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What does it mean to be a people marked by prayer? In this episode of In All Things, Dave Strunk, outgoing Moderator of the 45th General Assembly and Thursday morning worship speaker, reflects on the theme of prayer through the story of Hezekiah and Isaiah. Drawing from scripture and his experience serving the EPC, Dave offers encouragement for leaders and churches to seek the Lord with humility, dependence, and trust. As we gather for General Assembly, this conversation reminds us that our strength as a church is found not in ourselves, but in the Lord, and that we are “Better Together” when we come to Him in prayer. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
In this episode, we speak with Elvis Ebikade, Director of Strategic Market Development at Bioleum Corporation, about why the Global South should be producing SAF rather than just exporting raw feedstocks, how renewable fuels are becoming an energy security play, the technical challenge of getting aromatics into SAF, and what actually separates a bankable SAF project from a good-looking spreadsheet.Ebikade discusses:The case for Africa and Southeast Asia as SAF producers, not just feedstock suppliersWhy exporting feedstocks and reimporting SAF adds a carbon intensity penalty that undermines the product's core valueFeedstock diversity in Africa: HEFA, alcohol-to-jet, woody biomass, and e-fuelsThe energy security reframe: why renewable fuels change who sits at the tableExport vs book-and-claim: why there's no single model for Global South SAFWhat Bioleum is building: lignin-to-aromatics, cellulosic ethanol, and the Hexas Biomass acquisitionWhy most SAF today still needs to be blended with fossil jet fuel before it can be used to power aircraftWhat makes a SAF project bankable: feedstock, offtake, EPC, and a credible path to cost parityThe gap between financial models and operational realityIf you LOVED this episode, you'll also love the conversation we had with Meg Gentle, Executive Director at HIF Global, about how synthetic fuels and waste-based pathways could reshape the economics of sustainable aviation fuel. Check it out here. Learn more about the innovators who are navigating the industry's challenges to make sustainable aviation a reality, in our new book ‘Sustainability in the Air: Volume 2'. Click here to learn more.Feel free to reach out via email to podcast@simpliflying.com. For more content on sustainable aviation, visit our website green.simpliflying.com and join the movement. It's about time.Links & More:Bioleum Corporation Why the Global South could produce aviation's cheapest sustainable fuels - SimpliFlyingThe six-times markup that convinced a Kenyan entrepreneur to make his own SAF - SimpliFlying Could Cameroon become Central Africa's SAF gateway? - SimpliFlying The country that banned petrol cars is now betting on SAF - SimpliFlyingHexas: A sustainable solution to the food vs. fuel debate - SimpliFlying
Creation Outside Genesis Part 6: The true CreatorIsaiah 45:7-12Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: God is the only actual Creator
Paulo Passoni, Managing Partner at Valor Capital, and Olga Maslikhova sit down with their first-ever TJC Debrief guest — Ivana Delevska, Founder and CIO of Spear Invest and Portfolio Manager of the Spear Alpha ETF (SPRX, Nasdaq), one of the best-performing actively managed AI ETFs. Ivana spent a decade at Tiger Management, Millennium, and Citadel before founding Spear, where she now runs over $100M in AUM as a one-person fund augmented by AI. This is the June 2026 edition of TJC Debrief — a monthly show covering tech, venture, and capital markets through a global lens.We cover where $1 of AI spend actually goes — 50% to compute, 15–20% to networking, 15% to power and physical build-out — and why networking is the most under-the-radar layer of the value chain, why behind-the-meter power and former Bitcoin mining sites (Applied Digital) are the most overlooked plays in AI infrastructure, why Latin America could become a serious data center alternative to the US given cheaper electricity and faster permits, why hyperscaler-backed offtake deals are solving the cost-of-capital problem for data center build-outs, the SpaceX IPO at $1.77 trillion and 60x forward revenue with only 15% growth — and why Paulo thinks the employee lockup wall is the biggest risk, why Anthropic at ~$1T with $15B revenue scaling to $200B in 2027 is the more reasonable bet on a 12-month horizon while SpaceX is the better 10-year hold, why the application layer is where the next wave of billion-dollar revenue companies will emerge — using Higgsfield as a case study going from $0 to nearly $500M in revenue in one year by orchestrating 30 video models, why speed and revenue per employee ($1–10M is the new bar) are the only real moats left in software, why Elon is the "king of hardware" and what the EPC contractor insourcing playbook actually looks like, why community is the anti-AI moat — from independent watchmaker collector groups to Corgi's coffee shop in Silicon Valley, why the air pocket of AI demand is the real risk to watch (token prices are the early signal), and why wealth concentration from the AI boom is the biggest macro risk of all — and what forced-savings products and intelligent wealth transfer mechanisms could prevent it.Subscribe to The J Curve Insider newsletter for deeper insights and follow Olga on LinkedIn and Instagram.
We are excited to welcome guest preacher Katie Piquette, as she continues our summer series with Psalm 63. Katie is a teaching elder in the EPC and a chaplain at the VA Hospital.
Creation Outside Genesis Part 5: The good news of CreationIsaiah 40:9-31Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: The Creator is in your corner
In this episode, Priya Ranjan Mohanty speaks with Anand Jain, Founder & CEO of Aerem (meaning 'clean air' in Latin) - a solar-focused FinTech platform making rooftop solar adoption accessible through financing, technology, and an end-to-end ecosystem.Anand, a Yale MBA and former Wall Street investment banker, breaks down a staggering shift: 10 years ago, 70% of energy investment went to coal and gas. Today, 70% goes to solar. Yet India has tapped only 5-7% of its rooftop solar potential. The catch? Lack of financing, fragmented installer ecosystem, and consumer hesitation. Aerem solves this with structured loan products, a curated solar equipment marketplace (SunStore), remote monitoring (AeROC), and training for 2,000+ EPC partners. He also discusses India's dramatic shift from 90% Chinese module imports to 85% domestic manufacturing in just two years.Chapters:00:00 - Introduction00:37 - What is Aerem?01:00 - The Company Name: Clean Air in Latin04:20 - Solar Energy: Current State & Potential05:00 - 70% of Energy Investment Now Goes to Solar09:00 - Solar is 70-80% Cheaper Than Grid Power09:35 - Why Isn't Every Rooftop Solar Yet?10:00 - The Financing Gap Aerem Solves12:50 - 2,000 Projects in 4 Years14:00 - Consumer Hesitation & Technology Maturity16:55 - Standalone Solar vs. Hybrid with Battery21:00 - India's Solar Manufacturing Revolution24:00 - Future of Solar Technology26:40 - Advice for Entrepreneurs29:05 - Closing Remarks---About ELI Podcast:ELI (Entrepreneur's Live Interviews) brings you inspiring stories from India's startup ecosystem. Real founders, real journeys, real insights.Website: https://eli-podcast.com
IP Fridays - your intellectual property podcast about trademarks, patents, designs and much more
[powerpresss] My co-host Ken Suzan and I are welcoming you to episode 175 of our podcast IP Fridays! Today's interview guest is Bruce Dearling, patent attorney and partner at Hepworth Browne in the UK, and we talk about how non-technical features must be considered when assessing inventive step of patents at least according to recent decisions of the UK supreme court and the Unified Patent Court. Profile of Bruce Dearling UK Supreme Court Emotional Perception AI Limited UPC Abbot vs Sinocare But before we jump into this interesting interview, I have news for you: On May 20, 2026, the Swiss Federal Council adopted the fully revised Patent Ordinance, which will enter into force on January 1, 2027, together with the revised Patent Act. In the future, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property will prepare a mandatory search report for each application; applicants can choose between a partially examined version and a full examination that assesses novelty and inventive step. The full examination costs an additional 300 Swiss francs, and renewal fees will increase by a total of eight percent over the 20-year term. On May 19, 2026, Asus entered into a licensing agreement with the Wi-Fi multimode patent pool managed by Sisvel, thereby ending all ongoing infringement proceedings. Sisvel bundles standard-essential patents in the pool from, among others, Atlantia, ETRI, and Mitsubishi Electric. On May 18, 2026, the UPC Local Chamber in Düsseldorf rejected Align Technology's application for a preliminary injunction against its Chinese competitor Angelalign. Angelalign may continue to sell its clear aligners within the UPC jurisdiction. Our partners Dirk Schulz, Ulrich Storz, and Wanze Zhang, together with Arnold Ruess, successfully represented Angelalign. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced midweek that, since October of last year, it has invalidated or is seeking to invalidate approximately 10,500 trademark applications and registrations in eleven administrative orders. Reasons include forged attorney signatures and the fabrication of non-existent filing requirements. This stems from ongoing abuse of the U.S. trademark system, primarily by non-U.S. applicants, which can lead to conflicts with validly registered trademarks for legitimate businesses. On May 12, 2026, the British Court of Appeal overturned a lower court decision that would have required Nokia to grant interim licenses for video coding patents. The court found that Nokia's license offer to the Taiwanese manufacturers Acer and Asus had already been made on RAND terms. In May, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a brief in the ongoing Corteva v. Inari litigation, expressing antitrust concerns regarding certain patent practices in the field of plant breeding. This marks the first time the agency has actively intervened in a biopharmaceutical patent dispute with implications for seed innovations. Episode 175 of the IP Fridays podcast was a conversation I will not forget quickly. My guest Bruce Dearling, partner at Hepworth Brown in the UK and a patent attorney for 36 years, took a case through every level of the British court system up to the Supreme Court and, in doing so, fundamentally changed patent law for AI inventions in the UK. The case is called Emotional Perception, and its effects reach well beyond British borders. Below I summarize the key points from our conversation. The full episode is available at IP Fridays. A. What Is the Emotional Perception Case About? The underlying invention concerns artificial neural networks. Specifically, it relates to a method of closing what is called the semantic gap at the output of a neural network. That sounds abstract, but the idea is straightforward: a neural network always produces an output that does not fully correspond to what a human would actually expect or feel. Closing that gap brings the system closer to human perception and human expectations. Bruce Dearling drafted this application himself and filed it at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). The Office rejected it as excluded subject matter, characterizing it as essentially a computer program as such. The legal basis for that rejection was the Aerotel decision from 2006. The case then went to the High Court, which found in favor of the applicant. The Court of Appeal reversed that decision. Then the UK Supreme Court stepped in and changed everything. B. The Aerotel Test and Its Flaws Since 2006, the Aerotel test had been the standard British method for assessing whether an invention falls within the excluded categories under patent law. It was a four-step approach: construe the claim, identify the actual contribution the invention makes to human knowledge, ask whether that contribution falls solely within excluded subject matter, and finally check whether the contribution is technical in nature. The problem Dearling described in our conversation is that Aerotel reverses the logical order of the analysis. You start with the contribution and only then ask about the exclusions under Article 52 EPC. The UK Supreme Court described Aerotel in its judgment as “unsound law” and overturned it. The EPO’s Technical Boards of Appeal had previously called Aerotel “disingenuous,” which at the time led to a public dispute between the British courts and the Boards. With the Emotional Perception ruling, that conflict has now been resolved in favor of harmonization with the EPO. C. What the UK Supreme Court Decided The Supreme Court made two central findings. First, the exclusion of computer programs “as such” is overcome as soon as a claim includes any piece of hardware. It does not matter whether that is a processor, a memory module, or any other component. The threshold is deliberately low. Dearling described this as the “any hardware” approach, which aligns fully with the EPO’s position following G1/19. Second, and in Dearling’s assessment the more important finding: when assessing inventive step, the invention must be considered as a whole. The Court introduced what it called an “intermediate step,” an analytical stage in which the interactions between all features of a claim are examined before the question of inventive step is addressed. Non-technical features cannot simply be struck out if they contribute to the overall technical effect of the invention. D. Inventive Step: The Intermediate Step This is the heart of the judgment. In EPO practice, Dearling said, it happens regularly that examiners strike through features they consider non-technical and thereby fail to assess the invention’s inventive step correctly. A recent Technical Board of Appeal decision, T 1249/22, already criticized this approach: a claim directed at a technical solution to a problem can be patentable even if the underlying problem is non-technical in nature. Dearling recalled a remark made by a Board of Appeal member at a hearing he attended years ago: “We understand that examining divisions can operate with a degree of mental laziness and that it’s too easy to throw too many things out of the basket when considering the issues of inventive step.” That quote stayed with him because it names a structural problem that the intermediate step now addresses directly. The British method for assessing inventive step is the Pozzoli test, which differs from the EPO’s problem-solution approach. The Supreme Court explicitly retained Pozzoli because the problem-solution approach, in its view, is structurally infected with hindsight reasoning: you already know the invention, you work backwards to formulate an objective technical problem, and then you ask whether it would have been obvious for the skilled person to arrive at precisely that solution. Dearling sees this as a source of unfairness toward genuine inventions. E. Alignment with the Unified Patent Court In April 2025, the Court of Appeal of the Unified Patent Court issued a decision in Abbott v. Sinocare (APP_000000901/2025, judgment of 17 April 2025). Dearling pointed out that this decision uses language and reasoning strikingly similar to the UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception ruling of February 2025. That is significant because the UPC is bound neither by UK courts nor by the EPO. The overlap suggests voluntary convergence. Dearling reported a conversation with a person close to the EPO, whom he did not name, who used the word “permissive” to describe the UK Supreme Court’s approach and indicated that the EPO might move toward it. Whether and how quickly that happens remains to be seen. What is clear is that the UPC, as the new European patent court, is setting its own standards, and the question of how to handle non-technical features in inventive step assessment is now being asked at multiple levels simultaneously. F. Implications for the EPO and Practice The EPO is not directly bound by the ruling. It is an administrative body, not a court. Dearling is nonetheless optimistic that change is coming. On one hand, external pressure is building: when the UK Supreme Court and the UPC articulate similar principles, convergence becomes hard to resist. On the other hand, Article 27.1 TRIPS requires all contracting states to make patents available in all fields of technology. Examiners routinely striking non-technical features from AI claims and rejecting them on that basis sits uncomfortably with that obligation. For the underlying application in the Emotional Perception case, the ruling has a pointed consequence. The Supreme Court did not grant the patent itself; it referred the matter back to the UKIPO for reconsideration under the intermediate step. The Office’s subsequent response was, in Dearling’s words, unconvincing. He suspects the Office is attempting to reintroduce the Aerotel test through the back door. As a last resort, he has not excluded a judicial review, a procedure that does not simply challenge the substantive decision but holds the Comptroller General of Patents to account for whether the Office is deliberately circumventing the Supreme Court’s direction on the intermediate step. That is, as Dearling put it, “a nuclear option,” but one he would not rule out if the evidence in the file already suggests the Office is in contempt of court. There is also an international dimension. Singapore’s Intellectual Property Office launched a public consultation shortly after the ruling, asking whether Singapore should adopt the Emotional Perception approach into national law. That is British soft power operating in real time within the Commonwealth. G. Three Takeaways for Patent Practitioners At the end of our conversation I asked Bruce Dearling to distill the most important practical points. His first takeaway: make sure the claim contains hardware. This applies not only to UK and European applications but is simply good drafting hygiene. Without hardware in the claim, the application remains exposed. The second takeaway concerns the description. Anyone filing an AI invention needs to explain clearly which function is achieved by which piece of hardware, circuit, or software. Not as boilerplate, but as a complete technical account that describes the real-world effects. Dearling’s experience is that practitioners who write the claim first and fill in the description afterward run into trouble. The third takeaway emerged from the conversation itself: how the EPO assesses inventive step for AI inventions is not a settled question. It is worth following the development of UPC case law and any shifts in EPO practice closely. Anyone advising on AI patent applications today needs to know these arguments. H. Conclusion The UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception ruling is not a British footnote. It has declared the Aerotel test dead, introduced the intermediate step that brings non-technical features back into the inventive step analysis, and set off a convergence movement that is already visible at the UPC and still pending at the EPO. For everyone working in AI patent practice, whether in prosecution, examination, or counseling, this ruling is required reading. Rolf Claessen: Our interview guest on IP Fridays podcast is Bruce Dearling. He has been in the IP field and a patent attorney for 36 years and is partner at Hepworth Brown in the UK. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. Bruce Dearling: My pleasure, Rolf. Thank you for inviting me. Rolf Claessen: All right. We just met at the INTA annual meeting in London. And you talked about the UK Supreme Court case where you were involved. And the core questions were whether non-technical features would be considered when assessing inventive step of patents. Can you briefly summarize this case? Bruce Dearling: It’s a bit more than that. It started — I actually wrote the case. And I prosecuted it through the patent office. The patent office rejected the case for being excluded subject matter. So pretty much the excluded subject matter provisions in the UK are nearly identical. They’re as near as practical to the language of the EPC, so those of the European Patent Office — Article 52.2. But again, they apply as such. The actual technology relates to artificial neural networks. And the invention related to a very clever way of what is termed closing the semantic gap at the output of the neural network. So that means that in a neural network, there is always a discrepancy between the output of the neural network in terms of what it’s telling you you should be thinking essentially, and what reality is. So if you can close the semantic gap, then you align the neural network or the artificial intelligence system to better reflect human knowledge or human reactions and human expectations. So that’s really what the invention is about. There’s no point in going into too much detail with it — that’s the way it is. It’s very clever. So the UKIPO rejected this because they said it was essentially a computer program excluded from patentability as such. And they used a decision which is called Aerotel, which has been around since 2006. And that decision has caused considerable consternation and tension between the EPO Technical Boards of Appeal and the UK courts. Aerotel was described as being essentially disingenuous by the EPO Technical Board of Appeal. And the UK courts pushed back and said, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So that’s where it fell apart. So that’s where they rejected it for essentially being a computer program as such, possibly with a bit of business methods thrown in as well. But let’s leave that for the time being. So the case then went to the High Court and at the High Court, we won. The judge said, actually, it’s not a computer program. Neural networks aren’t computers. They’re not programs themselves. There’s more to them than that. And the invention as claimed is not excluded from patentability as such. The UKIPO obviously weren’t very happy about that because they liked their Aerotel case and so they appealed it. And they appealed it on several grounds, including a new one, which was that it was a mathematical method. The Court of Appeal decided that the UKIPO was right and that we were wrong, so we lost the case. So we then went to the Supreme Court. Well, actually, they denied us an ability to go to the Supreme Court. The court said no appeal. We went — actually, no, I think there is a bigger issue here — because we realized, or I realized at that point, that the work that we were doing was much broader than this. It requires real consideration of what an invention is at a fundamental level. So not only exclusions, but how inventive step is applied. And these issues were built into the case from the very beginning. And they sort of — I wouldn’t say crept up on the court as we went through — but they became more and more prominent to the extent that ultimately, when we made an application to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court went, yeah, we’ve got some issues here. We want to hear the full arguments on why this is not excluded from patentability, why Aerotel is potentially bad and how we more or less try to align ourselves with the European Patent Office. So that’s essentially what happened. And the Supreme Court hearing was last July. It took them the thick end of eight months to come out with a decision, which was issued in early February, at which point the entire legal landscape in the UK changed because they said we were right. The Patent Office doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Aerotel is bad. It’s unsound. That’s what they described it as — unsound law. It needs to be removed and we’re going to harmonize with the European Patent Office. So before I — I’m just going on a bit of a rant here, standing on my soapbox telling you what you already know. But the Aerotel test essentially was — it was a four-step test, past tense. So you firstly had to construe the claim. That’s pretty straightforward. Then you actually had to identify the actual contribution. This is what they said — identify the contribution. Really in this aspect, you’re asking what, as a matter of substance rather than form, the inventor has added to human knowledge. So that’s what they said the contribution was. And then they said, the next step in Aerotel was to ask, well, does that contribution fall solely within the excluded subject matter field or realm? And then they said, well, if you get through that question, then you check the actual contribution or the alleged contribution to see whether it’s technical in nature. So that’s the Aerotel test as it was. And what the Supreme Court in their unanimous final decision said was that Aerotel at best jumbles up the order. It reverses the logical order of the analysis by starting with the contributions and then addressing the Article 52 exclusions. And then finally it goes back to what the technical nature of the invention is about. So they really went, no, we don’t like any of this stuff. It’s bad, it’s stupid, it puts the cart before the horse. So, in the intervening period between finding the case and actually seeing it progress all the way to the Supreme Court, we obviously had the G1/19 decision from the EPO Enlarged Board. And they basically said that they are going to validate any hardware as the approach. And that’s essentially what the UK also went with. The UK Supreme Court said we’re going to say that the threshold of patentability — or the exclusion to patentability — is simply overcome by the inclusion in a claim of any piece of hardware, whether it’s a processor or a piece of memory or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Any hardware makes the invention a technical invention. So it’s a really low threshold to consider. And they then went, well, actually, if we now align and harmonize with the European Patent Office sensibly, then we need to look at how we assess inventive step, which is the other thing that we raised with the Supreme Court. In fact, we probably raised it at other times and in all the other instances as well, but it came to a head at the Supreme Court. So the Supreme Court then also went a bit further and said, well, actually, whilst we do like the global approach to assessing inventive step for all fields of technology — whether it’s chemistry or biotech or electronics or software or AI — we use a test called Pozzoli. So that isn’t problem-solution. We don’t like problem-solution. We think it’s not codified in the European Patent Office. It’s just a mechanism that the EPO has come up with to try to objectively assess inventive step. We don’t particularly think that’s appropriate. We like our approach called Pozzoli. That’s it. So we’re going to say with Pozzoli, however, in order to actually understand — particularly in the context of mixed inventions having technical and non-technical features — it’s necessary for the examiner to undertake the so-called intermediate step, where you have to look at the interactions between features within a claim. The invention is defined by the claim. That’s what the act says. That’s what everyone understands. It’s the invention defined by the claim. So you look at the claim features and then you have to understand the interactions that take place. And even if they are between technical and non-technical features, if they bring about an overall technical effect when you consider the invention as a whole, then your claim should be good and you can assess it for classical inventive step. So that’s really where we’re at. There’s a lot to unpack there already. It’s probably a podcast in its own right, but that’s the positive history of where we’re at. And I can keep going if you wish me to for a second and talk about why I think this is — we’ll just contrast it quickly with the problem-solution approach at the EPO and COMVIK. So for inventions in the computer-implemented field, they use COMVIK and the problem-solution approach. The Supreme Court said, as I said, they don’t like problem-solution. I think the problem-solution issue is that it is also inherently pre-baked with hindsight because you have to look at the invention and then step back and exclude those features which are common. And then you formulate a problem based on the function that the claim achieves. And then you’re asking whether or not it would be obvious for a skilled person to arrive at the claimed invention, having been given that hindsight-developed problem. So COMVIK is not great by any means. And we know from a practical perspective that examiners are only too willing to look at a claim and simply line through features which they believe are non-technical, whereas they don’t actually look at the interaction of those features in the context of the claim as a whole. There is also a decision — very recent one actually, about a year ago — T 1249/22, where the Technical Board of Appeal told the examiners and the examining division, you cannot do this. It’s okay to have a claim directed towards an invention in a non-technical field, as long as the invention is directed to a technical solution of that problem. I think it’s paragraphs 11 and 12 or 10 of that decision that are worth looking at. But they’re saying that in all fields of technology, it doesn’t matter as long as the technical solution is about technology — therefore, you should be able to obtain a patent as long as there is a realistic and appropriate technical effect. Be careful actually, Bruce — I don’t mean technical contribution, I mean technical effect. There’s a reason for that distinction. Rolf Claessen: The non-technical features are nevertheless used to assess inventive step in the UK now after this decision, right? Bruce Dearling: Yes, that is the intermediate step. The decision says you must look at the invention as a whole. It’s the important thing. There are a couple of issues that arise out of this. The first one is that you have to provide context for the invention. The Supreme Court never provided any specific guidance about how we deal with the intermediate step or what the exact test is, which is in some respects fine. It seems to be fairly clear that you just have to engage your gray matter — your neurons — to work out what is going on in the real world. And once you work out what’s going on in the real world, what the benefits are, then you look at whether or not the actual implementation of the invention fundamentally has a technical flavor to it, which is not just coding, not just simple coding, but it does something smarter. There’s a real technical impetus. There’s a technical effect. Now that actually brings me onto something I’ve postulated or said. I think the intermediate step will follow something like what I’ve termed the holistic character test, which essentially is: work out what’s going on in the real world. Then once you’ve worked out what’s actually being achieved, what the benefits are, what the invention’s concerned with, then you ask the question, how am I achieving it technically? And how is there a technical effect? How does the technical effect arise? That brings out a couple of issues. The first one is that it’s actually about the word “contribution” because it depends on how the word is used. So if you look at head note one in COMVIK, it uses the word “contribute” — how the non-technical feature contributes to the invention. So that’s an additive inclusive concept. The UK IPO historically, and arguably at the moment today whilst they’re trying to retrain their 400 examiners — which this has caused them to have to do — their idea of contribution is this backward-looking concept. So technical contribution and technical effect, I think — although we mix them up and interchange them — are distinct. Technical contribution: you’re looking backwards. Technical effect is what you look at when you look forward into what’s going on. So this is subtle — it’s really subtle, but it’s important. And once you realize that you are actually looking for the technical effects, then you’re on much safer ground. It’s much more objective in terms of the assessment. This might be somewhat contentious, because it’s the way I’m looking at this, but I’ve been working on this a long, long time and thinking about it for probably decades, worryingly so. So technical contribution and technical effects are probably not the same, where they are interchangeably used to mean the same thing within existing decisions. Rolf Claessen: And in the beginning you said, now that Aerotel is dead basically, it’s more harmonized with the EPO’s approach. But what I take from the discussion now is that maybe — especially in view of the problem-solution approach — it’s not fully harmonized with the EPO’s approach at the moment, right? Or did the UK Supreme Court get something wrong, or was that a desired outcome from your point of view that this is not so completely harmonized with the EPO? Bruce Dearling: Well, the EPO — the any-hardware solution is fully harmonized, no doubt. So it’s now a question of inventive step under Article 56 or Section 3 of the Act. The EPC nowhere mandates the use of problem-solution. And we know that there are many different ways of actually assessing inventive step, including the concrete elaboration test from last year and problem-of-invention approaches. So there are numerous ways of assessing inventive step. So the UK says, “Pozzoli — we like Pozzoli.” Interestingly, I had a discussion with someone I probably can’t mention. They’re saying that the UK approach may actually be more permissive now. It might even influence how the EPO operates. So they may move away from COMVIK towards more of a Pozzoli approach, which basically says this: You identify the notion of the skilled person — step one. You identify the common general knowledge of that skilled person — step one B. You identify the inventive concept of the claim in question, where you construe it if you can’t work out what it is. You then identify what the differences are. And then you ask the question, is it obvious to the skilled person, given knowledge of the common general knowledge? This is entirely not artificial because, as I said beforehand, when you look at problem-solution, you are formulating a problem by backtracking from what the claimed invention is to a situation where you say, well, these are the common features and I’m going to project a problem to try and solve. Now that is already tainted with hindsight reasoning. It’s not safe, it’s not thoroughly objective. There is an inherent problem with this which sees good inventions cast by the wayside. Although it’s a preferred mechanism, it’s not fully baked. There are situations where examiners are inherently lazy, or they just simply use something like the requirements specification argument, which is just factual. It just demonstrates that they can’t be bothered to actually argue it properly or think about what the invention is. Sorry to any examiners listening to this, but this is just my personal view, that sometimes there are problems. I’m reminded of a quote from an EPI hearing I was at a long time ago, where the Legal Board of Appeal member said: “We understand that examining divisions can operate with a degree of mental laziness and that it’s too easy to throw too many things out of the basket when considering the issues of inventive step.” Now that one has stayed with me because you think — did someone just say that? And the answer is yes, they did. But it just goes to show that there is some tension between the TBA and the examining divisions, and they don’t always get it right. Rolf Claessen: So there might be a small difference now between the UKIPO’s future approach of assessing inventive step and the EPO? Bruce Dearling: Yeah, it might do. But the other interesting thing here — and thank you for pointing this out, I hadn’t entirely caught up with it, I’ve been traveling beforehand and I missed some of the UPC case law. So the UPC case law — in, was it — yeah, we talked about that. Rolf Claessen: Yeah. There was a decision in April, Abbott versus Sinocare. Bruce Dearling: Yeah, 901 of 2025. So a Court of Appeal decision from the UPC. It was APP_000000901, I believe, 2025. Decision 17th of April, hearing 27th of March. The UPC is not bound by — it’s a court. The European Patent Office is not a court, it’s an agency that administers and looks after the administrative rule of law. So the fact that this decision came out from the UK Supreme Court in February, and you see almost identical language used in the UPC decision, suggests that there is some alignment here, or some convergence in thought. Now, whilst the UPC decision also references G1/19 and uses problem-solution, there is enough — you’ve got to bear in mind that high-level courts do look at each other’s decisions. And this is really a question of influence and the desire to converge. So the fact that they’ve done this at this time is quite interesting. Again, I can’t quote someone directly from the EPO, although I would love to. They were saying — at a very high level — and they used the words “converge UPC practice towards UK Supreme Court practice on interpretation of the law.” So this may actually be happening in real time. Again, it would be wrong to actually refer to anyone by name, but it’s an observation that when I looked at the case, I can see why this is going ahead. And I can see why the judiciaries — they want to maintain independent judicial controls. They won’t reference the UK Supreme Court decision, not least because we’re not in the UPC. But if you look at the arguments in sections 106 and 107 of the UK Supreme Court’s Emotional Perception decision and head note one, you go — wow, this is very close. Rolf Claessen: Very close and nearly identical wording. Yeah. And the UPC also now uses non-technical features for assessing inventive step. Is that a problem for the EPO that has historically been aggressive in throwing out non-technical features for inventive step analysis? Bruce Dearling: Well, I think they really need to get to the situation — I don’t know — this holistic character test that I’m sort of proposing, where you really have to think about what the invention is achieving, and then look at how it’s technically being achieved. And then if you look at that again in the context of that other decision I mentioned — T 1249/22 — it says something like, in the case of an invention that amounts to a technical implementation of a non-technical method, provided the non-technical method does not contribute to the technical character of the invention. The board validated the approach of identifying the non-technical method and then goes through and says it’s patentable. There are decisions like this which suggest that examining divisions have to give it a bit more thought, because the Technical Board will realize that to satisfy the WTO requirements — which pretty much everyone is bound by — Article 27.1 TRIPS, which requires that you protect all fields of technology. And that means whether it’s data processing or business methods, because business methods can be patentable so long as they are implemented on a technical basis. That essentially seems to be what T 1249/22 is saying, although it doesn’t explicitly say “allowing business methods.” The exclusion is only “as such.” So does this decision, in combination with the Supreme Court case and the movement of the UPC, say: well, actually, let’s look at this properly? It requires objective assessments, not just superficial “let’s strike through that feature because I don’t like it, it looks non-technical.” Rolf Claessen: So are you hopeful that the EPO is adjusting and will reshape their case law in view of the UPC decision and the UK Supreme Court decision? Bruce Dearling: It’s a bit unfortunate that the corresponding UK case at the EPO was dropped by the applicants, because it was heading towards an examination hearing at the examining division. It would have gone to the TBA, and I’m sure it would then have gone from the TBA to the Enlarged Board. I’m pretty sure that’s the case. There is another case from the same client which will probably argue the same thing because the specs are almost identical. It’s just