This Week in Solar

Eight months ago, we decided to host our little solar news channel on Substack. Now that we’re almost at 500 subscribers, we thought it was time for a breakdown!

I first started using Substack to host my own blogs in 2020, and it’s since grown into a powerful hub for news, thought leadership, and culture. I love Substack. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with it as a creator.

I’m fully sold on this platform (and so are iconic human beings like Pamela Anderson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

But I realize that not everyone has used it yet, or taken the time to understand how it works! So I wanted to take a minute to walk everyone through it.

How to Engage

When one of our news roundups or interviews lands in your inbox, and you open it, this is what you’ll see:

I’ve circled the different ways to engage below, since they’re not easy to see in the emails. I go through each one in the video above, but here’s an easy guide to what happens if you click them (from left to right):

Heart = Like

Bubble = Leave a comment

Bucket with up arrow = Share

Circle with Arrows = Re-stack (re-post on Substack)

Read in App = Takes you to the Substack App if you have it, or to the download page if you don’t.

How to Read

If you don’t want to watch the video or listen to the audio for This Week In Solar, you can always just read. I write each of the news synopses I send out each week in Smart Brevity format, with “what’s new” and “why it matters” sections clearly visible.

So if you don’t want to hear my voice or look at my face and you just want to skim what’s going on in the industry, the writing is there for you. You can read Substack posts in three places:

* Your Email Inbox: Every publication you subscribe to will send new posts directly to your email.

* The Substack App: The app features an Inbox tab with a reading queue for all your subscriptions.

* The Web Publication: Every writer has a unique URL where you can browse their entire archive of past posts (e.g., exactsolar.substack.com).

How to Listen

Substack also offers several ways to listen to posts, whether that’s dedicated podcasts or narrated articles (some creators will narrate articles themselves, some will use AI).

1. Podcasts & Audio Posts

* In-App Player: You can listen to podcasts and posts directly in the Substack app. Their player supports background play, so you can continue listening while using other apps.

* External Podcast Apps: If you prefer apps like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen, you can engage there, too. Substack lets you host your RSS feed in

How to Watch

Video content on Substack is integrated into the same feed as written posts. Here’s how to watch them:

* Video Posts: Creators can upload full-length video episodes or short clips. You can watch these directly in your browser or within the app’s inline player.

* Picture-in-Picture: On the web, you can click the “two screens” icon to watch a video in a floating window while you continue reading.

As promised, that was our full breakdown of how to engage on Substack!

My deepest hope is that This Week In Solar grows into a community of clean energy professionals and enthusiasts all over the world. Engagement is how we’ll get there.

If you’ve been enjoying what we’re doing at TWiS, please like, comment on, or share posts that arrive in your inbox. It’s the only way something like this grows.

Thank you for tuning in today, and we’ll see you next week!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

In today’s episode, Aaron sits down with Meghan Stimmler of Solar Hut.

Meghan shares her journey from:

* Sweeping floors at her dad’s solar company

* Being dragged “kicking and screaming” into sales

* Becoming a veteran solar consultant and board member at the California Solar & Storage Association (CalSA), and actively shaping solar policy in California.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Connect with Meghan on LinkedIn here.

Together, Aaron and Meghan dig into:

* How California regulators have repeatedly tried to strip solar contractors of the right to install batteries, and how CalSA has fought back.

* Why PG&E customers are now seeing ~47¢/kWh rates (three times higher than the national average!).

* Why renters are stuck with $1,000+ electric bills and almost no options (why portable and modular solar needs to be part of the future).

EpisodeQuotes:

“You can’t reduce your costs even though you’re reducing your usage. The bill just keeps going up.” — Meghan Stimmler

“Every rental, every apartment complex should have carports with solar all over the roof. It’s not going to erase every bill, but it really does help.” — Meghan Stimmler

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols:Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today we have someone who’s been fighting for solar and selling solar for much longer than I’ve been in the industry.And she’s been in one of the battleground markets in California, which I’m excited to hear about, because I know nothing about selling solar in California.So, Megan Stimler, would you introduce yourself and talk about what you do at Solar Hut and what your role is?

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m Megan Stimler. I’m with Solar Hut out of El Dorado County in California. We’ve been in business since 2008.We’ve been installing batteries since 2009 and I started here in 2012 as an intern. My father actually started Solar Hut.

He worked for one of the oldest solar companies in Sacramento called Akina Solar and then branched off and started his own business, and so when I was in college I had to work or I had to do an internship for an energy or environmental company.So went to work for my dad and his solar company.

So that’s how I started—sweeping floors, you know, doing copier stuff. And then I became the receptionist, then I started doing permits, PG&E paperwork, interconnection.And then I was tossed into sales, even though I didn’t want to do it because I was a bartender for like 10 years and I was like, no, I’m done with the people.

So I started doing sales and I think in April will be 10 years in sales. So I’ve been in a little part of every part of this company besides actually installing on the roof.

Aaron Nichols:Sometimes the best leaders and the best salespeople are the ones who are just dragged into it kicking and screaming.

Meghan Stimmler:That’s exactly me. I did not want to deal with people again and talk with people, but I’m just like my dad.I have a niche for talking to people.

Aaron Nichols:Nice. Yeah. I was a bartender for a long time too. I had a great time with that.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned when we were talking before the episode that you’ve been fighting for solar contractors’ rights for a long time.So when did that start and what—2015 or… yeah, 2015? And what is CalSA for anyone who doesn’t know—California Solar and Storage Association?

Meghan Stimmler:Okay. Back in 2015 the Contractor State License Board were trying to remove a solar contractor C-46’s rights to install batteries in California.They were saying that it was unsafe and we did not have the knowledge or expertise to install batteries.

And we’ve been, you know, since back long before that—80% of all batteries in California have been installed by a C-46 solar contractor without incidences.So that is where the fighting did begin—attending those meetings with the CSLB, the California State Licensing Board.

And then we won back in 2015 and then they came back in about 2019 again, trying to remove our rights of installing batteries and restricting it.They wanted us to just do PV solar and thermal solar, pool solar.

And so I got started heavily involved with CalSA and actually speaking at the CSLB meetings against why we are entitled and our expertise and how we are doing it safe and efficiently.The biggest thing for me was we would actually have to teach the electrical contractors how to install batteries, so it doesn’t make much sense to me why they’re trying to remove it.

We are now in litigation with, I think it’s litigation with CSLB, and we are starting to get majority of what we are fighting for for the last 10 years—install batteries up to a certain kilowatt, install it with existing solar systems, you know.

But that’s, you know, if you want to really go into it, I’ve been working—I’m on the board for CalSA, so now I’m on the subcommittee for C-46 contractors and the fight to install batteries.

Aaron Nichols:And back then, I mean, was it mostly flooded lead-acid batteries? Were you still even installing lithium batteries? Like, I’m sure the technology has changed a ton.

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah. Back then it was the lead-acid—Magnum was a big one we did.I think, you know, Tesla Powerwalls didn’t really come available… that was probably around 2016.

But we were doing the lead-acid off-grid. I live in a really rural community and so lead-acid was a big thing up here for many years, but you almost need to—as the homeowner—know how to maintain those batteries.So it’s nothing that we really suggest for the average homeowner, but now with Powerwalls, it’s, you know, plug-and-play, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, I came into this solar industry when flooded lead-acid was basically on its way out, but I heard that, you know, homeowners had to periodically pour distilled water into them to maintain them.

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah, we had battery sheds and battery rooms and all that fun stuff.It wasn’t a common thing, but it was definitely people who were very rural that lost power—you know, we had one customer who, they lost power twice or 12 times a month on the regular.

And they had kids who were dependent on electricity for medical issues. So they didn’t really want to always rely on a generator because that was very expensive, so we did batteries for them.But those are the type of clients we really worked with back in the olden days of solar.

And now it’s more for grid reliability and grid optimization.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, and I’m sure for someone like that, especially in a rural community that’s losing power, the work you guys do is so important.

And obviously, I think if you take the ability to install those batteries out of the hands of solar installers, then I’m sure it gets much more expensive, doesn’t it?

Meghan Stimmler:Absolutely. Especially with the laws in California and being an electrician—you have to be an electrician, you have to have apprentices, all the insurances—it is a lot.There is a lot of expense that goes in there. And at the end of the day, you don’t really want to hire the cheapest electrician.

Aaron Nichols:Right. So yeah, there are certain things that you just don’t go budget on.My friend was joking about that, like, I don’t think you should buy used climbing ropes on Facebook Marketplace.

Meghan Stimmler:Probably not. Probably not a great idea.Yeah, when you’re talking about something that you want to last for decades on your home, you definitely don’t want to go bargain-basement.

No, and so I always see—like I said, I see these batteries on Marketplace and I just saw Magnum the other day and I’m like, how old are those, and did you maintain them, and you’re selling them for, I think it was like 16 grand and I’m like, wow.Yeah, it was ridiculous and I’m like, someone will probably buy those, thinking they’re getting some crazy deal.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. And they’ll plug it in and they’ll have 10 minutes of backup.

Meghan Stimmler:Wonderful. Yes, exactly. I mean, a lot of these old batteries, since we’ve come in and converted them with newer-age batteries…Most of the time with those ones that are very rural or almost off-grid, we usually do Franklins for those with a generator backup.

But, you know, we’ve had our hand in every type of battery kind of around here—LG Chem, SolarEdge, Tesla, Franklin, Enphase.So we really do a lot of research into the actual battery manufacturers—what can they run—because a lot of people up here have wells and so we can’t just sell anything that’s not going to have that well run.

So it’s really made the list of what we prefer to sell small.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, I think if you talk to most contractors who have been in business for a long time in this industry, they’re going to have some preferred vendors.

Meghan Stimmler:Yes. Our president is very just like, no new stuff until it’s been very, very proven by other people. Yes. Yeah.

I—my house is usually a test site for a lot of manufacturers in PG&E territory. So, you know, I allow it, but it becomes… I think we’ve had a test site for racking.I’m like, okay, let’s do it. Let’s figure it out. We were one of the first Franklin batteries for PG&E territory—it took me, I think, 120 days to get PTO.

So yeah, nothing I would put a regular customer through, but yeah, we usually take somebody around here and usually my house is the fun site.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Well, I’m pretty amazed because, I mean, you’ve been in this industry six times longer than I have. I’ve only been here about two years, you’ve been here about 13, it sounds like.

