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Even Kvelland says the cheapest project a developer will ever work on is the one they kill in week one.

Even co-founded Glint Solar in Oslo in 2020. The software helps developers screen sites and pre-design projects before they spend real money on them. He didn't come up through engineering. His background is diplomacy, business intelligence and consulting, and in this episode he tells host Peter Pongracz what he saw when he first looked at how developers choose where to build: Google Maps, a hunch, and in some cases an old map, binoculars and a notepad.

Most of the conversation is about where project risk is hiding and how early you can still do something about it. Even describes a developer who was about to pay 5-10 to million dollars for a solar project, ran an intense due diligence process, and still missed a local ordinance that meant the project couldn't be permitted. He lays out the five or six things he'd settle before committing: grid capacity at the date you're likely to connect, hard exclusions, buildable land versus land that only looks good, yield and hurdle rates, site control, and regulation and community sentiment. And why you can't rely on the seller's report when you're buying.

They spend a good part of the episode on what isn't online. Even cites a recent US study of projects facing significant local opposition, where about 40% were cancelled, and explains how Glint lets developers show a town hall what a project will look like, hedgerows included. They also get into how Glint went from floating solar to data centers, why Claude Code sits inside their product team, and the advice he was given years ago: curiosity compounds, credentials don't.

Connect with
Even Kvelland LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evenkvelland/
Glint Solar, GlintAI and new Design Agent: https://www.glintsolar.com/
Glint Solar LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/glint-solar

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Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

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🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek

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Twenty years of owner's engineering taught Orçun Başlak that a solar report is only as honest as the person who filled it in.

Orçun Başlak, co-founder of PVX.AI, has spent two decades between Turkish utility-scale development, owner's engineering and solar design software. In this episode he walks host Peter Pongracz through the parts of project development that rarely make a pitch deck: how grading actually gets decided, what satellite data can tell you about the ground before a surveyor arrives, and why two tools can produce the same yield number while only one is defensible.

The conversation gets specific on terrain. PVX.AI runs three grading methodologies — smoothing, pad grading, and a minimum-cut solver that shifts racks within reveal limits — and Orçun is blunt that the third often produces a surface nobody can build. He describes a client who asked for the least possible grading and said the site team could deal with the consequences. From there he moves to soil: satellite-derived compaction mapping calibrated against field checks, the transition zones between hard and soft ground that decide whether you ram a pile or drill and pour concrete, and an erosion model that tells you where the water will go before you design drainage.

He also covers why solar alone is the wrong answer to a grid-stability question, how tracker manufacturers check slope and reveal in incompatible ways, and the limits of yield simulation — irradiation varies three to six percent year to year, which swallows most of the accuracy any challenger tool claims over PVsyst. The sharpest section is about integrity: a module manufacturer flattening the incidence angle modifier in a PAN file to lift production numbers no financier would catch, and an inspection where fifty thousand modules turned out to share four electroluminescence images between them.

Connect with Orçun Başlak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orcunbaslak/
LinkedIn PVX.AI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pvxai/posts/?feedView=all
Web: https://pvx.ai/

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn
Soliverse Instagram
Soliverse X (Twitter)
Subscribe on YouTube

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek

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Battery energy storage went from niche to critical infrastructure. Fluence's Julian Jansen on Europe's storage boom, Germany, and AI data centers.

Julian Jansen has been in energy storage since 2014, back when most projects lasted 15 to 30 minutes and the industry was still trying to prove a battery could do the job at all. In this episode of Soliverse, he walks host Peter Pongracz through the turning points that took battery storage from a niche grid service to critical energy infrastructure, including the 2016 acceleration in the PJM and UK markets and the moment South Korea installed 2.9 gigawatt hours in a single year.

The conversation gets specific on Europe today. Germany is going through a boom, with 720 gigawatts of grid connection requests for battery storage and a clear move from two-hour to four-hour duration systems. Julian explains the grid fee exemption that can add 1.5 to 2 percent to project IRR, the new Reifegradverfahren that sorts the connection queue by project maturity, and why hybridizing solar with storage has become a no-brainer in markets with long periods of negative pricing.

He also covers the rise of battery storage as a foundational part of AI-ready data center infrastructure, Fluence's large data center pipeline, the SmartStack platform approach, the shift from NMC to LFP chemistry and the coming challenge from sodium ion, and the hard operating truth that with storage the value sits in performance over the lifetime of the asset, not in the cheapest block you can buy.

Connect with Julian Jansen:
LinkedIn
Fluence

Support the show

Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.

Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.

Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn
Soliverse Instagram
Soliverse X (Twitter)
Subscribe on YouTube

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek