413 episodes listed below
Practical conversations from inside cleantech.
CleanTech Talk brings cleantech leaders, advocates, founders, and policy people into long-form conversation. The show favors practical explanation over hype, moving from origin stories into grid mechanics, home electrification, solar, EV fleets, and clean-energy policy.
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CleanTech Talk is a long-running interview series about the mechanics of the clean energy transition. It is not a quick headline show. The conversations give founders, executives, advocates, and policy leaders room to explain how their corner of the system works. That can mean state clean-energy legislation. It can mean induction stoves with built-in batteries. It can mean room-by-room heat pump controls, solar inverter technology, distributed energy coalitions, or vehicle-to-grid school bus fleets. The show’s strength is its willingness to stay with the details. Technical ideas are treated as tools with social consequences, not as abstract gadgets. Battery costs lead into installation costs. Appliance design leads into home electrification. State policy leads into public health, pollution, community impact, and the gap between public support and political conflict. The tone stays warm and interested, even when the subject is complicated or frustrating. Hosts often begin with a guest’s background, then widen the frame into policy, market structure, engineering choices, and adoption barriers. That rhythm makes the show accessible without flattening the material. Listeners hear how people inside cleantech think through scale, incentives, regulation, reliability, and affordability. The recent episodes also show a strong interest in distributed energy: solar, batteries, EV fleets, VPP programs, and appliances that can support the grid rather than simply draw from it. CleanTech Talk is optimistic, but its optimism comes from implementation rather than slogans. It is most compelling when a guest connects a specific product or coalition to a larger shift in how homes, schools, utilities, and states use energy. The result is a practical, conversational map of climate progress in motion.
Made for: For listeners who follow climate, energy, EVs, solar, home electrification, or public policy and want more than headline-level coverage. It especially suits people who like measured explanations from industry and policy insiders.
What sets it apart: CleanTech Talk stands out by connecting engineering detail, market structure, and policy work in the same conversation. It keeps returning to how clean-energy ideas become real systems in homes, fleets, utilities, and state governments.
CleanTechnica CEO Zach Shahan interviews cleantech leaders, top researchers, and investment experts in the fields of electric vehicles (EV), batteries and mining, solar energy, climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
CleanTech Talk connects clean-energy hardware to the manufacturing, installation, grid, and policy constraints that decide whether it can scale.
CleanTech Talk follows clean-energy technology from the component level to the systems that determine whether it scales. Zach Shahan and Scott Cooney take turns interviewing company leaders and legislators, asking how lithium-sulfur batteries, solar inverters, heat-pump…
A school bus can give power back to the grid; your clean-energy curiosity will have follow-up questions.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
State lawmakers, public health, and clean energy policy meet federal pushback over the EPA.
Cleantech Talk shifts into state-level clean energy politics with Dylan McDowell, CEO of the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, and Chris Lee of the Hawaii State Legislature, president of NCEL.
A clean-home electrification case built on battery costs and appliance-level loads.
Scott Cooney's conversation with Sam Kalish keeps the focus on a simple clean-electrification idea: pairing batteries with appliances instead of depending only on wall-mounted storage.
A control-systems look at heat pumps puts empty rooms and power bills at the center.
Paul Lambert, CEO and co-founder, frames heat pumps through the lens of control systems, compressors, and optimization, which gives the episode a distinctly technical angle.
A solar industry conversation centered on utility planning and VPP adoption.
Clean Tech Talk centers Marty Rogers, SolarEdge's general manager for North America, as he discusses how the solar business keeps adjusting when tax incentives move.
Electric school buses make vehicle-to-grid technology feel tangible by pairing large batteries with predictable routines and useful idle time.
Electric school buses land here as one of the more persuasive early cases for vehicle-to-grid technology. Their appeal is practical: big batteries, regular routes, and long idle windows give energy managers something they can actually plan around.
Solar access becomes a question of upkeep, local income, and safety.
Electricians Without Borders treats electricity access as something that has to keep working after the panels are installed. Tanya Chauvin, a senior project manager at the French NGO, sketches its growth from a group founded in 1986 by French energy professionals into a more…
Lithium-sulfur batteries are discussed alongside EV battery dominance, mineral bottlenecks, and the slow path to commercialization.
Zach Shahan's conversation with Tom Pellett, CEO of Zeta Energy, and Michael Liedtke, the company's Chief Commercial Officer, centers on lithium-sulfur batteries and the challenge of moving a new chemistry toward commercial production and mass-market scale.
Specialists walking through software's tradeoffs, one system at a time.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Zach Shahan interviews Tania Chauvin, Senior Project Manager at Electricians Without Borders, a French NGO founded in 1986.
Interview with Volvo Construction's VP of Sustainability about the transition from diesel to electric off-road construction equipment.
An interview with Volvo Group executives discussing the potential of electric construction equipment to reduce carbon emissions and fight climate change.
Zach Shahan interviews Tom Pellett and Michael Liedtke from Zeta Energy about their lithium-sulfur battery technology.
Suvi Sharma, founder of SolarCycle, tells CleanTechnica's Zach Shahan that over 1.2 billion panels are made each year and that the figure could triple in seven to eight years.
Cleantech Talk brings together Zach, Dylan McDowell, and Chris Lee to argue that state legislatures now matter more than Washington for clean-energy policy, EV rules, and environmental protection.
Scott Cooney interviews Sam Kalish about Copper's battery-backed induction stoves and the problem of turning gas-range replacements into simple installs.
Quilt's Paul Lambert says the company's heat-pump system reaches a CR2 rating of 25.3 and saves the most energy by ramping down empty rooms automatically.
Scott Cooney speaks with Marty Rogers, SolarEdge's general manager for North America, about panel-level optimization, battery systems, EV chargers, and energy management across more than a million installs in 140 countries.
Mary Rafferty discusses her background and the mission of Common Charge, a coalition focused on improving energy affordability and reliability through distributed energy resources.
This past summer, Synop sent back enough energy to power 3,000 homes for an entire month.
Scott Cooney interviews Will Wiseman of Climateize about the future of renewable energy and EVs in the US under a potential Trump 2025 presidency.
Scott Cooney and Zach Shahan discuss the outlook for climate action and clean energy progress in the US under a challenging new political reality.
Zach Shahan interviews Mike Spagnola, President and CEO of SEMA, about the organization's role in the auto industry and the future of EVs and hybrids.