Episode 21 Transcript: Don’t Sleep on Solar

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood. In recent weeks, we've been exploring big new ways to approach the climate crisis, like reinventing cement or changing how we build buildings or getting rid of plastics or putting reusable water bottles everywhere.

Today, though, We're going right to the source, the top of the mountain, the big enchilada, the number one thing at the burning hot heart of global warming, energy.

Human caused climate change is the artificially fast increase in the global temperature that is the result of burning fossil fuels, mostly for energy. That's the whole deal. So in addition to all of the things we've talked about on this show, and we'll keep talking about on the show, The real key to this whole thing is transitioning the way we get our energy away from burning coal or oil or natural gas, which releases all this pollution that heats up the globe and also stinks and chokes us and ruins the air and the water and gives us asthma and two energy sources that are non polluting and renewable, wind, hydro, geothermal, and of course the free burning ball of energy in the sky.

Because solar is old technology that's still in its infancy in some ways in terms of adoption, partly because it wasn't until relatively recently that we started combining solar with batteries to store that energy and distribute it when it's most needed.

And the big, huge, hairy, audacious goal is to transition all or most energy production to renewable sources and then electrify everything. Meaning get off oil and gas powered cars and furnacers. Meaning get off of oil and gas powered cars and furnaces and water heaters and stoves and air conditioners. So that as much of our energy use as possible is coming from renewable energy and not fossil fuels. And then all the stuff we're using and driving uses that nice, clean electricity. Simple, right? But to do that, we need a lot more power. And a heck of a lot more of you are gonna have to get solar. Alright, let's get to it.

Chris Rauscher:

I'm Chris Rauscher and I'm the head of Grid Services at Sunrun. And Sunrun is the country's largest residential solar battery, and, uh, home energy management company.

Molly Wood:

I feel like most people have encountered Sunrun, certainly most people listening to the show, but just in case, give us a little bit of the backstory and the history around Sunrun. 'cause I sort of feel like, to me it's the first company that came along and just packaged up solar in a way that people could understand.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah. So we, you know, the journey of Sunrun began maybe 18 years ago or so, and at that time, solar on, uh, your home on the roof was relatively niche and for early adopters, and the innovation that Sunrun really brought to the market is called third party ownership. So we own the systems on our customer's roofs and they pay us a monthly payment for a term of years.

And that really unlocked access to solar power for people, you know, a much broader swath of the income spectrum. 'cause people didn't need to have 30 or $40,000 lying around or have to sell finance. So that's what allowed us to really scale and provide solar savings to now nearly a million customers, uh, in the United States.

Molly Wood:

So you handle all of the installation and operation and management of that. At what point did Sunstart integrating batteries.

Chris Rauscher:

We introduced our battery product probably six or seven years ago now, and um, that's really where I spent the bulk of my time is working on batteries and how to get as much value as possible from the batteries to the grid and to the homeowner. And when you think about ownership and management of solar on someone's roof, that value proposition is really appealing to people because they don't have to worry about maintenance or is my system functioning properly or how do I finance any of that stuff.

But then you add a battery in and that's a complex dynamic technology that can be daunting for people. And so having a company also own and manage that for you, and then acting as a sort of guide between your battery and the energy markets to create more value for you has really proven to be a winning proposition for Sunrun. And it has allowed us to deploy tens of thousands of batteries across the country in the last few years.

Molly Wood:

And this is where I find what you're doing especially fascinating, is around this grid management and the idea of sort of decentralizing energy in some cool ways. So talk about the evolution that got you to that point where there is in fact a grid management team.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, I think, you know, so let's break down the different value propositions that a customer has when they go solar and batteries with Sunrun. So you have the solar on your roof and if you have a contract with Sunrun, usually what you pay Sunrun, combined with your remaining utility bill is less than you pay to your utility before you had solar on the roof.

Right? So that's solar savings number one. So monthly energy savings, then generally people get a battery outside of certain certain markets, but generally people get a battery to provide backup power to the home when the grid goes down. And that's another value proposition, having the peace of mind that your family is gonna have resilient power even when the utility grid is not operating.

