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.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 17, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
The Grid Isn’t Ready for Robots on Wheels (opens the original)
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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,
The Case for Electric Cooperatives in the Microgrid Era (opens the original)
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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'
The Wild, Weird & Wonderful History of Solar (opens the original)
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Most people in solar assume the industry started with the trade-show boom of 2006–2007. It didn't. It started decades earlier, in the logged-over hills of Humboldt County, California, where back-to-the-land hippies were hacking a self-sufficient life out of the wilderness — powering their homes off car batteries, micro-hydro, and windmills just so they could keep the lights on and play a little music. Host Elisa Wood sits down with filmmakers Jeff Spies and Jason Vetterli, whose two-hour documen
How Customers Are Reshaping the Grid (opens the original)
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From homeowners to businesses to AI data centers, customers are investing in distributed energy for their own reasons — and collectively rewiring how the entire electric system evolves. Recorded live to open The Great Transformation conference in Bend, Oregon, host Elisa Wood sits down with three people who aren’t just watching this shift — they’re shaping it: Cameron Brooks of Think Microgrid, Greg Castle of Schneider Electric, and Mike Grenier of Elexity. The panel digs into the data center po
Resilience as a Team Sport (opens the original)
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Wildfires, record heat, and a grid under more strain than ever have turned “resilience” from a buzzword into one of the fastest-growing categories in energy technology. Host Elisa Wood talks with Julia Hamm — who spent nearly 20 years growing the Smart Electric Power Alliance (SEPA) before becoming a partner at The Ad Hoc Group — about how resilience became its own market, the AI cameras and wildfire-spread software utilities are deploying today, why microgrids are still an emerging (not mainstr
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