Meghan Stimmler:Yes, 13.

Aaron Nichols:And I’ve, you know, been here for a period of tremendous change and upheaval, but you’ve been here six times longer than me.So what are some of the major changes you’ve seen since you started here?

Meghan Stimmler:I mean, the first one was PG&E going from NEM-1, which NEM-1 was the NEM interconnection for 30 years.And then we went to NEM-2. It wasn’t a drastic change. A lot of people were a little upset by it but it wasn’t some drastic change.

It was a connection fee payment and then they did have a cap of what they were going to be paying you on a retail value for your solar system.

The second one after that—I’m trying to get them all in order in my head—I mean between all that time we had the changes in CSLB and the fight to keep, you know, solar…

Aaron Nichols:What is CSLB?

Meghan Stimmler:California State Licensing Board. Those are the people who were trying to change the C-46 solar contractor’s ability to install batteries, and that might have started in 2015-ish as well.

And we lost NEM-1 in 2015. I remember doing like Saturday interconnection paperwork for that one.

And then we went from NEM-2 to NEM-3. That was a mad dash trying to get all of the interconnection paperwork submitted in a timely manner.I took a lovely week break after that.

Because it was— the systems didn’t have to be installed but we had to submit all the paperwork and the paperwork couldn’t be wrong, otherwise your contract could be voided and those homeowners would be pretty upset.

NEM-3 was transitioning from retail value to wholesale value of over-production of the solar system.And then they also put a cap—a 150% cap—on what you were allowed to install based on your historical data.

So that was in 2023. So two years ago… will be, yeah, it’ll be three years in April. And now we’re in the mad dash for the federal tax credit.

So there’s all that. We also, you know, between that we’ve had COVID. That was kind of intense in California.They couldn’t tell you for the first three weeks if solar was a… if you were allowed to install solar—if it was an essential service or not.

Exactly—essential service. So we were on pause for about three weeks.And then during that timeframe, we started doing a lot of SGIP—Self-Generation Incentive Program—which helped people who were in those really rural areas, who had a lot of public-safety shut-offs or wildfires, with incentives to install batteries at their house.

So that became a big part of us. That program ends as well on December 31st.So that’s very sad because I think in the last 24 months, we’ve had about $500,000 worth of incentives for homeowners.

It’s not just your address. You also either have a medical rate with PG&E or you had the low income with a well.So we’ve gotten about $500,000 for homeowners in the last 24 months, which is great for those types of people. That program does end though, so very sad.

And then, you know, we’re starting on conversations of, you know, the next NEM. So that’s a little precede—a little break—on all these stops.

So it’s always a fight trying to install systems easy. My crew always jokes around how we miss the simple solar installations, and now they’re not.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned as well before we recorded this that you just think it’s unfair that solar has to jump through so many more hoops than most other industries.

Meghan Stimmler:Correct. Yeah, I’m all for having things environmentally safe and making sure that we are installing a safe product, but the amount of hoops…Like, you know, just like the C-46 contractor—they have the real record of incidents of a residential battery installed incorrectly and causing harm to homeowners or the house or anything like that.

It’s a very safe product that we are installing. So for them to come and fight and remove our abilities to do that is unfair, especially without cause.

So there’s that fight and then, you know, the fight for the homeowners to save money.I mean, I’m not sure how much your utility rates are there, but here we’re an average of 47 cents—

Aaron Nichols:A kilowatt-hour?

Meghan Stimmler:A kilowatt.

Aaron Nichols:Oh my gosh, that’s crazy. We’re less than half that.So that means an average person is paying more than a thousand dollars a month for electricity.

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah, exactly. So I have an electric house. I have a pool. I’ve got three kids. I’ve had an EV for about… the last two and a half years now.I’ve had my EV for about three and a half years now. My husband just bought one back in June, and if we did not have solar, my summer bill would be $1500 a month.

Wow. I don’t even want to afford that. And that, you know, that’s what California has wanted you to do. They want to go all-electric.They want you to buy the EVs, you know, and then they’re going to now punish you for doing that.

They’re removing incentives. They’re removing the federal tax credit.They like to tell us that we’re the reason why, you know, the rates are going up so high is because of this curve that doesn’t exist.

You know, if you look at CAISO, which is the California Independent System Operator—they’re the ones who control the grid—and if you look at what solar is actually doing for the grid and what batteries are doing for the grid,we’re saving so much money for Californians in general just by going solar. But we’re the bad guys.

So it’s very disheartening because like I said, you know, I’ve been a homeowner for 12 years and 12 years ago my bills were 150% cheaper.That is how much my rates have increased.

Aaron Nichols:So when you say, I mean, 150%, that means your average would have been what?

Meghan Stimmler:My average was probably about like $250–$300.

Aaron Nichols:Wow. And so, you know, there’s so many other people who are like you. You’re just an average homeowner—not some crazy mansion. You have a regular house in a regular neighborhood.

Electricity bills here just went up by 22% in our service area, and so that’s just what we’ve been hitting people with in terms of messaging: just opt out of this madness.You’re never—you have no control over this. It’s just going to cost more every year. It’s always going to be the same product.

And solar lets you exit this hamster wheel.

Meghan Stimmler:Absolutely. I have homeowners who tell me, like, “I have upgraded my HVAC. I’ve redone my insulation.I’ve, you know, stopped using my air conditioner as much. I stopped using my heater as much. I stopped doing this, this and that.”

And they go, “My bills are still rising.” And it’s, you know, you can’t reduce your costs even though you’re reducing your usage.It just keeps going up.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, that’s one of the things that I thought was so powerful when I caught up with one of our homeowners whose system has now been operating for a decade.We just talked about what it’s like and he said, you know, “Price increases used to piss me off. Now I don’t even think about them. My wife is too hot, I just crank up the AC. It doesn’t matter.”

Meghan Stimmler:Yes, exactly. And that’s fine with me too, because I’ll, you know, sometimes it’s just a hot day.We get up to sometimes upwards of 110 out here. So I’m like, it’s too hot. I need to turn that down a few degrees.

And it’s fine. I mean, if at the end of the year my bill is just $10 more because of those few days, like, really, I’m going to pay that.But overall, I think we’re—you know, I am an energy hog, but I do try to conserve in some aspects, but I also have a huge solar system. I’ve got three batteries, so I do what I can.

And it’s great for the environment, but it’s also great for my pocketbook.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, absolutely. Well, you also mentioned that it’s important to you to protect the more than two million solar energy systems that y’all have out there in California.Why did you use that word “protect”?

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah, so because of all of the changes in California—from NEM-2 to NEM-3—we lost over 17,000 solar jobs in the state of California.A lot of those companies’ customers are now orphaned.

So we’re having to go in—I mean, I just dealt with a phone call yesterday where he called as a past customer.He just bought a new home. The system installed was by a company who’s no longer in business, so he calls me panicking like, “What do I do? If there’s an issue what do I do? This company is no longer in business.”

And I go, “That’s no worries. You just, you know, you have to call the manufacturers and get it transferred to my company so if there are issues we can take care of you.”But a lot of people don’t have that sense. They just think that, you know, the system’s up there and now they just have to deal with it.

And when you don’t have monitoring, you have no idea what’s going on. You don’t really know who to call.So luckily, you know, we do have some homeowners out there who try to figure these things out on their own.

But there’s a lot of people like that where they just are orphaned—they’re left to figure it out themselves.And you shouldn’t have to. You’re talking about electricity. You shouldn’t go messing around with electricity on your roof.

Aaron Nichols:Exactly.

Meghan Stimmler:Usually they don’t go mess with it, but they don’t know what is going on with their solar system.There’s no real conversations with them about what is on their roof.

And it might be just a lack of education to real estate agents or the new homeowners.But there’s very little conversation about, you know, “Here’s what you have on your roof.”

It’s kind of like someone buying a car and then being like, “Well, it drives from A to B.” Sometimes you don’t, you know, and so that’s what these homeowners are experiencing.They don’t know the solar system. They don’t know about the warranties.

They don’t know about the manufacturers. They don’t know what it should be producing unless someone is there to help guide their hand and say, “Okay, you need to call this person. You need to press this button. You need to connect this and that.”

And a lot of people don’t have that. They’re just hoping that their PG&E bills just stay low.And I don’t even know if anybody knows how many orphan systems are out there.

17,000 jobs is a lot. And so how many homes were installed by the 17,000 workers?

So we do take care of a lot of companies that have been in and out of the industry over the last, you know, 15 years.And we’ve got a really good repair crew with my team that takes care of a lot of these orphan systems.

But sometimes, you know, you just don’t—you don’t know. The homeowner doesn’t know.I’m in the industry, so I have a, you know, jaded perspective, like, “Oh yeah, you just call this person.” But, you know, not a lot of people do that.

Aaron Nichols:Oh, it’s not always that easy. Totally.

Well, to bring us home here, Megan, I ask the same question to everyone that I interview on this show, and it has to do with the fact that a couple of months ago, I went to my grandma’s 80th birthday party.And as I was sitting there thinking about what 80 years means, that means that she was born into a world without renewable energy.

We didn’t even make the first PV cell until 1954. So for most of her life, the only way we knew how to create electricity was to dig things up and burn them.And throughout that time, I mean, Jimmy Carter put panels on the White House, the new millennium rolled around, the prices of solar just absolutely dropped, and now it’s the cheapest, fastest form of energy.

So all of that has happened in her life. I’m curious, if you’re just going to moonshot, what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Meghan Stimmler:I hope that we make the panels—in the last 10 years they have gotten larger. I want a reduction of it,so we can fit more kilowatt-hours into that little silicon wafer and fit more in the roofline.

Like for me, I’m stuck. My roof is maxed out and I still have a true-up at the end of the year, you know.And keep going with safer, cleaner battery technologies and make it more available to everybody.

You know, and portable—people who rent. That’s the number one complaint I get is, “I’m renting my house.Landlords don’t want to go solar, and my bills are $1,000, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

So portable renewable energies would be amazing, because you can just take it to the next house.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. And I mean, if anyone is in that situation—obviously, this is just a band-aid for that problem—but you can just buy, like, get on Facebook Marketplace, find a used panel, find an EcoFlow battery bank.And, you know, you’ll spend less than what you spend on power in a month and you can charge all your devices on it.

Meghan Stimmler:Yeah, it’s a band-aid, but, you know, we need more than the band-aid for all these renters.And, you know, I know in Europe they’re starting to do solar on patios and formulas that are just collapsible and you can take them with you.