And then what I work on in particular is using that battery, the other 300 and days, 360 days a year when the grid is functioning fully using that battery to create value for utilities and for the customer, right? And so what that means is tying together thousands of homes with software, orchestrating them so that they can all push power to the grid at peak times, as well as provide other services such as capacity and ancillary services and a few other kinda more sophisticated things.

But fundamentally what we're doing is we're using all of these homes, all of these batteries to defer the need to fire up another natural gas peaker plant or a, you know, heaven forbid, a coal fired power plant or something like that.

Molly Wood:

Can you, um, before I dig into that kind of piece by piece, describe what a peaker plant is for people who don't know.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah. So our electricity system, the utility system was built to deliver electricity from large centralized fossil fuel power plants across the poles and wires to people's homes and businesses. And for the first a hundred years or so of electricity, there was no way to store electricity. And so it's just in time delivery.

So as soon as demand goes up, so as soon as people get home from work and they start turning on their ovens and they start running their water heaters, the utility needs to fire up new sources of generation to create, to meet that demand. And one of those sources can be a peaker plant to meet peak demand. And oftentimes in the US those peaker plants are natural gas peaker plants.

So the alternative to firing up another peaker plant and increasing pollution, increasing costs in increasing climate warming emissions is to use our home batteries and provide power to the homes that have the batteries as well as to the grid so that we don't have to turn on another power plant.

Molly Wood:

And I think it's sort of important for people to realize, you know, part of the reason I've been obsessed with batteries is that there was a growing realization that with renewable energy generation, we needed storage. But I don't think it's as well understood that with all electricity generation, we need storage. And so it's this kind of double whammy, but when you pair distributed battery system with home generated renewable energy, you have effectively harness together a bunch of tiny power plants. Like that's the thing that you are doing when you install these systems in your home.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, there's a good saying. Batteries are like bacon. Everything's better with a battery on it.

Molly Wood:

That is amazing.

Chris Rauscher:

With apologies to the vegetarians.

Molly Wood:

I was just gonna say to my like new vegan listeners that I recently harnessed in.

Chris Rauscher:

Maybe I should say whipped cream or something that. Change the analogy. But yeah, that is absolutely true. And about batteries, because I think people often, when they're looking at batteries for the first time, when they're looking at renewables, they're like, well, the sun doesn't shine at night. And the wind doesn't always blow. And so you need a battery to make that a firm resource. Yeah. Batteries can help there. Right.

But even without pairing batteries with renewables, batteries can provide amazing services to the grid. Right? They can buffer the grid basically in a way that we never could before, and this is becoming increasingly important because I think there's a growing consensus that in order to combat climate change, we have to electrify everything in the economy and run that on clean energy, right? If we do that, if we increase the kilowatt hour throughput through the utility system over the years, we just increased the number of electrons that are being consumed throughout the year, to power our electrified economy, but then we also increase the kilowatt peaks. So the spikes of demand every single day.

So not just the volume over the whole year, but also any single instant of max demand. When we increase that max demand, we're gonna see costs absolutely skyrocket, right? And if the electricity industry experiences spiking electricity costs and people's bills go up, they won't want to have an electric car. They won't wanna have an induction stove or heat pumps.

Um, and the only way to increase kilowatt hour usage over the year, so the electrons that are consumed over the course of a whole year, but not increase those daily peaks or those monthly peaks, is to use technologies like batteries and what we call distributed power plants, which are batteries networked together with software to provide those services.

Molly Wood:

What is the kind of consumer awareness of this? I think like people know I should get solar. A growing number of people are sort of aware that you could have this battery that would help keep the lights on. But it does feel like there's almost this additional interesting education layer, which is like, listen, if you adopt this solution you are also part of the solution set that allows us to electrify. And then you can tell your uncle at dinner, like, yes, we do have, we will have enough grid capacity for all the electric cars, or in this my brother.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, I mean, I'm, you can probably see the heat pump behind me, but yeah, I think like increasingly these technologies are getting into the public consciousness. I think electric vehicles are probably gonna be the main avenue into mass adoption here and into people's homes because it's such a big asset. And in America, we use our cars all the time.

And so with increasing electrification of vehicles, I think you're gonna see faster and faster adoption of solar to help offset the cost of your new electric consumption as well as batteries. And, you know, I don't, I actually don't think people, I don't think the average American or busy US family really needs to think about this stuff at all.

