ILLUMINATORS

Uplight
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Illuminators is a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy. Businesses and industries regularly face sweeping transitions. Those transitions are now getting more frequent and volatile as technology cycles speed up. We'll tell stories about how businesses or industries have managed disruption throughout history. This show will help energy experts learn from the wider world of business, and help business learn about the unique world of energy.

Все

  1. Выпуск 1

    Origins of the Modern Battery Storage Business

    In this episode, we profile a pioneer in storage who proved out the business case for putting big batteries on the grid: John Zahurancik.

  2. Выпуск 2

    How Failed Green Jobs and Energy Poverty Shaped This Founder

    In this episode, an entrepreneur who’s applying community organizing tactics and data crunching to clean energy in inner cities: Donnel Baird.  Donnel is the CEO and Founder of Blocpower, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York.  Blocpower helps inner-city buildings lease heat pumps, install new lighting systems, or invest in solar. And it has a piece of software to help microtarget the right buildings and make installations faster. Donnel grew up in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where he experienced energy poverty and was forced to think about how the environment directly impacts quality of life. “I think when you're poor you have to be aware of your environment and the kinds of adverse health impacts that can be caused by your environment. That's part of surviving as a poor person in America or any country. And I think that in my family we were, we were definitely super attuned to that,” explains Donnel. Later, he played a role in the green jobs push within the Obama Administration. It opened his eyes to the limitations of the green building sector. “The green buildings and energy efficiency industry is fundamentally broken. It has sales problems, it has mechanical engineering and energy efficiency audit problems. It has a huge financing problem, it has a construction and installation problem. It has an M&V problem, and if you pour $7 billion into that failed industry and hyper fragmented industry, we didn't get the results that we would've hoped,” he says. In this episode, we tell Donnel’s story of frustration, confusion and inspiration that led him to become a founder.  Resources:Grist profile: Donnel Baird makes inner cities more efficientNation Swell: How to power a renewable energy startup

  3. Выпуск 3

    An ‘Intrapreneur’ Driving the Corporate Clean Energy Revolution

    In this episode: an "intrapreneur" who’s managed the clean energy and sustainability strategies of some of the world’s biggest and most complex organizations.

  4. Выпуск 4

    From Dotcom Bust to Clean Energy Visionary

    Michael Liebreich is the founder and former CEO of New Energy Finance, a research and analysis firm that was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009. It’s become one of the premier organizations focused on clean energy investment and deployment trends. Michael is one of the savviest and most vocal energy experts out there. His talks, articles and twitter threads are closely watched in industry circles. He has a knack for explaining things clearly and provocatively.  And as it turns out, he has a pretty wild story. We’re going to hear about how he went from McKinsey cheese consultant to olympic skier to a debt-laden founder who lost almost everything in the first internet bubble. “You're not expecting 10 years out of Harvard Business School...you're unemployed and you're unemployable. Your Rolodex is gone, because everybody that you know has also lost their job,” reflects Michael. In spite of his dotcom bust, Michael later created a highly-influential research company focused on wind, solar, biofuels, hydrogen and other cutting-edge energy sectors. It made him an early visionary on the global energy transition. “I saw all of these problems in the fossil and in the incumbent energy system, and I had had enough exposure to technology and venture capital to understand that there were alternatives. And I had the very great fortune in my pre-business school career of being forced to calculate experience curves,” he explains.  “And I decided ‘I'm just going to follow my gut. There's something big here.’ And I started with another unemployed friend. We started New Energy Finance just started collecting data about energy.” We’ll talk with Michael about the ups and downs of his entrepreneurial career. And we’ll examine the economic and technology trends that convinced him of the transformative impact of clean energy. Resources: A 2011 Financial Times profile of Michael Liebreich after he sold New Energy FinanceMichael Liebreich BNEF analysis on the road to deep decarbonizationMichael’s new company: Liebreich Associates

  5. Выпуск 5

    How Trust in Companies Is Changing Rapidly

    In this episode, we’ll hear about the surprising ways businesses can earn trust — and what happens when they lose it.

