How Do you Sell Solar to a Climate Denier | Ep 222 | Cherie Gregoire [Re-edited]

When Cherie Gregoire was asking Cambridgeshire's councillors for money to build solar, some of them didn't believe in climate change. She decided she was never going to convince them, so she stopped trying. Instead she asked questions they could all say yes to. Does the council need more money? Is this low-risk? Is the electricity free once it's built? Her first solar farm, she says, cleared a couple of hundred thousand pounds in its first year. Cherie started out as a Department of Defense intern working on tank cannons, until one overheard conversation made her change degrees. We talk about solar on school roofs that helped keep teachers employed, turning park-and-ride car parks into mini grids, why giving electricity away is harder than it sounds, choosing a home by the flood maps the week Cyclone Alfred hit Brisbane, and why insurers already believe in climate change even if your neighbours don't. Recorded in March 2025, re-edited and shared again because the argument she makes works on anyone, whatever they believe. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

If Australia tried to meet the storage in its long-term grid plan with home batteries alone, Glenn Drover worked out you would need to install about 1,000 Powerwall-sized batteries every working day from now until 2052. I did the sum the other way round: the same storage is already sitting in about 1.4 million electric cars. Glenn is company secretary of the Yarra Energy Foundation, which built what may have been Victoria's first community battery in Fitzroy North, and he spent years introducing Sumitomo's vanadium flow battery to Australia. We talked about why flow batteries suit long-duration storage (and can't be stolen), whether a community battery can pay its way without grants, how the backstop let his son double his rooftop solar, why Americans can't believe what Australians pay for solar, and an estate on the Bass Coast where houses with about 5 kW of panels export more than they use over a year. Recorded in 2025, re-edited and shared again because the question of who will own Australia's storage is still wide open. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

In 2006 Grant McDowell had a shady roof in Marrickville and an idea: put the panels on a solar farm somewhere sunny, and match that energy to your house every half hour. He patented it in 2007. Eighteen years later, Plenitude in Italy is advertising it on TV as Adopt a Panel. Households pay €3 or €5 a month for a share of a solar farm in Sardinia, and their energy is free whenever they use power while it's generating. We talk about why, as Grant puts it, about 55% of an Australian power bill now goes to poles and wires and only 35% to the energy itself, and why he thinks the grid already belongs to the people who paid for it. We also cover the plug-in solar kit he couldn't legally sell here, and his hard-won view that most people think about electricity seven minutes a year and shouldn't have to think about it more. Recorded in 2025, re-edited and shared again because the bill hasn't got any simpler. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Can you leave the grid? A couple of houses in the middle of Townsville already have. But Steve Blume, who has been banging on about load duration curves for forty years, thinks almost nobody will — because you can't buy 99.99% reliability at home at any sensible price. He calls the grid the Medicare of energy. We talk about why Australians started buying EVs the moment fuel prices jumped, why the Integrated System Plan is a set of scenarios rather than a plan, and who ends up paying for the network when the people who can afford solar, a battery and an EV need it less. Steve warned utilities back in 2012 that their customers were becoming their competitors. Fourteen years on, he says most of them still haven't come to grips with it. And my favourite story of the conversation: a family on the Sunshine Coast who spent $78,000 on a lead-acid battery to avoid two or three hours of blackouts a year. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

A few years ago Pakistan had about two gigawatts of big wind and solar projects at an advanced stage. None reached financial close. Meanwhile, as Danny Kennedy puts it, its citizens "went up to the border and bought truckloads of panels" and installed 20 gigawatts themselves. Danny co-founded Sungevity and Mosaic, ran the California Clean Energy Fund and New Energy Nexus, and has spent most of the last decade backing energy startups across Asia. We talk about why planners keep using solar and battery prices that are years out of date, the $50-a-kilowatt-hour battery contract he is showing investors, the farmers in Balochistan who got a third harvest from panels laid on the ground, why a billion-dollar LNG terminal looks like a bad bet against $100 million of solar and batteries, and his case that island economies should electrify the boats first. Recorded in 2025, re-edited and shared again because the gap between the big projects and what people are building for themselves has only got wider. Disclosure: Energypreneurs Advisory now advises Tiger New Energy, which comes up near the end of the conversation. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Western Australia sends almost a billion tonnes of iron ore offshore every year. Ray Wills wants it to leave as green iron instead — and to make that, he says, WA needs about 500 gigawatts of energy. Its grid today is around 10. That sounds insane. Ray's answer: it is only insane on an Australian scale. China installed more than 90 gigawatts of solar in a single month last year. So we talk about what it would take to build at that pace here — including bringing in a construction workforce of 30,000 to 40,000 people, and why he thinks that creates Australian jobs rather than taking them. We also get into why 2026 is the year he has been waiting for since his 2015 models, why anyone building new fossil plant now may never get their money back, how batteries are already taking the peaks off gas prices, and why his own 14 kW rooftop is only allowed to export 1.5 kW. After the interview I checked his numbers with Grok in my car. You can hear that at the end — including where the AI agreed with him, and where it got a number wrong. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

