Episode 98 – Tim Montague | Solar Expert & Clean Tech Podcaster

In this episode I speak with Tim Montague, an absolute powerhouse when it comes to the global transition to clean energy. His passion leans into both the sustainability and economical aspects of clean energy and this episode is a must-listen for anyone who cares for our future.

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Transcript

Murray Guest  

Tim, welcome to the podcast. It’s been great chatting with you before I hit record, getting to know you and your journey and your passion for what you do. How are you, on this glorious September morning or afternoon for you.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, I’m great, you know here in the US, it’s the first day of fall, I think, and the weather just turned, you know, it went from hot and dry to cool and a little moist and it’s beautiful here in the Midwest.

Murray Guest  

And it’s a great part of the world there in the Midwest, I’ve been there a little bit, wonderful hospitality, wonderful, friendly people. And tell me, what are you, what have you been up to lately?

Tim Montague  

I am a commercial solar and storage developer. I work for a construction company in the Chicago area and we install, what we call large commercial, you know, couple 100 kW to a couple megawatts of rooftop solar, and now increasingly battery, battery storage is now on the scene here in the Midwest, as well. And it’s, it’s really heady days in the solar and storage industry across the US, but especially here in Illinois where we’re having a boom.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. And you’ve got some major projects you’ve been involved in, haven’t you, so there’s a couple of really big projects that you’ve delivered on in the Midwest.

Tim Montague  

Yeah you know Continental is a, is a wonderful company that where, we, we have the chops to do big projects we have, we have installed the two largest rooftop arrays in the Midwest one is 3.4 megawatts at a company called Magid glove and safety they make safety gloves and safety equipment, and then we did an Ikea distribution center also which was 2.9 megawatts in Joliet which is near Chicago. And so, yeah, large commercial solar really gets us pumped up.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, wow, they’re big projects. So, just let’s go back in time a little bit, why solar for you? How did you find yourself in this industry?

Tim Montague  

Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s been a great journey and and not without some regrets. My main regret being that I didn’t get into solar sooner, but I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is a medium sized city in the Southwest, and my father was a professor of environmental studies there at the university. He was a DIY’er so we were doing solar thermal in our backyard making hot water with solar panels, and making solar cookers, and there was an energy fair at the at the university every summer, PV wasn’t on the scene because it was very expensive in the 70s, it was, you know, on the order of $100 a watt. So, you know, it was it was around, it was on satellites and solar dates back to the 1950s in its modern form. So it’s now quite mature technology but it’s really only in the last 20 years that the price has come down and it’s become accessible to consumers and business owners.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. Okay, so I’m just picturing you with your dad tinkering away. We’re similar ages like as, as we’re talking about before in the 70s, and that’s that sounds so exciting to be working on those little projects with your dad back when you’re at that age.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, I’m, I’m so grateful for those, for those times, you know, as, as a, as a boy, you know, that’s really what you want, right, is to do stuff with your dad, and so we had a great time he’s a, he’s a techie and very handy. And I, you know, so I’m a little jealous though you know he’s, he’s a polymath, he is a journalist, he’s a historian, he’s a self taught programmer, he’s a toxicologist, or toxics expert I should say. He wrote two books on heavy metals. So I grew up fighting environmental bad’s like coal burning power plants and uranium mines in New Mexico that, you know cause major health problems for low income people, and he actually tried to convince the Navajo Indians, the Native Americans in that part of New Mexico, to consider solar as an alternative to coal power, and they, they didn’t take him up on the offer at the time but now they’re now those projects there are some ginormous coal plants in North, northern New Mexico it’s an area called the Four Corners, it’s the area where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet. Okay, and there’s a, you know, a two gigawatt coal plant there that has now been decommissioned and is being replaced with solar and battery storage, but it took 40 years, from, from my youth, but that’s, you know, energy is in my blood, Murray, and on the other side of the family, my mom’s father and his father ran a coal industry publication called The Black Diamond and Illinois is a coal state, my mom is from Chicago. And so, you know, energy is just really in my blood, and it’s just a privilege to be working in the solar PV industry now with the, with the energy transition upon us, and climate change ever so present, right? Like in the last five years climate change has really gone mainstream, and it’s just smacking us upside the head, right? We saw that in Australia two years ago with the major major fires, you know, and for the last really three years in California just year after year, we have a major drought in the Southwest this year, the heatwave in the Northwest. I mean Canada was experiencing over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I mean just crazy weather.

