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This is a Soliverse Spotlight — a bonus, on-the-ground conversation recorded live at Intersolar Europe 2026.

Peter Pongracz catches up with Stanislas Van Der Vaeren, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Sitemark, on day three of the show floor. Ten years after starting Sitemark as a drone hobby project with co-founder Maxime Bossens, Stan reflects on scaling to a 400 GW portfolio, what a decade of "software dog years" actually teaches you, and where the company is headed next — including a bold ten-year vision built around automation, robotics, and multi-asset expansion.

Key topics:
Ten years of Sitemark — from drone hobbyists to 400 GW under management
The biggest lesson learned: listening to customers and solving simple problems well
Sitemark's shift to multi-asset — solar, BESS, wind, hydro, and grid infrastructure
Explosive US growth — now roughly half of company revenue
The next ten years: closing the loop from data capture to autonomous resolution with drones and robots

Takeaways:
Sitemark now manages roughly 400 GW of renewable assets after a decade in business.
The company's biggest challenge today isn't funding — it's hiring, with 15-16 open roles to fill by December.
US revenue has grown to about half of Sitemark's total business in under three years, with contract sizes 4-5x larger than in Europe.
Sitemark is expanding beyond solar into BESS, wind, hydro, and power line/grid infrastructure on one modular platform.
The company's ten-year roadmap centers on automation and robotics — pairing digital twins with physical robots to detect, prioritize, and eventually resolve site issues autonomously.

Resources:
Sitemark - Official Website - https://www.sitemark.com
Sitemark on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/sitemark
Contact: [email protected]

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly. This one's a bonus Spotlight from Intersolar Europe 2026.

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Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek

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Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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Solar developers and EPCs who assume more tools means better coverage are paying a hidden cost in wasted hours and lost data. Douglas Geist, Co-founder and CCO of PVcase, quantified the problem after surveying 400-plus industry professionals: teams are running six to twelve separate tools per project, losing control of their data at every internal handoff, and duplicating effort before a single wire is pulled. Geist's blueprint for collapsing that stack, built while scaling PVcase to a globally used solar design platform backed by over $120M raised, gives solar teams a concrete path from fragmented workflows to a unified design process that protects both margin and momentum.

PVcase was born from an internal tool at co-founder David's engineering consultancy, where redesigns that once took two to three weeks were suddenly completed in a day or two. That speed caught the attention of major solar customers, who wanted direct access to the software. Early traction led to a first US appearance at SPI in 2018 or 2019, where the team discovered everything was in metric units and immediately rebuilt the unit logic after returning. The Anderson Optimization acquisition, completed three years ago, extended PVcase earlier into the project lifecycle by adding site selection to the design workflow. A fundraising round was run simultaneously to close that transaction, a deliberately opportunistic move Geist credits with averaging two to three hours of sleep per night for six months.

Geist's core argument is that the real bottleneck in solar development is no longer design speed but what surrounds it: permitting, grid connection, and data continuity across six to twelve tools. For solar developers and EPCs, the highest-leverage investment right now is reducing handoff friction rather than adding more point solutions. The Anderson acquisition shows how PVcase is acting on this by closing the gap between site selection and design in one platform. Geist also flags that speculative early-stage project flipping is effectively dead in the current market, and that only projects with existing permitting approval carry real transactional value.

Connect with Douglas Geist:
LinkedIn

PVcase:
Website
LinkedIn

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

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PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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In this episode, Peter Pongracz sits down with Christophe Lits, Senior Market Analyst at @SolarPowerEurope, live at Intersolar Europe 2026 to unpack the freshly launched Global Market Outlook for Solar Power. They dig into the slowdown in global growth momentum, China's shift away from guaranteed feed-in tariffs, Europe's first-ever expected installation decline, and why battery storage is becoming the make-or-break factor for the next phase of solar deployment.

Key topics:
Global solar market growth slowing from 80% to 30% to 12% year-on-year
China's Article 136 reform and the shift from feed-in tariffs to market pricing
Europe's first anticipated drop in annual PV installations
Grid curtailment and negative electricity prices driving the storage pivot
EU's new 200 GWh battery storage target for 2030

Takeaways:
2025 was a record year for solar with 664 GW installed globally, up 12% YoY.
China is moving PV developers from secured tariffs to market-based electricity pricing, partly due to emerging grid constraints.
Europe expects its first-ever installation decline in 2026, driven by falling residential subsidies and utility-scale developers pausing amid curtailment risk.
Battery storage is now the critical enabler for renewed solar growth from 2027 onward.
Solar's 2025 generation could cover five years of LNG shipments to the Strait of Hormuz — a striking energy security data point from the report.

