Energy Changemakers Podcast

About Energy Changemakers Podcast

As the energy grid faces unprecedented changes, local energy solutions are increasingly needed. Hosted by Elisa Wood, an experienced energy journalist, The Energy Changemakers Podcast brings you into the heart of these transformations. Each episode features in-depth discussions with industry leaders pioneering the move toward a decentralized grid. From technological innovations to policy changes — discover actionable insights to help your company leverage emerging opportunities. Join us at The Energy Changemakers Podcast and be part of the conversation that shapes our energy future.

Publisher

Energy Changemakers

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Jun 2024

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

59 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   The DER-Utility Standoff—and a Way Out

   Utilities and distributed energy companies often talk past each other, and each side blames the other for the stalemate. Navneet Trivedi, co-founder and COO of Vrinda Inc., has spent more than three decades working with over 100 utilities in eight countries, and he calls himself an "energy transition realist." In this episode, host Elisa Wood talks with Navneet about why utilities behave the way they do, why he called New York's REV initiative flawed when everyone else was celebrating it, and his proposal to change the relationship. If batteries, microgrids, and other DERs make customers more resilient, Navneet asks, should responsibility for reliability, and the pay that comes with it, be shared between the grid and distributed resources? It's a candid conversation from someone who loves utilities and wants them to change. Check out Vrinda's latest white paper: https://energychangemakers.com/resource-library/grid-utilization/

2. 

   17 Sept 2026

   The Grid Isn’t Ready for Robots on Wheels

   Autonomous vehicles are more than cars without drivers. They’re “robots on wheels” — and they will need enormous amounts of electricity at the grid edge. In this episode of the Energy Changemakers Podcast, host Elisa Wood talks with Mike Calise, CEO of EV charging company Tellus Power, about why the rise of autonomous fleets could make microgrids and distributed energy a strategic necessity. Calise sees two massive transformations colliding: the electrification and automation of transportation, and a power system already confronting soaring demand from AI and data centers. Microgrids could help bridge the two by generating and managing electricity close to where autonomous vehicles operate — while bidirectional charging allows the batteries inside those vehicles to become grid assets rather than simply new loads. The conversation explores a real-world example at Oakland Unified School District, where 74 electric school buses can act as dispatchable batteries, returning energy to buildings or the grid when the buses are sitting idle. It also looks ahead to robotaxis, delivery vehicles, drones and other forms of “physical AI” — and what it will take to power them as they scale. Calise calls it a collision between the multi-trillion-dollar energy and transportation industries. At the center of that collision may be one of distributed energy’s biggest opportunities yet: using microgrids, storage and vehicle-to-grid technology to power the machines emerging at the edge.

3. 

   2 Sept 2026

   The Case for Electric Cooperatives in the Microgrid Era

   What if the model to solve many of our biggest electricity problems already exists—we've just never used it to its full capacity? In this episode, Keith Taylor, a UC Davis  institutional economist, makes the case that America's 800-plus co-ops are a form of "latent community capacity" hiding in plain sight. Keith proposes federating cooperatives so that they compete in the microgrid era, and what a Lake Tahoe utility crisis reveals about who really gets served when data centers come knocking. It's a hopeful, practical conversation about doing "policy from below." Look beyond the market and the state. Drawing on Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom's insight that "there are no panaceas," Keith argues we systematically overlook the civic economy — a third leg of the stool alongside the market and government — where cooperatives operate on logics of service at cost rather than profit. We already have energy democracy. The U.S. has more than 800 electric cooperatives serving roughly 42 million Americans, generating about $42 billion a year in revenue. Of those members, some 8,000 serve as elected board directors — a political economy of its own that's ready to be leveraged, not built from scratch. Co-ops are often more efficient, not less. Investor-owned utilities serve about 30 households per mile of line; the average co-op serves about 7 — yet co-ops deliver comparable rates. In the 1930s, IOUs claimed lines would cost $2,000/mile; co-ops innovated the cost down to under $650/mile. Keith sees the same pattern today in broadband, where a South Carolina co-op (Carolina Connect) is stringing fiber for ~$15,000/mile against incumbent telco estimates of $200,000–$300,000/mile. Small doesn't mean weak — they federate. Individual co-ops stay locally controlled but pool into federations for financing (CoBank, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation, and USDA's Rural Utilities Service together hold over $300 billion in assets), insurance (Federated Insurance), and white-label marketing (Touchstone). Keith's vision: a "microgrid federation" that makes co-ops a trusted vendor for communities building distributed energy. The Tahoe warning. A pocket of ~50,000 Californians around Lake Tahoe is served by the Nevada grid — and as Nevada's data-center demand grows, that region may be dropped in about 18 months, facing spot-market rates and rolling blackouts. It's a concrete example of customers losing out to data centers, and of why platforming alternative institutional models matters. Policy parity works. Co-ops have lagged on renewables largely because of incentive structures — they were historically excluded from renewable subsidies and often exempt from state renewable portfolio standards. When the Inflation Reduction Act's "direct pay" provision finally gave them parity with IOUs, co-ops rapidly expanded their renewable and distributed-energy portfolios. Start local, start now. Keith's call to action is bottom-up: engage your co-op's board and member-relations staff, join a member advisory committee, or run for the board. Where there's no co-op, look to public utility districts, community choice aggregators, or form a new association. As Ostrom put it: "We can, so we must."

Who has been a guest on Energy Changemakers Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Alok Singhania
• Tim Hade
• Lisa Cohn
• Peter Asmus

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.5 / 5

8 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 30 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

46

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Energy Changemakers Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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