ILLUMINATORS
Business & Economics Podcasts
Illuminators is a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy. Businesses and industries regularly face sweeping transitions. Those transitions are now getting more frequent and volatile as technology cycles speed up. We'll tell stories about how businesses or industries have managed disruption throughout history. This show will help energy experts learn from the wider world of business, and help business learn about the unique world of energy.
Location:
United States
Description:
Illuminators is a show about the people and the forces transforming the business of energy. Businesses and industries regularly face sweeping transitions. Those transitions are now getting more frequent and volatile as technology cycles speed up. We'll tell stories about how businesses or industries have managed disruption throughout history. This show will help energy experts learn from the wider world of business, and help business learn about the unique world of energy.
Language:
English
Email:
podcast@tendrilinc.com
Episodes
A Wind Pioneer’s Big Gamble
4/22/2020
Michael Skelly is the former president and co-founder of Clean Line Energy Partners, a company that attempted to build a cross-country power line to send wind electricity to the Southeast.
His nearly decade-long saga of Clean Line is filled with setbacks, frustrations and failures.
“I do believe in progress. It comes in fits and starts and so maybe we're not successful but hopefully that the second mouse gets the cheese on these things,” says Skelly.
But his career is filled with plenty...
Duration:00:50:34
The Tough Job of Closing Down Coal
2/18/2020
In this episode: how one CEO was forced to reckon with her roots in coal country, change her view on climate change, and reorient her utility to embrace the clean energy transition.
Patti Poppe is the president and CEO of Consumers Energy, the biggest utility in Michigan. She’s an industrial engineer who got her start in the automotive industry managing plants for General Motors.
For the last 15 years, she’s been working in the utility business. She’s done it all: power plant director,...
Duration:00:39:17
The Birth (and Near Death) of Demand Response
2/4/2020
Tim Healy co-founded EnerNOC in 2001. EnerNOC was one of the companies that turned demand response from an obscure, low-tech process into an automated and powerful tool for managing the electric grid.
Tim found his calling as an entrepreneur early on in life. But he’s had plenty of people who told him he wouldn’t be CEO material — including his first business partner in college.
“I would say it's driven me for the last two and a half decades, to really take that as motivation rather than...
Duration:00:34:41
How Trust in Companies Is Changing Rapidly
1/21/2020
Rachel Botsman is a trust expert. She predicted the rise of the sharing economy and wrote two books about trust — Who Can You Trust and What’s Mine is Yours. She also has a podcast called Trust Issues.
So why are we talking about trust? As we’ve detailed, the energy system is changing fast. New distributed energy players are entering the space, customers are increasingly in control of their energy choices, and utilities must think differently about their relationships with customers in...
Duration:00:34:35
From Dotcom Bust to Clean Energy Visionary
1/8/2020
Michael Liebreich is the founder and former CEO of New Energy Finance, a research and analysis firm that was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009. It’s become one of the premier organizations focused on clean energy investment and deployment trends.
Michael is one of the savviest and most vocal energy experts out there. His talks, articles and twitter threads are closely watched in industry circles. He has a knack for explaining things clearly and provocatively.
And as it turns out, he has a...
Duration:00:36:25
An ‘Intrapreneur’ Driving the Corporate Clean Energy Revolution
12/23/2019
Miranda Ballentine is the CEO of the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance, a group that helps companies like Apple, Google, Disney, GM, Citigroup ink wind and solar deals worth billions of dollars.
Miranda knows this space better than anyone. As a former leader of sustainability teams at Walmart and the Air Force, she’s had to buy renewable energy for hundreds of stores and military bases, and track carbon emissions across complex supply chains.
In this episode, we’ll talk about Miranda’s...
Duration:00:35:19
How Failed Green Jobs and Energy Poverty Shaped This Founder
12/10/2019
In this episode, an entrepreneur who’s applying community organizing tactics and data crunching to clean energy in inner cities: Donnel Baird.
Donnel is the CEO and Founder of Blocpower, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York.
Blocpower helps inner-city buildings lease heat pumps, install new lighting systems, or invest in solar. And it has a piece of software to help microtarget the right buildings and make installations faster.