Murray Guest  

Yeah and then on top of that, there’s been more extreme weather events with the flooding in New York, and then some of the as I understand some of the hurricanes being more frequent than they have in the past. So you’re right, climate change is on top of us right now, And solar panels and solar energy development, as you’re talking about with that shift to that from the coal plants is so so important right now isn’t it like, you know, when you think about what the difference that can make.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, you know, 40% of our carbon emissions come from energy on the grid. Energy production is a major source of co2 emissions. Of course there’s other major sources like transportation and industry and and the food chain, or the food supply industry so it’s it’s a both/and. We need to decarbonize the economy. The good news is is that we have the technology. It’s not about really getting better technology or even cheaper technology, of course it’s going to continue to get better and get cheaper. Solar’s come down 90% in the last 10 years so that that cost adoption curve is very real, as you double the volume of technology, right, the price comes down around 25% and, and we here in the US are looking at really doubling year over year for the next several years in the solar industry and, and we need to do that. We need to step back from the brink of what is, you know, who knows what lies ahead if we don’t do that right, but it’s, it’s not a world that I want to live in and certainly I don’t want, or wish on my, my grandchildren. And so, you know, I am on a mission for the energy transition and and I aim to to make an impact on it.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. So tell me, Tim, what, what do you think some of the biggest barriers are for it to be really implemented, and that transition to happen, that you’re so passionate about.

Tim Montague  

Good question. I think humans are not very good at looking long term into the future. We are good at, you know, six months or a year or maybe five years at best, and here we are, we need to think about 100 years. Because once that tipping point with climate change or tipping points are crossed it can be very very difficult to get back to a previous way of life, so to speak. Of course, finance, has been a major barrier historically, the cost of the technology of wind and solar and batteries was just off the charts and it was out of reach. Here in Illinois we saw wind come in first. We have very good wind here in the Midwest, very good wind resources but now solar is is playing catch up and globally, solar PV is the number one source of new power globally so it has become cost effective and competitive with all other technologies. And so, money is no longer an obstacle, and there’s more money flowing in to the industry than there are projects. I get contacted all the time on LinkedIn. And, you know I love to connect with people on LinkedIn, if you’re on LinkedIn, please reach out to me. But other than that I say, lack of understanding, you know, consumers and business owners don’t realize that this is an opportunity, that it’s real. As we were talking in the pre show Murray, you yourself have solar on your building, on your home, and Australia was an early adopter, and obviously you have great solar resources, but even in, in, you know, in the far northern hemisphere, you know in Canada, in Germany, in Scandinavia, solar is a thing. And so, those, those historically though are the other major bear, you know, obstacles, there’s others money in politics is a major obstacle, frankly. You know the coal or the fossil lobby is very powerful. And they’re facing stranded assets and that’s a that’s a painful situation, you know, we’ve seen major coal companies going bankrupt. Peabody Coal being a major company, and coal took it on the chin from the natural gas industry. It wasn’t solar that that kicked coal’s butt, it was natural gas, and now, solar and batteries are kicking natural gases’ butt. So, you know these energy transitions are something that humans have dealt with over the millennia, right? You know we used wood and then we discovered coal and whale oil and then fossil oil and now we have wind, solar and batteries and there’s others, you know, hydro and closed loop pumped hydro and gravity batteries and green hydrogen and you know it’s going to be a mix, but you know we’re looking at a grid here in the US by 2050, that’s going to be 45% solar powered, and today it’s 5% solar powered so the next 30 years are going to be a rocket ship.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, that’s great to hear. And from my limited knowledge one of the things that I’ve heard a bit about is some of the challenges in the US, around how the grids are managed at a state level versus a national level. Is that something that you have a bit information on as well?

Tim Montague  

Yeah, we have what’s called regional transmission organizations – RTOs – that cover multi state regions. So in Illinois, we’re divided between something called PJM which stands for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland. And oddly enough, Northern Illinois is part of this mostly eastern seaboard RTO. And then, central and southern Illinois are in something called MISO which is a huge swath of the Midwest, including parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, etc. And every RTO has their own rules and regulations. They all report into a federal organization called FERC. And then there’s a layer below that, which is the local utility right, the the grid operator and the energy suppliers, you know, and it’s, it’s complicated, but every state has their, you know their system, their group of utilities and so if you work in a state you get to know it and that’s the thing with solar, it is a local phenomenon, you have to really know the local rules and regulations and sometimes it’s a good opportunity but not every state is a good solar opportunity and you know example of that is Florida. Great solar resources but it’s not a great state for distributed generation. There is quite a bit of utility solar there, but the, the power company, Florida Power and Light, and their sister company NextEra have really pushed back on consumer access to solar as big businesses want to do right they’re looking out for number one. So it’s, it is an interesting landscape. How is it in Australia in that regard? Is solar available everywhere ubiquitously or is it spotty.

