The Energy Show

The grid’s down. The fridge is warming up. And you haven’t had your coffee. How much solar and battery power would you actually need to get through two weeks? On this week’s Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon shares The Solar Prepper’s Guide, a practical look at backup power for two scenarios. You’re riding out an outage at home, or you have to pack up and leave. At home: Barry walks through an example with 4 kW of rooftop solar and a 10 kWh battery. He explains how automatic load shedding can pause

On this week's The Energy Show, host Barry Cinnamon welcomes Kevin Chou, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Bright Saver, the nonprofit helping bring balcony solar to communities across the United States. Inspired by the explosive growth of balcony solar in Germany and Europe, Bright Saver is working to make DIY solar affordable, simple, and accessible to everyday Americans. And the numbers are surprisingly compelling. Episode Highlights: • California's SB 868: What the new balcony solar law means for

This week on The Energy Show, Barry sits down with Anoushka Tamhane, an MIT Climate Systems Engineering student who's researching battery storage and exploring an ingenious approach to geothermal heating and cooling. The technology is brilliant. The politics? Not so much. While students at MIT are developing the next generation of energy solutions, research funding cuts and changing policies are making their work more difficult. Barry and Anoushka discuss what happens when technological progre

This week on The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon sits down with Tom Werner, who led SunPower from 2003 to 2020 and helped build it into one of the world's largest solar companies. Tom has ridden the solar coaster through booms, busts, policy changes and technology revolutions. And his assessment of 2026? It's actually worse than he expected. In some U.S. markets, Tom says residential solar is down 25–50% or more, as the industry deals with the loss of the residential tax credit, changing net-mete

This week on The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon sits down with longtime solar industry leader Tom McCalmont, CEO of Paired Power and president of McCalmont Engineering, to talk about one of the biggest challenges facing electrification: how do we add massive new electrical loads when there simply isn’t enough grid capacity? Tom's answer is surprisingly straightforward: stop thinking of the grid as the only source of power. By combining existing grid capacity with solar, battery storage, and intel

Solar Is Installed. Now Who Keeps It Running? There are millions of solar panels, batteries, EV chargers and other energy systems installed on homes and businesses around the world. There's just one little problem: Someone has to keep all that stuff working. This week on The Energy Show, Barry Cinnamon sits down with John Berger, founder and CEO of Otovo Energy, to talk about what may be one of the biggest—and most overlooked—opportunities in clean energy: service and maintenance. Episode H