I think they just need to think in terms of what we have experience with, with our customers is our customers are thinking in terms of the value propositions to themselves, right? So how can I make my monthly energy costs lower? How can I have backup power when the grid is down? How can I, you know, not let the food in my refrigerator spoil? How can I run my medical device that needs to stay plugged in, or whatever it may be.

And then the grid services piece, the distributed power plant piece is kind of like a sweetener on top. It's a little bit of an adder that creates an even better value proposition because, you know, like I'm running a program in California right now that has more than 8,500 customers in it.

This is a direct bilateral contract with pg and e, the largest utility in California, and one of the largest investor owned utilities in the country, if not the largest. And that distributed power plant we're cycling those 8,500 customers every single day, August through October.

And it's really interesting. Their batteries are discharging power to their homes into the grid every evening when the time of use peak periods end, right, because have rates, time of use, rates where the price goes up if you use electricity during that time, but as soon as the price drops, people turn on all of their appliances, which then creates a new peak.

So the utility contracted with us to provide megawatts and megawatts of power every single day to meet that new peak. And our customers that we put into this program for doing, they didn't, they don't have to do anything. They don't have to make any behavior changes. This isn't like, you know, a thermostat where they had to turn their heat down or turn their AC up.

They don't have to do anything at all. We fully manage the battery and our customers receive $750 plus a free Nest thermostat for being part of the program. So yeah, I think it's a pretty cool value proposition for our customers.

Molly Wood:

Yeah. And then even if I mean, I think the point is very well taken that people don't Have to care about this. They should ideally care about saving money. And, you know, having the lights stay on. How much though, you know just between us energy nerds like how much is it a crucial part of the solution set to get as many batteries out there as quickly as possible to, you know, meet what is real increasing demand?

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, I think it is really crucial to get back to my point earlier about needing to increase kilowatt hours that are delivered across the system throughout the year, but keeping peaks down. This is really the, with distributed power plants and batteries, it's really the only way that we're gonna be able to electrify everything and not spike costs.

So it is gonna be very crucial. And I also think too, you know, although it's not necessary that everyone becomes an energy nerd, this is one of those rare cases where collective action is necessary, but individual action can be taken on our own and we can really be part of the clean energy transition.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about some of the reasons there isn't yet solar everywhere.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. I'm talking with Chris Rauscher of Sunrun about the simple elegance that is solar. Super useful solution, getting less expensive all the time. Chris pointed out that the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, includes all kinds of new incentives for solar and batteries and all the electrification that goes with it, like electric heat pumps for heating and cooling.

And yet, We're nowhere near where we need to be in terms of deployment. And I'm not even talking about new solar farms and filling up open land with panels or whatever. I mean, us.

Molly Wood:

What are the kind of remaining barriers to solar? I mean, I was flying over New York, I think just looking down at rooftops and being like, come on. I mean, I understand that there's like, there are a lot of barriers if you live in a multi-family dwelling or you don't own, or there still are affordability concerns, but you know what's wrong with the people who could afford this and aren't adopting it.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, I think we are, right now in the US we're only at about 3% of the 77 or so million homes, only about 3% have solar. So we're still at the beginning of this trend and some of the stickiest barriers are super boring. Things like permitting, like code, interconnection, which refers to the ability to basically connect something to the utility system and push power to the system.

Those in the US make up a very large share of the costs of solar. And in fact, in places like Australia and in Europe, the cost of installed solar can be half as much as it costs in the us, maybe even less in some cases. And almost all of that has to do with soft costs, not hard costs, right?

Solar is commoditized now. And so solar panels basically are solar panels. They're the same everywhere around the world, cost effectively the same. It's those soft costs and the permitting, the interconnection and inspections and all of that stuff that really have been a barrier to the adoption rate accelerating more than it has.

And one of the reasons that's the case is, if you call up a solar company and you're, you say to Sunrun, Hey, I'd like to have solar on my roof and a battery in my garage for backup power. Great, awesome. We proceed. But then Sunrun has to go to what we call hjs authorities having jurisdiction.

