This week on Watt It Takes: how a Texas entrepreneur with fossil fuel roots came to see solar and storage as the future of energy. 

We feature a conversation with John Berger, the CEO of the residential solar-and-storage firm Sunnova, about his mission to convince traditional energy investors to put their money into solar. Sunnova has pulled in tens of millions of dollars from investors who once thought solar was laughable.

"I'm proud of getting a bunch of oil and gas money. I worked hard to get that money. And I want a lot more of it. The reason is that there's been a

These days, customer service comes in a bewildering array of flavors — many of them robotic.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and other self-service technologies, companies are now automating traditional points of customer contact, such as call-in centers. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of all customer interactions will be handled without the involvement of an actual human.

But technology alone cannot reinvent customer service, even in a modern industry such as solar. “If your primary goal is not keeping [a PV installation] up and running, then you’re not on the right path,” said Roberto Cardoso, director of service, North America

When they go low, Sonnen goes high.

Instead of striving to cut prices and make its product more accessible to the mass market, the U.S. branch of the German home battery company just released a new model that costs $10,000 more than its predecessor for the same 10 kilowatt-hours of energy capacity.

With that price bump, the ecoLinx delivers a longer battery life — warrantied for 15 years and 15,000 cycles. It also kicks on backup power much more quickly when the grid goes down — 100 milliseconds, instead of 30 seconds.

More alluringly, the ecoLinx comes fully integrated with two of the leading platforms in luxury home automation, which means

The world needs more entrepreneurs like Varun Khurana. And companies like Khurana's need better access to later-stage capital and support. 

A successful Silicon Valley veteran, Khurana returned to his native India to launch a series of companies, including Grofers, the country’s leading on-demand delivery service. Khurana’s latest venture is Crofarm, a company that taps the power of advanced logistics, apps and software to connect small farmers and agricultural cooperatives with the small retailers that sell their goods.

Crofarm was launched to transform India’s notoriously inefficient agricultural supply chain, which results in tremendous food waste and lost potential income for Indian farmers.

“With Crofarm, retailers place orders in

This year saw new solar output highs across Europe as summer temperature records were smashed.

In the U.K., solar broke the record for weekly output between June 21 and June 28, producing 533 gigawatt-hours of energy. The spike in output led solar to take over from gas as the number-one energy source in the country, said the European PV industry body SolarPower Europe.

In July, solar also reached a new high in Germany, with a record 6.17 terawatt-hours of production, SolarPower Europe said. Further north, Denmark registered 361 hours of sunshine in May. This led to an increase of 33 percent in solar electricity production,

There’s a revolution in the air. Literally, up in the sky. Winged devices and the necessary ecosystem around them are undergoing the biggest transformation since humanned flight began over 100 years ago.

Technologists have promised “flying cars” for decades, but the aircraft industry has failed to deliver. This time is different. Instead of cars with fold out wings, there is a new species of aircraft evolving  —  one that is small, agile, fast, all-electric, and emission-free. Most of them are eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) aircraft, meaning they take off and land vertically like a helicopter and then glide horizontally on a fixed wing like an airplane.

These