 25 years in the wind industry, from prospecting sites to predictive maintenance on turbines the size of skyscrapers. His message is simple: renewables don't need subsidies anymore. They're winning on cost, full stop. In this conversation: why offshore wind's real…
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The Internet Taught Us How to Run a Grid. We Just Haven't Noticed Yet.| Ep 264 | Bruce Nordman [Re-edited]
Bruce Nordman spent nearly 40 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory asking one question: what if we ran electricity the way we run the internet? His answer reframes everything. A notebook computer is already a nanogrid — it can run on battery or grid power, and it distributes electricity...
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E330: Everything You Think Is the Future Already Happened Here
John Lin grew up Dutch-Chinese, worked strategy at the Netherlands' biggest e-commerce company, and spent years telling his McKinsey colleagues that everything they called "the future of commerce" had already happened in China. Nobody listened. He was right. He now does 50 keynotes a year telling...
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Hydrogen Is Dying. Here's What the Data Actually Says | Ep 230 | Michael Barnard [Re-edited]
Originally published as Episode 230 — this conversation has only become more relevant since. Michael Barnard is a climate futurist who builds decade-by-decade projections of the energy transition through 2100. He doesn't claim to be right. He claims to be less wrong than most. In this episode…
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E329: From Cooking With Gas to Cooking With Batteries
Hamish McKenzie is Deputy Director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Grattan Institute. His team just published a landmark report on Australia's gas transition — and the findings are stark. Gas use has peaked across every sector. In the National Electricity Market, gas generation is down…
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E328: The Duck Curve Is Dying. Here's What Replaced It
Jess Hunt has spent 25 years redesigning electricity markets. She was involved in the Hornsdale Big Battery — the world's first grid-scale battery — and now consults for governments and regulators across Australia. In this conversation: the duck curve is dying, eight-hour battery storage is…
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E327: Why Is the Energy Transition Inevitable? | Energypreneurs Masterclass Ep 1
Why is the energy transition inevitable? Not just desirable, but inevitable. In this first module of the Energypreneurs Masterclass, I curated five conversations from 300+ episodes to answer that question. You'll hear from a trucking entrepreneur, a clean energy analyst, a physicist, and an...
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E326: The Technology is Ready. So Why Hasn't it Scaled?
The Philippines imports $15 billion worth of oil every year. 4 million tricycles burn a significant share of it. Paul Johnston is the CEO of Pure EV, 350 electric tricycles operating across the Philippines, 92% utilisation, drivers taking home 30% more income. The technology works. The numbers...
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E325: Never Waste a Good Crisis
The Philippines has one of the best renewable energy laws in the world, one of the highest electricity tariffs relative to income, and 278 island communities still running on diesel. Something doesn't add up. Ruth Yu Owen — CEO of UpGrade Energy Philippines, chair of two national energy…
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E324: Bottom-Up Development: Lessons from Bangladesh
In this episode, our guests are Sayeed and Zahir, two experienced engineers and infrastructure specialists who discuss Bangladesh's development journey across water, transport, urban planning, and renewable energy. The conversation explores lessons from large infrastructure projects, the…
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E323: Solar, Batteries and the End of the Power Bill
South Australia is producing 150% of its electricity demand from solar. Australia installed 10% of global battery capacity in a single month — for a country that represents 1% of the world's population. Something extraordinary is happening down under, and Daniel Perotti is in the middle of it....
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E322: Why You Must Never Cross Your Own Line | Raju Mandhyan
In this episode of the Energypreneurs Podcast, Raju Mandhyan discusses authentic influence, leadership, and staying true to your values in a rapidly changing world. Raju shares powerful personal stories and practical insights on what it means to influence others ethically, make difficult…
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E321: When Electricity Becomes Free | Jeff Wolfe
Jeff Wolfe, a pioneer of rooftop solar in the U.S., joins Energypreneurs to discuss the rapid evolution of solar, EVs, and battery storage, and what it means for the future of the grid. From $20 per watt solar to near-zero marginal cost electricity, this episode explores how energy is becoming...
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E320: Climate Finance Beyond the Buzzwords
In this episode, our guest is Jyoti Bisbey, a climate finance expert and former World Bank professional, discussing climate finance, adaptation vs mitigation, sustainable infrastructure, clean mobility, and the future of global development. She also shares career insights, leadership lessons, and...
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E319: Energy Security - A Kilometre of Anxiety
In this episode, I reflect on the growing energy security crisis in net energy-importing developing countries like Bangladesh and the Philippines. Drawing from a recent visit to Dhaka, I share the powerful image of a mile-long fuel queue and paints the contrasting Picture of using electric…
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E318: Energy, Trade & the Future of Logistics
In this episode, our guest is Penny Estrada, Chief Growth Officer in a global freight forwarding business. She shares how constant disruptions, rising fuel costs, and supply chain bottlenecks are reshaping logistics. Penny highlights the hidden operational strain behind these challenges, the…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Energypreneurs is a podcast that brings solar power, electric vehicles and battery technologies to young entrepreneurs. Sohail Hasnie, our host, is a firm believer that the solution to climate change lies in these technologies, which will also fundamentally change the way we think about electricity and transportation—on road, on water and even on air.Over the last 35 years, Sohail has applied technology and innovation in many large infrastructure projects across Australasia. As a staff of the Asian Development Bank since 2001, he has developed large investment projects with solar power, battery, and electric vehicles across Asia.
HOSTED BY
Sohail Hasnie
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Energypreneurs have?
Energypreneurs currently has 364 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Energypreneurs about?
Energypreneurs is a podcast that brings solar power, electric vehicles and battery technologies to young entrepreneurs. Sohail Hasnie, our host, is a firm believer that the solution to climate change lies in these technologies, which will also fundamentally change the way we think about electricity...
How often does Energypreneurs release new episodes?
Energypreneurs publishes regularly with 364 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Energypreneurs?
You can listen to Energypreneurs on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Energypreneurs?
Energypreneurs is created and hosted by Sohail Hasnie.
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