Resources:
SolarPower Europe - Official Website - https://www.solarpowereurope.org
Global Market Outlook for Solar Power 2026-2030 - https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks/global-solar-market-outlook-2026-2030
European Battery Outlook 2026-2030 - https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn: https://itl.ink/soliverseLI
Soliverse X (Twitter): https://itl.ink/soliverseX

🎧 Listen on Buzzsprout: https://itl.ink/soliversebuzzprout

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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Rooftop solar costs seven times more in the US than in Australia, and most energy professionals don't know why.

Gavin Mooney, energy and utilities software expert based in Australia, breaks down how a 7-kilowatt system runs around 4,000 USD in Australia versus 28,000 USD in the US, pointing to the specific soft-cost and permitting reforms that created that gap. Where American and European markets treat slow approvals and high sales overhead as fixed realities, Gavin explains the structural decisions Australia made that other markets can directly copy, and why those same conditions now make Australia the world leader in battery storage deployment relative to grid size.

Gavin traces Australia's battery lead directly to its rooftop solar saturation: more than four million households, roughly one in three nationally, already have panels, and in South Australia the figure hits one in two. That midday generation flood drove the Hornsdale Power Reserve, installed in 2017 at just over 100 megawatt hours, and the market has since scaled to gigawatt-hour and multi-gigawatt-hour projects, with Chile the only country close in deployment rate relative to grid size. On costs, Gavin contrasts Australia's end-of-week installation turnaround against US permitting delays stretching weeks or months, state-level rule fragmentation, and high customer acquisition costs, pinpointing these soft-cost gaps as the core reason the same 7-kilowatt system costs 10,000 USD in Germany and 28,000 USD in the US.

Listeners in US or European markets get a concrete reform checklist from Gavin's cross-market comparison: compress permitting timelines, reduce customer acquisition overhead, and increase installer competition. On storage, he explains why arbitrage windows are wide right now as midday wholesale prices go negative, but warns that growing battery capacity will compress that spread, making early mover advantage real. He also frames demand flexibility, EV charging, hot water systems, pool pumps, and dynamic tariffs including Australia's three-hour free electricity windows, as the fastest and cheapest lever to absorb excess solar before new transmission is needed. Software orchestration, not manual consumer action, is what makes any of it scale beyond early adopters.

Connect with Gavin Mooney:
LinkedIn

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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In this episode, Peter Pongracz sits down with Bradley Mundt, CEO and Co-Founder of PLAN-B NET ZERO AG, to explore why a renewable energy company is building something that looks a lot more like a tech lifestyle brand than a traditional electricity supplier.

Bradley breaks down the concept of Neo Energy: the idea that solar industry insights and clean electricity can be packaged the same way Revolut or N26 packaged banking, with full transparency, real-time pricing, and an AI-driven app that knows your household better than you do. He explains how smart meters can read electricity usage so precisely they can identify individual appliances, and why that data layer is central to Plan B Net Zero's strategy. For anyone following battery storage markets or the evolution of the B2C energy sector in Germany, this is a revealing look at how one company is trying to change what customers expect from their energy supplier.

The conversation also covers grid resilience and what households and businesses genuinely underestimate about energy security until something goes wrong. Bradley draws on his background as a day trader to explain why emotional discipline and flexibility matter as much in energy markets as they do on a trading desk. He touches on the ongoing geopolitical pressures reshaping European utility scale solar and storage investment, and why the answer to most energy dilemmas comes down to one word: autonomy.

Bradley also previews Plan B Net Zero's plans for a Q3 2026 IPO and the company's next moves in the app, digital energy, and cross-industry partnership space. If you are interested in renewable energy podcast conversations that go beyond project finance and grid connection challenges and into the business model of the energy transition itself, this episode is one to bookmark.

Connect with Bradley Mundt:
LinkedIn
Website

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

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Most discussions around energy storage focus on electricity. But what if the bigger opportunity is heat?

In this episode of Soliverse, Peter Pongracz speaks with Tommi Eronen, CEO and Co-Founder of Polar Night Energy, the company behind the world's first commercial sand battery.

Tommi shares the story behind the technology, how thermal energy storage works, and why industrial heat remains one of the most overlooked challenges in the global energy transition. The conversation covers thermal storage economics, district heating, industrial decarbonization, project deployment in Finland, and Polar Night Energy's vision for scaling Heat as a Service across Europe.