Donnel grew up in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where he...
Duration:00:30:30
Origins of the Modern Battery Storage Business
11/26/2019
Welcome to our second season! Over the next eight episodes, we’ll hear from people who’ve scaled new clean energy technologies, built market-changing companies from scratch, and managed big firms in the face of competitive threats.
In this episode, a pioneer in storage who helped prove out the business case for putting big batteries on the grid: John Zahurancik.
John is the chief operating officer of a company called Fluence, a storage supergroup made up of teams from AES and Siemens. He...
Duration:00:34:33
We're Coming Back for Season 2
9/23/2019
We're coming back for a new season of ILLUMINATORS!
In our first season, we told stories of disruption in other industries and then applied them to energy.
This season is a bit different. We’re talking to some of the leading thinkers, entrepreneurs and executives in energy — people who’ve grappled with extreme change — and bringing their stories to you.
And of course, we’re going to hear about what they’ve learned from other areas of business, at a time when companies of all kinds are...
Duration:00:01:05
Reflections on Utility Disruption With Adrian Tuck
6/27/2019
Over the last four episodes, we’ve detailed the history of corporate innovation, wins and fails in customer strategies, the winding path of technology adoption, and the role of big corporates in catalyzing change.
We’ve been talking about the recent and distant past, trying to understand how it applies to the competitive challenges that energy companies face today.
In this episode, we are revisiting those themes — and looking to the future — with Tendril, now Uplight, CEO Adrian...
Duration:00:23:11
What Do Google Glass, Segway and Thermostats Show Us About How Tech Evolves?
6/20/2019
New technologies and products fail all the time — but sometimes those failures turn into something unexpected. In this episode, we’re exploring the surprising ways that technology evolves.
Remember Segway, the personal transporter that became a cultural joke? Turns out, it’s a major force behind the scooter revolution.
Remember Google Glass, the augmented-reality glasses that freaked everyone out and became an object of scorn? It's now a powerful tool in manufacturing and...
Duration:00:31:28
What Can JCPenney, Southwest Airlines and Green Mountain Power Teach Us About the Customer?
6/13/2019
What can JCPenney, Southwest Airlines and Green Mountain Power teach us about knowing (or not knowing) your customer?
This episode will look at how companies are evolving in this customer-centric world. How can a fierce dedication to the customer change the fabric of a company? And how can companies fail when they lose sight of their customers?
Sometimes the customer isn’t who you think. JCPenney is an iconic retailer who failed to understand its customers’ needs and became “America’s...
Duration:00:35:37
What Do Edison’s 'Invention Factory' and Exelon Drones Have in Common?
6/6/2019
Thomas Edison wasn’t just an inventor. He created a whole new way to make and sell his inventions — setting the stage for modern corporate innovation. His model influenced a generation of titans: General Electric, Westinghouse, Ford, and the electric utility as we know it today.
And then, something shifted.
In the 1970s, executives of large companies turned their attention to “shareholder value.” They valued efficiencies, cost cutting and dividends over invention and innovation. Today,...
Duration:00:32:58
What Can Walmart and Xcel Energy Teach Us About Moonshots?
6/6/2019
What can we learn from Walmart, Xcel Energy and the humble electric motor?
In retrospect, big economic or technological shifts are often obvious — but they’re not always obvious as they’re unfolding. This episode will focus on how big businesses respond to external challenges in real time.
We’ll start with a glimpse at how the distributed electric motor catalyzed the second industrial revolution. Are we in the middle of an “electric-motor moment” for the modern economy?
Then, we’ll...
Duration:00:33:51
Introducing ILLUMINATORS
5/22/2019
Illuminators is a show about the forces changing business. What can energy companies learn from them?
Like in many other industries — manufacturing, retail, media, hospitality — leaders of utilities have a very difficult task. They can’t avoid change. They have to embrace it.
This show will borrow from some of those industries.
We’ll explore topics like: What can JC Penney’s flop tell us about knowing your customer?
What can Thomas Edison teach us about corporate innovation?
What does...
Duration:00:02:33