Murray Guest  

Well it’s available everywhere and there’s a lot of people have been putting on domestic systems quite a bit, there’s, I can’t give you any sort of stats but you do see it quite a lot. It is advertised quite significantly for different programs and different incentives to take it on. The tariffs for the solar that you feed back into the grid have dropped significantly from when when I first got it back in oh I’m thinking nearly, I would say, like, 15 years ago, 14 years ago, I was getting 66 cents a kilowatt feeding back into the grid. Yeah, that was the early sort of promotion of getting them installed, you get some interest free loans from the government to have that all implemented. Now, it’s around 17-19 cents a kilowatt and different energy companies have different contracts where they have different tariffs and different amounts that you pay, but it’s definitely on the rise. I think the, still the major opportunity is those big commercial installations where, whether that’s replacing some of the coal fired power stations, or in some of the other areas because as you said, we’ve got some great resources down here like sunshine is something which we’ve got a lot of. The other part that I’ve heard a bit about and I don’t know if you’ve got some thoughts on this Tim, is micro grids. So moving forward, I’ve heard from some of the energy distributors around instead of being one big, you know state based grid or, you know, as part of the national grid but micro grids, which then can be turned on or off to meet the smaller, you know, requirements of smaller regions.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, the cool thing about micro grids right is that they’re an opportunity for resiliency. If you have rooftop solar, and there’s a grid outage, your solar array gets cut off from the grid by code as a safety measure. If you have a battery though, and you can island from the grid then as what we would call a micro grid, and a micro grid just means that you have a generator, and some and some way to store or and then island from the main grid and so, solar and storage or wind and storage allows you then to continue to have a, you know, a, a micro grid, right? Electricity in your home and you would typically not necessarily have all of your loads met, you would have essential loads like the lighting, and maybe the refrigerator and, you know, who knows. But, you know, we saw this in Texas right, in February we had a major grid outage in Texas because it got super cold there and the infrastructure was not prepared for that weather and the grid failed. And it wasn’t, despite some, some efforts to point fingers at wind and solar, it was really a failure of the fossil grid, the gas plants and the coal plants failed, and the grid went down. And so people were without electricity for days on end and it was freezing cold, and when you’re, you know, if you have a gas fired furnace, and the electricity stops working, your furnace stops working, so it was a major problem. And, and we’re learning slowly that this is going to be vital as, as climate changes is very real and there’s going to be problems, we see this in California now right with rolling blackouts, that micro grids really are the bee’s knees. And the challenge is that batteries are expensive, they’re gonna get cheaper, of course, as time goes on, but it is a bit of a luxury item. And, but if you want off grid operation or to be able to have electricity when the, when the grid goes down, the micro grid is where it’s at and I think that I talk about a grid list future, you know, and there’s also a billion people in the world that don’t have any electricity in the less developed world, and micro grids are wonderful for them. You don’t even have to build a grid, you just build micro grids, right, you put rooftop solar and batteries in the living room or the garage, and then they have access to electricity.

Murray Guest  

Yeah and I can imagine also in some of the smaller communities where you can have smaller systems like that which support a whole community, for those areas that have no electricity. Can I just ask Tim though, you mentioned about the cost of batteries and I’ll be open here we’ve got the, the solar PV system on the roof, but we don’t have a battery at the moment because of that cost. And the cost of solar has come down quite dramatically in the last 10 years as you said. What do you know about the cost of batteries moving forward.