lagged in time. So is it going to change? I hope so, because I think the EPO have got it wrong — more often than not in this field. Well, maybe not more often than not — they get it wrong more times than they should do. Would I like to see it changed? Yes, I would, because I want the examiners to actually think about the technology as opposed to just — oh, it’s not — I don’t want to engage the gray matter. That serves no one. That doesn’t serve technology. That doesn’t serve industry. These patent rights are there for a reason. They are property rights. I’m referring to the award of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Economics — they are a core driver for society’s development. So the 2025 Nobel Prize was for something called creative destruction — the replacement of old technology with new — and it’s based on the patent paradigm. So all this stuff is coming to a head now. It’s just a question of how quickly the EPO actually catch up, and maybe they have something to catch up on. It’s just understanding that the examiners have to start to think. As I said, we’ve got the issues at the UKIPO where they’re going to have to retrain 400 examiners. Rolf Claessen: Yeah, right. Bruce Dearling: The Emotional Perception case wasn’t granted by the Supreme Court. They referred it back to the patent office for consideration under the intermediate step. So the patent office produced a response that I would describe as — I’d say arguably — not well reasoned, which I’ve filed the response to, which basically says you don’t really know what you’re talking about. What really worries me a bit is that I think they’re trying to introduce the Aerotel case through the back door. It’s backsliding. It’s a mechanism for trying to apply it in a different way or a different context, which would be wrong. I think they believe that the applicant will appeal this if they get a bad decision — they will appeal it back to the courts again via the High Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court route. I say maybe not. I say maybe the client will file what they call a judicial review, which is a nuclear option. That’s when you actually hold the Comptroller General of Patents to account and get full discovery of whether or not there’s internal documentation showing that they are deliberately circumventing the direction of the Supreme Court on the intermediate step. This is basically holding them to account and saying: if you’re not applying the intermediate step appropriately, you are in contempt of the law. So judicial review is a really serious thing to do, but it’s certainly something I would not exclude from consideration. We’ll see what happens. It’s not saying we’re just going to go through the courts and make them decide on this. We’re going to say you’re wrong. And there’s already enough evidence in the files to suggest that they are probably in contempt of court and they’re not applying the intermediate step appropriately. They may not know any better at the moment — they need to be guided — but the consequences for them are potentially severe. Rolf Claessen: I have another question for you. You were the instructing attorney — do you think the decision was perfect? What argument that you made was the most underappreciated by the court? And where do you think the judgment got it wrong, or was it all perfect? Bruce Dearling: No, it got 90% or 95% correct. The intermediate step is right. That’s the most important thing in the decision — it’s the intermediate step. The any-hardware thing — that’s logical, that makes some sense — but if people say “if the any-hardware rule is the important bit,” no it isn’t. It’s the intermediate step. That’s the important thing. Where do they go wrong? I think they went wrong because — and you’ve got to bear in mind that unlike German courts, I’ve got to be careful about how I express this — generally, as I understand it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but the judiciary in Germany on patent cases are generally more technically able. They’re normally technically qualified. I look at the Supreme Court justices and the Court of Appeal justices — we had one who was a humanities undergrad, one was a chemist. Good luck with trying to argue complex artificial neural network technologies, which are difficult even for me to understand. And I’ve been working in the field. They’re hard to understand. They require real understanding, real appreciation. They could say, well, actually we don’t need to look at the technology — but frankly, if you’re looking at the statutes and exclusions to patentability and asking what a computer program is, then you need to understand what these technical terms really are. And if you can’t, then the judgment is potentially flawed. Their finding that the neural network is a computer program is, I think, technically obtuse. You know that the Singaporean government — the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore — released about six weeks ago a consultation note to the Singaporean profession and population, asking: is the Emotional Perception case right, and do we need to adopt it into Singaporean national law? So this is direct soft power from the UK Supreme Court changing Commonwealth legislation and statutes. We’ll see what happens. But from what I’ve seen of a draft response from the attorneys, they’re saying essentially: we agree any hardware is right, the intermediate step is right. The assessment of the neural network as a computer program is wrong, or it just doesn’t make any sense. And I’ve made the same comments before in SIPA, in the relevant round in March. There’s a disconnect. I mean, it’s like they equate a computer program with being able to be run on an analog computer. Now, an analog computer has no central processing unit. An analog computer just has resistors and transistors and capacitors. So if they’re saying that an analog computer can run a program — that’s essentially what they’re saying in part of the judgment. Where is the program in an analog computer? And if they’re saying it’s in the values of the resistors and the capacitors, then that has implications for any circuit we’ve got — it’s potentially a computer program — which is just madness, because it doesn’t sit well with the legislation and decisions we’ve looked at over the last 50 years. This is a real problem. It may be a storm in a teacup because you can overcome the objections by having any hardware, but it’s an argument they shouldn’t have been making. It seems to be abstract legal argumentation which has little credibility in my personal view, although it’s now law. It may be that someone can take that, have an argument with the Supreme Court, get them to fix this. The other thing is the EPO looks at a neural network as a mathematical method, and the UK now says it’s a computer program. Neither is right. The EPO is wrong as well. If you look at the actual decision which they regularly quote — the Vicom case — if you actually read the claim and look at the case, you see that it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense. A neural network has applied mathematics in it. It can be based on a computer program because it’s required to set up the learning objectives and the loss function. Mathematical processes — it tweaks the weighting factors of neurons over the course of the training epochs. But at the end of the day, if the function performed by the neural network is new and it’s directed towards a technical implementation which is technically relevant, then it shouldn’t fail for being a mathematical method. And I think the EPO guidelines actually say that. Even recommendations — the UK court said that a recommendation is not technical. Well, actually it is, because it’s data processing, and you’ve got to work out how does the data processing work to provide an improved recommendation? Again, it goes back to the T 1249/22 decision. There’s a whole raft of these things which are left not entirely resolved. There’s enough here to keep someone busy for a few more years. Rolf Claessen: Right. So I have a question for you now that we’ve talked about the decision of the UK Supreme Court and the UPC — the Unified Patent Court — with very, very similar wording. What do you say are the three most important takeaways for patent practitioners in the US, in Europe, in the UK, before the EPO? Are there any things that you really want patent practitioners to take away from our discussion here? Bruce Dearling: Yeah, okay. So first: make sure the claim has some structure in it. You need to have any hardware. That’s number one — in terms of claim drafting. In terms of the description, you really have to understand what the invention is about. And you’ve got to make sure that you explain what function is achieved by what piece of hardware, kit or software. And if you do that — don’t nickel-and-dime this by writing the claim first — I would suggest that you run into problems. You need to understand what the invention is about. And you need to make sure that the description is complete and full to describe the functionality and the effects that are achieved in the real world. And if you can do that, then you’re on a much sounder basis — much, much stronger. There’s a much stronger foundation for this. So that’s two things. Is there a third one? That’s me being a bit cheeky, but I suppose I know what’s going on. Rolf Claessen: Yeah, but maybe the third takeaway is that maybe the EPO will rethink the way — at least how AI inventions are assessed for inventive step. Bruce Dearling: Well, as I said to you before, it could be that that’s the case. I don’t want to repeat myself again. The word “permissive” was used in a conversation I had with respect to the UK Supreme Court approach. COMVIK fundamentally still breaks with me and has done for years, because the way it’s set up and the way it’s applied distorts fundamentally what the invention is about. And until such time as that distortion is removed, there is a problem of objectivity versus subjectivity. And I think that’s really what the EPO has to grapple with. It’s not an easy thing to deal with, but maybe there are things going on. Bruce Dearling: It’s not an easy thing to deal with. I don’t know who’s going to argue it. It would have been useful for me to still have the original case up and running at the EPO because these arguments would have been fleshed out. I’m pretty sure they would have been referred to the Enlarged Board. We would have got it resolved. So it’s whether or not I can now work this into the existing case to try and get the examining division to — well, they will refuse, I suspect. And then it’ll go to the TBA. And then the TBA will have to look at this, hopefully with the referrals to the Enlarged Board. And then that fixes the problem on a national and international basis. Rolf Claessen: Yeah. Let’s see. [Laughs] Bruce Dearling: No, we don’t know. I mean, you might have a different view. What do you think? Do you think COMVIK is fundamentally right or fundamentally wrong? Rolf Claessen: Well, I’m not so much into AI inventions. I’m a chemist and I usually deal with chemistry inventions. But from the discussion that we had, I think that the EPO might rethink their position. I don’t know. Let’s see. Let’s hope so. Bruce Dearling: Well, they liked it. They liked problem-solution. It’s been with us for 25 years. It suggests that it’s a compromise. It’s not mandated by the European Patent Convention — that’s the point. It’s something they think works. And these things only work until such time as someone comes along and says, actually, you’re wrong, and this is the reason. Rolf Claessen: Let’s see if they choose a different route at least for AI inventions. So Bruce, thank you very much for your insight and for talking about the case that you were involved in with the UK Supreme Court. Where could people reach you if they have more questions about this field — basically patents, AI protection in the UK and Europe — and if they want to ask you more questions about this case? Bruce Dearling: Sure. Through the Hepworth Brown website or my LinkedIn profile, I suppose. The Hepworth Brown website has an email link. I’m trying to post things on it as well to try and provide a bit more context. But if people have fundamental questions on this stuff, then I’m happy to try and answer them. I suppose that I can be considered to be quite knowledgeable in the area. Rolf Claessen: Right. Certainly more than I am. [Laughing] Bruce Dearling: So I was fortunate. As a consequence of the work I’m doing, I was appointed last year to the WIPO Standing Committee on Patents and Privacy. That was discussed for the issues of where WIPO goes and what the direction of the problems are that we have in high-tech areas. So there seems to be some degree of understanding that I might know what I’m talking about. I think I probably do. Rolf Claessen: Thank you, Bruce. Thank you very much for being on IP Fridays. Bruce Dearling: My pleasure. Thank you very much, Rolf.
Haroon Inam is Co-founder and CEO of DG Matrix, a company that makes the world's most compact Power Router, aggregating distributed energy for GenAI datacenters, microgrids, fleet electrification, and associated systems. As AI workloads drive unprecedented electricity demand and legacy grid infrastructure struggles to keep pace, DG Matrix has commercialized the world's first multi-port solid-state transformer to meet the energy needs. In this episode, Inam explains why transformer bottlenecks, distributed generation, and 800V DC architectures are reshaping the future of power delivery for AI infrastructure. He discusses DG Matrix's product strategy, manufacturing scale-up plans, and the role of software-defined power systems in next-generation data centers. Finally, Inam shares his take on the future of distributed microgrids and “cellular power” and how to scale power electronics manufacturing. DG Matrix recently closed a $60 million Series A led by Engine Ventures that MCJ is proud to have participated in. Episode recorded on May 13, 2026 (Published on May 26, 2026) In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Overview of DG Matrix (01:41) Introducing the Founders: Haroon Inam and Dr. Bhattacharya (05:25) How traditional grid architecture became constrained for AI workloads (09:57) Solid-state transformers (SST), multi-port systems and voltage classes (12:18) Why early SST efforts struggled economically (13:13) How DG Matrix's multi-port architecture works (16:48) Comparing DG Matrix hardware footprint to legacy power systems (20:08) Transformer shortages and data center infrastructure bottlenecks (24:27) DG Matrix's medium-voltage and low-voltage product strategies (27:55) Product rebranding and current commercial deployments (30:45) Partnerships with EPC firms, battery providers, and turbine manufacturers (34:27) Manufacturing scale-up plan and hyperscaling production (36:36) Supply chain strategy to avoid rare earth dependencies (38:16) Reliability engineering and software-defined power systems (43:47) DG Matrix's go-to-market and hybrid hardware/software business model (46:36) The vision for distributed “cellular power” (48:14) Utilities, microgrids, and the future of interconnected distributed infrastructure Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
This limestone battery can achieve 100+ hour heat storage without lithium and zero standby losses.Industrial heat is a $1T+ problem, but most solutions ignore storage, especially those using ancient chemistry.Arpit Dwivedi is the founder and CEO of Cache Energy, building thermal storage systems for industrial decarbonization.Cache uses calcium oxide chemistry to store and release heat, targeting sub-1,000°F processes that represent ~75% of global industrial demand, with modular systems designed for rapid deployment and low cost.Here's what we discussed:Unit economics anchored in materials, not breakthroughs – Limestone feedstock at
Energy resilience for homeowners is the mission behind Energy Access Innovations, a multi-brand clean energy company building an end-to-end ecosystem for solar and battery storage. Nicole Tomasin, Chief Commercial Officer at EAI, joins Tim Montague to explain how the company serves the consumers the rest of the industry ignores, including DIYers and rural markets.Battery storage and solar access for homeowners is moving beyond coastal markets and high-income consumers. Energy Access Innovations has built a multi-brand portfolio covering distribution, DIY support, installation, and financing under one mission: making energy resilience affordable for every American. Nicole walks Tim through how the company's sister brands, including EG4, Signature Solar, Outback Power, Solar 76, Sun Atlas Power, and EA365, work together to serve customers that most distributors and installers turn away. The company's new XR60 battery, 60 kWh with a 16 kW inverter for under $20,000, and its EA365 prepaid lease, which returns a 30% rebate directly to homeowners, are proof that affordability and transparency are not competing goals. Here is what you will learn in this conversation about residential battery storage affordability and energy resilience:You will find out how the XR60 delivers 60 kWh of storage and a 16 kW inverter for under $20,000, why it ships as a single freestanding unit weighing 1,600 pounds, and when it arrives in market.Learn how the EA365 prepaid lease returns a 30% rebate directly to homeowners, making the residential ITC phase-out less damaging for consumers who no longer qualify for the tax credit.Understand why Energy Access Innovations built Sun Atlas Power, its own EPC company, to capture DIY customers who need installation help, and how it taps a network of 2,000 to 3,000 regional contractors already buying through Signature Solar.Find out why Tim pushed back on a California developer's claim that consumer-owned residential batteries are done, and what EAI's experience with DIY customers suggests about that prediction.You will hear why Texas surpassed California in storage deployment, how PJM grid services programs are generating returns that recover a battery investment in two to three years, and why Illinois is a priority market for EAI.The residential ITC phase-out is compressing margins across the solar industry and pushing more customers toward third-party ownership models. Illinois is incentivizing 1.8 gigawatts of distributed batteries through its clean energy incentive program, and Texas has already surpassed California in storage deployment. Contractors who are not yet offering storage are running out of time to get positioned.Connect with Nicole Tomasin, Energy Access Innovations Nicole Tomasi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-santos-tomasin/Sun Atlas Power: https://www.sunatlaspower.com/Episode 325, James Showalter: https://youtu.be/7CoJQ_lTLkU Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.comCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Is the 18-year property cycle about to trigger a crash? Plus, with EPC rules changing, should landlords be upgrading now or holding off? Your questions answered on this week's episode of Ask Rob & Rob. (00:45) Phil's wondering, could the conflict in Iran spark a property crash and prove the 18-year cycle right? Rob B explains why he's confident enough to go on record saying it won't happen this year. (06:08) Pete's properties are rated D and E. Should he start upgrading now to meet the 2030 EPC deadline? Rob D reveals why waiting for the new criteria could save you thousands and a lot of unnecessary hassle. Enjoy the show? Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts - it really helps others find us! Sign up for our free weekly newsletter, Property Pulse Got a question? Send it in here Find out more about Property Hub Invest
Creation Outside Genesis Part 4: Floored by awePsalm 33Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: The proper response to God's creative work is awe
Steve Coyle, Managing Director of Cullen Property, returns to the Citylets podcast to discuss what Scotland's recent election result could mean for the private rented sector. Topics include the Housing (Scotland) Act 2025, rent controls, EPC reform, landlord compliance, Making Tax Digital and the wider direction of housing policy in Scotland.
What does it mean to be part of Christ's global church? In this episode of In All Things, Ed McCallum, ITEN's Associate for Site and Program Development and our Tuesday evening worship speaker at this year's General Assembly, reflects on Matthew 16 and the promise that Christ will build His church. With a focus on global mission and the upcoming World Outreach Commissioning service, Ed shares how the EPC participates in God's work around the world. This episode reminds us that the church is truly global and that we are “Better Together” as we join in God's mission across nations and cultures. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
Send us Fan MailThe next wave of rental regulation isn't a headline to skim, it's a checklist that will decide whether your property is legally “decent.” We sit down with Alison and Anthony McMullan from Homemaker Property to map out what the Decent Homes Standard actually requires, how it connects to the Renters' Rights Act, and why waiting until 2035 is the fastest way to get caught out. We talk plainly about the five criteria, the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS), and the kind of evidence landlords need, from inventories to periodic inspections, to prove you're running a professional, compliant rental business. We also dig into the part that's keeping many investors awake: energy efficiency and thermal comfort. EPC C by 2030, Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards, and the possibility of changing EPC methodology can shift what “good enough” looks like, especially for gas central heating versus newer low-carbon systems. We share practical guidance on when it makes sense to act now, how to think about upgrade budgets, and why you should focus on smart, defensible steps rather than panic spending on the wrong improvements. Damp and mold, repairs, core facilities, and the grey areas that lead to disputes all get a real-world run-through. Then we flip from compliance to opportunity. Using an independent “top 50 buy-to-let hotspots” style report, we look at what's performing across the UK, including Manchester and Glasgow near the top and Coventry holding a standout spot. We break down what these rankings measure, what they miss, and how to pressure-test any location with local insight so you don't buy a great “deal” that becomes an unsellable asset. We finish with a rapid set of buying tactics: stronger offers, proof of funds, negotiation posture, sales fall-through reality, and how to keep solicitors moving so your purchase doesn't stall for weeks. If you want more grounded property investing advice like this, subscribe, share the episode with a landlord friend, and leave a review so more investors hear it. What's the one Decent Homes Standard change you're preparing for first?VALUABLE RESOURCES:Let me help you build your property business, Check out how I can support your investing now.Visit https://www.thepropertyunleashed.com/homeMy Property Investing Community called Property Education To Action, This is the best place to achieve your property goals and build the life you desire. https://educationtoaction.com Apply here: thepropertyunleashed.com — click Inner Circle“Free Goal Setting Masterclass: Build Your Life In Five Days”“If you've enjoyed these episodes, leave us a five-star review”https://www.facebook.com/groups/816926952556608 to meet like-minded property investors and be a part of the community.CONNECT WITH ME:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mark.fitzgerald.7921Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markfitzgeraldentrepreneur/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-fitzgerald-59200079/...
Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) are everywhere - but do they actually help homeowners make decisions? Alongside expert insight from David Sanders from Vibrant Energy Matters, Phil Spencer breaks down what EPC ratings are meant to do, why they often fall short, and why so many homeowners find them confusing or frustrating. They explore how EPCs fit into the retrofit conversation, what factors actually affect the rating and why better guidance is needed. Do you know your home's EPC rating, and has it ever been useful? We want this series to reflect real homeowners so please do share your retrofit experiences, questions, and home upgrade stories in the comments. Your input will help shape future episodes and support others on the same journey!
Creation Outside Genesis Part 3: Sculpting with wisdomProverbs 8:22-31Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: Jesus sculpted the universe with wisdom
In dieser Folge von „Energie im Wandel“ spricht Claus Hartmann mit Dennis Hager, Senior Manager Sales & Business Development bei Terra One, über einen Hebel der Energiewende, der viel zu oft unterschätzt wird: Batteriespeicher an bestehenden Wind- und Solarparks. Denn während neue Netzanschlüsse vielerorts knapp sind und Projektentwickler auf lange Bearbeitungszeiten stoßen, liegt ein Teil der Lösung bereits vor uns: vorhandene Infrastruktur, bestehende Einspeisepunkte und erneuerbare Anlagen, die heute noch nicht konsequent mit Speichern kombiniert werden. Dennis erklärt, warum Terra One auf eine vertikal integrierte Speicherstrategie setzt – von der Projektentwicklung über Finanzierung und EPC bis hin zur eigenen Vermarktung. Besonders spannend wird es beim Thema Grünstromspeicher: Speicher, die direkt an Wind- oder PV-Parks angeschlossen werden, keinen Netzbezug benötigen und erneuerbaren Strom dann einspeisen, wenn er im System wirklich gebraucht wird. Wir sprechen über Netzanschluss-Staus, Intraday-Handel, KI-gestützte Preisprognosen, Multimarkt-Strategien, Tesla-Batteriecontainer, Renditeerwartungen und die Frage, warum Flexibilität zur Schlüsselressource der Energiewende wird. Eine Folge für alle, die verstehen wollen, wie Speicher schneller in den Markt kommen – und warum wir endlich konsequenter nutzen sollten, was schon da ist.
Andrew Davies is a Principal Consultant at 9 Degrees Consulting, specialising in onshore wind energy projects with deep expertise in multi-contract delivery and split scope contracting. With a background spanning technical engineering, project execution, and commercial advisory across Australia and Europe, Andrew brings a well-rounded perspective on how wind farm projects are delivered. In this episode, Andrew joins host Bijay to break down the evolving contracting landscape in the wind energy sector. They explore the shift from traditional EPC models to split scope contracting, the risks and rewards for developers, and how financing, cost pressures, and supplier dynamics are shaping decisions. The conversation also touches on emerging trends like battery storage, grid stability, and rising electricity demand, offering ideas for engineers, developers, and anyone navigating large-scale renewable energy projects. Resources and links: Andrew Davies on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-davies-9degrees/ Connect: The Society of Construction Law Australia website: https://www.scl.org.au/ The Society of Construction Law Australia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/society-of-construction-law-australia/ Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast series are those of the individual contributors and are not necessarily endorsed by the Society of Construction Law Australia (SoCLA). The content is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, professional, or other advice. Listeners should consider their own circumstances and seek appropriate advice from qualified professionals before acting on any information contained in this podcast. This show is produced in collaboration with SoundCartel. Visit soundcartel.com.au for more information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Week in Review - May 13, 2026In this Week in Review, we discuss the fallout from the EPC summit in Yerevan, Armenia's role as a platform for anti-Russian messaging, and Putin's warning about a possible “separation” if Armenia moves toward the EU. They examine the Armenia-EU declaration, focusing on TRIPP, Ukraine, hybrid threats, security cooperation, visa liberalization, and the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant. The episode then turns to Armenia's election campaign, Pashinyan's claim that Artsakh was “never ours,” Aliyev's parallel messaging from occupied Artsakh, pressure on opposition figures, the Swiss Peace Initiative, and sharp divergence between election polls.Topics:EPC fallout and Russia responseArmenia-EU declaration controversiesPashinyan's Artsakh campaign narrativeAliyev-Pashinyan tag-team messagingSwiss Peace InitiativePollsters diverge on election forecastsHosts:Hovik ManucharyanAsbed BedrossianEpisode 545 | Recorded: May 12, 2026SHOW NOTES: https://podcasts.groong.org/545VIDEO: https://youtu.be/pLYUk6q9Wx4#WeekInReview #Armenia #SwissPeaceInitiative #NagornoKarabakh #ArtsakhSubscribe and follow us everywhere you are: linktr.ee/groong
American solar manufacturing is getting a reboot. Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy and formerly of Shoals Technologies, sold 1 GW of product in Q1 of this year alone. In this episode, he walks Tim Montague through his vertically integrated factory in Portland, Tennessee, and names exactly why utility-scale solar equipment is quietly failing at scale. American solar manufacturing has a reliability problem, and the utilities and independent power producers who own these fields for 30 to 50 years are the ones absorbing the cost. Dean Solon, founder of Create Energy and the man who built and took Shoals Technologies public on the NASDAQ in 2021, has spent three years building a vertically integrated solar manufacturing operation in Portland, Tennessee, to address this directly. Create sold 1 gigawatt of product in Q1 of this year, with Q2 expected to double that output. Host Tim Montague tours the Create Energy factory floor and draws out exactly what full-stack, American-made solar hardware looks like in practice. Here is what you will learn from this conversation:You'll hear Dean Solon explain why module warranties are misleading and why EPC economics push toward equipment designed to last only past the two-year mark, leaving utilities and IPPs exposed for the decades of ownership ahead.Find out how Create Energy's OnTrack system uses one common control board across trackers, E-boss units, weather stations, and inverters, giving asset owners a single view of every row in a solar field with no separate pony panel required.Learn why Create offers a 10-year bumper-to-bumper warranty on its full product stack, and what Solon means when he says he eliminated failure modes rather than reduced them.Understand how automated, electric vegetation control cuts solar O&M costs in half, and why long-term asset owners should treat this as a budget line item, not a feature.For any asset owner weighing supply chain decisions in 2025, this conversation is a direct look at what the American manufacturing alternative looks like on the ground. Connect with Dean Solon and Create LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-solon-b8876649/Website: https://www.create.energy/ Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.comCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Conversations on Groong - May 11, 2026Anna Grigoryan of Hayastan Dashinq (Armenia Alliance) joins Groong to discuss Armenia's June 7 parliamentary election and the start of the official campaign. The conversation examines the EPC and Armenia-EU summits in Yerevan, EU political and financial support for Pashinyan, Aliyev's remote demarche, and opposition protests around Artsakh rights, Armenian prisoners, and democratic backsliding. The episode also covers opposition coalition math, Hayastan Dashinq's 8% bloc threshold, Strong Armenia's lead among opposition forces, possible post-election governing formulas, and the risks of a falsified vote. Grigoryan also discusses Armenia's foreign policy direction, the peace treaty with Azerbaijan, TRIPP and Syunik amid the Iran war, education as a national priority, and Hayastan Dashinq's core message to voters.Topics:Election campaign and opposition strategyEPC, EU-Armenia summit, and foreign influenceForeign policy, security, and regional risksDomestic priorities and election integrityGuest: Anna GrigoryanHosts:Hovik ManucharyanAsbed BedrossianEpisode 544 | Recorded: May 9, 2026SHOW NOTES: https://podcasts.groong.org/544VIDEO: https://youtu.be/SV2I8iBr9ss#AnnaGrigoryan #Armenia #ArmenianPolitics #ArmeniaElections #HayastanDashinq #EPCSummit #TRIPP #ArtsakhSubscribe and follow us everywhere you are: linktr.ee/groong
Creation Outside Genesis Part 1: The ballad of CreationPsalm 104Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: God's creation shows us that he is beautiful, loves order, and is a provider
Creation Outside Genesis Part 2: Beyond our questionsJob 38:1-33Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: God's creation establishes his sovereignty
Pick your pollster, party fundraising, a legislative all-nighter, a new Governor General Links BC Politics: Still-leaderless BC Conservatives open 10-point lead over NDP amid DRIPA uncertainty B.C. Politics: NDP Holds Narrow Lead as Housing, Health Care, and Deficit Concerns Keep Pressure on Government, Leger Poll 2026 First Quarter Interim Financial Reports Available | Elections BC B.C. premier calls allegations that cabinet minister was target of investigation false – The Globe and Mail Politicians were up all night debating B.C.'s Bill 9. Why does it matter so much? | CBC News Minister's statement about amendments to Bill 9 Supporting students in Tumbler Ridge with new secondary school Tumbler Ridge Secondary School will be demolished and rebuilt after mass shooting, province says | CBC News Louise Arbour to be installed Canada’s next governor general June 8 | CBC News Canada and Europe should get ‘creative' in forging closer ties, EU ambassador says | CBC News ‘I would be very pleased': PM Carney invited to address European Parliament Canada to be first non-European nation at EPC summit as Carney seeks allies Pension funds should invest more in Canada, Senate finance committee chair says – The Globe and Mail
What role does church planting play in the future of the EPC, and how can we be a part of it? In this episode of In All Things, Tom Ricks, National Director of Church Planting, shares a vision for church planting across the denomination and reflects on the opportunities available for current and prospective planters. Tom highlights the ways the EPC is working to equip, support, and send leaders into new communities with the gospel. With a special focus on this year's General Assembly, this conversation invites listeners to consider how they might engage in the work of church planting – whether by going, sending, or supporting – and reminds us that in this shared mission, we are truly “Better Together.” To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
Solar racking is one of the lowest-cost line items on a DG project and one of the highest-risk failure points. Kyle Sinclair, Co-founder and CEO of SDE (Sinclair Designs and Engineering), joins Tim Montague to explain how USA-made steel and 4-day commercial engineering turnarounds are solving the lead time and logistics failures that slow commercial solar projects. SDE produces 3 megawatts of racking in a single 8-hour shift.On this episode of the Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague speaks with Kyle about the full arc of SDE's product line, from the Skyrack 2.0 fixed-tilt ground-mount system to a new I-beam solution designed for rocky soil conditions in Texas and on the West Coast. They also cover the realities of solar carport installation, including foundation risk, soil testing, and why carport projects require a fundamentally different approach than ground mount racking.Here is what you will learn in this conversation:Learn how SDE turns around residential stamped drawing packages in 2 days and commercial packages in 4 days, and why that speed has become the deciding factor for EPCs managing safe harbor deadlines.Understand the difference between C-channel and I-beam ground mount racking, including why high refusal rates in rocky soil conditions led SDE to develop a 6x9 and 6x15 I-beam solution that Kyle says is more cost-effective than most competitors' C-channel designs.Learn what every EPC should know before pricing a solar carport installation: how soil conditions drive foundation costs from $1,500 per hole to $2,800 per hole, and why planning for worst-case geotech results protects your margin.Find out how SDE holds a 95% delivery accuracy rating using ISO 9001 quality management and Keyence scanning technology integrated into their ERP system, and why that matters when your crew is at a remote site expecting a full kit.Any EPC designing projects in the Midwest or expanding into new geographies need to hear Kyle's approach to engineering for conditions that historical data no longer predicts accurately.Connect with Kyle Sinclair, SDE Kyle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-sinclair-b9b60a62/SDE Website: https://www.sinclair-designs.com/ Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.comCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Arménie, dlouho považovaná za blízkého spojence Ruska, hostila počátkem týdne třicítku evropských lídrů a kanadského premiéra na summitu takzvaného Evropského politického společenství (EPC). Další den se v zemi uskutečnil vůbec první bilaterální summit EU-Arménie. Proč je tato událost důležitá především pro zakavkazskou republiku?Všechny díly podcastu Názory a argumenty můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.
