A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

You’re listening to A Climate Change. The thing that I thought was most interesting was the world’s worst zen monk.

I’m the daughter of a Silicon Valley serial founder, ended up dropping out, hating technology, having lapsed as a Luddite, and going over to the storytelling side. My former mentor is a woman named Leila Janah. She really taught me how to run a nonprofit like a business, her business is still around. It’s called Sama. Clients ranging from Google to Apple. We thought it was ludicrous that the U.S is behind many other nations in terms of balcony or plug-in solar adoption. So that’s a problem we’re trying to solve.

You’re listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Mattern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Cora Stryker. I’m really excited to speak to Cora. Her bio is very intriguing as a former field tropical biologist. And the thing that I thought was most interesting was the world’s worst zen monk. That fascinates me. Graduated from Brown and won a Steinbeck fellowship for creative writing, which is really good stuff. So without further ado, welcome to the program, Cora.

Great to be here. Thanks, Matt.

I guess the main reason we brought you on the show was not to discuss your world’s worst zen monk, but though that’s fascinating, probably more fascinating to me than anything. But we’ll start with the cofounder of BrightSaver, and it’s all about the story as we were talking about earlier and Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey. And tell us about your hero’s journey to the climate movement.

So I’m the daughter of a Silicon Valley serial founder, so I definitely thought my whole life I would be a computer scientist of some sort. Started college in that track, ended up dropping out, hating technology, having lapses Luddite, and going over to the storytelling side. But I eventually found my way into nonprofit work via, as you say, rare and endangered species work in Hawaii. And, you know, I found it really compelling. My former mentor is a woman named Leila Janah who passed away at 37 from a one in a million cancer, but she really taught me how to run a nonprofit like a business.

So her business is still around. It’s called Sama, and it has a really strong earned revenue stream, clients ranging from Google to Apple, she was empowering folks living in slums in Kenya and India to do digital work, primarily tagging for AI applications but what she was doing was pretty revolutionary actually at the time because a lot of outsourcing goes to folks who are fairly educated in all kinds of places, East Africa, India. But she said, hey, let’s turn that on its head.

Let’s educate people who are just as smart, but living in more desperate circumstances to do this kind of work. And she did. Her vision became a reality, it’s still happening today. And that really shaped my idea of what a nonprofit is. And so after working there, I founded a couple of my own nonprofits, always had earned revenue, and then in terms of BrightSaver, really started with my cofounders, Kevin Chiu and Rupert Mayer. They were looking at what is happening in Europe with balcony solar, how renters, low income homeowners are buying these really small wattage systems and plugging them in and producing solar energy immediately.

And I became really excited about this idea. For me, it’s really the union of my environmental work, my climate work, and also equity. Because when you think about the number of people who are excluded from the rooftop solar market in this country, we’re talking about 70% of the population, but this gives people an option they never had before to save money on electricity bills and produce clean energy.

I was really excited about the idea when I first heard about it. I think it was related to Pakistan and you know, I guess it’s hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in Pakistan doing this balcony solar, and it was so effective that they were not having to make as many coal fired generation plants, so that caught my eye.

Absolutely. And in Germany, we’re seeing something similar. There are an estimated 4,000,000 of these and the U.S is really falling behind, which actually is why we exist. My cofounders and I started BrightSaver because we thought it was ludicrous that the U.S is behind many other nations in terms of balcony or plug-in solar adoption. So, that’s a problem we’re trying to solve.

Well, tell us what are the origins of the problem, and how are we gonna solve it?

It’s complex as we continue to learn. So I think that one thing we have on our side is we do have a couple playbooks to look at, and one of them is Germany. So starting about 15 years ago, really in earnest 10 years ago, we started seeing this DIY balcony solar movement. People were buying these plug-in photovoltaic systems, pretty small, and just on their own, plugging them in, hanging their panels over the railings of their balcony, putting them on their patio. And that really started this virtuous cycle of manufacturers coming into that market competing against each other, lowering prices, increasing the ease of use.

And it really took off when there was enabling legislation in 2024. So that legislation allowed back feeding, it also protected renters from landlords who wanted to take it down. And after that, it just kinda took off, you know, the adoption has doubled in the last year alone. Here in the U.S, we’re really lagging behind for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, we can’t just buy those German systems and install them here because we have a different electrical system – we have 120V, most of Europe’s on 230V, so there’s a technological problem, but that’s not the fundamental problem. There are fundamentally regulatory concerns. It’s a complex picture, I don’t know if we wanna go into it all at once or meet it out piece by piece.

