Clean Power Planet: Fighting Climate Change

Sandra Begay grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, near the Navajo reservation. Her grandmother lived on the reservation and her father and grandfather served on the tribal council. Sandra remembers going to her grandmother's house when it was first hooked up to the grid. The family got to watch as her grandmother turned on the porch light. That was only twenty years ago. Roughly 18,000 households in the Na...

Microgrids have a dirty past. They were once dependent on diesel generation, one of the dirtiest forms of power generation. Even with the addition of solar or wind it was difficult to cut down on diesel consumption since the generators had to be online for backup. Now with the addition of storage it's becoming possible to cut down on diesel dependence and bring clean and resilient power to isolated c...

Mary Marshall studied journalism in college and then jumped right into a career in television news, working on NBC's Dateline and Nightly News with Lester Holt. But she became disillusioned and wanted to do something more meaningful. So she took a walk to clear her head. Actually she hiked 500 miles of the Appalachian trail by herself. When she got off the trail she signed up for AmeriCorps and disco...

We're very excited to announce that we're partnering with the American Solar Energy Society for a series of interviews from their Solar 2018 conference in Boulder, Colorado. In this episode I'm talking with ASES Chair Lucas Dixon about the organization's history and vision.

ASES was created in 1954 by researchers at Bell Labs that had discovered the photovoltaic...

Tim Darst is the Executive Director at Kentucky Interfaith Power and Light, an organization that's mobilizing a religious response to climate change. They offer Creation Care Consulting to help churches choose the best options for getting started with conservation, efficiency and renewable energy.

Tim had a comfortable career in accounting when he had a "lightbu...

Blake Jones was an Ernst and Young "Entrepreneur of the Year" in 2010. You could even describe him as a serial-entrepreneur. But it would be more accurate to say that he is a serial cooperative co-founder. He co-founded Namasté Solar, an employee-owned cooperative and certified B-Corp that has installed over 5,000 solar electric systems. He co-founded Amicus Solar Cooperative, a purchasing cooperativ...

Lane Boldman is not your stereotypical lobbyist. She is Executive Director of the Kentucky Conservation Committee (KCC), an organization that tracks legislation that impacts Kentucky's environment and natural resources. In the current political climate it's a tough job. Every year there are a large number of bills designed to roll back or weaken environmental protections. KCC analyzes every piece of ...

Harvard professor and former Washington policymaker Meghan O'Sullivan was named the 2017 "Energy Writer of the Year" by the American Energy Society for her book Windfall: How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power and for her New York Times commentary "How Trump Can Harness the U.S. Energy Boom."

That's just the most recent line on her incredibly impressive resume. A couple of the highp...

Steve Ricketts is a partner in Solar Energy Solutions, the largest and oldest company in Kentucky's fledgling solar installation industry. Steve and his partner Matt Partymiller and many other solar installers have been forced to drop everything and fight utility-sponsored anti-net metering bills during the 2017 and 2018 legislative sessions. Kentucky is ranked 48th for solar friendly policies by SolarPowerRocks.com. In fact the on...