So that could be Los Angeles County. Could be Braintree, Massachusetts, right? And no matter where you are, the municipality generally has authority over the permit that might be building permit or electrical permit or some other thing. They all have different processes for how they apply for those permits and how they're granted.

So in some places you have to physically go to the town hall and get a physical application, fill it out, and then bring it back to the town hall. It's different everywhere. And what ends up happening is that customer who was really excited about getting solar and batteries, now two weeks has passed, a month has passed, three months has passed, and they cancel. They no longer wanna do it.

Molly Wood:

Oh, really? There's a whole like a cart abandonment comes with it. Wow.

Chris Rauscher:

Exactly. And as you might imagine every one of those customers that walks away because they're frustrated due to the timelines, that represents a cost. Right. And so that's what drives up the cost of solar in the United States, much higher than places like Australia.

Molly Wood:

I officially, by the way, retract listeners the part where I said, what's wrong with those of you who can afford it and don't have it, because Yes. I mean there are a lot of these, the cost thing all by itself is bananas.

So what could streamline that? Is there something that could happen at the national level? Was there something missing in the IRA? I mean, obviously, I'm not arguing for like more government control over deploying solar, but at the same time there's a sense that this is a mature technology that is as close to a silver bullet as we have when it comes to the energy transition. It feels like we should be on a war footing about getting this on every roof.

Chris Rauscher:

Right. Yeah. I think just to the premise of your question here, you know, I don't, there's a split between Bill Gates and some people and then others in our industry where Bill Gates and others think that we need some sort of breakthrough in order to combat climate change, we need technological breakthrough.

And then those of us who are better educated about the transition and know that we have the technologies that we need today, we already have those with solar being a fundamental foundation of that. And Saul Griffith, who started Rewire America, he has done a lot of incredible modeling on the energy transition.

And one of the things that he's shown is that if we electrified everything in our economy, electricity usage would double. And we could meet half of that double demand with solar on the built environment, with solar on people's roofs, car parks, businesses. And when you think about it that way, that's not even with putting solar up on fields or anything like that, that's just on the built environment, the buildings that already exist that you fly over and you look down and there are no panels, and you're like, what the hell?

Right. And when you think about solar in the built environment, you realize that there are no NIMBY problems because it is, by definition, YIMBY. People want this on their roof, right? There are no problems with building additional poles and wires because you don't have to convey that electricity to load. It's already at the site of load. And it is sort of like a virtuous cycle where someone gets solar in a neighborhood, their neighbors see it, and it just accelerates further.

So this is really, I think a lot of times we can fall into the trap of thinking that we need big, huge utility scale solutions, offshore wind, utility scale, solar, nuclear, small nuclear, whatever it is. And those all have their place. But this is a key, solar on the built environment, rooftop solar is a key part of the transition.

So to your question, what can we do to speed it up? It's a really boring answer, but there are things like Solar App, which is an automated permitting software that's backed by the Department of Energy as well as some of the national labs, and has been developed with industry players like Sunrun.

That is a software that can be provided, and I think in most cases free to municipalities and they can run their permitting through that. And it has standard sort of proforma solar and battery permitting. And what that does is it reduces staff time at the municipality level and therefore increases the rate of permits they can get in and it increases permitting revenue.

So it's little things like that that could really help accelerate this.

Molly Wood:

Those are, you're like a, you, you're kind of an undersell sort of guy, like, that is neither boring nor small. It's not small. Little things such as a standard that anyone could adopt would speed this up. Because Again, I wanna stress that this exists. It works. And we're still, and sometimes when you talk about the energy transition, you're absolutely right that there's this tendency to focus on the next thing when this thing that's so impactful at only 3% deployment. And then I would assume the numbers are similar when you look at the rest of the built environment. It's not like every business has solar.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah. No, and this is actually like an interesting nuance, or at least it's interesting to me. The adoption rate of residential solar, so solar in people's homes has far outpaced community, or sorry, commercial and industrial solar, so solar on businesses. There's so many available roofs on businesses around the country that really need to be built.

