The Gist

In honor of his four-year anniversary at Ad Hoc, we invited our first full-time team member, Ian Rinehart, to take over the Gist this month. He shares his reflections on how the climate tech market and AHG itself have changed since he joined the company, and what he’s most excited about looking ahead.

In other news, we shared the importance of resilience on the With Great Power podcast, which dropped this week, and how policymakers, utilities, advocates, and startups have to do more to ensure we’re prepared for the worst.

Electrification is a cornerstone of any reasonable climate strategy. So is deploying solar at scale. But there is a squabble brewing between the new electrification vanguard and the solar industry. We cover it in this month’s Gist.

Greece experienced a summer from hell with raging wildfires and a punishing heatwave. And that’s less than two years after the war in Ukraine sent energy prices soaring.

But the land of sun and wind is poised to capitalize on the energy transition, says Nikos Tsafos, chief energy advisor to Prime Minister Mitsotakis.

On the first anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most significant piece of climate legislation in US history, we’re taking you inside the Department of Energy. Karen Zelmar is the manager of the home energy rebate programs, which provide $8.5 billion for home efficiency and electrification projects. We talked to her about their newly released guidance and what it’s like to work at DOE during a pivotal time.

At AHG, we pride ourselves on being climate wonks. Some of us also pride ourselves on being fashionable climate wonks. But recently, we’ve been wondering if that’s an oxymoron.

In honor of Juneteenth, we wanted to do something different. We invited two leaders, Devin Hampton, CEO of UtilityAPI, and Vida Asiegbu, principal at Energy Impact Partners, for a candid conversation on equity and representation in the energy transition.

With extreme weather and resilience on our minds, we’ve dug into microgrids and how they can help us keep the lights on..

Building codes are a key weapon in the climate fight.

We need to improve EV charger uptime if we want people to trade in their gas guzzlers for electron eaters.

We can’t solve climate change without carbon dioxide removal, and we need to scale policy.