Something that, you know, it’s kind of like—I’m probably one of the few, but I think every rental, every apartment complex,they need to have carports with solar all over the roof to make those bills lower.

I’m not going to say it’s going to completely eliminate all of your bills, but, you know, it really does help.In California, every home has to be built with solar.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. I’m huge on carports. I mean, yeah, unfortunately, they’re difficult to finance if anyone is listening and wondering why we don’t have more of them.

But we just—we have, I think, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of square miles of parking lots in this country because we’re so obsessed with our cars, and they’re already ugly and pointless,and putting solar over them makes them so much better.

Meghan Stimmler:Oh yeah. All the school districts around me are building giant parking lots full of solar and I talked to the superintendents there a few years ago about it.My company is too small to do the vast giant rows that they were doing and it was right during NEM-3 and I’m like, I’m not taking this on.

But they just now—we’re almost three years in—and they’re just now finishing, I think, the seventh school out of like 15.So it’s great. It’s going to save them—I mean, I was looking at it—it’s going to save them like a billion dollars.

And those billion dollars are going to go back into the kids over the, you know, 25 years of their PPA.There’s a lot more money that we can be spending, you know, towards the kids, towards healthcare versus electricity.

Something that is an essential now is we have to—I don’t know anybody who doesn’t use a light bulb.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah. Well, Megan, thank you for coming on today.

If people want to find you, and if you want to be found, where can you be found?

Meghan Stimmler:So you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Megan Stimmler, S-T-I-M-M-L-E-R.Solarhut.org—that’s my company’s website. You can find me on there too.

Any of the CalSA meetings—California Solar and Storage Association—I’m a board member for them and I’m always at all their events.But thank you so much for having me today. It was great talking to you.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, thank you so much for coming on, Megan. And for anyone listening—that’s been This Week in Solar, and I will talk to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

What’s new

A Climate Power report using U.S. Energy Information Administration data finds Americans’ electric bills are up 13% nationwide in 2025. That’s the national average, but in more costly states like New Jersey, bills are up more than 20%.

The group links higher costs to Trump’s July spending bill, saying it is “driving up utility costs and destroying jobs by removing cheaper, cleaner energy sources from the grid, all while funding new tax breaks for the oil and gas industries.”

Why it matters

Energy affordability is now a leading topic on Capitol Hill and will be a huge deciding factor in upcoming elections. Electricity demand is increasing faster than supply, particularly from data centers. We are simply not able to bring supply on as fast as demand is increasing. Or at least, that’s what we’re being told.

But renewables, especially solar, are the fastest power source to deploy by far. So why is the administration not using them?

The report tells another story: renewable projects that could have powered 13.17 million homes have been canceled since Trump took office. The EPA also terminated the $7B Solar for All program in August, which was directly targeted at lowering power costs for low-income families by paying for their rooftop solar panels.

At a time when we desperately need to bring prices down, we are cancelling the fastest-to-deploy projects so that the administration can hand contracts to fossil fuel companies, and the American people are suffering for it.

The White House has responded by saying that it’s fixing an energy crisis caused by Biden-era policies and that high energy prices are a “choice” by blue states. Climate Power expects that we’ll see further spikes as data centers and extreme heat lift demand while we wait for slower energy projects to come online.

If you’re not so keen on paying for the power needs of data centers out of your own pocket, it’s time to look at home solar. If you live in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or Delaware, Exact Solar would love to speak with you about how that would work for your unique home.

PA Bright Expands Statewide

What’s new

Capital Good Fund is taking its Pennsylvania BRIGHT solar leasing program statewide, powered by a $3.2 million investment from Candide Group’s Afterglow Climate Justice Fund.

The program helps households earning under $165,000 or living in Low-Income, Disadvantaged Communities to go solar with no minimum credit score and no hidden fees.

Why it matters

With the Residential Solar Tax Credit ending after Dec. 31, 2025, programs like PA BRIGHT will be key to helping low and moderate-income households save money on their power bills by removing upfront costs.

The initiative has already helped more than 60 households statewide past participants in the program say it’s transparent and affordable. Hopefully, we’ll see more states following suit with programs like this as we move into a world with no residential tax credit.

BLM Approves First Solar Project in Five Months

What’s new

The Bureau of Land Management just approved amendments to the $2.3 billion Libra Solar project in southwestern Nevada, the first advance of a utility-scale solar project since the Department of the Interior started requiring Secretary Doug Burgum’s sign-off on clean energy projects planned on federal land back in July.

Why it matters

This breaks a months-long freeze that solar developers say felt like a near moratorium on public-lands projects.

The project, which was previously approved by the Biden administration, sat in limbo for over a year. The revised plan keeps 700 MW of solar plus 700 MW/2,800 MWh of storage, enough to power about 212,000 homes.

SEIA estimates more than 500 projects nationwide are in danger, with 18 states having over half of planned capacity at risk.

Sources

Energy bills in US have increased 13% since Trump took office, new report finds - ABC News

Analysis Shows Electric Bills Have Spiked 13% in Trump’s First Year—And His Own Policies Are to Blame | Common Dreams

POLITICO Pro | Article | For first time in months, BLM advances solar power project

After a five-month freeze, BLM finally advances a solar project

Pennsylvania BRIGHT expands solar leasing program statewide

Pennsylvania BRIGHT Expands Statewide with $3.2M Investment from Candide Group’s Afterglow Climate Justice Fund

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

In this episode of This Week in Solar, host Aaron Nichols talks with Sean Swentek, Vice President of Marketing at Omnidian, about one of the solar industry’s biggest blind spots.

They discuss why many solar companies fail to plan for long-term operations and maintenance (O&M), how that’s created a wave of stranded customers, and what needs to change across the industry to restore trust.

You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn here.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to learn:

* Why great installers shouldn’t race to the bottom on price (and what they should do instead).

* Why “set it and forget it” solar was a dangerous myth.

* How O&M costs can be built into every solar plan from day one.

Quotes from the episode:

“If everyone decides to just compete on price, it’s a race to the bottom, and everything goes out the window as far as quality.” — Sean Swentek

“Being able to communicate briefly and meaningfully with emotion is becoming a lost art in clean energy.” — Sean Swentek

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today, once again, we’re going to be talking about service and maintenance for solar energy systems. Today’s guest is someone that I’ve followed and kind of orbited for a little while on LinkedIn, and I’m excited to finally be meeting him digitally face-to-face.Sean Swentek, would you like to introduce yourself, maybe give a high-level overview of Omnidian and explain what your role is at that company?

Sean Swentek:Yeah, Aaron, thanks for the nice intro. I’ve also been orbiting you on LinkedIn—really impressed with the content that you share there and the way that you position your company and your podcast in the industry. It’s just really informative, and I really love watching your videos and reading what you write on LinkedIn.So, grateful for you. Thank you.

I mean, this industry, the best part about it is the people. I think all of us kind of agree: being in renewables is such a blessing.I’ve come from big industries like healthcare and banking and things where you don’t get that. Everyone you interact with in renewables, at least for me in the five years I’ve been in this, has just been incredible. So I feel really blessed to be in this space.

My name is Sean Swentek. Well done on the pronunciation—it’s not as hard as it looks; it just reads as it is. I’m the Vice President of Marketing and manage branding and communications at Omnidian.

We’re a nearly 10-year-old startup—really a growth-phase company today—with a technology and services solution for solar and battery storage, and soon EV charging systems. We created a purpose-built technology solution called Resolve that ingests data agnostic of any provider or data source. We compile that into a single source of truth in a digital twin to accurately model expected performance of a system and the energy it will produce, track against that, and detect anomalies in production remotely.

We can differentiate between issues like snow and an inverter being out and understand their individual impact on a system. We can remotely diagnose and often help remediate those issues without rolling a truck—saving truck roll costs. And if a truck roll is necessary, we can advise exactly what to bring through our field service network that’s nationwide and now in Australia.

I run the marketing arm of Omnidian, so if we get too technical, I’ll probably have to pass. But I also take on the role of helping the organization understand where the industry’s going—policy headwinds, tailwinds, and shifts that might affect both residential and commercial operations. So I like to think I’ve got a good sense of the industry and where it’s headed, and I’m happy to talk about some of those burning topics today.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, thank you so much for that introduction, and I’m glad someone’s handling that at another company. It was a surprise to me to realize I liked policy and was interested in it. The whole birth of This Week in Solar was just me putting together internal policy briefs—and then realizing we should share them publicly.

Sean Swentek:I love that. Well done.

Aaron Nichols:Thank you. Well, you mentioned before we spoke that we don’t often do a great job considering operations and maintenance (O&M) of a solar project from the outset. And I think, as you know and as Omnidian is seeing, there’s going to be a crisis of solar service.

We get calls all the time from people who had a less-than-savory company install a solar system on their roof, promise a 25-year service plan, and then vanish. They don’t know what to do.So I’m interested in how we got here. Why don’t we do a great job considering operations and maintenance?

Sean Swentek:It’s a great question—and it’s not just a lack of considering O&M, it’s the lack of accounting for the cost of O&M over time.

On the residential side, which was the reason Omnidian was founded, many early systems weren’t meeting the promises made—especially from fast-scaling companies focused on sales, not long-term care. Homeowners didn’t usually bear O&M costs directly; they were handled through warranties or by the system owner in a lease.

But homeowners were rarely educated that solar systems, like homes or cars, need ongoing care. We need to normalize that expectation.

Aaron Nichols:Even just understanding that it might have issues. It’s a big electronic appliance. When you buy a washing machine or fridge, you know it might break. But with solar, people are blindsided when something goes wrong.

Sean Swentek:Exactly. And then there’s the lease model. Financing providers deploy systems across thousands of rooftops—they’re on the hook for performance. They plan for O&M at scale, but sometimes choose installers based on price and output promises.

That’s where we see over-promising on production and underestimating long-term costs. On the commercial side, the stakes are even higher—millions of dollars per system. If developers overmodel production, they’ll never hit those numbers in reality, and O&M budgets become an afterthought.

We need honesty across the industry—accurate modeling, real degradation rates, realistic inverter lifespans. Overpromising hurts everyone, including investors who lose trust in the sector.

Aaron Nichols:Of course. And I think there’s a human psychology factor too—25 years is hard to grasp. That’s nearly 10,000 days, almost a third of a lifetime.

Sean Swentek:Did you just do that math in your head? That was impressive.