Clearbot started because its founders watched people on big diesel boats trying to fish rubbish out of rivers with pool nets — polluting more than they were collecting, with a man half over the side reaching for the trash. So they built the electric version: remote-controlled, solar-charged boats that hold up to three tonnes of rubbish and water hyacinth, with no fuel, no engine noise and nobody leaning over the edge. I recorded this in Manila with Sanyuktha, Clearbot's head of business development and marketing, the day after we had been out to waste sites along the Pasig together. We talk about how the boats actually run (a set of batteries lasts four hours, you swap it and keep going), why a pilot pulling 500 kg a day out of a river in Northeast India turned into a year-long contract, why a solar panel on the bank means a boat can work with no fuel bill at all, and the families living beside water they didn't pollute. Recorded in 2025, re-edited and shared again because the problem hasn't gone anywhere. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs Instagram @energypreneurs Tiktok @energypreneurs Spotify Video @energypreneurs

Australia now has around half a million home batteries, thanks to the federal Cheaper Home Batteries program. Almost none of them can be dispatched. Glenn Dahlenburg puts it at 90 to 95% that no retailer can control, because customers don't want anyone else touching their battery. Glenn spent twenty years at the edge of Queensland's grid, and most recently built Energy Queensland's ~$300 million battery programme, including one-tonne batteries mounted on power poles. We talk about why community batteries will probably stay niche in Australia, why a network might one day deliver 22 hours a day and leave the rest to your battery, the swamp line that made the first case for standalone power, and his surprisingly good argument for an air conditioner on the balcony. And his call-out at the end, the one I keep thinking about: everyone is working out how to get batteries into the market, but almost nobody is thinking about how to get them out.  Glenn Dahlenburg — Managing Director, GCD Advisory. Brisbane. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs

By the early 2030s, the aggregated battery capacity of Australia's EV fleet is expected to exceed Snowy Hydro 2.0. Not approach it — exceed it. And unlike Snowy, it's already being paid for, by people buying cars. Portia Rooney has spent three years working on bidirectional charging in Australia, and went to Europe and China on a Churchill Fellowship to see what everyone else is doing. Her focus is AC vehicle-to-grid, which uses the car's own onboard inverter rather than expensive external hardware — Lego blocks rather than one big dam. We get into why interoperability is the bottleneck rather than the technology, what's actually launched commercially in the Netherlands, what China is running across 30 pilots in nine cities, and why this matters more in the Pacific than anywhere else — where a typhoon takes out one large power station, but not 2,000 cars. One warning worth the whole episode: there are products on the market that will trick a vehicle into discharging without the manufacturer's approval. Don't use them. Portia Rooney is Founder and Director of Batteries in Wheels. Re-edited from Ep 338, first published July 2026. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs  

Simon English has spent 15 years inside Australia's electricity distribution networks, and he's been asking them an awkward question: what actually counts as an outage now? With hundreds of thousands of home batteries installed, he reckons around a quarter of a million households no longer notice when the grid goes down. In the 2022 Brisbane floods his was the only house in his cul-de-sac with power for three days, so he knocked on doors and invited the street round to charge their phones. We talk about why networks are paid to build the road rather than to have it used, why the dumbest part of the grid is the transformer on your street, and why you might get two cents for your solar from the grid but thirty from next door. Simon also explains why he'd rather hire people from casinos, airports and prisons than from inside the industry. Come and listen. I think it'll change how you think about reliability. Simon English is a Brisbane-based distribution network specialist who has worked with around two-thirds of Australia's distribution networks, as an employee and as a consultant. Connect with Sohail Hasnie: Facebook @sohailhasnie X (Twitter) @shasnie LinkedIn @shasnie ADB Blog Sohail Hasnie YouTube @energypreneurs