Well, you know, I always think to jump right in but yeah, piece by piece to make it digestible for those of us who are not, maybe as wired in as you are. Yeah. I read a bit about this and the fact the UAL or whatever it is that we see on all the plugs have not you know, there’s a whole hurdle of getting stuff like this approved in the U.S. Maybe walk us through where it is right now as far as getting approval.

[00:06:46] Cora: So that’s an interesting place to start because there is UL certification for all of these systems. There’s a standard UL certification for the inverters, and there’s also a UL standard for the panels themselves. The debate comes when you pair these two things together and a lot of us, including BrightSaver, believe that the two certifications together are plenty for us to ensure safety, however, there are some folks who think we need a third certification end-to-end for the system as a whole.

And, you know, we talk to folks who are actually on the UL working group and who’ve been working on this for a couple years, and they tell us that it’s not a safety issue. It’s really partly a safety issue, but it’s largely a sort of messaging issue. There are manufacturers who are not coming in, to the market because they’re waiting for that end-to-end certification.

[00:07:41] Matt: I guess I’m kind of befuddled by this is that Germany is seen by pretty much everybody as being a pretty solid manufacturing country and produces amazing manufactured goods from Mercedes to Porsche and, you know, you name it, some of the most sophisticated stuff in the world. So I’m thinking that if Germany is approving this type of installation for years and maybe even decades, then, hey, it’s been proven safe before. This isn’t like a mini-nuclear reactor or something, this is a pretty low tech item. And then I guess the related question is, could states like California and other states just kind of approve these devices regardless of whether or not there is national or U.S approval for a device like this?

Yeah. Absolutely. It’s already started. So this year, Utah passed HB 340. And what that does is it essentially creates a new category for these small photovoltaic systems. They set the threshold at 1,200 watts. We think that’s a pretty safe threshold and what it says is below that wattage, you don’t need an interconnection agreement, and you can also have small amounts of back feeding to the grid. So the way we think of this is, imagine that you have one of these small systems hooked up, you go out to lunch, but the sun keeps shining, so you may not be using all the electricity that you’re producing, particularly if you don’t have a battery.

And so what will happen is you will send very small amounts of electricity back to the grid. Many states do not allow that. So what Utah does is it permits that and it cuts out a whole piece of equipment that we have to use in California, for instance, to prevent that back feeding, and that lowers the cost. The other piece is that here in California, we need an electrician to install that safe power meter, it’s called, which will shut off automatically if you’re ever producing more electricity than the house is consuming.

So states absolutely play a role, and we see that as the future. We are working with two state legislators at the moment, hopefully, they will be announcing soon that they’re working with us, and they’re gonna be introducing legislation in the next cycle because if the state approves this new category of photovoltaic systems, then we can get more manufacturers into the game. There’s one manufacturer already selling in Utah, but one is not enough. We’ve talked to several of these manufacturers, and they’re really waiting for a critical mass of states to permit this stuff so that they know they have a sizable market.

Right. Well, California would certainly give them a sizable market piece, yeah, you should talk to Senator Ben Allen who’s been on my program a few times and is definitely a leader in environmental causes. I will sign him up personally as my state senator that he should be behind this. He’s been behind a lot of great things like the single use plastic stuff. Well, tell us, where you’re at or where other states are at in this process. California isn’t the only state in the union that has fairly environmentally friendly laws and policies.

[Well, you know, it’s interesting. We live in California. We’re California-based, Bay Area-based. However, we’re told and our research has confirmed that California might be one of the hardest states to make this happen. And, again, a complex picture has to do largely with unions who might oppose such legislation. A lot of what we’re trying to do here is make these things self installable. That’s what happens in Germany, and it’s very empowering. You order this stuff, usually online, sometimes from a big retail store, you take it home, you plug it in, you’re done. So that cuts out a lot of labor, a lot of soft costs, which as you know is almost half the cost, sometimes more than half the cost of rooftop solar.

So we expect to encounter union opposition in California and other places as well. So California is not the quickest, lowest hanging fruit as far as we are concerned and right now, we’re looking at a bunch of different states. The first step as we see it is to find a champion legislator. So I did an interview with Bill McKibben, who’s absolutely wonderful. And based on that interview, the two state legislators saw it and came to us and said, hey, I wanna do this. So we’re working with them currently to craft legislation in their states and working with grassroots organizations in their states to help pass this stuff, introduce it in 2026, and pass it.

Well, I love the idea. I think it’s, you know, it’s one of those simple fixes that, hopefully, can make a huge difference. What’s kind of the endgame as far as in Germany? They’ve got 4,000,000 installations. What kind of power has that created? Give us a kind of ballpark.