Aaron Nichols:Thank you! I’ll get roasted if I’m wrong, though. But seriously—people can’t visualize that span of time. So they go for the cheapest quote and don’t realize they’re buying long-term headaches.

As a local company, we’re competitive, but not always the cheapest—and we have that conversation constantly. We fix systems all the time that were installed poorly by bargain providers.

What’s something people fail to take into account when modeling performance—something that comes back to bite them 10 or 20 years down the road?

Sean Swentek:First off—kudos to you and Exact Solar for standing by quality. Competing only on price is a race to the bottom.

As for modeling mistakes: expected component lifespan is a big one. Inverters rated for 15–25 years often fail earlier. Warranties help, but not if your installer or the manufacturer disappears.

The “solar coaster” is real—companies rise and fall fast. That’s why homeowners should prioritize proven components, rigorous installer vetting, and workmanship warranties.

Another overlooked factor is home turnover. Homes change owners more often than people think—sometimes six times during a system’s life. Lease transfers can be complicated and disrupt sales.

Overall, the industry has matured tremendously. Quality installations are more common, and companies like yours—and ours—are ensuring systems perform as promised. With rising utility rates, locking in a stable cost through solar still makes tremendous sense.

Aaron Nichols:We like to say you’re just prepaying for 25 years of power—smart shoppers buy in bulk.And interestingly, when we follow up years later, no one talks about ROI anymore. They just say, “I keep seeing bills go up—and it doesn’t affect me.”

Sean Swentek:I love that. The payback period conversation has always been there—three to seven years typically—but as battery storage grows, the economics improve again. And you’re right: utility power has infinite payback—it never ends or innovates.

Aaron Nichols:Exactly. Now, for local installers who care about quality, how can we model more accurately and deliver on promises using real-world data?

Sean Swentek:Great question. We actually published a public white paper years ago analyzing module and inverter failure rates and degradation compared to manufacturer claims. It’s eye-opening.

For our clients, we anonymize and share data-driven insights—like which components degrade slower, or which combinations yield better long-term performance. It helps them make database decisions that protect financial returns.

These systems are both clean energy solutions and financial assets. Using our data, clients can better manage those investments and forecast their performance more accurately.

Aaron Nichols:Usually when I hear “white paper,” I feel a yawn coming—but that actually sounds useful.

Sean Swentek:I know! It’s pretty wonky, but our data science team lives for it. Sometimes I need their help interpreting it myself.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, you and I are both nerd whisperers in this industry.

Sean Swentek:I love that. I’m stealing it—nerd whisperer. It’s perfect.This industry is full of brilliant technical minds who just need translators to help the public understand their work.

Aaron Nichols:Exactly. And that’s my mission—to bring emotion and storytelling back into clean energy communication. Data’s important, but people connect with stories.

Sean Swentek:Totally. I’m a huge AI proponent, but don’t let AI replace your human voice. Storytelling builds trust. When I see a clearly AI-written post full of buzzwords and emojis, I just scroll past.

Communicating meaningful ideas succinctly and emotionally is a dying art—and storytellers like you are keeping it alive.

Aaron Nichols:Thanks, man. So, to wrap up—I ask every guest the same closing question.My grandma just turned 80. She was born in a world that had just electrified rural America and had no renewable energy. Everything we now take for granted—solar PV, grid interconnection, cost parity—has happened within her lifetime.

So: what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Sean Swentek:Love this question. I didn’t prepare, because I wanted to answer creatively.

I always go back to that giant flaming ball in the sky—the sun. It already powers life; it could easily power the planet if we harness it creatively.

I’m fascinated by space-based solar—putting arrays in orbit that beam energy back to Earth. It could eliminate land-use issues and supply limitless clean power. Imagine the O&M challenges—astronaut electricians swapping out inverters in zero gravity!

I also think geothermal will play a major role—tapping the Earth’s core carefully, without destruction, for heating and cooling. Between solar in the sky and heat in the ground, everything we need is already here. We just have to use it wisely.

Aaron Nichols:I love that. One of our sales guys said something similar: “The sun already powers life—we just figured out how to harness it.”

Sean Swentek:That’s beautiful. I’m stealing that too. A nerd whisperer who believes the sun already powers life—we just have to capture it better.

Aaron Nichols:Well, thank you so much for joining today, Sean. Where can people find you?

Sean Swentek:I’m very findable on LinkedIn—I love connecting and having real conversations. My email and phone number are public there because I want to talk to people who care about this work. And if you want to learn about Omnidian, go to omnidian.com.

Aaron Nichols:Amazing. And if you want my phone number—good luck! Talk to Sean.

Thank you, everyone. That’s been This Week in Solar. We’ll talk to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

According to a report released by the Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative earlier this year, 59% of Americans surveyed agreed that “it sometimes seems like parts of their electric bills are written in another language.”

After 20 years of sitting with potential customers and discussing how going solar can save them money, we can confidently say that most home and business owners don’t realize how expensive their energy truly is.

In fact, most don’t know how to read their bill in the first place, and that’sokay. Utility bills are not designed to be easy to read.

Most people pay their electric bill each month without knowing they are billed for electricity in two different ways.

Here are the basics you need to understand about how your bill works:

What Is a Kilowatt-Hour?

Utility companies bill per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for energy. 1 kilowatt equals 1,000 watts.

A watt is a measurement of how much electricity something uses at a given moment. A kilowatt-hour is a measurement of how much power is used over time. For example, if you turn on a 100-watt light bulb for 10 hours, you’ll use 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity. Drying laundry can use 3 to 5 kilowatt-hours per load.

To bill you for electricity, your utility adds up all the kilowatt-hours you use during a billing period and multiplies that total by the rates they charge.

But here’s what most people don’t understand:

Every bill includes two charges for the same energy that are assessed separately: supply and delivery.

What’s the Difference Between Supply and Delivery?

Supply is the price you pay for the electricity you use, and delivery is the price you pay to get that electricity to your home.

Think of it like ordering a pizza. Supply is the cost of making the pizza, and delivery is the cost of bringing it to your house. If you paid for pizza the same way you pay for electricity, every receipt would look like this:

* Pizza ingredients and preparation: $10

* Pizza transportation: $10

* Total pizza cost: $20

The bill above shows this clearly. In the “PECO electric delivery” section, it says “692 kWh X 0.09655.” The first number shows that this PECO customer used 692 kWh of electricity in their last billing period.

The second number is the per-kWh rate this person is paying for delivery. In this case, they’re paying $0.09655 per kWh.

Many people see the first number and (if they know that they’re paying per kWh at all) assume that that’s the rate that they’re paying for electricity. But to see how much you’re actually paying for electricity, you need to add together the supply charge and the delivery charge.

Under the “electric supply” section, it says “692 kWh X 0.1249.” That means that this person is paying $0.1249 per kilowatt-hour for supply.

To get the total rate, we have to add the supply rate and the delivery rate.

$0.09655 + $0.1249 = $0.22145. The true rate this person is paying is 22 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Going solar reduces or eliminates both parts of your electric bill. You no longer need to buy supply from the utility, because your electricity is generated right on your roof.

And when your own solar energy powers your home, you avoid delivery costs, since the electricity is traveling from your roof straight into your home instead of on the utility’s poles and lines.

This is why solar energy systems are such a powerful investment. Once you have one, it makes energy for you at a far lower price per kWh than your utility does, at a rate that never goes up.

If you live in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, we’d love to walk you through the numbers for your home in a free consultation.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Aaron Nichols talks with Hervé Billiet, co-founder of SunVoy and former CEO of Ipsun Solar, about how frustration with off-the-shelf tools led him to build a white-labeled software platform just for solar installers.

Hervé explains how SunVoy helps established solar installers centralize data, keep customers informed, and tap into their “gold mine” of legacy customers to lower acquisition costs and grow through referrals.

You can connect with Hervé on LinkedIn here.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to Learn:

* What “brand” really means for a solar company (it’s more than just a logo or truck wrap).

* Practical first steps for small and growing solar installers.

* Why most installers are sitting on a hidden gold mine of legacy customers they don’t cash in on.

Quotes from the Episode:

“You order a twenty dollar pizza and you can track every step. You order a twenty thousand dollar solar system and you can’t. That made no sense to me.”– Hervé Billiet

“Most installers hear from the three angry customers and forget about the hundreds of happy ones. Your legacy customers are a gold mine if you bring them back into your ecosystem.”– Hervé Billiet

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols:Hello, everyone, and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today we have a very special guest. It’s Hervé Billiet, one of the co-founders of SunVoy. Hervé, I’ll let you introduce yourself.

Hervé Billiet:Hey, thank you. I’m Hervé Billiet. I’m the co-founder of SunVoy — a software to run and grow your solar business, where we really invest in marketing.

Aaron Nichols:Great. And I know that you built a version of this software back when you were working for Ipsun Solar.Well, I know you co-founded Ipsun Solar, and you owned it, and then you sold it. But you must have gone through a period of frustration with software to manage a solar business.So what was the moment when you and your co-founder said, “There’s nothing out there that works. We need to do this ourselves”?

Hervé Billiet:Yeah. So I co-founded a solar installation business. It started simple — in your basement you want to do something else with your life and fight climate change — and installing solar panels is one way to do that, very actively.You plug it in, it produces power — it’s phenomenal, the closest you get to magic.

The company grew. Once you have a few customers, maybe 10, you know them all by name — even their pets’ names. But then you grow the company, keep hiring people, you’re doing 100 installs, and you start forgetting who’s who. And once you have 1,000 customers, you don’t remember anymore.

Plus, you’re not in the trenches anymore. You have salespeople doing the work for you. As CEO of Ipsun Solar, I cared so much about branding.Branding is what differentiates you between every other installer you compete with. It doesn’t just magically happen — you need to do something about it.

One way is having your own customer portal — making sure you have that app in the App Store so when you sell solar, the homeowner can track the project.You order a $20 pizza and can track every step, but you order a $20,000 solar system and can’t track anything. That was one of the first problems I wanted to solve.

As you grow, you go from doing the work yourself to hiring people who do it better and more focused — you’re building a process.Going solar is a one-time thing for a homeowner, but for a solar company you have hundreds of projects at once. It’s very process-oriented — like a conveyor belt of solar projects moving through your business.

And in that conveyor belt, there were missing pieces. People get impatient, drop off, or cancel because they feel out of the loop.