Connect with Tommi Eronen:

LinkedIn
Polar Night Energy

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

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What does it take to build utility-scale solar at the speed the energy transition actually needs?

In this episode of Soliverse | The Future of Solar, Peter Pongracz speaks with Matt Campbell, CEO and Co-Founder at Terabase Energy Inc., about the future of solar construction, AI-driven robotics, energy storage, and the digital systems needed to scale solar from megawatts to gigawatts. Matt explains why traditional solar construction is still largely manual, why the industry needs integrated workflows instead of disconnected tools, and how Terabase is building a platform that connects yield simulation, construction management, data, AI, and robotics into one end-to-end system.

The conversation goes deep into the pressure created by data center power demand, grid constraints, battery storage, project scale, and supply chain realities. Matt also shares how Terabase approaches products like PlantPredict, Construct, and Terafab, why physical AI is changing what robots can do on real construction sites, and what it could take to build a gigawatt of solar in less than ten weeks.

Connect with Matt Campbell:
LinkedIn
Terabase Energy Website

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

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What if solar’s biggest advantage right now is not more complexity, but simpler communication? In this episode of Soliverse l The Future of Solar Episode 39, host Peter Pongracz is joined by Aaron Nichols, host of This Week In Solar and Marketing and BD Manager at Exact Solar, and Jacob Yang, Founder and CEO of Amp Your Story and clean energy marketer.

Together, they explore why solar, storage, and clean energy companies often struggle to communicate clearly, why energy security is becoming a stronger message for homeowners and businesses, how distributed generation and balcony solar are shifting the market, and why clean energy marketing needs to meet people where they are.

The conversation also covers data centers, rising electricity bills, utility relationships, community solar, solar conferences, personal branding, storytelling, and why simple, human, specific messaging can help the solar industry build trust and drive action faster.

Connect with Aaron Nichols:
LinkedIn
This Week In Solar on Apple Podcasts
This Week In Solar on Spotify

Connect with Jacob Yang:
LinkedIn

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn
Soliverse Instagram
Soliverse X (Twitter)
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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek

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Is Europe’s solar market hitting a wall, or entering its next phase? In this episode of Soliverse | The Future of Solar, host Peter Pongracz speaks with Antonio Arruebo Lacleta, Market Analyst at SolarPower Europe and the Battery Storage Europe Platform, about why solar installations are slowing, what negative power prices are telling us, and why battery storage is becoming essential for the future of the energy transition.

Antonio explains how curtailment, grid congestion, permitting delays, and weak flexibility markets are starting to drag on solar growth across Europe. He also breaks down why hybrid solar plus storage is quickly becoming the new default, which battery markets are moving fastest, where Europe still lacks manufacturing depth, and what policymakers need to fix to unlock the next wave of deployment. This is a grounded conversation for anyone working in utility scale solar, battery storage, project development, policy, or energy finance.

About this episode:
Learn more about Battery Storage Europe
Explore the Market and Policy Navigator
Read the EU Battery Storage Market Review 2025
Read the Mission Solar 2040 report
Battery Storage Europe, policy and action plans
Connect with Antonio Arruebo Lacleta on LinkedIn

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn
Soliverse Instagram
Soliverse X (Twitter)
Subscribe on YouTube

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek

Send us Fan Mail

Is Europe’s solar market hitting a wall, or entering its next phase? In this episode of Soliverse | The Future of Solar, host Peter Pongracz speaks with Antonio Arruebo Lacleta, Market Analyst at SolarPower Europe and the Battery Storage Europe Platform, about why solar installations are slowing, what negative power prices are telling us, and why battery storage is becoming essential for the future of the energy transition.

Antonio explains how curtailment, grid congestion, permitting delays, and weak flexibility markets are starting to drag on solar growth across Europe. He also breaks down why hybrid solar plus storage is quickly becoming the new default, which battery markets are moving fastest, where Europe still lacks manufacturing depth, and what policymakers need to fix to unlock the next wave of deployment. This is a grounded conversation for anyone working in utility scale solar, battery storage, project development, policy, or energy finance.

About this episode:
Learn more about Battery Storage Europe
Explore the Market and Policy Navigator
Read the EU Battery Storage Market Review 2025
Read the Mission Solar 2040 report
Battery Storage Europe, policy and action plans
Connect with Antonio Arruebo Lacleta on LinkedIn

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Explore Enerdatics

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

Explore our partners:
Enerdatics, renewable energy market intelligence
PVX.AI, utility-scale solar design software

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn
Soliverse Instagram
Soliverse X (Twitter)
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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek