Energypreneurs

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 that hold up to three tonnes of rubbish and water hyacinth, with no fuel, no engine noise and nobody leaning over the edge. I recorded this in Manila with Sanyuktha, Clearbot's head of business development and marketing, the day after we had been out to waste sites along the Pasig together. We talk about how the boats actually run (a set of batteries lasts four hours, you swap it and keep going), why a pilot pulling 500 kg a day out of a river in Northeast India turned into a year-long contract, why a solar panel on the bank means a boat can work with no fuel bill at all, and the families living beside water they didn't pollute. Recorded in 2025, re-edited and shared again because the problem hasn't gone anywhere.

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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 twenty years at the edge of Queensland's grid, and most recently built Energy Queensland's ~$300 million battery programme, including one-tonne batteries mounted on power poles. We talk about why community batteries will probably stay niche in Australia, why a network might one day deliver 22 hours a day and leave the rest to your battery, the swamp line that made the first case for standalone power, and his surprisingly good argument for an air conditioner on the balcony. And his call-out at the end, the one I keep thinking about: everyone is working out how to get batteries into the market, but almost nobody is thinking about how to get them out. Glenn Dahlenburg — Managing Director, GCD Advisory. Brisbane.

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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, and went to Europe and China on a Churchill Fellowship to see what everyone else is doing. Her focus is AC vehicle-to-grid, which uses the car's own onboard inverter rather than expensive external hardware — Lego blocks rather than one big dam.

We get into why interoperability is the bottleneck rather than the technology, what's actually launched commercially in the Netherlands, what China is running across 30 pilots in nine cities, and why this matters more in the Pacific than anywhere else — where a typhoon takes out one large power station, but not 2,000 cars.

One warning worth the whole episode: there are products on the market that will trick a vehicle into discharging without the manufacturer's approval. Don't use them.

Portia Rooney is Founder and Director of Batteries in Wheels.

Re-edited from Ep 338, first published July 2026.

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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 when the grid goes down. In the 2022 Brisbane floods his was the only house in his cul-de-sac with power for three days, so he knocked on doors and invited the street round to charge their phones.

We talk about why networks are paid to build the road rather than to have it used, why the dumbest part of the grid is the transformer on your street, and why you might get two cents for your solar from the grid but thirty from next door. Simon also explains why he'd rather hire people from casinos, airports and prisons than from inside the industry.

Come and listen. I think it'll change how you think about reliability.

Simon English is a Brisbane-based distribution network specialist who has worked with around two-thirds of Australia's distribution networks, as an employee and as a consultant.

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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 free one-hour video call from Dhaka. Neither one of those things existed outside Star Trek when we graduated.

His company works with the World Bank, ADB, UNDP, WHO and UNICEF. We talk about what happens to a 40-year business — and a 40-year friendship — when AI takes over the work at the bottom of the ladder, and the question I keep coming back to: does AI narrow the gap between rich and poor countries, or widen it?

The best moment in the whole conversation: my 75-year-old cousin in Bangladesh, diagnosing a sick chili plant by talking to ChatGPT in Bangla.

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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 Financial Review and has covered the energy transition for most of the last fifteen years. We get into Victoria turning off the gas and the death spiral in its distribution networks, why he thinks the pipeline owners are telling the regulator one thing and the public another, and why the same argument is not being had about closing coal stations. We also get into what privatisation actually got wrong (not the selling), why green hydrogen went on the back burner, why carbon capture never scaled, and whether electricity ends up as a flat monthly subscription. And right at the end, his father — a chemical engineer who tried to tell the State Electricity Commission how to burn brown coal better, and was told they had a thousand years of it in the ground. Ben Potter is a contributing editor at The Energy (theenergy.co), after 40 years in journalism and 25 at the Australian Financial Review.

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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 renewables come in and close again as storage is built — and why Marija thinks that's the market working exactly as it should, not failing. Battery revenues in Queensland have already fallen 70% in a year, with not one coal plant gone yet. We also get into the chicken-and-egg nobody wants to own: state governments want the oversupply before they'll let coal close, and investors want the price signal before they'll build it.

Plus why Queensland owning its own coal fleet gives it options no other state has, why nobody gets the spreadsheet out before buying a home battery, and what it was like being told at university that if renewables ever reached 20%, the sky would fall.

Marija Petkovic is Founder and Managing Director of Energy Synapse, a market modelling and analytics firm working with developers and investors in utility-scale clean energy.

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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 where the line between real and fake is disappearing.

We talk about what it takes to build a voice when everyone has one, why bots attacked ADB's annual meeting and what she did about it, how institutional climate communications has been quietly muzzled by geopolitics, and why AI won't take your job — but the person next to you who uses AI will.

Reah Sy is a Communications Officer at the International Monetary Fund, previously a Social Media Communications Officer at the Asian Development Bank.

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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 management, and now to an AI world where the line between real and fake is disappearing. We talk about what it takes to build a voice when everyone has one, why bots attacked ADB's annual meeting and what she did about it, how institutional climate communications has been quietly muzzled by geopolitics, and why AI won't take your job — but the person next to you who uses AI will. Reah Sy is a Communications Officer at the International Monetary Fund, previously a Social Media Communications Officer at the Asian Development Bank.

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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 having no electricity at all.

Mark Lister has worked on clean energy transition across both worlds. We talk about why the energy transition is happening fast in Australia and almost nowhere else, why AI is replacing knowledge but not the financing gap, and what it will actually take to move things in markets that are stuck.

Mark Lister is Managing Partner at Asia Clean Energy Partners and co-organiser of the Southeast Asia Corporate Decarbonisation Exchange (CDX).

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