Tim Montague  

So I would say we are, there’s a 10 year lag in the battery technology, basically batteries are where solar was 10 years ago. It’s still a luxury item. I was a Tesla owner for a period of time, I ended up selling my Tesla because I wanted to pull a camping trailer and the range on my model Y was really not that great with a trailer being towed behind it and going to places where one would want to go camping, there’s not a lot of charging infrastructure yet. So, the cost of batteries is expensive. The way around that is to incentivize the installation of batteries. Batteries in Illinois, for example, now we have a new incentive it’s $250 per kWh. And so we do commercial batteries, these are you know megawatts. So our typical installation is either a megawatt or two megawatt battery, and it could be a two hour or a four hour battery but so if you have a two megawatt battery and it has four megawatt hours of electricity capacity in it. That’s a million dollars that the state of Illinois is now, and I say the state but it’s actually consumers, all of us ratepayers in Illinois are paying into this program to subsidize and incentivize the adoption of batteries, and that’s a great thing because it does give access then to consumers and business owners. And let’s face it, incentives like this have happened in all industries and all forms of energy. Energy is a highly subsidized thing because it, it’s, it’s, it’s such a good, right, it’s such a common good for all of the, the residents in a place. And that’s why governments go out of their way to create these programs and and, it’s still the fossil technologies are still way more incentivized and subsidized than renewable energy so we’re playing catch up in the renewable space, and the fossil industries are somewhat in denial of how good they’ve had it, and now it’s just that, you know, really they, they can no longer hide the fact that carbon pollution is causing climate change and impacting our everyday lives. And you see now this week in in the news right, BP has come into the spotlight because their CEO is now saying we are going to make the transition to cleaner technologies. They’re an oil major, but there’s no reason they can’t become a wind, solar and storage major. And you’ve seen this time and time again. The European companies have done the same thing, not, not all of them will make the transition, some of them will go extinct. So they, it will be change or die for the for the fossil industries, unfortunately.

Murray Guest  

And those incentives and as you mentioned before the politics that are behind some of those arrangements, if they shift as to where those incentives lie, which then encourage big companies to invest differently then we’re going to see those transitions. There’s a number of the energy providers here in Australia which are advertising their goals, such as you know by 2030, moving to 100% renewables, which is great, and you wouldn’t have seen that in the last few years, so we’re starting to see them putting that out there without, without my knowledge of what the incentives that they’re getting to do that. I’ll tell you what is frustrating Tim I don’t know if you’re seeing this, and one of our states here in Australia is actually applying a tariff to people or levy to people that buy an electric car, which is actually de-incentivizing the purchase of electric cars. And so, it’s actually just recently going, it was in the media that someone’s taking it to court to challenge it.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, the, the EV industry. You know, we need to do everything we can to support the EV industry. We are close to a tipping point if not at a tipping point in terms of just the pure economics, you know, EV’s have many fewer parts, and there’s no stopping an all electric vehicle future it’s going to happen whether we like it or not because they’re going to be cheaper, and we’re talking about, vehicles that can go a million or maybe even 2 million miles now. There’s a great author, I encourage your listeners to check out a book called Clean Disruption by Tony Seba. He is an adjunct faculty member at Stanford University in California, and he studies the energy transition and these historical transitions and and disruptions, you know, he gets examples from the telecommunications industry. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s just time and time again where micro computers and the and the PC is another one right, where the the established industry cannot see that the disruption is coming, and that is somewhat the way the, the, the vehicle industry is although now of course you see VW and Ford. Not the Japanese companies yet, but…

Murray Guest  

I’m seeing, here we’re seeing a lot that’s coming soon. Hyundai and Kia are both bringing out, which you know is both under Hyundai, they’re both bringing out fully electric vehicles.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, Koreans are going after it. I don’t know what the Japanese are waiting for. I’m a Toyota owner, I’ve owned many Toyota’s, I love Toyota, but they’re seemingly asleep at the wheel, they are, they are going to be releasing some EVs, they were very early with the hybrids, and they even have a hydrogen vehicle, which, once you start to really look at the math of hydrogen vehicles versus EVs you realize how the economics aren’t great for consumer vehicles, for long haul trucking I think hydrogen will be a thing, but EVs are two to four times more efficient than hydrogen vehicles and so the Tesla Model really is a wonderful model and unfortunately, you know, back to the incentive thing. There are some rules that you know the Biden administration is promoting, that’s our current president, that administration is promoting electrification of transportation but they’re really putting it in a box in a way that is cutting out Tesla and I disagree with that but that you know they’re promoting union builds, and I’m pro labor, and I want to have living wages for all the workers. But I think that there’s, there’s other ways and, and many of the automakers in the United States are non union now, but they pay equal or better wages as the union companies, and so they are competitive, and still providing a living wage. But anyway, you know, Elon, everybody was, you know, I mean he had so many doubters and and yet he has just proven time and time again that this is the future and he is going to succeed and, and he’s doing it.