And one of the reasons why Solar on Homes has accelerated faster is that it's basically cookie cutter, right? It's a five to eight kilowatt system paired with the same inverter every time with the same mounting, et cetera. And on businesses, each business is completely different. Businesses don't have credit scores, so having to evaluate them financially each time. So we do also need an increased focus, I think, on cracking the commercial industrial solar problem.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Okay, I am enough of a nerd that I could go on about this all day. One of the other things that slowed down solar adoption in some parts of the country is utilities worried about losing business and sometimes under pressure from the fossil fuel industry, utilities in some states impose fees on homeowners who want to install solar, or block or stop programs called net metering, where people with solar get paid back for the clean energy they put onto the grid.

Chris told me considering how much electricity we need to electrify everything, that's just dumb.

Chris Rauscher:

My wife and I, we have three young kids and we've been going through the process of fully electrifying the house that we live in - heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, we have a Chevy Bolt, a small EV and then also a plugin hybrid, and we consume a ton of electricity compared to before we electrified.

Of course, we also have solar on our roof, but our roof is such that we can only accommodate enough solar to provide for about half of our yearly electricity demand, which is a really good news story, right? If you're a utility and you're like, oh, solar's gonna be this threat. What utilities should be focused on is forget about solar, rooftop solar, and whether it's a threat or not, just electrify everyone's home.

Right. You know, all of those hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars that I would've spent, that we would've spent on oil and natural gas and gasoline. Instead, we are sending to our utility company, right? And that's an incredible opportunity.

So we have solar on a roof, but it doesn't cover our total demand. Before I worked at Sunrun, I worked in the US Senate on the Energy Committee as an energy policy advisor, and I worked for a senator who had a background in energy, and this was about a decade ago now.

And he had some utilities come in and he was saying, I don't understand why you see net metering as a threat. Every time someone sends in a net metering interconnection request, just send them a rebate for an electric vehicle.

Molly Wood:

Right.

Chris Rauscher:

And you'll immediately overwhelm or increase their demand. And they'll need to buy more power from the utility. That was a decade ago, and utilities around the country are still not doing that.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Okay and now we're gonna get super geeky. Time for some car talk.

Molly Wood:

Back to batteries in a roundabout way before I let you go. Sunrun signed Partnership with Ford. You know, when Ford announced the lightning and kind of casually dropped the fact that it had this bi-directional charging ability, which is that it could actually feed power back to your house.

I, it is my understanding that Ford was like shocked by how excited people got about this idea. But that is one of the really interesting conversations about EVs is that once you have an electric car, like I have a Polestar right out. I'm in a garage studio, right? It's like 10 feet from me. It is a big battery and it's just sitting there not doing anything useful.

So talk about bidirectionality and how in theory an EV and every driveway turns every house into a little power plant and like why we still have the walls of batteries and how we can make all those things work together a little bit better.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. It's, I think this is really exciting. I think this is gonna drive innovation and adoption at a rate that we just don't really appreciate yet. And Sunrun partnered with Ford on this.

Ford is really good at making cars and they had a really brilliant idea with the F150 lightning and making it bi-directional. And so we partnered on how to design the actual home system, the technology that would unlock that. And Sunrun is the installation partner for the system that you need in your home.

And I gotta give credit to Ford. I dunno if you've seen a lightning. Have you seen a lightning in person?

Molly Wood:

Oh Yeah. I'm with that truck.

Chris Rauscher:

I had the great privilege of being on a track with a professional driver in F150 Lightning, and I haven't been so scared in a very long time. They're performance vehicles. These are sports cars. They're phenomenal.

So putting that, the transportation aspects of the truck, those are good on their own merits and really cool. But then also on the energy side, being able to plug it into your house, not only power your house when the grid goes down, but also push energy to your home and to the grid when the grid is fully operational to create more value for you and for the grid.

And I had someone come up to me and ask me at a conference, like, oh, have you done the ROI on the truck? When does it pay itself off doing grid services? And I was like, can you, can we just stop for a second and realize the fact that you're asking me about the ROI on your vehicle.

Like no one, we've never thought about that before that you could just park a truck and it could just make you money. Right.

Molly Wood:

As opposed to every car you've ever bought, which is a depreciating asset. Full stop.

Chris Rauscher:

Exactly. Exactly. So, and to your point, Molly, about the size of the batteries. Each F150 long range lightning has 10 times the energy capacity of a Tesla power wall.