It’s estimated that it’s about one traditional power plant that has not needed to be built. So it’s not, it doesn’t transform the clean energy landscape, but it is an important part. And I think from my perspective, a lot of what we’re doing too is we’re empowering people. We’re helping them lower their electricity bills. For my work in the climate nonprofit sector, we often talk about paying a green premium. For those of us who care about climate, we’ll pay extra for a product or rooftop solar short term. What I love about this is a number of things, but, fundamentally, we’re not paying a green premium.

We’re talking about saving money really quickly in order to produce clean energy. So in terms of the end game, there are many end games, I think, ultimately, we wanna get out of the way. We see ourselves as market enablers, clearing the regulatory hurdles, helping manufacturers see what they need to see to come into our market, compete against each other, and lower prices. And that’s actually we were talking about storytelling earlier. Right? I mean, that’s something that I’m really passionate about because in Utah, the champion who passed that legislation is Raymond Ward, who’s a Republican.

And he did this thing that sort of seems miraculous to me, which is he built a coalition of Democrats and Republicans to pass plug-in solar legislation unanimously. I think that that is an exciting piece of this for me is there are a lot of different stories that we can tell about this. We can talk about energy independence. We can talk about deregulation. In the environmental movement, deregulation is sometimes an ugly word. In this case, we want regulations to get out of the way. This is a no brainer as a legislator said to me a couple weeks ago.

So I think that there are a lot of ways into this problem, and that excites me because I think that we need unity right now. And if we can come at this from a lot of perspectives and tell different stories, we can bring together some strange bedfellows to do what needs to get done.

Yeah. It’s an incredible victory. You know, the unanimity and the fact that there was a Republican leader of this proposition or this law in Utah is incredible, and it hearkens back to what the origin story of the environmental movement in The United States back in the 70s. Clean air and clean water was passed with practically unanimous support of both parties, and everybody was behind it. This is, like, this is apple pie and, you know, mom’s whatever, I mean, this is kinda traditional stuff that we can all get behind. And I think it does start creating the story of this is something we can all agree on, which is really important to reframe the whole story of the environmental movement, which has kind of gotten hijacked in a way that’s not really healthy for the environment or for our political scene as well.

So kudos to you for kinda getting that rolling. And related to that, I was thinking that engaging people in taking an environmental action that is positive is incredibly powerful. So, even though it’s not gonna solve all of our problems, it’s just giving people a sense of, I can do something, I can take a step in this right direction, and then it leads to the next step and the next step versus I have a personal sense of kind of being thwarted to do certain things, like, I have a roof that is kind of has weird shapes on top fit, so it’s not easy to install solar. So I felt like I wanted to install solar, but it’s not easy to do, so this is kind of a path to making that happen.

Matt, you’re a perfect candidate for this.

There’s millions of people like me out there that are just, you know, make it simple for us, and we’ll do it.

That’s right. That’s part of what we see and what we’re fighting for. And I think too, I’m glad that you brought up the history of the environmental movement because I think that I think about that a lot. And having worked in climate and nonprofits, I have had this sense for a long time, and I know a lot of my environmentalist friends feel as well, kinda feels like we’re Sisyphus. This is before my time, but the environmental movement as a whole fought for the IRA for quite a long time as you know, and then to see it disappear so quickly.

And actually go the other way, like, we’re subsidizing fossil fuels. I mean, the madness is just mind boggling. And I think that one thing I’m super excited about is that we’ve reached this tipping point where clean technology has become cheaper. Solar, as you know, is the cheapest energy on the planet full stop but why isn’t it adopted more widely in this country? There are a lot of reasons, and we’re trying to address those reasons one at a time and knock down all the barriers.

Well, I appreciate that work. I guess going back to a point you just made, which is that the current administration kind of pulled the plug on a number of initiatives in the environmental movement. It raises kind of an issue of whether or not they had the authority to do it because congress had voted for certain funds to be distributed. That’s kind of the end of the story. Are they able to do what they’re doing?

That’s a legal question. I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that. I mean, one thing I will say is that it leads me and a lot of my environmentalist friends to this feeling of helplessness, this loss of control. And I really think that we need to create space for a new model where we try to enable these market forces. We try to ride these market forces so that we’re not Sisyphus, we’re not, it’s not all on our backs. We don’t have to subsidize everything in order for the logical clean solution to become dominant but there is sort of, some resistance to overcome in in the case of plug-in solar regulatory and also the manufacturers not coming in and making it as easy as it is in Germany and Pakistan and other places.