Murray Guest  

Yeah and, and, you need people like him in organizations like Tesla at that cutting edge to drive innovation and then now we’re seeing the other ones follow which is great. But as you said we want to see more doing that. I make the assumption, and I reckon you can clarify that the cost of the EVs, to get them down, it’s going to be the cost of the battery. That’s the challenge at the moment.

Tim Montague  

That is a big one, you know, the, the model Y that I owned had a 65 kWh battery in it. And you know that’s a 1500 pound battery, it’s a big battery you can run your you could run your house probably for three days, maybe a week, on, on the battery in the vehicle and so we will see vehicle to grid technology coming. Ford has announced a partnership with a company called Sunrun, which is the largest solar installer, and to do vehicle to grid. I think that’s a wonderful idea, but think of the car as a battery on wheels right it’s a power plant that is mobile. And you can use it, it’s a, you know it’s a bi directional thing not only does it get you around, but it could power your house, or keep you alive in some other place if you needed to escape, you know, to some safer place in the in the event of a storm or an outage.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, wow, okay. So, the, the car itself as a battery and I’ve seen, t’s interesting you just reminded me I saw one of the new videos for the new Kia EV6 on YouTube, and they were plugging their microwave into the back of the car and showing you how you can run the appliances from the the power of the vehicle.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, exactly. It is a power plant, and now you need, you need something to charge that battery either the grid or source of renewable energy and, you know, that’s why we don’t really see solar vehicles yet, I mean, there, there are some cars that have solar panels integrated. If you solarized a model Y for example you might get 15 miles of range from those solar panels that on the surface area of the vehicle so per day so it’s not a huge amount of range. Now, but you could have a rooftop array or a or a, you know, a ground mount array that’s much bigger and then charging your vehicle. And that’s really the way to go.

Murray Guest  

Gotcha, okay. So, right now, for people listening, what do you recommend people do? I mean we’re going to have the recommendation from that book that you mentioned earlier in the show notes, but if people want to understand this more, they want to get more informed, what’s the best thing that they could do? Besides listen to this great conversation!

Tim Montague  

Yeah. You know, I have a little research project going to identify all of the sustainable related podcasts. And there’s over 200 podcasts now related to sustainability. So, there’s so many media outlets, and that’s just podcasts, right, of course there’s many good news websites and publications. Here, you know, I, I go to a trade publication called PV Magazine which has global, you know there’s an Australian version, there’s a European version, there’s a US version. So, you know it really depends on your interest and Google is a wonderful tool or other search engines. We’re just swimming in, we’re swimming in in good knowledge and information. I wouldn’t recommend social media so much, I think there’s a lot of misinformation. I was talking with a colleague today about a video that Vox, which is a well known media company here in the US, I don’t know about in Australia but Vox made a little video saying the grid isn’t ready for renewable energy. And it was, it was really off the mark, and they, they don’t, whoever made that video they don’t understand how we are going to green the grid in the next 30 years. And they’re an influential, you know, source of news and information so it’s disappointing when there’s when that’s out there but you see mainstream publications like Forbes. I like to point people to a great article in Forbes about the 100 trillion dollar economic opportunity and if you just Google those words ‘$100 trillion economic opportunity of the energy transition’, Forbes has a story about that. And that’s the cool thing about this is, this transition that we’re in requires a lot of construction. We’re installing equipment, we’re making equipment, we’re creating clean jobs, we’re Greening the Grid, we’re cleaning the air, creating a healthier, safer, safer future for humanity. And it’s, it’s a virtuous circle, it really is good for the entire species that we make this transition. Will we make it, the only question is Murray, will we make it fast enough to save our butts, the earth is going to be fine. It’s been here for 4 billion years. And, and it will be here for several more billion years before the sun swallows it, and it’s just a question of, you know, do we choose to live a good life the way we have for the last 100 years for the next 5000 or 10,000 years? Or do we choose to really face very challenging times? Climate change is an existential threat. There’s others that we need to be concerned about like the potential AI explosion. If artificial general intelligence were to explode, we could be snuffed out like, like cockroaches. But, so I you know I don’t think, I don’t think climate change is the only threat. And that’s why, Elon, literally, Elon Musk plans his day around how quick his activities are going to get him to Mars because he deeply believes that we need a backup civilization on the planet Mars. And he’s right. We should put 1% of our resources into creating a backup because we know from the geologic record that catastrophes happen, meteors do strike the Earth, and big ones do come and they wiped out the dinosaurs and they could easily wipe out modern civilization. Humans would probably survive a major strike, but maybe not. And but it would certainly put us back to the Stone Age and that’s just no fun. I mean, who wants to live like a caveman? I certainly don’t.