You need a way to keep homeowners informed without adding too much work. You could hire more people, but automation helps.Automation is tricky — you shouldn’t automate everything, because people don’t want to talk to robots. I still prefer talking to a real person.So you automate what makes sense and let your team handle what’s specialized and human.

We got started because we couldn’t find software that could do this white-labeled. That’s key.I wanted the Ipsun Solar app, emails from our own domain, consistent colors — 100% white-labeled. That didn’t exist, so we built it ourselves.

And since I knew other solar CEOs, I realized if I built it for me, they’d want it too. So I designed it white-labeled from day one, knowing I’d resell it.

Aaron Nichols:Well, obviously it’s a powerful tool and white-labeling is very important.For anyone listening who doesn’t know what white-labeling is, it means the software runs in the background, but your company’s brand is what the customer sees.

You mentioned branding — and we’ve seen a lot of benefits from investing in it. Before we talk about the benefits, what do you believe a “brand” even is for a solar company?

Hervé Billiet:A brand is the perception of your company — and it’s often a reflection of the CEO or leadership team.

When someone sees your brand — online, on a vehicle, on a letter, or even just the name — that gives them an impression.If I say Nike, Toyota, Tesla — you instantly feel something. It might be positive or negative, but it’s something.

Ideally, when someone recognizes your logo or colors, it should immediately trigger: “That’s a good company. I want to work with them.”Branding isn’t just for businesses — individuals have personal brands too. You, Aaron, have one on LinkedIn. It’s everywhere.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, I would say brand is how someone feels when they haven’t talked to you yet.But I’m interested in what benefits you saw from investing in brand at Ipsun — what kind of returns did it bring?

Hervé Billiet:I can go back to the early days of running Ipsun. I asked myself, “How do I sell something anyone with a hammer could also do?”

You realize not everyone can — and not everyone wants to.In the early days, I even helped some people do DIY installs, shipping materials and walking them through it over the phone. That didn’t work out well.

So I had to figure out how to differentiate myself. There were already plenty of solar companies in my area.Branding was the key — but how do you create a brand people actually associate with quality?

Becoming a B-Corp made a big difference. Joining the Amicus Solar Cooperative did too.That network of premium, independently owned solar companies helped us run differently.

In solar, you can be residential, commercial, or utility-scale. You can also be vertically integrated — meaning you handle everything from sales to installation to service — or not.Other companies just sell, or only do labor. You need to know which you are, who you compete with, and what you value.

For me, I valued giving my employees full benefits — 401(k), healthcare, real jobs, not gig work.That’s part of your brand too: how you treat people internally. Customers can feel that difference.

Aaron Nichols:Absolutely. And as you and I both know, the bar for investing in brand in the solar industry is still low.

At Exact Solar we’ve seen it snowball — the more you invest in it, the bigger it gets.But it’s hard for small business owners in survival mode to put time and money into something they might not see returns on for a year or more.So where can someone start — and how does SunVoy help with that?

Hervé Billiet:At SunVoy, we build customer portals and fleet management systems, but we cater to established solar companies.Not two-guys-and-a-truck operations — we stopped selling to them. We’ll still give them advice, but SunVoy makes sense once you have enough customers that you don’t remember everyone by name.

If you’re just getting started, focus on basics.First: your website. Don’t overpay — you can get far with WordPress or Squarespace. Make sure your email works, you have a clean signature, and you set up your Google My Business page.

Marketing’s goal is to make the phone ring. The moment someone calls you — that’s when it clicks.

And it does compound over time. You start showing up more, people find you, and soon you can’t believe it — “They’re calling me!”But it takes consistency. Just having a website isn’t enough — update your Google listing regularly. Post something every day if you can.

And if you’re blogging, here’s a tip: every time you answer the same customer question three times, write a blog post about it.Then next time, send them that link instead of retyping the answer. You look more professional, you save time, and you build your website traffic.

That’s how branding and automation meet — you build assets that keep paying back.

Also — take good pictures. Clean up the yard before you shoot, position your van nicely, make sure your logo’s visible.Little things matter. Even custom license plates helped us. “IPSUN” fit perfectly, so we numbered our vehicles — Ipsun 1, 2, 3, up to 11.People constantly told me they’d seen the plates. Small touches add up to a strong brand.

Aaron Nichols:And I know that SunVoy also helps solar companies lower their cost to acquire customers.That’s a huge deal. The bigger a company gets, the harder it is to make sure every customer has a great experience.How does SunVoy help solve that and bring acquisition costs down?

Hervé Billiet:SunVoy builds white-labeled customer portals and fleet management systems. That’s the short version.

The long version: most established solar companies already have a CRM — Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite — full of data. They don’t want to switch.So we integrate with 20+ CRMs, pull data from them, and show it to homeowners in a clean, branded interface.

That keeps customers informed automatically as their project moves along.

And the real key to lowering acquisition costs is leveraging your legacy customers.Most installers are sitting on a gold mine — hundreds of happy customers who’ve just forgotten about you.

Installers remember the few angry calls, but forget the hundreds who are thrilled. SunVoy brings them back into your ecosystem.We connect their inverter data, show them lifetime savings in dollars, not just kilowatt-hours, and give them a place to engage again.

Once they’re back in, they see your referral tools, your online store, your add-ons — batteries, EV chargers, smart panels — and you get more referrals and repeat business.

It’s about consistency. You can’t just blast one email and call it done. You need to meet people where they are — in-app, by email, through updates.

Our best clients have customer acquisition costs under $1,000. It’s repeatable, process-driven, and proven.

Aaron Nichols:That makes total sense. Solar’s biggest challenge is that it works too well — people forget it exists.

Most customers don’t even remember who installed their system years later because it just runs silently.Like your partner said, when he asked people who installed their solar, most couldn’t recall — they’ve had so many contractors since then.

That’s why brand matters.

Hervé Billiet:Exactly. I remember asking my own brother-in-law, whose solar I’d helped arrange in San Diego, “Who installed your system?”He couldn’t remember. And this was someone I personally referred to an Amicus member!

He loved the system, used the app, even referred neighbors — but couldn’t name the installer.That’s when I knew we needed to fix this.

Because solar installers work hard. Things go wrong sometimes — it’s construction — but good companies own their mistakes and make it right.So after all that effort, it’s a shame when customers forget your name. That’s what SunVoy solves.

Aaron Nichols:Well, to bring it home, I ask everyone the same question.

A few months ago I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party, and it hit me — she was born just ten years after the Rural Electrification Act.At that time, all we knew was how to burn things to create electricity.

Within her lifetime she saw the invention of PV cells, Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House, and the drop in cost from hundreds of dollars per watt to just cents today.

So — if you’re just spitballing — what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Hervé Billiet:Before I answer that, when I was 15, I read an article in a science magazine about electric cars.It said EVs would one day have so much stored power that when you plug them in at home, your car would charge your house — not the other way around.

The image showed a futuristic car powering lights in the wilderness. And now it’s happening — people have literally powered concerts off Ford F-150 Lightnings.

So that’s one.

Looking forward, I think we’re heading to a world where the grid becomes decentralized.It was built for centralized power plants that needed huge investment and monopolies to distribute energy.

But now we can harness the sun directly — solar panels are like wireless receivers of fusion energy.The only fusion reactor we’ve got that works is the sun — and we already capture it.

I think nations are now racing to be the first fully renewable, battery-powered economies.Whoever gets there first gains a huge competitive edge — near-free energy powering every industry.

For homeowners, it means total independence — complete energy sovereignty.

Aaron Nichols:Yeah, and you end up completely sovereign — you don’t owe anyone for power, you’re not beholden to anyone.

So thank you for coming on today, Hervé. And where can people find you?

Hervé Billiet:Go to SunVoy.com.

And if you’re watching the video, you’ll see the logo behind me — that’s how you spell it.Also, for anyone starting out with marketing, we offer a free website analysis tool. It reviews your site and gives tips on how to improve it.We don’t build websites — it’s just a free resource we share from our experience helping solar companies grow.

Aaron Nichols:Well, thank you so much. And for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar. I’ll talk to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

What’s new:

Earlier this week, the Department of Energy rebranded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, as the National Laboratory of the Rockies, effective immediately, and to be “reflected in all public communications and official correspondence.”

NREL is responsible for many of the advances in solar and battery technology that we’ve seen in the past few decades.

Why it matters:

The renaming is part of the Trump Administration’s continuing “all-of-the-above” energy strategy.

Department of Energy materials still list wind and solar as major laboratory research areas, and when asked if those would be deprioritized, NREL spokesperson David Glickson said:

“No such changes are planned at this time. Program funding is determined by the appropriations process.”

The Golden, Colorado-based lab, which was founded after the 1973 oil crisis to make America less dependent on energy imports, has historically been a hub for researching newer and more sustainable energy technologies.

In response to the rebrand, Earthjustice’s Michael Hiatt said:

“Solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies are the cheapest and most cost-effective resources in Colorado, and they have been for years. Changing NREL’s name will not change that fact. The reality is that the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy and its attempts to prop up uneconomic coal and gas plants are increasing costs and causing unnecessary energy affordability burdens for millions of Americans.”

Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said:

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL. We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Laboratory of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”

White House Taking a Counterintuitive Approach to Meeting Data Center Energy Demand

What’s new

According to a new report by Bloomberg, the White House’s plan to speed up new data centers while slowing down the wind and solar projects that could quickly power them will raise energy prices for millions of Americans.

Why it matters

Utilities now expect a huge jump in power use by 2030, mostly from data centers. AI needs a lot of power, fast.

Solar, wind, and battery projects can be built in under five years, while gas and coal plants take much longer. They’re also the cheapest to build.

As one energy expert said:

“In the next 10 years, there’s really nothing to replace renewables.”

If we slow down clean energy, data centers may face delays, and power bills could rise. It’s clear that the fastest, lowest-cost path to meet this new demand is to build more renewables and storage now.

U.S. Solar Manufacturers Strike Deals to Bring Solar to Space

What’s new:

Two U.S. companies are taking solar power into space. Solestial in Arizona signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Ascent Solar in Colorado sent test panels to a major space company (which remained anonymous) for missions between Earth and the Moon.

Why it matters:

Space has no clouds and no night, so solar is the perfect power source for spacecraft. But space is harsh on any materials, and getting anything into orbit takes a ton of fuel. Spacecraft need solar panels that are light, tough, and safe from radiation.

Both companies aim to create more reliable power for Moon and orbit missions.