So if you plugged it into your house and you participate in a distributed power plant program with Sunrun and the utility, and we leave half of that battery for driving and we only use the other half, that's like five Tesla power walls that we're using to create money to create value for you. And some of the numbers start getting big really quickly.

We're talking hundreds and thousands of dollars a year per customer for these grid services. So it's really exciting. Ford was the first, and certainly I think the adoption rate for the other auto OEMs, they're all gonna do this very soon, I think.

Molly Wood:

I hope so. I think there are like some vague announcements. I'm surprised that this is not more, although it sounds like, there are, to your point, you had to become a distribution partner because you do need, you need a, I'm gonna simplify dramatically, but basically a translation layer.

You can't, just, grids are kind of a one-way thing. You can't just like, come and be like, I plugged my car in and now it's automatically sending power back to the grid. Bidirectionality is a little bit harder than want it to be, Right?

Chris Rauscher:

No. This isn't a technology or even a regulatory barrier here. It's more just an educational one because the way that Ford and Sunrun designed this technology is it looks exactly like a stationary battery on the wall, what we call a DC coupled battery, because it flows through the inverter on the wall, except that the battery leaves sometimes, like the truck leaves sometimes, but everything other than the battery being on wheels is exactly the same.

So when you look at interconnection with the utilities, when you look at permitting, when you look at participating in grid service programs, distributed power plant programs, it should be treated exactly the same as a stationary battery.

And really what we've had to do along with Ford is go on a sort of education spree all around the country talking to utilities and talking to regulators and saying, no, no. Look at our signal line diagrams. Look at our technical specs on this. You should be completely comfortable with it.

I think for, on the automaker side, maybe one of the reasons Polestar hasn't done this yet is they're maybe not sure yet on like battery cycles, right? Or do customers even want this or

Molly Wood:

I'm not totally trying to Call them out specifically, it's just the one that I have.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want, I want the same thing. You know what, we had a hurricane threaten us here. I live in New England, had hurricane threaten us in here in New England a couple of days ago. And I have an inverter for the cigarette lighter in the car, and you can plug the inverter into the cigarette lighter, leave the car on and you can, plug appliances into that, but that's not the way to do it.

And so yeah, we need mass adoption of bidirectional electric vehicles. And once we do that, all the stuff that we're talking about earlier, Molly, about distributed power plants and keeping those demand spikes down, unlocking the battery capacity in electric vehicles is going to be, I think like the skeleton key for this clean energy transition.

It's really going to allow us to do it at a very low cost.

Molly Wood:

Awesome. I think so too. Okay, great. I'm good. I'm Glad you're with me on this because I keep thinking like that feels like it should be a way bigger thing.

Chris Rauscher:

It's gonna be very soon.

Molly Wood:

I do think it's sort of, I think this is a space where, again, like we've said, it's as close to a silver bullet technology as we have, and adoption is way slower than people think. And some of these complexities are why, but are improving.

Chris Rauscher:

Yeah, I think that's right. I think , I've said it a couple of times, but there is no way that we can electrify everything in our economy and keep costs down unless we have rooftop solar, unless we have batteries, bi-directional EVs and distributed power plants, we just can't do it otherwise.

You know, large solar farms off in a field, offshore wind, poles, wires. They all have their place. But without customer side solutions, without demand side solutions, the cost will just skyrocket.

I also think having people be part of the solution by having these technologies in their home and seeing the benefits, like seeing that their own personal agency and combating climate change not only makes them feel good about that, but it also results in a better experience and a cheaper cost of living, right? Like, it's just better, it's just simply better.

An induction stove is just better than a gas stove and a heat pump water heater is just better than an oil furnace. Also heating your water or natural gas boiler. It's just better. And we really need people to be engaged in that and we're starting to see that adoption trend.

Molly Wood:

Chris Rauser, Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.

Chris Rauscher:

Thank you, Molly. Really enjoyed the podcast.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

In sum, there are a lot of things we need to do and maybe invent and deploy and adopt but chief among them is actually this simple thing that's still way too hard. Don't sleep on solar everybody. Put some panels on your roof.

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.