Videos

Check out my new book: Wired for Sun: The Commercial Solar Playbook on Amazon https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/book Growing into large commercial-industrial solar? Book a free consultation with Tim Montague to grow your solar business today! https://calendly.com/tim-montague/coaching_consulting Clean Power Hour logo wear now available on demand: https://cleanpowerhour.merchyme.com/ Sponsor the show: If you make…

Electricity prices are rising in markets across the US, and commercial customers are looking for ways to control their energy bills. At InterSolar San Diego 2026, CPS America Midwest Sales Rep Evan Upshur explains who is buying the Gonzo, what problems it solves, and why availability right now is a…

How do you grow tenfold and still deliver the returns investors expect? That's the question Dan Leary, founder of Denowatts, posed at RE+ Northeast. His message to asset owners: stop waiting for the market to improve. Use this moment to examine your data, find the profitability gaps, and fix how…

Solar assets across the industry produce less energy than expected. Hervé Billiet, CEO of Sunvoy, traces part of the problem to how the industry sold solar for years. He admits it: he sold his first system telling the customer there was no maintenance. He did it long enough to realize…

A solar robot operates at head height on a construction site. How do you keep workers safe? I asked Jay Wong, CEO of Luminous Robotics, this question at RE+ Boston. His answer: AI algorithms running on multiple sensors detect when a person gets too close. The Lumi 4 stops and…

One large solar company reported less than 1% of its field employees were women. The solar industry overall sits at 25 to 30% women across all roles, but the construction side drops to an estimated 1 to 3%. Riley Neugebauer, founder of Solar for Women, joins Tim Montague on the…

Why are data centers going off-grid at scales nobody predicted? Not for sustainability. Because they cannot get grid interconnections. Wes Kennedy at Qcells says off-grid deployments co-located with data centers are happening at hundreds of megawatts. These projects already exceed what the off-grid sector imagined possible. The economics of clean…

Is AI going to take your job in clean energy? Wes Kennedy at Qcells says it depends on one thing: how narrowly defined your work is. If you do the same routinized task every day, you're at risk. If you bring creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to adapt, you're not.…

What happens when the battery becomes the product, not the add-on? That market is already here. Texas has battery-only installations. Base Power is deploying 40 kWh battery-as-a-service units in Illinois. And what used to be a $20,000 solar project is now a $50,000 solar and battery project. Residential solar is…

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Why is USA Residential Solar So Expensive? The Real Reason Behind this ! Solar modules once cost $8 per watt. Geoff Greenfield bought his first panels from a classified ad in Home Power magazine. Twenty-six years later, he leads an EPC division building 67 MW projects and negotiating 100 MW…

Residential installers moving into commercial solar are walking into a different business. Different equipment. Different modules. Different inverters. Different racking. Different proposal software. Different design tools. Different audience. Hervé Billiet, CEO of Sunvoy, puts it bluntly: explore commercial, but be careful. Your cash flow is completely different on C&I. Your…

Grid congestion is forcing a shift in how solar and storage connect. Wes Kennedy at Qcells explains that when AC capacity at the point of interconnection is constrained, the answer is DC coupling: connecting solar and storage on the DC side. Coupling is how solar and storage are electrically connected.…

Hervé Billiet, CEO of Sunvoy, has a clear position on O&M: do the work yourself. If you outsource everything, you don't learn. It stays a black box. You can't professionalize what you can't see. If you do it in-house, you learn. You take some risk. But you keep your price…

What's the difference between a vendor relationship and a true integration partnership? Doug Macmillan from Portside Systems described how his team works with Denowatts. It's not a vendor-consumer dynamic. Portside functions as the system integrator for the Denowatts platform, involved from the design phase through commissioning. That model cuts friction…

Don't outsource essential work. Doing it in-house builds knowledge, controls costs, and fuels growth. Open the 'black box' of operations and learn it yourself. #OperationsManagement #InHouse #BusinessGrowth #Learning

A 10-person, three-month estimating process. Compressed into 12 hours by a single AI agent. That is what Jesse Anglen, co-founder of Ruh AI, is building for construction and solar companies right now. In this episode of The Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Anglen to break down…

Tired of sifting through data for every support ticket? This solution consolidates info from 10+ sources onto one screen, enabling instant troubleshooting. No more hunting for customer or installation details. #SupportTickets #CustomerService #DataManagement #Efficiency #Troubleshooting

Demystifying energy accounting by breaking it down into understandable buckets. Identify climate factors, modeling issues, external influences, or controllable commercial elements. Understanding these distinctions makes solar energy more reliable. #EnergyAccounting #SolarReliability #SustainableEnergy #EnergyManagement

This is Part 6 of a 6 part series recorded live at RE+ Boston with the team at CPS. One CPS customer retrofitted a one-megawatt project from central to string inverters and hit all-time production highs, even with decade-old panels. Luke Schlicte, Utility Account Manager, and Andrey Malyshev, Applications Engineer…

Denowatts tackles solar unpredictability with 'energy accounting.' Identify losses, optimize recovery, and ensure investor returns. It's time to modernize solar data management. #SolarEnergy #EnergyManagement #RenewableEnergy #TechInnovation

Create Energy picked up 600 megawatts of orders in January 2026 alone. Trackers, EBOS, and a growing list of products, all from a company most people in solar have never heard of. In this episode, Tim Montague sits down with Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy, at InterSolar San Diego…

Corporate America often overcomplicates messages, leading to missed connections. Rule #1: Lead with ONE story. In the clean energy sector, a focus on complex data can alienate audiences, especially when facing opponents skilled in emotional appeals. Simplicity wins. #StorytellingTips #CorporateCommunication #BusinessStrategy #CleanEnergy

See how a compelling story about solar energy, organic produce, and community impact landed politicians, local organizations, and eventually national NPR attention. This is the power of narrative. #Storytelling #MediaRelations #CommunityImpact #SolarEnergy #Publicity