Ascent’s thin-film panels are designed to be light and strong, producing high power at low weight.

NASA will test Solestial’s ultra-thin silicon panels to see how they handle space charging and shocks. The panels can heal some radiation damage in sunlight and are built to last up to 10 years in space.

Sources

News Release: Energy Department Renames NREL ‘National Laboratory of the Rockies’‘

POLITICO Pro | Article | DOE removes ‘renewable energy’ from lab’s name, shifts focus

Trump admin renames National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Trump’s Plan For AI Dominance Threatened by His Own Attacks on Solar, Wind Power

US Solar Manufacturers Ink Spacecraft Deals

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Aaron Nichols talks with Matthew Britt, a Canadian entrepreneur at the intersection of renewable energy and regenerative food systems.

Matthew explains how his companies, Food Forest Abundance and The Commonstead, are helping families, schools, churches, and communities set up sustainable free food systems that pair naturally with solar and battery backup.

You can connect with Matthew on LinkedIn here.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to Learn:

* Why most people dramatically underestimate how much electricity and food they can generate on a small suburban lot.

* How solar and sustainable urban agriculture can work hand-in-hand.

* What the average person can do to make their home resilient and safe, no matter what the world throws at them.

Quotes from the Episode:

“Abundance is already here. Our food, our water, our energy – it’s all around us. We just haven’t been harnessing it the right way.”– Matthew Britt

“We don’t grow food. Nature grows the food. Our job is to work with nature instead of fighting it every step of the way.”– Matthew Britt

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Hello, everyone. And welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the research and policy specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today’s guest is another very special guest. I am very interested in how renewable energy intersects with food systems, and I’ve said for years, I don’t want to save the world I want to save the wild.Today’s guest intersects with all of that perfectly. He helps people take their power back. It’s Matthew Britt, ladies and gentlemen, if you’d like to introduce yourself.

Matthew Britt: Yeah, it’s awesome to be here. Thank you so much for having me on, Aaron. You know, it’s always awesome to connect with people who are on similar value driven missions and trying to make an impact.So I really appreciate you opening this up to me. And yeah, Matthew Britt, live in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. So Canadian born and raised and really have a personal mission of life, health and prosperity.I’m a father, I’m a father of three. And I have spent the past 25 years in the making a difference space.

At first, I was in the personal training and health and wellness industry, and I helped people improve their lives and their health through movement, and breath work, and good food, and really the foundation being movement.And then from there, moved into the renewable energy sector and, you know, really spent a big portion of my life in the coaching, personal development, movement, all of that stuff space and then really extended that beyond by going into: how can I provide solutions that impact billions of people and what do we need now based on our world?

And when I got aligned and really understood that making the biggest impact where you can impact the most people and the biggest size of the marketplace really gives you that ability to make serious long-lasting change that adds tremendous value that gives you tremendous value back. And that’s where the renewable sector came into play, first with the solar and storage, but then learning all about the different efficiency technologies and things that could be done there.

And then realizing that one of the biggest things we can do is take our power back when it comes to our food, and stop fighting nature.And when I got exposed to where I’m an owner and employee with now called Food Forest Abundance, and then leading into what’s The Commonstead, it really became about how do we give people the awareness back that has been taken from us around the abundance that nature provides.

Nature is abundant. Food is grown by nature and it should be grown everywhere. No one should be without. And we’ve got this belief that you need to have a green thumb or you need to be a farmer in order to have food growing.But the reality is those people don’t grow food either. Nature does. Nature grows the food.

And nature harnesses the sun, right? Solar energy to drive high value natural things that are meant to interact with us, that give us energy, thereby being the food, right?So when we take care of the soil, which we’ve neglected forever, and we stop growing ornamentals all over our lawns and our yards that don’t want to be there anyway, that are liabilities for us, that we invest time, money, energy, and resources into to get no value back, really.

And we’re not saying replace all your grass, but utilize a portion of your property to produce some food and let nature produce that food for you.So, our mission over at Food Forest Abundance is to build a localized and decentralized poison-free food and plant medicine supply around the world, using the science of permaculture.

Aaron Nichols: And I’m interested in what do you think the average education gap is for, let’s say, the average homeowner.I know that you mentioned ornamental plants. I think a lot of people don’t know that lawn grass is the most watered crop in America.And poisoned.

Matthew Britt: Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. You’re correct. Poisoned. Yeah.So, what do you think the average homeowner doesn’t understand about food systems?And also, how do solar energy systems, what we do, fit into this larger picture?

Matthew Britt: Yeah. So, the main thing is that there’s a gap as far as what they believe is possible.Right. Because when they think about growing food, they typically have one or two images that pop into their minds. One is they see an annual garden that mom or grandma, grandpa, maybe they keep and they say things to me like “I don’t have a green thumb,” or they see a monoculture farm and they say things like “I’m not a farmer.”

And when they think of both of those things, what they’re thinking of is something that does take a lot of time, energy, money and resources in order to manage.And the reason it does is because they fight nature every step of the way. Right. And nature is relentless. It doesn’t matter how much chemicals you put on anything, it does come back. Nature is relentless.

So instead of fighting nature, what if we started working with it? And that’s the first gap we have to close, helping people realize that we, I don’t grow food.You don’t grow food. We don’t grow food. Nature grows the food. If you live in Ontario, you might not get to grow pineapples.

Yeah, you grow what grows natively in that climate zone. But there are hundreds of thousands of edible and medicinal perennial plants that once you plant them, they come back year over year over year over year over year over year for decades, sometimes centuries, sometimes for millennia, depending on the plant, and will produce food, value for you that whole time.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. And I know that you have history as a solar energy entrepreneur as well, and I’m interested in how it fits into this whole picture for you.

Matthew Britt: So, the solar energy piece definitely has to do, again, with taking your power back. The sun is hitting your roof. Why is it just damaging your shingles when it could be powering your home?Right. And why not store some of that electricity?

So, I’m all in on solar and storage, and even the other systems that exist today for energy production, and all of them have their place.The great thing with solar is it hits everybody’s house and not only does it go on roofs, there’s more and more technology improvements happening there.

Next thing you know, the whole exterior of the home is gonna be able to collect energy.

Aaron Nichols: Right. It’s not gonna be long, right?

Matthew Britt: We’ll be able to paint it on pretty soon. You’ll be able to paint it on, exactly. So it just makes, again, logical sense to be able to capture what is already here for us in abundance.See, we’ve been fooled to believe that everything is scarce, right? But it’s the opposite. Abundance is everywhere.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. But there’s no money in abundance.

Matthew Britt: Right.

Aaron Nichols: Right. Yeah.

One of the guys on our team, Dave Hammes, who I’ve interviewed for the show and I think his episode will come out probably the week before yours, has mentioned that he wants to change the narrative and he wants to stop talking about solar deployment and talk about solar harvesting because it’s already there.You already get the sun. The sun is just shining on the earth and we now just have these things that you can just lay out in the sun and they will produce electricity.They don’t require you to dig up something and burn it one time so that you have to then go find more things to dig up and burn.We have better ways to do things.

Matthew Britt: Yeah, exactly. It’s extremely valuable. And I’m very grateful to be a part of that serious energy transition that’s happening right now.And I think that we’re going to see a rapid increase in the amount of people that are really ready to take on the adoption.

And, you know, I think the great thing now is everybody’s so much wiser. We’ve gone through the solar coaster as they say and it’s been ups and downs as an industry really finds itself, it gets its feet under itself and it really starts taking off. We’ve got all kinds of incredible innovations happening when it comes to energy and energy efficiency, all extremely important as we have more and more energy demands happening every day.

Where are we getting that from? Well, one, we should be able to use the energy we already have more efficiently, two, we need to produce more.And the wisest place that I can think of to be producing it from is the sun. It’s there for us.Let’s get it, right?

Aaron Nichols: I’m interested in what motivates people to come to you. Because I think, you know, for people to find a solution, they generally have to hit a threshold of a certain type of pain.And I’m interested what kind of pain drives people to you.

Matthew Britt: So we’ve got two kind of different businesses that we’re talking about here. One with Food Forest Abundance, and that’s where we’ll go first. That is the awareness of the poisons in the food system and the awareness of control mechanisms being applied to people in general and them wanting to take control of some of those things.

They know that the food system is full of chemicals and not so good stuff. So why not have the ability to take care of yourself in one way by producing some or all of your own food.And then two is just preparation; you know, people realize that there’s only three days’ worth of food in your average grocery store.

Right. What happens in a major interruption?

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, we saw that during COVID.

Matthew Britt: Now imagine that goes three weeks.If all the food is gone in three days, what are we doing for the next 17 of those three weeks?Right. And unfortunately, most people aren’t prepared. They don’t have anything at their homes extra. So when the grocery store runs out, they’re uh-oh, they get desperate.And desperate people do desperate things. So let’s try to prevent all of that from happening. Let’s grow food everywhere we possibly can.

Every house, let’s do a little.

Aaron Nichols: Oh, every house, let’s do a little. I’ll edit that section out, sorry, keep going.

Matthew Britt: Yeah. Yeah. Every house just grew a little.

Aaron Nichols: Right. And I mean, that same resiliency applies to solar energy. If you’re worried about your family’s safety, and you have solar and battery systems that, you know, in some kind of disaster, can power your home, then you live on a safe little island with the people that you love during an emergency like this. And if you add the ability to grow your own food, I mean preserve your own food, you have something very, very few Americans do.

Matthew Britt: Correct.And I help a lot of people add solar and storage to their lives still to this day. I just sold a system yesterday.This gentleman’s building the family compound and he’s buying three different storage systems. The first one he got, say, 40 kilowatt backup.And then he’s buying probably two 16 kilowatt hour backup battery systems. So we’ll have three big batteries on his property as well as solar for each one of those units.And it’s all because he wants to be resilient and self-sufficient just in case.

Aaron Nichols: And so I guess the next place to take it, I’d be interested in testimonial stories like general overviews, you don’t have to be too specific, but, you know, someone you’ve taken from zero to three. How does that person generally feel? What kind of things do they tell you after that? What’s that journey like for someone?

Matthew Britt: It’s extremely rewarding for them, because it now is giving them a consistent resource of food that is full of life force, right?You’re talking about fast food. What’s faster than walking out your front door, your back door, and grabbing the stuff right there.

