E326: The Technology is Ready. So Why Hasn't it Scaled?

Tim Ryan has spent decades thinking about energy markets — and he talks about them the way most people talk about sport. In this conversation we get into the Cheaper Home Battery Program's 450,000+ installations, why "self-consumption" isn't selfish, and why the old rule that electricity can't be stored is quietly becoming obsolete. We cover vehicle-to-grid ownership battles, why retailers are hiking daily fees right as consumers start saving, and why Tim believes the energy industry is about to have its own WhatsApp moment — the kind of shift that makes the old way of doing things look as outdated as a 1980s long-distance phone call. This conversation got cut short by a dropped connection. Stay tuned for Part 2. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Bambang Susantono has had three careers that would each be a full life's work — Vice Minister of Transportation for Indonesia, Vice President of the Asian Development Bank, and then the founding head of Nusantara, Indonesia's new capital city. In this conversation he explains why Nusantara studied three other purpose-built capitals — Astana, Brasília, and Canberra — to learn what not to do. His verdict on Myanmar's Naypyidaw, a city with five-star hotels and 20-lane roads: "the community doesn't have the soul." We also get into facial recognition and surveillance technology in modern cities, why AI should remain a tool rather than a replacement for human creativity, and a near-death experience surviving a cyclone in Samoa that reshaped how Bambang thinks about climate resilience. "Building forward better" — not "build back better." That's Bambang's principle, and it's the thread running through everything he's built. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Patrick Strom has spent 25 years in the wind industry, from prospecting sites to predictive maintenance on turbines the size of skyscrapers. His message is simple: renewables don't need subsidies anymore. They're winning on cost, full stop. In this conversation: why offshore wind's real bottleneck isn't catching the wind but absorbing it onto the grid, why concentrated solar power was "the wrong answer to the right question," and why 60% of decommissioned wind turbines in Denmark get a second life rather than the scrap heap. We also get into the lithium recycling myths fossil fuel defenders love to repeat, why insurance companies sometimes refuse to cover problems you can predict, and why offshore wind farms are quietly bringing fish habitats back to life. "It's pumped out of the ground, it's refined, it's burned, and it's gone." That's the fossil fuel business model. Here's what replaces it. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Bruce Nordman spent nearly 40 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory asking one question: what if we ran electricity the way we run the internet? His answer reframes everything. A notebook computer is already a nanogrid — it can run on battery or grid power, and it distributes electricity to every USB device plugged into it. Scale that idea up, add a price signal that machines (not people) respond to, and you have a model for the entire electricity grid — one that works the same way whether you're in California or an off-grid village in Sub-Saharan Africa. We cover the three things every grid actually needs to coordinate — energy, power, and capacity — why Bell Labs dismissed the internet before it existed, and why Bruce believes electricity technology is still trapped in the 19th century. This conversation ends on a teaser: direct current power distribution, and why your house might one day run almost entirely on it. Part 2, coming soon. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs  

John Lin grew up Dutch-Chinese, worked strategy at the Netherlands' biggest e-commerce company, and spent years telling his McKinsey colleagues that everything they called "the future of commerce" had already happened in China. Nobody listened. He was right. He now does 50 keynotes a year telling European boardrooms the same thing about EVs, AI, and energy. In this conversation, Xiaomi built a car factory in 180 days and took 200,000 pre-orders in 3 minutes for a car nobody had seen. AI agents ordered 10 million bubble teas in nine hours. Driverless cars with blue light indicators are on the streets right now. And a $70,000 phone-brand EV just demolished a $1 million Ferrari at the drag strip. The quartz crisis is coming for every industry. The question is which side of it you're on. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Originally published as Episode 230 — this conversation has only become more relevant since. Michael Barnard is a climate futurist who builds decade-by-decade projections of the energy transition through 2100. He doesn't claim to be right. He claims to be less wrong than most. In this episode: why hydrogen demand will fall, not rise — and why the narrative that sustained it for a decade is now collapsing. We also cover Pakistan's 22 gigawatt rooftop solar surprise, battery swapping for two and three-wheelers, containerized batteries sailing fully charged from China to Rotterdam, and why V2G is a rounding error for 90% of the world. The 2035 hydrogen study from Sweden's RISE Institute says it all: hydrogen won't pencil out for road transport — anywhere. Denial is also a river in Egypt. Watch the original: https://youtu.be/m0pXZsTjGqg?si=2h2fbLv8VRo_wH63 Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Hamish McKenzie is Deputy Director of the Energy and Climate Program at the Grattan Institute. His team just published a landmark report on Australia's gas transition — and the findings are stark. Gas use has peaked across every sector. In the National Electricity Market, gas generation is down 61% since 2014 and now just 4% of the grid. More households are leaving the gas network than joining it for the first time ever. The bigger problem isn't that gas is declining. It's that nobody is managing the decline — no legal definition of decommissioning, no coordinated phase-out plan, and networks shutting down with six months notice. We also cover V2G, the home battery boom, hydrogen's real use case, and why Australia is the most advanced country in the world on household energy transition. Cooking with gas used to mean everything was fine. Times have changed. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Jess Hunt has spent 25 years redesigning electricity markets. She was involved in the Hornsdale Big Battery — the world's first grid-scale battery — and now consults for governments and regulators across Australia. In this conversation: the duck curve is dying, eight-hour battery storage is making gas redundant, and South Australia's latest firming tender went entirely to batteries. Gas companies weren't successful. We also get into free electricity, $23 per kilowatt-hour price spikes, and why your EV could pay for dinner on a peak demand night. South Australia is the world's renewable energy laboratory. Here's what they've learned. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Why is the energy transition inevitable? Not just desirable, but inevitable. In this first module of the Energypreneurs Masterclass, I curated five conversations from 300+ episodes to answer that question. You'll hear from a trucking entrepreneur, a clean energy analyst, a physicist, and an InsurTech founder, each telling the same story from a completely different angle. This masterclass is free for 3 months. 8 modules total. Hosted by Sohail Hasnie, 40 years in the power sector, former Asian Development Bank energy specialist. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

The Philippines imports $15 billion worth of oil every year. 4 million tricycles burn a significant share of it. Paul Johnston is the CEO of Pure EV, 350 electric tricycles operating across the Philippines, 92% utilisation, drivers taking home 30% more income. The technology works. The numbers work. We go into the unit economics, the financing barriers, the charging infrastructure, and why converting Jeepneys is a maths problem and not a technology problem. The question is want. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs