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#HeroesofFreeingEnergy: Vikram Aggarwal

“Growing up in India, I experienced the shortage of electricity very personally. We did not have access to uninterrupted, good quality power. The thing that always bothered me was a thermal power plant I could see from my house. It was burning coal to produce electricity for the City of Delhi. Pretty much every day, it’s spewing dark smoke up in the air.

“The seed of EnergySage was planted in a brand new development of homes. It was a bright, hot, sunny day. We walk into this home, and this is a beautiful 3,000 to 4,000 square foot home, it’s nicely air conditioned. They had just installed solar panels on the roof. We go into the garage and look at the inverter, which shows how much energy is being produced. That home was being run by solar power. There is no noise, there is no white or black smoke coming out of the roof. I think that was the start of my love affair with solar power.

“We have power shut offs because of wildfires in California. We have really strong storms all the way up the East Coast, and you’re losing power because the grid is not very strong. And especially during COVID, people felt that they’re not in control of a lot of things. So they started looking at solar and storage as something that they can control. At least they can control their energy destiny. People are starting to be very interested in solar, and especially solar plus storage because of resiliency.

“I think solar has found its best friend, batteries. The amount of consumer interest in batteries is phenomenal. A power grid is less than fully reliable and consumers really want that kind of control over their electricity.

“Human history, I think if you look globally, has been driven by the availability of energy and especially, affordable energy. And with renewables, especially solar and wind, we are looking forward to affordable, abundant, clean energy. We are in the midst of the next energy revolution.”

Vikram Aggarwal, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of EnergySage, is one of the 320 people that author Bill Nussey interviewed for his new book, “Freeing Energy: How innovators are using local-scale solar and batteries to disrupt the global energy industry from the outside in.”

Available today

Learn more about Vikram from his Freeing Energy podcast with Bill Nussey.

You can see all the heroes (so far) and their stories here.

#HeroesofFreeingEnergy #320heroes #LocalEnergy #FreeingEnergybook