And the journey is fairly quick for people. They go through a design process, and once we have that design finalized, then it’s about bringing that design to life on their property.And then from there, the implementation of all of that, depending on the age of the plants that people buy, takes a certain amount of potentially seasons for it to grow, or if you’re starting from seed, but if you’re growing a tree you’re going to have a few years before it’s producing the fruits or nuts or whatever it is that it’s bringing to you.

But if you buy older stuff, then it could be that same season or a year or two later.But we definitely try to set them up where they have both the long-term as well as immediate production, so we’ll implement annual crops in the beginning too, that then can be kept or not.

But everybody’s, we’ve done stuff at schools. Those are the most gratifying, and orphanages, churches. So we’ve done five different schools, two churches, an orphanage. We’ve done over a thousand design and builds in 54 countries now.And it’s, you know, teensy-weensy but what I liked about it was I’ve expanded my impact beyond where I was in 23 states doing solar and storage. I’ve now made an impact in 54 countries.

So I also saw there’s a much greater ability to scale my impact with this particular entry into the “help a person change their life, become more empowered, take their power back” world.It was a simple foundational entry point, which then I could help them also implement solar and storage.Right. And I can help them implement water systems.I can help them implement everything that they need to be self-sufficient on every level. Food, energy, water, healing, education, privatization, all of it.

Aaron Nichols: Right. And there’s such a snowballing effect there. I mean, one of the most interesting projects we’ve been lucky enough to do: last year we did a ribbon cutting for it, but we designed a ground-mounted solar array with a battery backup that serves an off-grid greenhouse on the property of a charter school in Philadelphia.

So they have this big field and now they have a hydroponic gardening system in there that is completely off-grid and the students get to handle the whole process of zero to food and they get to prepare some of that food in an on-site kitchen and run a local farmer’s market a couple times a year.And the interest in that has been incredible. I mean, as a ribbon cutting we did, you know, a local or actually our state congressman showed up for that district and that eventually landed us a backlink in NPR and we got featured there.And there’s a lot of interest in this stuff.

But I’m interested also in, let’s say, the average person that doesn’t have a lot of land, the average suburbanite. Are they able to get involved in this stuff as well?

Matthew Britt: So people can grow food inside their home. There’s technologies that are implemented in that case. Vertical growing systems, I got a partner I work with called Harvest Today.They make something called the Harvest Wall and it’s literally a wall that actually you can be double-sided if you want it to be that big, and you can grow 720 plants in a couple of panels.It will produce a lot of food for you.

You can grow on balconies. You can grow on your countertop. I have another partner called Go Microfresh, and they do countertop microgreen systems that are stackable and all beautifully designed, technology driven, nutrient-dense food growing right in your countertop.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, and it’s interesting, because if you put solar on your home to power those things, it’s almost like you bypass—it’s like you put a barrier between photosynthesis, but you’re still powering it with the power of the sun. Like the sun there is…You can put them near windows and then also still power it from the power of the sun for sure. Yeah.

Matthew Britt: Right. The other thing too is, depending on, you know, you got a lot of people that obviously live in a city that are now today in condos and apartments. Right. But if they don’t live in a condo or apartment and they actually have a house even in the city with a small lot, you can grow on very small pieces of property.Right. That’s the great thing. It can be done anywhere.

You can put those plants in pots if you want.But then as you get, you know, into the larger yards, anything a quarter acre is a fairly large yard.But anything under a quarter acre we do designs for all the time.Right. But then we go up from there; our next, like we got three sizes. You know, we got under quarter acre, up to one acre and then up to three acres as kind of like our primary sizes. And then beyond that it gets very, very custom in size.

But everything is a hundred percent custom design specific for your size of property, utilizing local native perennial edible medicinal plants and all designed in a system that works with nature, meaning we design in seven layers of production. When you look at how people normally grow food in their mentality, them growing the food, they do it in either rows of just one thing or a whole system of just one thing.

That’s one layer. We go in seven, which is how nature does it, right? If you go outside to any green space that’s got some forestry around it, go look at that forest and you don’t just have one thing.You’ve got a mass diverse system in multiple layers. Your things that are growing underground, your ground cover, your small shrubs, your bushes, your understory trees, your canopy trees, and then oh yeah, you got vines in there and fungus.

So you’ve got a massive system that produces a serious amount of abundance in a smaller space.

Aaron Nichols: And how long does it take for the average person to start producing that abundance on their own land? If they, let’s say, you know, they go from a green yard that’s had a bunch of pesticides sprayed all over it to wanting to do this, how long does that usually take?

Matthew Britt: First of all, we can heal their soil very rapidly. And then as far as the design process, depending on the size you’re a month or up to, say, six to seven weeks, depending on how big your food forest is.And there’s multiple interactions with that customer.

And then from there, it is the implementation, which depends on how fast they want to do it. Because they get that design back, they can DIY that install themselves, they’re just following a blueprint. It’s just buying the plant and putting it in the ground.Or they can have someone come and do that for them, and then it just depends on scheduling on when that’s able to be booked and completed.

But once that stuff is all in the ground, things start growing right away, they start taking. Some stuff you’ll be able to utilize very quickly. Other stuff does take longer, right?So, you have a mix of speeds, depending on the plants that you’re utilizing at those times, but people’s journeys, it’s an ongoing thing. I think it’s kind of a better expectation: this is bringing something to life on your property that’s going to produce you value. It’s always going to be growing and evolving.

But to get it in the ground is inside of three months, and you don’t need permitting or things like that.Unless you’re HOAs; then they sometimes make them ask permission or tell them where they can grow. But you’re not waiting on, like, there’s no rules and regulations necessarily around like some of the blockages we have in the solar industry, right?

Like I’m trying to get solar installed someplace in a neighborhood, I’ll have the hydro company block me from doing it because they only want to allow 12% of homes in this area to have a solar array.Because the grid is so old, and if they’re going to add more, they have to go out and spend all this money to add new transformers and the big boxes, etc.We don’t have those type of things that hold us up in projects the same way.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah, there’s so much to solve, but I think people like you and people that run the local farm that I hang out at a lot and who work with their land rather than against it. There’s such a vision of a better future being painted there. And unfortunately, the way that things are now, it incentivizes not using the land the right way.

Matthew Britt: It does, yeah. I think, as we move forward, I mean, we have to adapt to these things or, you know, it’s just not going to be good, we’re just not going to have a world to live in that we want to live in.No, it’s very unfortunate, you know, the future generations, our kids, they’re the ones that are really going to feel the impact of all this.

Like, I would say it’s impacting us. But, you know, what’s that future look like if we continue to poison the earth like we are, poison the air, poison the water, poison the soil.It’s not—and unfortunately, you know, everybody is trying to do their best, right?

There’s these big agricultural producers, these farmers, there’s a lot of them that don’t want to use what they use.They feel trapped. They don’t have the education to do it a different way.

It’s definitely a mix of all these different things, right? Education, don’t have enough time to get the education, or at least that’s a story they tell themselves.They’re busy farming. They’ve also got quotas to hit, production numbers to hit. So for them, it’s a big risk to try something different because if they miss a quota, their whole season is out.Right. All the money for that year basically goes, poof.

Aaron Nichols: No. Well, as we’re thinking about that brighter future and we’re bringing it home, I end this podcast with the same question for everyone and it comes from the fact that a couple months ago, I was at my grandma’s 80th birthday party.

And as I was writing the LinkedIn post about it afterwards, I realized that she was born into a world where renewable energy, as we know it, did not exist.That was, you know, she was born ten years after the Rural Electrification Act in 1945. So the only way we knew how to generate electricity was to dig things up and burn them.And she was nine years old when the first PV cell was invented. And that was a fringe technology for years and then it’s only recently that we’re seeing the prices per watt that we’re seeing now and we’re starting to see mass adoption.

So if you’re just going to spitball and fantasize about the future, what do you think clean energy looks like in 80 years?

Matthew Britt: Well, the first thing would be that every roof, every exterior wall, every exposed space that we live inside of is all going to be collecting and producing energy.I think we’ll probably even finally have maybe some of the free energy devices that I think have existed for a long time, but have been quietly suppressed.

They seem to be making a reappearance quite rapidly, and the internet is disseminating and decentralizing that information very quickly. So it’s hard to shut up new advancements that are very abundance driven, very freedom driven, and because of that, the power of the internet and the decentralizing of the knowledge, I feel like we’re going to have a lot more abundance around us in every way.

All of our food, all of our water, all of our energy is going to be—it’ll be available for all of us.It already is. We’re just not harnessing it the right way. And I think we’re seeing a big awareness level increase right now amongst the greater general population.

And people are trying to see what’s possible. And because of that, the whole shift is increasing in momentum. And because of that, we’re going to have a lot more people asking for it and demanding it and doing it and inspiring others, which will then just continue to feed upon itself.

So I think the future is very bright in abundance. I’m excited to be a part of that, and grateful to have you a part of that as well and look forward to seeing, you know, what we can do together to accelerate the adoption and creating a world of abundance that really is here for us all.We all deserve it. It’s our birthright. You know, we’re born into this incredible place where we all live and abundance is here for us all.So let’s go get it.

Aaron Nichols: Amazing. And if people want to find you, where can they find you?

Matthew Britt: I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on LinkedIn, under Matthew Britt, and you know the other place would just be to send me an email.You can send me an email: Matthew at The Commonstead, The Commonstead, Matthew at The Commonstead, and I’d be happy to talk with you.

Aaron Nichols: All right. Thank you so much for coming on today, Matthew. For everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar and I look forward to talking to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

Energy bills in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware are going up again in 2026.

Here is our detailed article explaining why.

In June 2025, ratepayers in our service area (PA, NJ, and DE) saw their electric bills rise by up to 20%.

Electricity prices have increased dramatically for two straight years.

There’s a lot of blame and finger-pointing happening in the media right now about who’s fault this is, but one thing’s for sure: there is almost no chance that the price of power is going to come back down. Our aging grid needs billions of dollars of upgrades, and the only way utility companies can fund them is by raising prices.

Here are the utilities in our service area that are raising their rates in 2026:

PECO

PECO, the utility company that generates and delivers electricity to most of Greater Philadelphia, was approved by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission for a $464 million rate increase, which went into effect in January 2025.

This raised the average customer in their service area’s bill by 12.3% in 2025 and will raise it again by 1.7% in 2026.

Delmarva Power

In 2025, winter bills spiked for Delmarva Power customers, leading to public hearings and an average $10/month increase in supply charge starting June 1, 2025 (for a typical home using 811 kWh/month).