Groong Week in Review - May 3, 2026This Groong Week in Review examines a volatile week across Armenia and the region. Asbed and Hovik discuss Trump's declared ceasefire with Iran, the failed US-Iran talks in Islamabad, the continuing naval blockade, and the wider political pressure shaping Washington's war posture. The episode also covers “Operation Kochari,” the secret visit of Azerbaijani deputy prime minister Shahin Mustafayev to Armenia, border demarcation, TRIPP, and the political theater around trade with Azerbaijan. The discussion turns to Azerbaijan's destruction of the Stepanakert cathedral, the muted international response, and Pashinyan's comments on the issue. The hosts also analyze the latest MPG poll, opposition coalition math, election fraud concerns, the EPC meeting, legal pressure on the opposition, mass surveillance, and Armenia's falling press freedom ranking.Topics:Iran WarMustafayev in ArmeniaDestruction of the Stepanakert cathedral by AzerbaijanElection politicsHosts:Hovik ManucharyanAsbed BedrossianEpisode 539 | Recorded: May 2, 2026SHOW NOTES: https://podcasts.groong.org/539VIDEO: https://youtu.be/eIIg1IWYm1w#Armenia #Azerbaijan #IranWar #TRIPP #Artsakh #Stepanakert #ArmenianElections #GroongSubscribe and follow us everywhere you are: linktr.ee/groong
Next-level peace with Gaelen Nagus
Simon explores the significant impact of evolving Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) regulations on property investors in England and Wales, where 55% of properties currently fall short of the C rating required by 2030. He discusses the shift from measuring energy use to energy retention, the practical challenges of retrofitting older properties like Victorian terraces, and the potential pitfalls of installing unapproved high-efficiency appliances. Highlighting a growing trend of landlords exiting the market due to these hurdles and other legislative pressures, the episode identifies a unique opportunity for savvy investors to acquire off-market properties by connecting with local landlord networks. KEY TAKEAWAYS EPCs are transitioning from measuring how much energy a property uses to how effectively it retains heat, which can lower ratings for properties with poor insulation despite efficient heating systems. Investors may fail to improve their EPC rating if they install the latest energy-efficient boilers or appliances before they are officially added to the government's approved list, as assessors cannot grant points for unlisted items. There is a spending cap—currently around £10,000—where landlords who cannot reach a C rating after spending this amount may be exempt, as are certain listed buildings where heritage requirements prevent necessary energy upgrades. The complexity of these regulations, combined with the Renters' Rights Act and rising interest rates, is prompting many landlords to sell, creating a prime opportunity to find off-market deals through HMO registers and networking. BEST MOMENTS "55% of properties in England and Wales are not sufficient to meet the EPC rating C standard that is required by the year 2030." "No longer is it going to measure how much energy is used, but how good the property is at retaining energy." "The whole EPC system is kind of broken at the moment... it takes a while for the latest, most efficient products to be actually added onto the list and approved." "This is fueling the desire for many landlords to sell their properties, to exit the property market and do something else with their money." VALUABLE RESOURCES To find your local pin meeting visit: www.PinMeeting.co.uk and use voucher code PODCAST to attend you first meeting as Simon's guest (instead of paying the normal £20). Contact and follow Simon here: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/OfficialSimonZutshi LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonzutshi/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/SimonZutshiOfficial Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonzutshi Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonzutshi/ Simon Zutshi, experienced investor, successful entrepreneur and best-selling author, is widely recognised as one of the top wealth creation strategists in the UK. Having started to invest in property in 1995 and went on to become financially independent by the age of 32. Passionate about sharing his experience, Simon founded the property investor's network (pin) in 2003 www.pinmeeting.co.uk pin has since grown to become the largest property networking organisation in the UK, with monthly meetings in 50 cities, designed specifically to provide a supportive, educational and inspirational environment for people like you to network with and learn from other successful investors. Since 2003, Simon has taught thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners how to successfully invest in a tax-efficient way. How to create additional streams of income, give them more time to do the things they want to do and build their long-term wealth. Simon's book “Property Magic” which is now in its sixth edition, became an instant hit when first released in 2008 and remains an Amazon No 1 best-selling property book. Simon launched his latest business, www.CrowdProperty.com, in 2014, which is an FCA Regulated peer to peer lending platform to facilitate loans between private individuals and property professionals. This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/
永遠不回頭 因為頭沒油臭 深層去油垢 洗淨頭皮油臭 一次全擁有倫士度洗回頭皮健康狀態 7天有感去味 LUCIDO倫士度.頭皮去味洗髮精 極淨去味配方 深層洗淨熟男黏膩油垢 立即體驗7天去味不回頭: https://fstry.pse.is/9699zq —— 以上為 Firstory Podcast 廣告 —— 第8屆歐洲政治共同體(EPC)峰會,4日首度於「亞美尼亞 首都葉里凡」舉行。更邀請加拿大總理卡尼首度跨海出席,展現泛歐與北美同盟的團結。法國總統馬克宏針對當前受阻的中東能源供應鏈,向美伊喊話。烏克蘭總統澤倫斯基也現身呼籲對俄羅斯加大外交施壓。 加入會員,支持節目: https://cku2d315gwbbo0947nezjmg86.firstory.io/join 留言告訴我你對這一集的想法: https://open.firstory.me/user/cku2d315gwbbo0947nezjmg86/comments YT收看《寰宇全視界》
What does it mean to uphold faithful ordination standards in today's church? In this episode of In All Things, guest host Annie Rose sits down with Doug Resler and Julie Hawkins, co-chairs of the ad-interim committee on ordination standards, to discuss the work of their committee and the recommendations being presented to this year's General Assembly. They offer insight into the importance of ordination standards for the health of the church and the preparation of its leaders, as well as the process their team followed in studying and discerning these issues together. As the EPC looks ahead, this conversation highlights the value of thoughtful collaboration and shared discernment, reminding us that we are truly Better Together. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
As the utility-scale solar market collides with an era defined by massive load growth, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) firms are rethinking their strategy to meet the moment. In this episode, Shayle speaks to George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar and storage construction firms in the US. George offers a unique perspective into the state of the market as well as the logistics of building gigawatt-scale projects and insights into how automation is changing the EPC game. Shayle and George discuss: Why George believes rising demand can help solar move past boom-and-bust cycles How SOLV is taking on larger projects without needing to increase its workforce proportionally How automation helps SOLV build and install utility-scale solar faster The logistics bottleneck impacting EPCs' ability to scale How AI-driven simulations can help optimize installations Catalyst: Can AI revolutionize EPC? Catalyst: 2026 trends: Gas turbines, Texas' load queue, and China electrifies Catalyst: Scaling America's domestic solar supply chain Latitude Media: Can the US bring solar installation to below $2 per watt? Latitude Media: This former solar installer is all-in on software-only sales Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company's messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.
The Entreprenudist Podcast: The Place To Hear Real Entrepreneurs & Business Owners Bare It All
Ensuing Loss Explained: Steven M. Bush on Coverage, Causation & Policy Language Attorney Steven M. Bush of Merlin Law Group delivers a deep training session on one of the most misunderstood areas of property insurance claims: ensuing loss, concurrent causation, efficient proximate cause, and anti-concurrent causation language. This session was part of the "Mastering the Art of Public Adjusting" class provided by United Claims Professionals, hosted by Jack Hanks, with the recording sponsored by ShieldWolf Strongholds. In this training, Steven M. Bush explains why public adjusters must do more than simply identify damage. They must understand how the policy language works, how exclusions operate, how coverage can be brought back through ensuing loss language, and how different jurisdictions may treat the same facts very differently. This session covers: • What "ensuing loss" really means • Why the excluded cause may not be the end of the coverage discussion • How to read policy language with purpose and intent • The difference between ensuing loss, concurrent causation, and efficient proximate cause • Why anti-concurrent causation language can change the entire claim analysis • Florida, Texas, and Illinois distinctions • Why Texas claims often require careful damage allocation • The role of weather forensics, photos, intake forms, and investigation • Why public adjusters must know the policy before arguing the claim Steven also shares a practical highlighting system for reading insurance policies, including how to identify coverages, exclusions, endorsements, post-loss obligations, and key restrictions. This is not a beginner-level conversation. It is a "meat, not milk" training designed for public adjusters who want to sharpen their craft, protect policyholders more effectively, and understand how coverage decisions are shaped by policy language, facts, causation, and jurisdiction. Featured Speaker: Steven M. Bush, Attorney Merlin Law Group Training Provided By: United Claims Professionals Hosted By: Jack Hanks Recording Sponsored By: ShieldWolf Strongholds Educational Disclaimer: This video is for educational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. Public adjusters should consult qualified legal counsel regarding specific claims, policy interpretation, statutes, case law, and jurisdiction-specific issues. Suggested Chapters 00:00 Welcome to Mastering the Art of Public Adjusting 07:01 Steven M. Bush Introduction 09:40 What Is Ensuing Loss? 11:46 What Ensuing Loss Does and Does Not Cover 13:20 Policy Highlighting System for Public Adjusters 16:50 Two Purposes of an Ensuing Loss Clause 20:17 Separate and Independent Resulting Losses 22:11 Common Policy Language to Look For 23:32 Roof Leak Example: Faulty Workmanship and Interior Damage 26:01 Ensuing Loss vs. Concurrent Causation 27:40 Efficient Proximate Cause Explained 31:35 Why the Chain of Events Matters 40:49 Concurrent Causation Doctrine 43:52 Florida's Sebo Case Discussion 47:05 Texas Burden of Allocation 48:31 Weather Forensics in Texas Claims 52:21 Failure to Segregate Damages in Texas 56:54 Anti-Concurrent Causation Clauses 1:00:24 Common Exclusions and "In Any Sequence" Language 1:04:31 Wind, Flood, Ordinance, and Anti-Concurrent Causation 1:08:11 Florida vs. Texas Coverage Overview 1:09:42 Final Review: Ensuing Loss, EPC, and Concurrent Causation #PublicAdjusting #PropertyInsurance #InsuranceClaims #MerlinLawGroup #UnitedClaimsProfessionals #ShieldWolfStrongholds #EnsuingLoss #InsuranceCoverage #ClaimsTraining #PublicAdjusterTraining
What happens when the biggest threat to your publishing business is also buried inside the data you're not looking at? Jorge Barbosa of wecantrack, joins Lee-Ann to talk about what is actually happening to publishers right now, why most of them are flying blind without realising it, and what the ones who are thriving are doing differently. The conversation covers HCU updates, AI overviews cannibalising traffic, the overlooked relationship between affiliate managers and publishers, and why EPC broken down by traffic source might be the most important number in your business that you're not tracking.Talking Points Include:The visibility gap most publishers don't know they have and why logging into your affiliate network reports is not the same as understanding your businessHow one publisher shifted from 80 percent organic to 80 percent paid traffic over four years and grew overall revenue in the processWhy AI overviews are changing the user journey in ways that affect affiliate managers just as much as publishers and what you should be doing about it depending on who your audience actually isThe case for affiliate managers paying for their top publishers' tracking tools and the commercial intelligence that comes back in returnListen to Find Out More About:Why EPC by traffic source and landing page is the one metric Jorge always leads with in demos, and what it reveals that network reports never willHow big publishers use automated link testing and monetisation scripts to protect revenue at scale without adding headcountThe LLM tracking feature wecantrack is building that measures how often an AI model is crawling your content, not just mentioning itWhy affiliate marketing as a side hustle is the myth that drives Jorge mad, and what the industry actually looks like when you pull back the lensWhat the successful publisher looks like in 2027, in one sentenceWhy publishers building a brand rather than just a website is the single most important strategic shift happening in the industry right nowKey Segments of This Podcast and Where You Can Tune In to Go Direct:[02:00] The pain points publishers are dealing with right now: HCU losses, AI overview traffic cannibalisation, and why most are still guessing about where their revenue comes from[06:50] A live demo reality check: the publisher who thought YouTube was irrelevant until the data showed it was their best-converting channel[22:08] Pivot or die: real examples of publishers who lost eighty percent of organic revenue and rebuilt stronger by acting on what the data told them[28:00] The rapid fire round: the one metric everyone should track, the best and worst things to happen to publishers in two years, and what 2027 looks like for the publishers who make itCall to ActionA big thank you to Jorge for being so generous with what he's seen on the ground. If this episode has made you think differently about the data sitting inside your publishing business or program, that is worth acting on sooner rather than later. Have a look at their Affiliate Dashboard or book a demo if this episode has sparked your interest.KonverJ works with brands and affiliate managers to build publisher relationships and program strategies that are grounded in what the data actually shows. If you want to stop guessing and start making decisions that compound, get in touch with the team here.Rate, Review and Subscribe on Send me a text with your questions
US wind PPA prices climb to $79.40/MWh as the IRA sunsets. Plus GE Vernova ordered to stay at Vineyard Wind, lessons from Spain’s blackout, and data centers straining the US grid. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall here with Nikki Briggs, who is in North Carolina this week, and Yolanda Padron who is back from the exciting wedding and weekend in Mexico. Welcome back, Yolanda. Yolanda Padron: Thank you. Excited to be here, Allen Hall: uh, this week there’s a, there’s a lot going on and we’re gonna touch upon some of it. Uh, Rosemary is over in China this week and Matthew is actually at Wind Europe in Madrid. And so this is gonna be an American focused episode mostly, but it’s gonna have global implications. One of the key items is PPA prices in the United States and with the on sunsetting of the [00:01:00] IRA Bills, uh, tax credits, and the whole infrastructure there with the one big beautiful bill when it crushed the IRA bill. PPA Prices needed to come up well. That’s happening, right? So developers, uh, can’t live without some money to compensate for the roughly 26, 26 7 20 $7 in PPA prices that were compensated by the tax credits. But, uh, when purchase price agreements have hit the highest level since they begin tracking it at Wood Mac. The average wind PPA now stands at $79 and 40 cents per megawatt hour up 24% from just one year ago now, Yolanda, you and I were talking before we started recording today about how low some of those PPA prices were two years ago, three years ago. Some of them were almost single digits. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, yeah. Some of them were pretty low. I [00:02:00] remember 16, $19 EPA prices and then a couple years ago we were looking at those and thinking, oh no, I can’t believe we, we kept those prices and they’re so low and everything’s changed so much, and the prices grown so much, and that was two years ago and now it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s almost four times as much as, as what we had originally thought, which is. Not super great for those older projects, Allen Hall: obviously, uh, when they, if they do repower, the extent they’re gonna have to renegotiate the PPAs. Right. The, the landscape has changed quite a bit. So the, the question really is now are they gonna be able to renegotiate new PPAs when the existing PPA hopefully ends? You can’t, you can’t run turbines for free and will they repower. Or will they just try to extend the lifetime? I think it’s a lot of operators trying to figure that out right now. And that’s in light of installations. So Whim Mac also says that US wind installations are [00:03:00] on track to nearly double in 2026, uh, building towards 48 gigawatts of new capacity through 2030, which all makes sense, right? That the, the. Uh, everybody’s trying to get all their assets in the ground so they, they qualify for the, the tax credits. So there’s a big push. So 2026 and 2027 are gonna be pretty busy years. Uh, but the, the negotiations are still going on and we’re talking to operators. Nikki and I have been talking to operators this past week or the last couple of weeks, honestly. There is all kinds of negotiations going on for turbines right now and who can get turbines? Can they get ’em in time? Can they get ’em planted fast enough? Nikki, it is causing a lot of operators to spend a great deal of time doing planning that they otherwise wouldn’t have been working on two years ago. Nikki Briggs: Definitely. I mean, it seems kind of weird to me because it’s like a weird spot. It’s like, um, you know, we want more power and we need to do all these projects, [00:04:00] but then. The permitting process is just like a brick wall or something, you know? Um, like it just takes them so much more to get through, um, and get it moving. Allen Hall: Well, I, I think if you have an existing site, you’re gonna repower it. I mean, that’s probably the easiest thing to do if, if you can pull it off. The, the question is how big of a turbine are you gonna purchase? A lot of those turbines that are gonna get repowered are probably 1.5. To two megawatt machines. They’re going to move up to five or six megawatt machines, generally speaking. So they’re reducing the amount of turbines that are gonna be on site. But the, the amount of power that’s delivered usually is about the same, maybe a little bit more. Which, which, which strives the, which drives the, the equation of, Hey, what’s everybody gonna do in the next couple of years with the data centers. Having listened to the GE Renova financial report for Q1 that just came out as we’re earlier today. GE is trying to sell gas turbines like there’s no tomorrow. However, the weird thing about it was that they were [00:05:00] very nervous about locking in firm orders that a lot of the deposits they had for like 2029 or moving into 2030. So they had a, a discussion about GE Renova building gas turbines. They could do about 20 gigawatts a year, but they had like a 10 gigawatt hole. In 20 29, 20 30 of orders because the data centers are realizing, like to get a contractor to put a hole in the ground so you can put a data center in is taking more time than they thought. It’s not Silicon Valley where you can just type some software. And Yolanda, you’re kind of in the middle of this right now, being in Austin, Texas. Is the, the drive for data centers and the drive for power, what it was six months ago, is that landscape changed? Has everybody come back to reality? Like building physical projects takes time. Yolanda Padron: I think people are starting to get, get back to reality from the little bit that, that I’ve been, that. I privy to, uh, I do think that you mentioned the GE renova and [00:06:00] just kind of all the changes and everything. And I know in the past we’ve talked about, um, the fact that, you know, a lot of blade manufacturers have changed hands for wind and a lot of things are uncertain in general. Um, I think right now with the boom of people trying to repower and doing everything as quickly as possible and as safely as possible, it’s really important that everybody should. Try to get as much documentation on everything as possible, not just to, to protect yourselves, right? I mean, if there’s some sort of, I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re checking that the foundation on your turbine is perfect still, um, doing all the civil engineering studies that you need to do and making sure that, that everything’s fine, um, for, for the long term, right? If you’re not, you’re not planning on repowering again in five years. Um. But just to track everything. There’s so much movement right now and so much uncertainty that at the very least, so you know, what you’re dealing with, if and when you have an issue, [00:07:00] you know, five years down the line, like, oh, this is what happened and this is why, this is who I need to talk to, or this is how I’m going to solve this. Or, you know, it’s not a new problem. Um, because it’s just, there’s just so many, so many factors changing. All at once that it’s, it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit daunting for everyone in this space. I don’t know if you guys feel the same way. Nikki Briggs: I have a separate question, um, which is, you know about these PPA pricing, if it’s going up, it continues to go up. Is the old adage about like green energy is the, is is the cheapest? Is that like out of the wind now? I mean, that’s not even. You can’t even apply that. Allen Hall: No, I think renewable energy, solar and wind are the lowest cost, fastest way to get power onto the grid. The, the, the question is, uh, will state and federal governments prohibit it? Because if you’re talking about the gas turbines, [00:08:00] which is not cheap, and you’re talking maybe the earliest is 20 30, 20 32. Uh, as when you be able to, to get something scale there. What else did there that you’re gonna build? Nuclear. Nuclear GE iss. Talking about nuclear small modular reactors again today. And they got a project going up in Canada, it sounded like that’s not vast either. So if you’re talking about speed and deployment, solar’s quick, right? You can just put ’em up and you can get wind turbines up pretty fast too. But anything that’s uh, gas turbine or god forbid, we start burning oil again to make electricity. Uh, I, I just don’t see it. This has implications obviously over in Europe too, right? So Wind Europe is this week, and it’s in Madrid, of course. And the Vesta, CEO, Henrik Anderson’s, uh, told the audience over in Europe that, uh, hey, there’s a lot of choices to be made [00:09:00] here the next couple of years, and it’s more important now than ever, uh, to. Think about renewables with the problems in the ous, straight of ous, sending prices higher. Does Europe want to be connected to a petroleum future? I think Europe has been struggling with that since obviously the Ukraine war started. So the, the problems in Iran are just gonna double down on that. The EU Energy Commissioner, uh, Dan Jorgenson, uh, called it out. Earlier this week and said it’s, this is not an energy crisis, it’s a fossil fuel crisis. So if we don’t have to rely on fossil fuel so much, then the energy crisis will hopefully come down in Europe. Uh, but one of the weird things about what’s happening and where Europe is, although Vestas and the EU energy Minister Commissioner are talking about fossil fuels and moving to electricity into more renewables, when [00:10:00] Europe is talking about, uh. Unfettered media posts that are, that there’s misinformation happening and, and how they’re going to deal with misinformation. That’s not their, to me it’s not their problem. Misinformation is not slowing down projects you, you have to deal with. Uh, obviously people are gonna oppose power plants, Tesla facilities, whatever’s going on in their neighborhood. The, there’s gonna be opposition to it. You have to learn how to deal with it. And I, I’m always shocked when, when a, a large organization, be it American Clean Power or, or Wind Europe or one of the many others, or complaining about misinformation, they’re in their information business. They need to be doing more work, laying the groundwork locally to deal with some of these issues. But it does feel like. Yolanda have seen this up close, uh, where there’s been sort of local disputes about, particularly wind, uh, that you, you need a little bit of help, right? [00:11:00] You can’t rely on the, the operator, owner operator to provide all the ammunition to, to, to fight off. Uh, you know, the, the generic Facebook posts about wind turbines killing birds or whatever they’re gonna post. Is, is there a, a, a future here where a a, a Wind Europe does a, an American clean power for that matter, do a better job of communicating why you would wanna have renewable energy in your backyard? Yolanda Padron: I think we just all need to just agree in general about what our approach is here. Right? Because we, I know there’s, we’ve talked about companies that really, really wanna do, you know, if, if you can. Produce X amount of money by creating wind power, then you’re, I’m gonna charge you X minus one. Right? Like, I’m gonna maximize my profits as much as possible. Um, and then there’s other people who are just really, really trying to, [00:12:00] to do with, deal with what they can. You know, they, you have 25-year-old projects that have been going on forever and ever. No one’s manufacturing them anymore. And people are still finding solutions to keep those alive. And then there’s, I know we talked about, I think it was Japan that was doing that really crazy work with these smaller turbines that, I mean, they already know what the issues with those turbines are. So just, just removing a lot of the factors going into something very experimental for, you know. We could all talk about the greater good, which is making sure that renewable energy is something that’s financially accessible. Right. I, I know we have a friend who’s been talking about it for a really long time and he said, you know, it shouldn’t be a thing of this is the right thing to do, should be a thing. This is the most cost effective thing to do, and I think he’s right. I think we should all just really try [00:13:00] to make sure that we work together. To make it the most cost effective way of producing energy, um, of solving all the problems that we can and not just, I mean, we can focus about competition later, right? If we really, really want to. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the, the power demand for a minute. So, a number of states in the US have prohibited data centers altogether. I think the number I saw last was like 30 states have prohibited. Data centers main being the most recent one that I recall, where they just prohibited ’em in the state. That has to do with electricity prices. That the concern is if I have a couple of gigawatts being devoted to any, you know, uh, ai, Facebook, Google, uh, x, ai, any of those that my electricity rates are gonna go up and, and a lot of the states are putting blockades in essentially to prevent that from happening. That changes the landscape dramatically, right? [00:14:00] Where now, uh, if they were gonna put renewable energy in, in advance of ai, those projects are gonna die, obviously. Is there, is there a, a place where data centers, ai, electricity demand being increased, is met with renewables and some logic? Will that ever come to a place where everybody will be happy? Yolanda Padron: I mean, I think it can, in that case, I guess when Europe is correct in saying, you know, we need to stop the misinformation spread, right? But it’s also, I think it’s, it’s, it’s like one of those things where it’s like, it’s such a small part of the equation to make sure that the people who don’t exactly have a lot to do with the decisions that are being made. Legally, um, are on the same page. I think it’s more of, you know, the people who [00:15:00] are making these decisions need to come to an agreement on what’s, what’s best and what’s fiscally responsible for the area. Allen Hall: Would you wanna turn away? I, I think the thing about AI data centers and the issues that’s driving it, it’s once you have a AI data center up and running, there’s hardly anybody working there, so it doesn’t create jobs. A lot of times they don’t even have lights. Right? Why do you need lights? The computers don’t need lights. They’re just gonna sit there and run that. If it was bringing jobs, I think everybody would think differently about data centers. But because data centers don’t bring jobs, except in the power generation side, there’s not a big incentive for states to allow them. So I don’t see how this works. Right. At some point, somebody somewhere is gonna figure it out. That I’m gonna have to have a lot of excess electricity. Maybe it’s Norway and it has to be pretty cold again, Norway or Sweden, where I could put data centers and it, it may not even happen in the us. Is that what we’re, is [00:16:00] that what we’re gonna see? Nikki Briggs: I don’t know what we’re gonna see, but I’ve, I’ve heard that, um, aren’t they putting data centers in the, in the water now too underwater and like in the ocean and there’s talk about putting data centers in space and, you know, all kinds of things to, to find these different environments. But I think, um, with the. Increased demand and power that it’s gonna be all these data centers are gonna be taking. And as, um, we know AI is very exponential, right? So it’s, it’s growing exponentially in the use and, um, the adoption of it and the models are getting stronger and so it’s consuming a lot more energy, right? And so I feel like the switch back around to sustainability as, as, uh, like a core need of. Of the Earth is gonna have to, it’s gonna have to come back around for sustainability. I mean, because you can’t, you can’t just keep doing that. Allen Hall: I think the thing is, in, in Europe, they [00:17:00] obviously are interested in having some AI data centers, and that will be the, the growth plan of course, because they want to be able to compete with the rest of the world. So Europe will be in this mode of we need to create more electricity. But they want, at the same time, decouple from the Middle East and maybe even from the United States in terms of using, uh, petroleum based products to, to power their grid. I think that’s, that’s inevitable. So they’re gonna have to make a huge change in Europe. We’re, we’re looking at massive changes in the US who knows about China right now. Uh, what they’re planning to do besides pour money into everything, all the above strategy is what China seems to be doing. Does that then. If, especially, let’s just talk about the GE and over thing. So, Yolanda, I think this touches your point, which is GE and over win business is really not healthy. They lost about 300 plus million dollars in the first quarter, EBITDA wise, uh, compared to, uh, roughly a [00:18:00] year ago. It was like a hundred million dollars they lost. So the, the continued pain at GE Renova Wind. Uh, is maybe, which I thought was gonna flatline, it seems to be getting worse. All of a sudden. They think it’s gonna be better in the second half of the year. And maybe that’s true. Hopefully it is. But if you’re, if you’re talking about putting on more data centers, more electricity demand, just ’cause of population growth and your wind companies maybe besides vestus or not doing that well. Do we get there? Does, can we, can we do this? Can we actually turn this corner, make that turn, get onto, uh, more electricity, be able to compete against the world in AI and everything else, electricity wise. Is this gonna happen or is everybody gonna. Take a five year pause while they figure it out. Yolanda Padron: I just think that everybody’s just kind of running with their shoes untied, right? Like we’re all trying to race. Allen Hall: They’re running with scissors and the shoes untied. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it is like it. I mean, eventually someone’s gonna have to [00:19:00] pause or trip Allen Hall: because you always wonder how serious some of these data center projects are because you hear the names like who? Uh, and the one that always gets me is, no, no offense to Stanford University, but. Lately, I’m hearing a lot of Stanford University graduates that are planning some massive power generation source of some sun type and just go, okay, no. Can we stop? Can we stop for a minute? No. Having a master’s degree from Stanford doesn’t know. You probably don’t know how to build a data center. Sorry. And you probably don’t know how to do distributed energy. You don’t. It’s just those are complicated and industrial things that take a lot of money and time and resources, so, no. So the, the reality of what is. Real that will be built, that’s gonna come due. I think there’s a lot of projects that were theoretical and grand and, uh, six months ago even are going to go kapoof, like pets.com. In 2001, it’s gonna be the same thing. Nikki Briggs: You’re dating yourself, Alan. Allen Hall: There was a time when. [00:20:00] When everybody was gonna be, be a internet billionaire, and one of ’em was pets.com, right? So pets.com was this pet store thing, and, and it was, they had a great URL of course, but as soon as, you know, there was any e you know, the, the, the, the, uh, planes hit the towers in New York City, poof, that thing was gone and they could sustain the, the economics of, um. The US at the moment, and when I think of Austin, I think all the tech bros are in Austin. Like you drive around Austin, you just see it. There’s a lot of smart people on the ground trying to do these grandiose things. Electricity generation is a hundred and twenty five, a hundred forty years old. That is an industrial process that is really hard to break into and you can’t AI your way into creating data centers. Does somebody realize that? And was the GE talk today? I’m gonna be the GE talk today, Yolanda, on the gas turbines. Obviously [00:21:00] they wanna take as many orders as they can or get place placeholder deposits in one of the GEs competitors is not even taking orders past 2030 ’cause they don’t think they’re real if they were real. I think everybody taking orders and I think they’re, they’re seeing the quality of that individual walking in the door trying to place, place that deposit and realize. They don’t know how to work EPC. Yolanda Padron: Have you seen, I know there’s, there’s been a lot of like memes right now about how the use of electricity in AI and data centers and it’s like, you know, we’ve increased exponentially, so we will continue increasing exponentially until the end of time. Allen Hall: Till the world explodes. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, I don’t think, I mean, to your point, like I, is it real like it. It could, it was sort of, um, it did grow a lot and it’s continuing to grow a lot. I just don’t know that it’s gonna be something where like everybody has a data center in their backyard, or everyone’s connected to a data center within a mile. You [00:22:00] know, Allen Hall: I think you’re a hundred percent right about that. So the realism is hitting the market, right? So as PPA prices increase and the realities of construction projects hits everybody, this is gonna slow down. Quite a bit. Yolanda Padron: I’m curious to see how long that’ll be before we overshoot it for the PPA prices. Allen Hall: Oh, you think, okay. That’s a, that’s a really good point because I, I was wondering that today, I’ve been telling people for two years now, as soon as they, uh, the tax credits sunset that PPA prices necessarily have to go up, they just have to go up the, the, the offshore wind PPA prices, were in the $150, uh, megawatt hour. Ballpark, uh, for a couple of projects off the coast in New York. I don’t know what they are in Europe at the minute. I, I should go look. I do actually do know. I should go back and look though. But the onshore prices are obviously much less, right? If you’re in the $80 per megawatt hour, although it does seem high, it is relatively [00:23:00] low compared to everything else you’re gonna be able to do. What, what are the choices you’re gonna do? What other, what other choices can you make? Yolanda Padron: What kind of structure are you gonna. Work with is if you’re increasing, increasing, increasing, and then eventually we’re gonna hit a plateau eventually, or like an almost plateau. But I highly doubt everyone’s gonna be able to forecast exactly when that is without overshooting it. Allen Hall: Yeah. I guess the question is how much is the overshoot. Is it a hundred dollars? Is it $120? Is it $150? Nikki Briggs: I have a question though, because are these AI data centers, are they meant to be running completely on wind power? Allen Hall: They in theory can’t. Right? Nikki Briggs: They need power 24 7. So Yolanda Padron: yeah, they need to have some sort of backup thing, so maybe even backup in the grid or something if it’s not something directly hitting it. A lot of projects are like co-located, so you might have wind and battery or wind solar battery or something. All together, Allen Hall: the XAI effort in Memphis, right? There’s, it is gas turbines, a bunch of gas turbines they’ve bought from [00:24:00] all over, but it has a pretty good best backup to provide stability to that. I think you’d have to do that, right? Nikki Briggs: You’d have to have a a, a failover plan or something. Yeah. Allen Hall: Having watched the internet and at different times of day, there’s nothing happening between like us time midnight and 6:00 AM. There is zero going on, and I always think does 24 7 AI data center need is so not gonna happen because when people are, if, if the data center is providing roughly national, or say it’s Europe, there’s, there’s, people are awake as a certain time of day and then they’re not. Right? So unless your data center’s gonna feed China, which it won’t, and Europe at the same time, or the US and Europe, it’s still, there’s just blocks of time where the. You just don’t need a lot of power. You just don’t need it. So the 24 7 demand, I think is not real Nikki Briggs: well, but they have to keep them cool. And you [00:25:00] know, I mean there’s like the environment inside of the data center has to be a certain, uh. Uh, specification, I guess. Right? One question that I, that I had come up here on the side, Alan, had you heard about the, uh, CEO from Vestas talking about the need for an energy union? Allen Hall: Yes, but this is not the first time it’s come up, uh, to, to try to, to gather everybody together. Ideally, if you’re thinking about the eu. Working together, and rarely does that happen, but if it were to happen, Vestas would be a huge winner in that. So would Siemens esa Honestly, the, the weird thing about all what’s happening in Madrid and at, when Europe at the moment is that sizzle’s back and they’re talking about doing projects in Europe and uh, I think a Donny is also talking about doing projects in Europe or providing turbines, right? So there’s. [00:26:00] Once Ming Yang was rejected in Scotland, which I thought was inevitable, I’ve always thought that the second place to go to get turbines that would compete with Avesta and Siemens is in India, and I do, because it’s an English speaking country, it does break down a lot of barriers. That’s for sure. And because obviously it was a, a, a British colony for a long time, there’s the relationship there. That would be it. It, I think something that makes, makes sense. So Vestus, who would obviously be the winner of all the offshore and maybe even some of the onshore projects in the UK may have competition. So although Vestas may be hoping for more of a energy block, which. Uh, could work, honestly. It could work and you could see a lot of wind and solar and batteries and hydro in, in Europe and obviously France with nuclear. I think [00:27:00] India has a really good shot at penetrating that market that would change the dynamics quite a bit. That would put pressure on Vestas to lower prices, no doubt. And so the, the, the dream scenario of Vestas is the only. OM standing in this huge demand market, which is all local to them. Uh, that may not actually turn out there. There could be some really rough patches here. If, uh, the so salons, a Donnies of the world, they can produce a five megawatt, six megawatt turbine. God knows if they could make a a 15 megawatt offshore turbine, that would put a tremendous amount of pressure on Vestus. Tremendous, and that would be harder to stop. I think from a a UK standpoint, very interesting times. Vestus is well suited to, to gain market share and is rapidly in the United States and a number of other countries, Australia being another, and Europe, but woo. Huh. The dream scenario never works out like you think it [00:28:00] will. It never does. As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or a new. Wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today. So there’s been more information come out about the, this Iberian blackout that happened about a year ago. And as the, the details are, uh, published and everybody has a chance to review them, uh, one, one person to check out is, um. Howard Pinrose at Motor Dock and his chaos in Caffeine podcast, which happens on the weekends because he provides some good summaries about some of the latest news from the Iberian Peninsula and the reports that are being published. [00:29:00] The Iberian blackout and the role of renewables is very interesting. The, the problem that they had was, uh. Instability. So it, the grid was just generally unstable and they had a transformer fail and that just cascaded where, uh, they were disconnected from the rest of Europe. So the Liberian peninsula was just automatically disconnected and that happened relatively quickly. One of the things that could have supported the grid, and I think you’re gonna see changes happening, and Howard Pinrose was just in Washington DC with American clean power pushing for this, which is. As Yolanda knows, solar and wind have sort of two moats. They can follow the grid and produce power and just kind of follow along. Or better yet, they can form the grid and support the grid and be a resource when things get wobbly on the grid. And Spain learn that lesson really [00:30:00] well about a year ago, and I think we’re gonna find that all those solar panels that disconnected and because you’re in a following mode, protect mode. If they had had ’em in a, a more, uh, command role into managing the grid, that maybe the Iberian peninsula may not have blacked out. Maybe parts of it had because they lost a transformer, but there may be a role for renewables in terms of grid stability. Doesn’t that seem odd? Because the story and the mis, maybe the misinformation that’s happening around the world is, well, if the wind turbine isn’t turning, it can’t help monitor the grid. It actually can, same thing for solar. Those inverters that sit on the grid are actually thinking and working and reacting. So they can actually provide a lot more, uh, stability to the grid than maybe be some other resources at, at a lot less cost. Is there a scenario where we start changing the rules about wind and solar where we, instead of them playing dumb, that they become smart [00:31:00] and provide more stability? Yolanda Padron: Well, it happens a lot I think in Texas, right? We have, like you, you dispatch wind when you need it and you dispatch solar when you need it. And there’s a whole, I mean, the whole market. Behind the scenes that it’s for people a lot smarter than I am. But, uh, but yeah, I mean, you, you get, like, you’ll see sometimes wind turbines that are pitched slightly so they won’t generate electricity when it’s not needed, or they’re just free flowing when, I mean, it’s, it’s not necessarily to produce a lot of electricity or, you know, sometimes you’ll say, oh, you know what, I need this much. Energy from you at this moment, and so Sure. Switch. I mean, it’s, it’s literally a click of a computer. You turn it on, make sure the, that it’s dispatching energy, and then once you need it to be cut off, it’s cut off. Especially if it’s a co-located site, it’s a lot easier to make sure that you are [00:32:00] actually giving all the energy that you need to give in any given moment. Allen Hall: Because a grid reacts very quickly when things go wrong in the grid. It happens in seconds, and the only thing they can respond in seconds. Is renewables, inverter based resources. That’s the only thing you can respond. You can’t spool up a synchronous condenser to stabilize your grid in a couple of seconds. You may need a couple of hours typically to get that going. Isn’t this where we’re going? It because of the digital age and everything is on off so fast. If I had a data center that, you know, it collapses pulling a gigawatt, man, you need to be react almost instantaneously to that. The only thing that can do it today if they chose to do it is wind, solar, and battery. That’s it. In the digital age, Yolanda Padron: I think it’s great. There was this one time, uh, a few years ago where, um, uh, a, a buddy who’s, who was a, a traitor for, you know, the, the, uh, energy markets in the [00:33:00] states. Um, he, he saw what was happening and he knew that he could. You know, he was controlling like wind, solar, and, and battery. And it was a co-located solar and battery site. And so he let them dispatch the solar for a bit and then he held off on the battery. And then the moment that he dispatched it was like he. Within like five minutes, it was $3,000. Something crazy like that. ’cause it was just like the mo, like he was just, everybody was amazed. Just the moment that he was like, amazing. Just like, well this is, this is why you do what, what you do. You know? Um, but yeah. Yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s a really, it’s a really interesting, interesting, for anybody that wants to read up on it. Like the, the market for that is really, really interesting. Nikki Briggs: It does sound really interesting and like, I’ve been thinking a little bit about, um. The, the role of wind and, and you know, in Colorado we have a lot of high wind and then we have this [00:34:00] wildfire danger as well because of the drought. And so what happens when it gets really, really windy is they turn off the power ’cause they don’t wanna start a fire, a wildfire. So, um, so you know, here you want the wind so that you can generate the power, but then you can’t give it. So how do you store that and how do you, you know, like how do you manage that, you know? It’s a, it’s a tricky situation. Yolanda Padron: Yeah. That’s where they’re co-locating. I think a lot of sites, there’s a lot of, I know there’s a wind farm in Arizona that’s really huge and they have a, a whole, they have a certain perimeter around it where they just really make sure that there’s nothing that can spread there. Like it’s, it’s just. Kind of barren land, so in case there is a wildfire or anything, ’cause it’s in a very dry area. Um, nothing will really happen to that in theory, you know, that has all the systems for the battery. Nikki Briggs: What if the, what if the electric transmission lines are what, you know, causes the fire [00:35:00] because of the wind? The wind is causing those to break or to fall down. The poles fall down and then they cause a spark. And then they cause a fire. That’s what happened in Colorado a long time ago, a couple years ago. Allen Hall: Same thing in California. Nikki Briggs: So in order to protect from that, there’s like, it’s super windy. So they turn off the power. Allen Hall: Does it make it right? Right. Well this, this comes back to the infrastructure of the United States and how old that it is, and if you pay attention as you drive across the US you’ll realize that some of the. Towers and some of the infrastructure that you see on the side of the road. Dang, you’re a hundred years old and it doesn’t get replaced. It was never meant to be replaced. Or maybe they thought we were gonna be living on Mars in a hundred years, but basically it’s the same. Technology. It’s a wire on a kind of suspended up there in the air, and the wind moves around and it’ll burn and it wears out. It just wears out, right? Eventually you’ll just wear through that stuff, and we’re seeing that [00:36:00] across the United States. You’re seeing it in Europe, you see it in Spain, in other places where the infrastructure has just has a lot of age on it until we decide to do something new and refurbish it, like we refurbish the roads all the time. Uh, we’re gonna have trouble. We just are gonna have trouble in the states. Yolanda Padron: Alan, as an electrical engineer, I do have a question. So would the forecasted generation needed by all these data centers and stuff, like with our current system, would we be okay with that? Or what kind of changes would we need to make just as a country in general? Allen Hall: I think the problem with. A large data center as you’re seeing some of them being built on the east coast right now is one, trying to keep them up and running. Two, the infrastructure that are feeding and it’s old, right? So the transformers and all that. The things that don’t move, that are just planted on a concrete pad [00:37:00] that’s seem like they, they would never age, age, had fail. Eventually. So when you put a big demand on existing infrastructure that’s kind of powering old light bulbs and um, motors and things that are old and that have very well-known patterns, and you start putting these, uh, basically big digital power sinks that go up and down in in power usage. The grid can’t take that. It just won’t be able to take it at scale. It’ll take it for a while and we’ll figure out a way because electrical engineers tend to be pretty sy um, at how to make miracles out of, uh, uh, uh, of questionable things. That’s how we, how we do that, that’s why we get paid so much. But the, the, the problem is, is that at some point it’s gonna break, right? And, and the, the electrical grid in the US and the people that support that. Internally, I think we’re getting a little bit worried about it [00:38:00] and trying to figure out what we can do to keep the grid up and running. It’s a huge problem, huge problem, because when the grid was built back in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, there were a lot less people, and somehow we managed to get to about 350 million people. All with the mobile phones and big screen TVs, and now electric vehicles and laptops, and blahdy, blahdy, blah. How this thing is still running is a miracle. It really is it. It obviously is Yolanda Padron: delamination and bottom line. Failures and blades are Allen Hall: difficult problems to detect early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep into the label materials. To find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss [00:39:00] C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. So G Renova was ordered by the courts just recently to stay at Vineyard Wind. Vineyard. Wind had. Filed a complaint that, um, GE was gonna leave the site, uh, off the coast of Massachusetts at the end of April. That obviously caused some concern with vineyard winds, so they went to court, sort of bypass the arbitration process. According GE went straight to court to get an injunction to prevent GE from moving on. Well, they have that injunction now, and GE has to stay on at least for about the next 60 days. If I read this right. Then there’s gonna be more court proceedings. GE is trying to get it back into arbitration where they can do some negotiation, but it’s all about big, big dollars.[00:40:00] The one thing that came out with Scott Straza, uh, Q1 discussion, which was uh, a phone call today, had to do with the completion of GE Ver Nova’s offshore wind projects, and when they could be complete. That includes sort of the doer bank projects in the uk, which I think are gonna wrap up sometime in 2027 to try to get those finished and vineyard wind, which they said was gonna be finished at the end of April. So from a GE Renova standpoint, I think they’re considering vineyard wind to be done at the end of the month and that’s gonna be their position. It was very odd. To hear the CEO of GE Renova talk about something that’s in litigation. ’cause usually that doesn’t happen. But if the company position is, Hey, we’re leaving at the end of April, we’ll see you a vineyard wind. That’s a problem. And let me explain a little bit of the details of this. GE Renova is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not that far away from vineyard wind, which [00:41:00] is also based in Massachusetts. So you have this corporate entity, which just. Opened an office in Cambridge. It’s really swanky place, not very far from where MIT and Harvard and all the, the elite universities are just outside of Boston. And then you have this vineyard wind project, which is important to the state of Massachusetts where they need that power to happen and they need it to be sustained and needed to run properly inside the state of Massachusetts. There must be huge discussions about this in the state government. Massive discussions about how these two entities have to work together for the next 20 years, and they are really at each other’s throats. That’s not the way you wanna start an offshore project. And Yolanda, you’ve been around some of these offshore projects. Is it always this tense between the OEM and the operator? Is, is this where all these projects end in some sort of disagreement and [00:42:00] separation? Yolanda Padron: No, I think, I mean, from my experience. There’s usually someone at some point, and it’s usually, I think, I mean the. The owner, but you’ll stop and say, okay, I need to work with this person. I need to work with this company for the next X amount of years. I need to make sure that they give me the proper documentation once I need it. I need to make sure that they’re doing things in good faith. You know, I mean, if I can’t, it’s not like the technicians have like a camera strapped onto them to, so you can monitor every single blade repair, right? Like you need to make sure that they’re doing things right. Um, and not just patching things up because. Because they’re mad at you. Uh, so, so, no, I think it’s, it’s a little bit crazy to me that no one’s yielding as much. Allen Hall: I think GEs position is we’re gonna give vineyard all the manuals and the equipment would be up and running. You can find somebody to run it. You, you, you think that’s possible On a brand new turbine that [00:43:00] is only one other places on the planet that’s being run, which is over in the uk. Are you gonna be able to find people if GE walks off? Yolanda Padron: I mean, even if you can find people, once GE walks off, it’s like you, you need to be able to train your technicians. You know, like all of these, all of these projects are you, you need to have them in constant supervision. You need to make sure that everything’s working smoothly and you can’t just afford, I don’t know if we’re being really optimistic, like a month of no one touching those turbines. That’s crazy. Like anybody in the wind