Episode description

Earlier this year, solar reached a historic milestone: 1 terawatt of capacity around the world. One trillion watts is a huge achievement. But solar still only makes up 3 percent of the world's electricity. 

To deploy dozens of terrawatts in the coming years, we'll need to do something about the bottlenecks holding back the planning, design, and construction of the massive solar farms that will make up a renewable-powered grid.

Enabling dozens of terawatts of solar development is exactly what this month’s guest, Terabase Energy CEO and co-founder Matt Campbell, is doing.

Terabase's mission is to accelerate the build out of utility-scale solar by combining new modeling and design tools with robotics and automation. This combination of modeling software and automation robots is already bringing strong results. 

Today, Terabase has over 500 engineering, procurement and construction companies, developers, and independent power producers using their platform. Ten gigawatts worth of solar projects have been supported by Terabese across 30 countries. 

Emily spoke with Matt about what it takes to automate the buildout of utility-scale solar. They also talked about his decade-and-a-half career expanding solar worldwide at SunPower, and what the solar industry's early years taught him about pushing the technology forward.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

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