Higher electric supply charges will continue into early 2026.

PSE&G

In June 2025, New Jersey residents saw their bills rise by more than 20%, in a state that already pays more than 20% above the national average for power.

NorthJersey.com, citing Energy Information Administration data, reported that fall 2026 bills will be at least 8% higher than last year for PSE&G customers.

PPL Electric

On September 30, 2025, PPL Electric filed an application with the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission for a $356 million rate increase to improve its delivery and distribution infrastructure.

If approved, this increase will raise the average bill of anyone in PPL territory by at least 7%.

Jersey Central Power & Light

In June of 2024, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) approved JCP&L’s plan to raise prices in its service area by $923.3 million to fund infrastructure improvements.

These improvements will raise customers’ bills in their service area by $4.86/month starting in June of 2026.

Atlantic City Electric

In November 2024, Atlantic City Electric filed a request for an 8% increase through the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. If the BPU approves the 8% rate, it will take effect in 2026 or 2027.

Lower Your Electric Bills with Solar

No matter which utility you buy electricity from, price increases are coming, and electricity rates are not going back down.

Imagine feeling comfortable adjusting your heat or AC without worrying about what it will cost. With solar, rising utility rates have far less impact on your household budget.

If you begin the process today, you could have a solar energy system installed and producing electricity before next summer’s increases take effect.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com

In today’s episode, Aaron talks with solar recycling advocate and industry veteran Kate Collardson.

Kate shares how asking the simple question, “What are we going to do with all this stuff at the end of its life?” and repeatedly hearing the answer “Huh. Someone should probably figure that out” led her to try to… figure it out.

She walks us through co-founding SolarRecycle.org with Amanda Bybee, and tells us the story of handing the project over to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

You can connect with Kate on LinkedIn here.

Listen to this episode here, or on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to Learn:

* Why the solar industry should pat itself on the back (we did something very unique).

* How EPCs, installers, and service teams can start building responsible reuse and recycling into their project scopes.

* Policy and funding models (like landfill bans or small per-watt fees) that could make the solar industry truly sustainable.

Quotes from the Episode:

“We built this industry in the name of sustainability. We cannot ignore what happens to the equipment at the end of its life.”– Kate Collardson

“We are the first industry in history that chose to figure out recycling before the waste piled up. I am really proud of that.”– Kate Collardson

Transcript

Aaron Nichols Hello everyone and welcome back to This Week in Solar. I’m your host Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania.And today’s guest is very special. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Kate CollardsonThanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here. I’m Kate Collardson, as you said. And I have been in the solar industry for about 20 years.I started as an installer and have worked for manufacturers and distributors and financiers, and about seven or eight years ago I started getting interested in our end-of-life practices.So I kind of asked the question at trade shows, you know, around my network… What do you think we’re gonna do with all this stuff at the end of its life?And the answer was always, “Eh, someone’s gonna have to figure that out, huh?”And I got that answer enough times, and so nobody was really raising their hand to say, “I’m gonna figure it out.”Except for someone named Sam Vanderhoof, who has been in the industry for 40 years. He’s a pioneer from Northern California.And he started passing around a petition at an RE+ that might have been SPI back then, and it was (for anyone who’s listening, that’s a conference).It’s the biggest industry conference of the year. And it was a petition to get solar recycling going.And so I went up to him and shook his hand and said, I would love to help you out with whatever you’re doing.

Kate Collardson (continued)And so he was putting together a startup for recycling. I got him into an incubator program here in Colorado.We went through that, and through several twists and turns. That didn’t end up panning out for me.But in that time, I had gained this reputation in the industry as someone who knew something about recycling.People would give out my name, because whenever the topic came up, someone would say, “You know who knows something about that? Kate Collardson.”So they’d call me or email me, and I’d get back to them when I could, but I had a full-time job.I quickly realized I was becoming a bottleneck to getting information out.

So I sat down with my good friend Amanda Byby, who was in a similar situation (caring deeply about end-of-life practices) and willing to talk about it.She was also being given out as someone who “knew something.”So the two of us sat down and said, “You know what we could do? Put together a website that provides all the information we know, that anyone can access anytime.”Instead of saying, “Here’s Kate’s contact” or “Here’s Amanda’s contact,” people could say, “Go to solarrecycle.org.”

Aaron NicholsMmm. And the information that you’re looking for should be there. Well, how long has this been in the making? Because I know it just came out last week officially, right?

Kate CollardsonWell, last week officially, a different thing happened. We launched the website in 2021.So it’s been out there and people have been using it. What we quickly realized is that we were a volunteer organization, and volunteers couldn’t keep up with the changes happening.We’re a nascent industry (especially the recycling part) so there’s a lot that needed to change.We weren’t able to act quickly enough to provide the best information at all times.So we decided that SEIA, who was getting into recycling as a topic they wanted to support, could take it further.We worked with them and ended up passing the website off to SEIA.

Aaron NicholsOkay. And last week SEIA launched SolarRecycle.org under the SEIA umbrella. Got it, okay. So your baby grew up and you sent her to college.

Kate CollardsonYes, that’s a good way of putting it.

Aaron NicholsOkay, yeah. You mentioned something before we started recording about why you think the solar industry is special in one very particular regard. Would you like to elaborate?

Kate CollardsonYeah. We get a lot of bad press around how there’s “nothing to do” with solar at the end of its life.A) That’s not true. But B) we’re really young and just coming up to needing to recycle.We are the first industry in history to impose recycling on ourselves before it became a problem.Other industries wait until they run out of materials or the government steps in and says, “You have a waste problem, fix it.”We didn’t wait. We said, “We built this industry in the name of sustainability, we need sustainable solutions for our equipment at end of life.”We’re figuring it out before it becomes a crisis, and I’m really proud of that.

Aaron NicholsThis is one of my deepest life principles: never take life advice from people who aren’t trying.That might sound like a segue, but it reminds me of Peace Corps. I met so many critics who had never actually done humanitarian work.Same thing happens with solar — people criticize it without ever doing anything to help.An elderly relative once told me it takes years for solar panels to produce more energy than it took to make them. I asked, “How many years does it take a piece of coal?”We can’t take criticism from people who aren’t trying.Following that idea — what are the major obstacles we’re facing in recycling solar panels and end-of-life?

Kate CollardsonThere are a few. First, we built solar panels to last decades outdoors without service — now we want to take them apart easily.Those two ideas don’t mix well.So we’re still experimenting with different recycling methods to find the most efficient one.You can take off the aluminum frame — that’s easy to recycle. Then the junction box, which has electronics and metals.What’s left — the laminate — is the hardest: glass, backsheet, cells, and bus bars.Silver is the most valuable material, but it’s hard to access.Some recyclers cut off the backsheet with heated knives, but that only works if the glass is intact.Others grind and sort the materials or use chemical processes to separate them.Different companies are testing all these methods right now.

Another big problem is economics. In 20 years, module costs have dropped dramatically due to dematerialization — thinner frames, thinner glass, less silver.That’s great for cost but bad for recyclers, because there’s less valuable material to extract.So as the commodity became cheaper, the incentive for recycling dropped too.

Aaron NicholsWhat about electronic components? Is there anything in there that can be reused, or are they just destroyed at end of life?

Kate CollardsonReuse is something I absolutely advocate for. On SolarRecycle.org, we not only track recycling and policy — we also track where to donate used equipment for second-life use.A system that’s end-of-life for one person might still have plenty of life left for someone else.Electronics, like inverters, have robust recycling options — just like phones and computers.So yes, there are definitely ways to reuse or recycle electronic components responsibly.

Aaron NicholsSo what about for us as an EPC that’s sometimes removing old panels to put on new ones… where do we start?

Kate CollardsonGreat question. Recycling isn’t free, you pay to recycle.Unfortunately, landfilling panels is cheaper right now.Some distributors, like CED, will take used or end-of-life panels and consolidate them for recycling.So EPCs should calculate the recycling cost upfront, pass it to the customer as a line item, and deliver panels to a consolidation point.There are more and more of these cropping up nationwide.

Aaron NicholsI met someone from We Recycle Solar at the ASES Conference, they donate the glass to local artists who paint on it and sell the pieces.

Kate CollardsonOh, that’s great. There are all kinds of things you can do with used panels. Art is absolutely one of them.There are folks here in Wyoming doing something similar. You can make tables out of them, you can do all kinds of creative things.Of course, the world only needs so many solar panel tables. But I’m happy that we care and that we’re trying.It’s unfortunate that recyclers have to pay for panels to be recycled, but as costs come down and legislation evolves, this will improve.

If the company is motivated, they can make recycling part of their standard process. It just becomes part of the cost of doing business.Over time, as the industry matures and we have more material coming offline, the cost will come down.Policies like landfill bans or recycling fees, similar to what we pay for tires, paint, or batteries, could fund recycling sustainably.

Aaron NicholsYou’re so right. Well, what would you change first if you had a magic wand? What one big thing would you change about recycling in solar?

Kate CollardsonIf I could change anything, I’d like us to get behind the idea of a half-penny per watt to pay for today’s recycling needs.If we, as an industry, agreed on something small and fair like that, it could fund recycling sustainably.In Europe, there’s already a small fee that covers recycling from manufacture to consumer.We could do the same if the industry chose to, and it would help us live up to our sustainability promises.

Aaron NicholsWell, since we’ve been doing this interview series, I’ve ended every show with the same question.This started because I went to my grandma’s 80th birthday party and realized she was born in a world where the Rural Electrification Act had just happened.Renewables didn’t exist yet. The first PV cell was 1954, Jimmy Carter put panels on the White House in 1979, and now solar prices have absolutely cratered.So, just for fun, what do you think clean energy looks like 80 years from now?

Kate CollardsonI think we’ll use a lot less energy. Homes and businesses will be far more efficient.Although, data centers might challenge that.Hopefully we’ll be fully renewable, and technology will be so efficient we won’t need as much generation.

Aaron NicholsThat’s a great hope. Thanks. Kate, where can people find you if they want to connect?

Kate CollardsonLinkedIn is the best place. Or at industry events like the NABCEP conference.

Aaron NicholsAmazing. Well, thank you everyone for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode.If you’re watching on YouTube, please subscribe. If you’re on Substack, drop your email and I’ll send you more like this.That’s been This Week in Solar.

Kate CollardsonThanks for having me.

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