world is even onshore. Could you imagine if we just walked off a site and just let the wind turbines just be for a month? Like that’s, I mean, I don’t know, I, I’m not super, super well versed in exactly what they’re getting, but are they getting any sort of, at least like technical support? Allen Hall: I don’t think so. No. Yeah, Yolanda Padron: no rock system, no. Nothing. Allen Hall: If it all works out like GE wants it to, [00:44:00] no. You get the manuals. You get a, a, a nice, uh. Card in the mail saying Thank you for your business. And that’s it. It, that’s, I think that’s where it’s going. Nikki Briggs: Doesn’t seem like a good way to, like, doesn’t seem like they’re stand standing behind their product or what they sold. Um, I mean, and it seems like there would be some downstream ramifications for other, other companies that want to buy ge. Allen Hall: They don’t wanna be in that business. I, I think that’s one of the discussion points that never comes up when the quarterly calls is. Is GE gonna remain in the wind business? Because I think the answer to it is maybe how could a lot, I mean, you said on the financial side of some of these, uh, wind farms and paid attention to the details. If you were losing a billion dollars a year, how long would you be in that business? Yolanda Padron: I mean, not very long. I think you’d have to change things to make it work. Um, yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I think, [00:45:00] I think it’s one of those things where they’re trying to. Find exactly where they fit into this business, if they still fit in at all. Uh, I really hope they don’t fully back out because of everyone that’s in operations that has GE products out there that’s really gonna need that support. Uh, I think especially for a vineyard’s sake, at the very least that they’ve are doing, that vineyard is doing a better job than a lot of the operators I know at making sure that. Everything you need within operations has been asked for since development and construction. Um, I’m not super, super optimistic about that. Just because like everyone has so many things to do that you don’t like if you’re in development, you don’t always have time to think about. Oh yeah, I really hope they give me the repair manuals in case there’s a lightning strike on the blade at R 20. You know, like it’s just, um, so it’s just. It’s, [00:46:00] it’s just gonna, it’s gonna be a very interesting case study. Whatever they end up doing, I think it’s gonna be something that will be worth following a bit more closely. We’ve seen, there’s been projects where, you know, day one, the OEM just backs off, but that was at least. They knew that, you know, the, the owner knew it two years in advance, and so they tried to get as many people as possible. There were to, to get on those turbines. There were of course mishaps and stuff, um, and it was more of a financial than an engineering decision. Um, but when the decision was made, people knew about it and people had time to act. I mean, people having a week to find, I. Someone to, to, to take care of every single aspect of their site is a little bit insane. Especially, I mean, [00:47:00]with the history of veneer, right? Like, come on, they had a, they had a blade break, Allen Hall: right? There’s gotta be a lot of questions about the durability. There has to be Right. Even if, even if GEs figured it out, and I think they probably have, and then they’ve put a, a lot of money and time into resolving the issue. You still have to wonder. Is it right? And if you’re vineyard, I think that’s one of the questions is, is it right and could we operate it by ourselves without needing a lot of handholding from ge? Or paying GE more money than we already agreed to, which is probably what’s likely to happen, right? That GE iss gonna ask for more money if they can break the contract legally and renegotiate, that would be a smart move. I think they will try to do it. It’s unfortunate and it causes a lot of grief for a lot of people, but I think GE probably needs to renegotiate and probably Vineyard wants to renegotiate it too ’cause they both feel disgruntled at this point. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting ’cause we focus a lot on vineyard and just the [00:48:00] way that the OEM and the owner operated with each other just because it gets, it’s so close to such an important part of the country that gets so much PR all the time. It’s just, it kind of sets the mood for a lot of things that go on. So it’s, I mean, it’s not that we’re just picking a lot of vineyards, it’s just really, it’s a really important site just in general from where it is, right? It’s not like it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s a very important place that gets a lot of attention Allen Hall: that writes up another episode or the Uptime Wind Energy Podcasts. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode, if you found any value in today’s conversation, I mean any value, please leave us a review. And those reviews, we actually. Take and use to help create the next episode. So send us your notes, send us your comments. Send us what you would like us to discuss. Because the wind energy marketplace and [00:49:00] development are changing so rapidly, it sometimes it’s, it’s faster than we can keep up with. So please send us your ideas. Uh, and anytime you have a chance, please like and subscribe because it really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. So for Nikki and Yolanda, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
How can the church approach complex and sensitive questions with both theological clarity and pastoral care? In this episode of In All Things, Cameron Shaffer, co-chair of the ad-interim committee on same-sex attraction and ordination standards, shares insight into the work of the committee and the recommendations coming to this year's General Assembly. Cameron offers a thoughtful framework rooted in Scripture, as well as practical guidance for how church leaders can navigate these conversations with wisdom, humility, and compassion. This episode invites listeners to consider how the EPC can remain faithful to its convictions while continuing to pursue unity in mission, living out the reality that we are Better Together. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
Luke Part 92: Blessings of the resurrectionLuke 24:36-53Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: Jesus gave us blessings as he ascended
What role does the Book of Discipline play in the life of the church, and why does it matter for the EPC today? In this episode of In All Things, Betsy Rumer, co-chair of the Book of Discipline Revision Task Force, joins us to discuss the work of the task force and the recommendations being brought to this year's General Assembly. Betsy offers helpful insight into the purpose of the Book of Discipline, the process behind the proposed revisions, and how these changes are intended to support the health, accountability, and unity of the church. Throughout the conversation, Betsy highlights the collaborative spirit of the EPC and the importance of approaching this work with both clarity and grace, living into this year's theme that we are truly Better Together. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
This episode explores the critical importance of rethinking vendor selection in EPC projects by shifting focus from purchase order value to the comprehensive cost of ownership, emphasizing long-term value and strategic procurement.
Solar modules once cost $8 per watt. Geoff Greenfield bought his first panels from a classified ad in Home Power magazine. Twenty-six years later, he leads an EPC division building 67 MW projects and negotiating 100 MW contracts.In this episode of The Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Greenfield to trace the full arc of the U.S. solar industry, from off-grid battery systems with lead-acid batteries to utility-scale construction backed by a multi-billion-dollar general contractor. They cover NABCEP's role in professional standards, why U.S. residential solar costs two to three times more than in Australia or Germany, and why the industry needs to prepare for a future without tax credits.EPISODE HIGHLIGHTSStarting a solar company in 2000 meant buying used 53-watt panels from classified ads at $6 per watt. Greenfield traces how the economics shifted from pure environmental motivation to grid parity and beyond.NABCEP credentials go beyond technical competence. Organizations have lost certification over ethical violations, and state attorneys general are now pursuing solar bad actors.Panel efficiency is approaching physical limits, but economic efficiency still has room.In PJM territory, commercial battery storage pays for itself through peaking value and ancillary services, sometimes faster than solar alone. Resilience sells in residential, but the commercial case depends on grid services math.The solar tax credit is likely not returning. Companies preparing for 2028 and beyond are cutting soft costs, joining procurement cooperatives like Amicus Solar, and building business models that work without incentives.This conversation provides a 26-year field perspective on what it took to grow from a one-person off-grid installer to a utility-scale EPC, and what comes next for companies facing the same transition.Connect with Geoff Greenfield, Kokosing Geoff LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-greenfield-595a406/Kokosing Website: https://kokosingsolar.com/ Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.comCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Luke Part 91: The opening of the ScripturesLuke 24:13-35Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: Jesus unlocked the scriptures for us
What is coming to the 2026 General Assembly, and why does it matter for the life of the EPC? In this episode of In All Things, we introduce the 46th GA and what listeners can expect as pastors, elders, and ministry leaders gather for worship, discernment, and fellowship. We explore the specific business coming to this Assembly and how this annual gathering strengthens the shared mission of the EPC. To learn more about the 2026 General Assembly and to register, visit: epconnect.org/ga2026
A 10-person, three-month estimating process. Compressed into 12 hours by a single AI agent. That is what Jesse Anglen, co-founder of Ruh AI, is building for construction and solar companies right now. In this episode of The Clean Power Hour, host Tim Montague sits down with Anglen to break down what a digital workforce actually looks like in practice, how solar contractors and EPCs can start using agentic AI today, and what it means when AI agents take over knowledge work at scale.Episode HighlightsAnglen breaks down the three categories of AI agents and explains why most of what people call "agents" today are not actually agents at all.One construction firm with projects in the hundreds of millions of dollars had a core operational process that took 10 people three months to complete. Ruh AI turned that same process into an overnight task.Solar contractors are sitting on a lead generation opportunity that most have never considered. AI agents make it possible to act on it at scale, at almost no cost.The administrative burden of running a billion-dollar construction or solar company is staggering. Anglen explains exactly which back-office functions AI agents are already handling, and what that means for headcount.Anglen gives a clear breakdown of what it actually costs to build and run a custom AI agent, from the entry-level option any business owner can start today to the complex systems designed to replace entire departments.Anglen shares a number that reframes the entire AI conversation. It is not about chatbots or writing emails. It is about the total size of the knowledge economy and how much of it AI is already capable of doing without a human in the loop.Solar and EPC companies are already operating under margin pressure, competing on thin spreads while administrative overhead continues to grow. The tools Jesse Anglen describes are available today, at a price point that is lower than hiring a single full-time employee. The window to adopt these systems before competitors do is narrowing fast.Connect with Jesse AnglenLinked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseanglen/Website: https://www.ruh.ai/ Support the showConnect with Tim Clean Power Hour Clean Power Hour on YouTubeTim on TwitterTim on LinkedIn Email tim@cleanpowerhour.com Review Clean Power Hour on Apple PodcastsThe Clean Power Hour is produced by the Clean Power Consulting Group and created by Tim Montague. Contact us by email: CleanPowerHour@gmail.comCorporate sponsors who share our mission to speed the energy transition are invited to check out https://www.cleanpowerhour.com/support/The Clean Power Hour is brought to you by CPS America, maker of North America's number one 3-phase string inverter, with over 6GW shipped in the US. With a focus on commercial and utility-scale solar and energy storage, the company partners with customers to provide unparalleled performance and service. The CPS America product lineup includes 3-phase string inverters from 25kW to 275kW, exceptional data communication and controls, and energy storage solutions designed for seamless integration with CPS America systems. Learn more at www.chintpowersystems.com
Luke Part 90: Christ, resurrectedLuke 23:50-24:12Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: All hope rests on the resurrection
Luke Part 89: What happened on the cross?Luke 23:44-49Rev. Justin OlivettiMain idea: So much was accomplished on the cross
Most BESS revenue forecasts aren't wrong, they're just being used for the wrong thing. The gap between a valuation-grade forecast and what a project actually earns in a live market is where BESS developers win or lose. The developers who survive that gap are the ones who design for uncertainty from the start - not after the fact.Recorded live at the Investing in Battery Energy Storage conference, Paul Mason, Chief Investment Officer of Harmony Energy, joins Ed Porter for a return appearance on Transmission.They cover:- Why treating a revenue forecast as a fixed cash flow is the most common mistake in BESS development.- How the listed fund model enabled GB BESS to scale.- Why splitting BESS revenues into ancillary, wholesale, and balancing mechanism streams is now a misleading framework.- How Harmony selects new markets in France and Germany: renewable penetration, grid-first site selection, and why any business case dependent on high ancillary revenues is a losing strategy.- What good optimizer relationships actually look like.Got follow-up questions? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst : https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=paul_masonWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a2--s956k-c⏱ CHAPTERS────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────0:00 Introduction1:16 What do BESS developers get wrong when building an IPP?3:25 Why full EPC contracts — and why they still hired project managers5:28 Duration strategy: the case for 2-hour batteries early7:00 The full BESS lifecycle — develop, build, operate, sell8:25 How Harmony raised capital through listed funds (and why it worked then)10:45 Why listed fund capital flowed out and what came next13:20 The Foresight asset sale: private vs. public valuation15:08 New markets: what Harmony looks for in France, Germany and beyond18:05 Market timing — should you enter early or wait for wholesale dynamics?20:12 Grid connection across Europe: where it works and where it doesn't22:33 Operating a live fleet: what drives performance once assets are running24:10 How to work with optimizers without burning the relationship26:30 BM trading trials with Tesla — what the data showed28:45 Is GB still exciting for Harmony, or is it old hat?30:20 Audience Q&A: colocation, revenue cannibalization, and market saturation32:35 If you ran European power: one thing to fix────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────Transmission is hosted by Ed Porter, Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy. New episodes every week.
Most BESS revenue forecasts aren't wrong, they're just being used for the wrong thing. The gap between a valuation-grade forecast and what a project actually earns in a live market is where BESS developers win or lose. The developers who survive that gap are the ones who design for uncertainty from the start - not after the fact.Recorded live at the Investing in Battery Energy Storage conference, Paul Mason, Chief Investment Officer of Harmony Energy, joins Ed Porter for a return appearance on Transmission.They cover:- Why treating a revenue forecast as a fixed cash flow is the most common mistake in BESS development.- How the listed fund model enabled GB BESS to scale.- Why splitting BESS revenues into ancillary, wholesale, and balancing mechanism streams is now a misleading framework.- How Harmony selects new markets in France and Germany: renewable penetration, grid-first site selection, and why any business case dependent on high ancillary revenues is a losing strategy.- What good optimizer relationships actually look like.Got follow-up questions? Ask Ko, Modo Energy's AI analyst : https://modoenergy.com/sign-up?utm_source=podcast_apps&utm_medium=podcast&utm_id=paul_masonWatch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a2--s956k-c⏱ CHAPTERS────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────0:00 Introduction1:16 What do BESS developers get wrong when building an IPP?3:25 Why full EPC contracts — and why they still hired project managers5:28 Duration strategy: the case for 2-hour batteries early7:00 The full BESS lifecycle — develop, build, operate, sell8:25 How Harmony raised capital through listed funds (and why it worked then)10:45 Why listed fund capital flowed out and what came next13:20 The Foresight asset sale: private vs. public valuation15:08 New markets: what Harmony looks for in France, Germany and beyond18:05 Market timing — should you enter early or wait for wholesale dynamics?20:12 Grid connection across Europe: where it works and where it doesn't22:33 Operating a live fleet: what drives performance once assets are running24:10 How to work with optimizers without burning the relationship26:30 BM trading trials with Tesla — what the data showed28:45 Is GB still exciting for Harmony, or is it old hat?30:20 Audience Q&A: colocation, revenue cannibalization, and market saturation32:35 If you ran European power: one thing to fix────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────Transmission is hosted by Ed Porter, Director EMEA & APAC at Modo Energy. New episodes every week.