Murray Guest  

No, no. $100 trillion opportunity. They’re big numbers. And just to help us understand that. So, is that based on the opportunity of the shift to the installation, or is that the whole, you know shift that we can make across generation/distribution/usage?

Tim Montague  

Yeah, that’s the big enchilada, to decarbonize the economy globally. You know, the US GDP on an annual basis is 21 trillion. It’s estimated that we need to, in the US, in order to electrify everything we need to invest a trillion dollars a year for 20 years. But the good news is, is that for every dollar you invest in clean next generation technologies, you get $3 back in the form of healthier people, and job creation. So it’s a net benefit to society. And it is a virtuous circle.

Murray Guest  

Yeah. And can I ask is there some, I’m sure there is now I ask it, is there some research on then through investing in solar and renewable energy, then we have a reduction in health costs, because people have better environmental conditions. There’s got to be some links there, isn’t there?

Tim Montague  

Huge, huge links, and, and this is another way in which most of society is either just ignorant, we just don’t know, or we’re in denial about the health costs of burning fossil fuels. I think the global statistic is that six plus million people die from air pollution every year. A huge number of people die from air pollution every year, and that is an avoidable loss. And that’s people that have chronic illness. So they’re deeply involved in the medical industry, spending a lot of their resources on medical attention and vice versa. The government is having to subsidize that, and it’s it’s just a drain on society. As well as death, right, and neither is good, and it’s just no fun to suffer from chronic health problems either. I myself was asthmatic as a child, and that was genetic, that wasn’t caused by air pollution, I grew up in a fairly benign environment in Albuquerque, New Mexico where the air is pretty clean as far as cities go but yeah when we, when we leave coal in the ground, and natural gas in the ground, and oil in the ground. That is a public good. And we just have to realize that you can’t use the atmosphere as a garbage dump forever. The atmosphere is very thin, you can think of the Earth as a peach. Or a tennis ball. And the atmosphere is just the thickness of the fuzz on that peach, it’s very very thin and, and we have filled it up with carbon now, and you see that right when I was a kid, the the co2 levels were below 350, and in the 300 range. And now we’ve, we’ve surpassed 400 and we’re gunning for 450. And we’re in the danger zone, right? The IPCC has come out with their, their first, most recent report, there’s several more reports coming, but they are sounding the alarm that this is a red alert moment for humanity. We have to decarbonize the economy. We have to suck carbon out of the air, we have to develop what’s called direct air capture. It’s not enough to plant trees, we do need to do forestation – I’m a forest ecologist by training, I love trees, I love ecology – but that’s not enough, we have to actually build machines and this is happening now. There’s a project in Iceland now that just got a bunch of attention because they’re using geothermal energy to generate electricity to drive a machine that it’s kind of like an air conditioner. It looks like a ginormous air conditioner and it sucks carbon out of the atmosphere and turns it into liquid and then pumps it into the Earth’s crust and it turns to rock. It’s the permanent source of storage of that carbon we could also turn it into building materials. So there’s gonna be a huge wave of innovation around direct air capture, it’s really the next big thing I think in clean tech. It’s still expensive and small scale, but like anything, it has to start somewhere, and you know, the good news is if you get to 1%, like we have machines now that will store like four mega, I think it’s four mega tons of carbon, we need to store, you know, 1000s of gigatons of carbon I don’t I don’t know the statistics off the top of my head, but if you’re at 1% of something you just, you’re seven doublings away from 100%, right? So that exponential growth is our friend and you see that with these tipping points. I should I should mention one of the tipping points that that Tony Seba famously points out is the transition from the horse and buggy to the internal combustion engine. It shows a photograph of New York City in 1901, and it’s all horse and buggy and there’s one internal combustion engine in the in the picture. Fast forward to 1913, 12 years later, and it’s flip flopped. It’s all internal combustion engine cars and there’s one horse and buggy in the scene. We didn’t have anything against horses. It was more economical, and faster, and convenient to drive an ice engine vehicle and that’s why we did away with horse and buggy, right? The same thing is going to happen in renewable energy, and direct air capture and electrification of transportation, and we just need to lean in and deploy deploy deploy, as my friend Jigger Shaw says.

