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…
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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 first EVs into Europe, she's sharp on why "business sense" beats "moral duty," where greenwashing actually…
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 customer, coordinated by one mechanism: price. Not aggregators. Not cloud platforms. Not utilities…
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 conversations into one argument: solar didn't win on policy or ideology. It won because it got cheap, then kept…
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 about what generative AI is doing to document-centric institutions — development banks, law firms,…
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 demand 42% and save around £650 a year, and the striking claim that a simple behavioural nudge, at scale,…
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 transport. It's a battery on wheels that can power your home, stabilise the grid, and earn you money while…
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 dig into what's really driving uptake, what's stalling it, why some households see payback in under four…
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 built yet, but it is one of the more unusual conversations I've had on the show. Connect with Sohail…
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, and an argument with Tesla's AI about a future where knowledge is free too. Only I have finite energy.…
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 three years working on exactly that — and took a Churchill Fellowship to Europe and China to study how…
