Scaling Clean

My latest Scaling Clean guest, Rebecca Holmes, has spent two decades helping companies rebuild their websites and brands. Now she's the founder of bennu, a growth marketing company working with mission-driven clients in renewable energy and resource resilience.Here are three takeaways from our conversation:🔹 A website isn't the final product. It's an artifact, and the strategy behind it is what actually matters. Rebecca says companies often revamp their site when the underlying problem is an outdated story that never grew with the business.🔹 Having a forgettable brand is a big risk; you should strive to build a bold brand. Playing it safe is what gets you overlooked. Rebecca loves seeing renewable energy companies move past typical branding toward bolder colors and imagery that speaks to new audiences.🔹 AI is not a strategist. It moves fast and can generate dozens of options, but it has no conviction about which one is right. That judgment still has to come from a person.Rebecca also shared some striking stats on women-led startups and her advice for anyone thinking about starting a business.

After nearly a decade interviewing founders and CEOs for Suncast, my latest Scaling Clean guest turned the tables and let me ask him the questions.With nearly 1,000 episodes under his belt, Nico Johnson has probably interviewed more clean energy executives than anyone else in the industry. Along the way, he's picked up on both the trends driving clean energy and what makes an executive or company sound interesting to the media.Here are three takeaways from our conversation:🔹 The story lags behind the company. Businesses land on an early narrative that helps them raise money and win first customers, then keep repeating it long after the product, the customers, and the economics have changed. Nico believes the best leaders slow down long enough to notice when their story is out of date.🔹 One message doesn't work for every audience. Too many executives only know how to pitch investors, because that's the call they take most often. Nico's advice is to build a "story bank" so you can speak fluently to investors, customers, partners, and government officials, in the language that moves each one.🔹 Podcasts build your personal brand and your investor readiness. Being a guest sharpens your message, boosts discoverability, and adds to what Nico calls your "trust ledger." Nico said, “revenue is downstream of trust,” and trust gets built by showing up.

Times may be tough for residential installers, but my latest Scaling Clean guest says those installers are sitting on a gold mine.Hervé Billiet, CEO of Sunvoy notes that installers can earn the most valuable asset: consumer trust, and maintaining that relationship post-install is an under-tapped opportunity.  Here are three takeaways from our conversation:🔹 Installers should think beyond the first sale. Residential solar has evolved from selling panels to selling batteries, EV chargers, maintenance, etc. The installers who stay connected with customers are in the best position to grow alongside them.🔹 AI is only as valuable as the data behind it. Hervé believes the opportunity isn't adding AI for the sake of it, but rather organizing years of installer data, customer interactions, production data, and service history so AI can help businesses operate more efficiently.🔹 Installers can prove they deliver as promised with real fleet data. That can build trust before a sale happens. Sunvoy compares projected system performance with actual production across an installer's entire fleet, allowing companies to show prospective customers that their systems perform as promised. 

One comment from my latest Scaling Clean guest, Yann Brandt, really stuck with me.He said that as a CEO, by the time an idea reached his desk, it had been filtered, softened, and stripped of what made it interesting.That's why he wants more people (especially younger professionals) to speak up, ask questions, and not be afraid to bring new ideas to the table.After nearly two decades across the solar industry and 14 years publishing SolarWakeup, Yann has offered many thought-provoking ideas to our industry.Here are three takeaways from our conversation:🔹 The solar industry can't afford to be passive in politics. Solar may have bipartisan support among voters, but policy still determines how quickly the industry can grow. Yann argues that companies need to view political engagement as a core business function.🔹 The best leaders want to hear fresh ideas. His advice to younger professionals is to never assume your voice doesn't matter. Thoughtful ideas only make an impact if you share them.🔹 Consistent writing and reading build better thinking. Fourteen years of publishing SolarWakeup sharpened Yann's perspective on the solar industry by forcing him to read deeply, form opinions, and challenge his own assumptions.Yann also argued that the ITC isn't just an incentive for the industry, but a tool to keep electricity affordable. Lowering the cost of building solar projects helps deliver lower-cost power at a time when consumers need it most.

Imagine your EV sitting in the driveway overnight - not just charging, but powering your home, supporting the grid, and earning money while you sleep.That's not a distant vision. It's what Marco Krapels, Chief Marketing Officer at Enphase Energy, says is coming soon. Marco is my latest guest on Scaling Clean. He's spent decades shaping the clean energy industry, from early EV charging infrastructure to some of the sector's hardest-fought policy battles. Now he's focused on turning millions of homes into grid assets.Here are three takeaways from our conversation:🔹 Your EV may soon become an energy asset.Marco believes bidirectional EV charging could change the role of EVs. Instead of consuming electricity, EVs could store energy, power homes during outages, and provide flexible capacity to the grid when demand spikes. As a Mach-E owner myself, I found this fascinating.🔹 Utilities and distributed energy don't have to be opponents.The solar industry spent years fighting utilities over net metering. Marco believes the next era is about partnership. As utilities face growing demand from electrification and AI-driven data centers, distributed energy resources can help solve capacity constraints faster than traditional generation.🔹 We have a deployment problem.The U.S. already has untapped energy potential. 10 million homes with 10 kW of solar and 10 kWh of storage could unlock roughly 100 GW of dispatchable capacity. As electricity demand surges from AI, data centers, and electrification, the challenge may be less about building new generation and more about deploying the solutions we already have.