  6. Выпуск 6

    The Birth (and Near Death) of Demand Response

    Tim Healy co-founded EnerNOC in 2001. EnerNOC was one of the companies that turned demand response from an obscure, low-tech process into an automated and powerful tool for managing the electric grid. Tim found his calling as an entrepreneur early on in life. But he’s had plenty of people who told him he wouldn’t be CEO material — including his first business partner in college. “I would say it's driven me for the last two and a half decades, to really take that as motivation rather than as some sort of negative criticism,” explains Tim. He later used that motivation to get him through one of the roughest periods of his professional life: a battle at the Supreme Court that threatened the existence of EnerNOC. “There were times during that period of time where I did feel more isolated and alone than usual, where I felt like it was unfair that we were having to fight this big of a challenge and that something so good for society, something so good for the energy innovation sector was having such a difficult time making its business work,” he says. We’ll talk with Tim about his tumultuous journey building one of the most influential companies in clean energy. Resources: Profiles of EnerNOC’s co-founders from the Tuck School of BusinessGreentech Media: Enel Buys EnerNOC for $250 millionFortune: Why the Supreme Court’s demand response ruling is important for innovation

  7. Выпуск 7

    The Tough Job of Closing Down Coal

    In this episode: how one CEO was forced to reckon with her roots in coal country, change her view on climate change, and reorient her utility to embrace the clean energy transition. Patti Poppe is the president and CEO of Consumers Energy, the biggest utility in Michigan. She’s an industrial engineer who got her start in the automotive industry managing plants for General Motors. For the last 15 years, she’s been working in the utility business. She’s done it all: power plant director, operations VP, customer experience lead, and now chief executive.  Today, Patti is leading the biggest power company in Michigan through a massive transition toward renewables and energy efficiency. And she’s convinced that the transition needs to happen quickly. “We've made a big transition here. We used to have the ‘sucker's choice.’ You can have clean energy, it's just going to be expensive. Or you can have the cheap and dirty stuff, take your pick. We sold that story for a long time. And the reality is we don't have to make that sucker's choice anymore,” says Patti.  Deciding to go all-in on a climate strategy was a huge transformation for Michigan’s biggest utility. And for Patti too. “And so when we actually brought the data...I think people felt free and safe for the first time to say what they really believed about it, and we could really come to a place that we could all agree on how to move forward.” In this episode, we’ll detail how it all unfolded. Resources: Wall Street Journal profile of Patti Poppe’s approach to the clean energy transition Crain’s Detroit Business: Consumers plan to close down coal plants Energy News Network: Poppe is “betting on the people of Michigan” to clean up the grid

  8. Выпуск 8

    A Wind Pioneer’s Big Gamble

    Michael Skelly is the former president and co-founder of Clean Line Energy Partners, a company that attempted to build a cross-country power line to send wind electricity to the Southeast.  His nearly decade-long saga of Clean Line is filled with setbacks, frustrations and failures. “I do believe in progress. It comes in fits and starts and so maybe we're not successful but hopefully that the second mouse gets the cheese on these things,” says Skelly. But his career is filled with plenty of big successes. Before co-founding Clean Line, Skelly was the chief development officer for Horizon Wind. And earlier in his career, he built a mile-long ski lift in the jungle for eco-tourism. He knows a thing or two about complicated infrastructure. A book was recently written about his journey, called Superpower. It’s all about Skelly’s mission to build a 700-mile clean energy transmission superhighway -- and what happened as he grappled with the political and market forces stacking up against him.  In our final episode of the season, we’ll talk about what Skelly learned from his experiences taking on big, daunting projects. Resources: Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform America’s Energy Axios: How America’s Biggest Renewable-Energy Power Line Failed

  9. Трейлер сезона 2

    We're Coming Back for Season 2

    We're coming back for a new season of ILLUMINATORS! In our first season, we told stories of disruption in other industries and then applied them to energy. This season is a bit different. We’re talking to some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs and executives in energy — people who’ve grappled with extreme change — and bringing their stories to you. And of course, we’re going to hear about what they’ve learned from other areas of business, at a time when companies of all kinds are constantly under threat. We are still in the early stages of production, but we’ll be dropping episodes later this fall. So don’t go anywhere.

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Illuminators is a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy. Businesses and industries regularly face sweeping transitions. Those transitions are now getting more frequent and volatile as technology cycles speed up. We'll tell stories about how businesses or industries have managed disruption throughout history. This show will help energy experts learn from the wider world of business, and help business learn about the unique world of energy.

Информация

  • Автор
    Uplight
  • Выпуски
    15
  • Сезоны
    2
  • Ограничения
    Без ненормативной лексики
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    ILLUMINATORS