Murray Guest  

Yeah and I get that message really clearly from you Tim and in your passion that the speed in which we do it is absolutely critical for the health of people and the planet.

Tim Montague  

Yeah, for our future and our children’s future and our children’s children. We, you know, we have no excuse, Murray, that’s the thing. And we have the technology and we can afford it, we’re rich, and we’re rich because the sun is a vast resource. We get 10,000 times more solar energy than society uses in all of our sources of energy right, so we just have to capture a small fraction of it, and then turn that into other things, you know, like making batteries and like doing direct air capture of carbon, and to create a, a decarbonized economy. It’s totally possible. We just have to demonstrate some leadership and togetherness and that’s one of the other things is these energy transitions I think do bring us together. Like, like, I feel very much a part of a major economic movement, being in the clean energy industry. And it’s just a great feeling that you’re part of the solution. And part of job creation and better health and safety creation.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, I mean, and I’d link so well Tim to, in preparation for this conversation, I asked you what is your definition of inspired energy and I hope you remember what you said because it was fantastic. Do you remember what you said?

Tim Montague  

Oh my goodness. That was a little while ago and I don’t remember but if you have that quote I would love to hear it back.

Murray Guest  

I’m going to quote you back to you right now, because it is great because I said, What is your definition of inspired energy, and I ask it in every podcast. And you said energy that is good for people, profit and planet.

Tim Montague  

That is one of my mantras. You know the Triple P economy – people profit and planet – it’s not, it’s not an either or, it’s a ‘both and’, that’s my other mantra, it’s a ‘both and’. So many people think you have to make significant trade offs. And it’s not that there aren’t trade offs, it’s like electrification. Yeah, we have to do mining, mining can be a destructive dirty business. But the alternative, right, of not developing all that infrastructure is so much worse, that it’s worth it. And yes, we can get better at recycling and we use, again in the news, there’s a major battery recycling company called Redwood technology.

Murray Guest  

I saw a special on them on YouTube, it was fantastic actually what they’re doing.

Tim Montague  

Yeah JB Straubel, he’s one of the cofounders of Tesla, has started a battery recycling company and he just signed a major contract with Ford Motor Company. Ford wants to have a circular economy because we’re gonna have a lot of batteries right and we don’t want to put those in a landfill. I mean, basically we’re the world is running out of landfill space. And, and so we have to figure out this this circular economy really and make stuff to be repurposed.

Murray Guest  

Yeah, so there’s so many great references, Tim, that you’ve mentioned I’m going to make sure that they are in the show notes so people can check those out. It’s been great talking through with you. For people to find out more about what you do and to connect with you, where do we want to direct them to?

Tim Montague  

Well, they should check out my podcast the Clean Power Hour, which is at CleanPowerHour.com, and that’s the audio only website for the podcast. It’s also on YouTube. I host that show with a co host named John Weaver who’s a journalist for PV magazine. He’s also a solar professional, and we talk about everything related to the energy transition and so it’s a news roundup. And then we are also interviewing technologists that are inventing the next generation of solar photovoltaics, which are called perovskites. And, and we’ll be bringing more interviews with battery storage companies and and other form of long term storage, you know, long term storage is a, is a very hot industry because we have a plethora of wind and solar, but they’re intermittent, right? The wind isn’t always blowing and the sun is definitely not always shining, and, and so you need big storage facilities like the one, well, the listeners can’t see it but there’s a picture of a battery farm and, you know, Australia is famous for that very large Tesla battery farm right. That was at one time the largest battery farm in the world, I think it’s been surpassed now but, but, yeah, the Clean Power Hour is a great way to find me. Or on LinkedIn, I love to connect on LinkedIn, I’m also on Twitter – TG Montague.

Murray Guest  

Great, so I will make sure that we’ve got links to the podcast, to LinkedIn and Twitter. And Tim, thank you so much, you shared so many insights around the industry and your knowledge and your passion for what it is that you’re doing. I know a little before this conversation, and I know a lot more thanks to you and I hope my listeners also learned a lot more. So, so valuable. So everyone, make sure you check out the Clean Power Hour podcast. As you can hear from Tim he’s got a lot to share and it’s going to help you understand what you can do to educate yourself and also make some really valuable decisions going forward. Tim, it’s been amazing. Thank you so much for your time.

Tim Montague  

Yeah. Thank you, Murray. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on your show. I’m so grateful.

Murray Guest  

Thank you.