Well, I mean, from what you just said, I don’t see why you’re the world’s worst zen student because that sounds very zen and I’ve been saying for a little while with the onset of this new administration that maybe a more tai chi type approach to them might be more effective than a full frontal assault and that, hey, we’ll just go around now. Just go around the blockage and find and, you know, talking to other people in this space, that’s one of the things to be optimistic about is that there’s so many bright people out there working and creative people and just create around the stupid things that they’re doing. Okay, you’re gonna do this stupid thing, okay, we’ll just, we’re gonna find a way around it. You’re not that smart, you guys, so we’re gonna outfox you.

I hope so. We could talk about Xander for a long time, but I’m gonna not go down that rabbit hole right now.

Yeah. Well, I guess the other thing that the environmental movement has going for it is that market forces, as you said, and solar being the cheapest and wind being right up there as well, is that it’s going to win. It’s kind of an inevitability factor to it. So you guys may try to block certain things, but, eventually, this is going to beat you.

Yeah. But speed matters as you know, right? I mean, this took for instance, in the case of plug-in solar, it took ten years to ramp up in Germany. We don’t have ten years. The damage that’s gonna be done in the next ten years, if we let this happen organically, if we’re passive, we’re not okay with that. I know you’re not okay with that either. So I really think there’s a role for nonprofits to speed along these inevitable processes, as you’re saying, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

I encourage people to support the work that you’re doing, and you can tell them where to find you and how they can support you because I was just reading this morning about how tons of money is being pulled from the federal government that was going to support initiatives like this. So, private support is gonna be really important and critical to, probably, you as well as to many other organizations. I guess, are you seeing other governmental entities supporting the work that you’re doing? Are you primarily just relying upon individuals and private corporations?

We really thought that ITC would be part of our business model. We start in early January. We’ve had to adjust. At the moment, we’re privately funded. Our goal is to keep prices as low as possible to serve as many people as we can and we also have a whole part of our nonprofit that’s focused on education, and in particular, educating people on the need for this and educating legislators on the need for legislation. So, yeah, we are privately funded. We keep the lights on with donations, and we do see ourselves as analogous to the government.

We see ourselves as stepping in where the government has failed to stimulate market forces in the correct direction of clean energy. So you can find us at brightsaver.org, and we would love to see you there. We’d love your support. Talk about this. Let people know this exists. I mean, a lot of people are coming to know about us, but it’s slower than we would like and I think that’s how people can help.

Yeah. Well, definitely. I was gonna ask you as to not just state governments, but say local governments of large cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland. Are they able to adopt standards, or is it more of a statewide solution necessary?

Yeah. It really is state. So the state will trump local. So, I’ve actually spoken to a number of county level, city level government officials who really want this, but they are encountering the same roadblocks that any county in the state of California or other states are encountering. So it really does need to be state legislation at this point or federal, but I’m a believer that I don’t believe that that is on the table at least for the next two years.

Yeah. Well, I think that it would be a brilliant way for local governments, once they’re allowed to do it, of giving these units to low income folks and seniors who are struggling to pay their electric bills. Here’s a way to allow them for ten years or so, how long are these panels good for to reduce that subsidy and give them an opportunity to get clean energy?

So they’re good for twenty plus years. And that’s one of the visions we have is we think that many more people, we know many more people can be served with these small units than traditional rooftop systems. And, actually, we think there’s quite a lot of opportunity as the federal funding disappears to use what we still have to serve more people with these lower cost, smaller, more modular systems. So we are talking to folks about that, and we’re hopeful about that direction as well.

Okay. Well, I appreciate the great work that you’re doing out there. Any other things that you’re working on that you like to tell people about?

I have paused writing my novel about Atlas, who tricks Hercules into holding up the world and comes down to help save us from climate change. But someday, I might get back to that novel.

That sounds like a good one and maybe what you’re doing right now is kind of the personification of that story. So, good work on that front. Thank you, Cora, for being on the show. Everybody check out Bright Saver, and follow them and donate to them. Give them some funds to do the great work that they’re doing, it’s clear, this is important work. I think that it’s giving people the pathway to take an important first step to energy independence on a personal level, which I think supports the whole country and the whole planet moving in the right direction.

Thanks, Matt. This has been great, and I think it gives people hope as well. It’s not totally out of our control. We can be empowered to do something about climate even in this very climate unfriendly federal government environment.

Indeed. Yeah. One step at a time. So as my friends in the Dow say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So here it is. So let’s take the first step.

That’s true. Let’s take it together.

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