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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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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/

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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.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

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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

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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.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

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🎙️ In this episode, Peter Pongracz sits down with Even J. Kvelland, Co-Founder & CCO of @GlintSolar, live at Intersolar Europe 2026, fresh off parental leave and straight back into back-to-back customer meetings. They dig into what it actually takes to de-risk utility-scale solar siting, why the grid is the real bottleneck everywhere, and how Glint Solar is turning AI into a genuine competitive edge — not just a buzzword.

🔑 Key topics:

🗺️ GIS-based site screening and de-risking projects across 30+ markets

🎨 Iterative layout & design tools for PV and BESS

🤝 Project management and external stakeholder communication (including AI renderings)

⚡ Grid data, redispatch, and curtailment across different European markets

🔀 The shift toward hybrid, co-located solar + storage projects

🤖 Embedding AI into developer workflows, not just using ChatGPT on the side

💡 Takeaways:

✅ Glint Solar's platform screens hundreds of critical data points per country — grid, environmental, zoning — to de-risk projects before a shovel hits the ground.

✅ Searching an entire German Bundesland for suitable land now takes minutes in Glint instead of months manually.

✅ AI-powered renderings are helping developers win over mayors and municipalities by visualizing projects before they're built.

✅ Grid data availability varies wildly by market — from open capacity data to a total black box — and Glint adapts its approach country by country.

✅ Recent funding is going straight into hiring across Europe and the US, and 2026 will bring more hybrid and co-location features.

🔗 Resources:

Glint Solar - Official Website - https://www.glintsolar.ai

Glint Solar on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/glint-solar

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:

Peter on LinkedIn: https://itl.ink/soliverseLI

Soliverse X (Twitter): https://itl.ink/soliverseX

🎧 Listen on Buzzsprout: https://itl.ink/soliversebuzzprout

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

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:
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Solar panel recycling is about to flip from liability to profit center, and Dr. Jan-Philipp Mai explains exactly why.

Solar developers and asset owners who treat end-of-life panels as a future disposal cost are sitting on roughly 110 billion euros of installed silver they have written off entirely. The failure is treating recycling as an inevitable gate fee rather than a recoverable asset. Dr. Mai's layer-by-layer silver extraction process at Solar Materials GmbH now recovers 60 to 80 percent of that silver, swinging the economics from 150 euros per ton charged to net positive returns and making the green business case inseparable from the profitable one.

Dr. Mai traces his silicon obsession to a year-2000 high school presentation, a thread that led 26 years later to three interconnected companies: JPM Silicon as a technology holding company, Circular Silicon for material refining, and Better Cell for second-life applications, all operating under Solar Materials GmbH. The company scaled from 17 to 70 employees in roughly two years, driven by market timing, a unique silver-recovery edge, and deliberate team specialization. By 2030, Solar Materials targets 450,000 tons of panels under management, scaling through licensing in Australia, operator partnerships inside Europe, and joint ventures in India. Global panel waste sits around 100,000 tons annually today, a figure Dr. Mai projects will climb to millions of tons per year by 2030.

The practical framework Dr. Mai offers cuts across every stakeholder role. EPCs and O&M firms that partner with a zero-gate-fee recycler can underbid competitors on decommissioning costs and win projects on that margin alone. Pension funds holding long-dated solar assets can reframe end-of-life provisions as a balance-sheet positive rather than a contingent liability. Critically, these economics already work without regulatory mandates, meaning first movers capture the arbitrage before compliance forces every asset owner to the same table. Waiting for regulation to confirm what the numbers already show is the costliest decision a solar asset owner can make.

Connect with Dr. Jan-Philipp Mai:
LinkedIn
SOLAR MATERIALS

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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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Solar developers and EPCs who assume more tools means better coverage are paying a hidden cost in wasted hours and lost data. Douglas Geist, Co-founder and CCO of PVcase, quantified the problem after surveying 400-plus industry professionals: teams are running six to twelve separate tools per project, losing control of their data at every internal handoff, and duplicating effort before a single wire is pulled. Geist's blueprint for collapsing that stack, built while scaling PVcase to a globally used solar design platform backed by over $120M raised, gives solar teams a concrete path from fragmented workflows to a unified design process that protects both margin and momentum.

PVcase was born from an internal tool at co-founder David's engineering consultancy, where redesigns that once took two to three weeks were suddenly completed in a day or two. That speed caught the attention of major solar customers, who wanted direct access to the software. Early traction led to a first US appearance at SPI in 2018 or 2019, where the team discovered everything was in metric units and immediately rebuilt the unit logic after returning. The Anderson Optimization acquisition, completed three years ago, extended PVcase earlier into the project lifecycle by adding site selection to the design workflow. A fundraising round was run simultaneously to close that transaction, a deliberately opportunistic move Geist credits with averaging two to three hours of sleep per night for six months.

Geist's core argument is that the real bottleneck in solar development is no longer design speed but what surrounds it: permitting, grid connection, and data continuity across six to twelve tools. For solar developers and EPCs, the highest-leverage investment right now is reducing handoff friction rather than adding more point solutions. The Anderson acquisition shows how PVcase is acting on this by closing the gap between site selection and design in one platform. Geist also flags that speculative early-stage project flipping is effectively dead in the current market, and that only projects with existing permitting approval carry real transactional value.

Connect with Douglas Geist:
LinkedIn

PVcase:
Website
LinkedIn

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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.

📌 Explore more from Soliverse

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
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In this episode, Peter Pongracz sits down with Christophe Lits, Senior Market Analyst at @SolarPowerEurope, live at Intersolar Europe 2026 to unpack the freshly launched Global Market Outlook for Solar Power. They dig into the slowdown in global growth momentum, China's shift away from guaranteed feed-in tariffs, Europe's first-ever expected installation decline, and why battery storage is becoming the make-or-break factor for the next phase of solar deployment.

Key topics:
Global solar market growth slowing from 80% to 30% to 12% year-on-year
China's Article 136 reform and the shift from feed-in tariffs to market pricing
Europe's first anticipated drop in annual PV installations
Grid curtailment and negative electricity prices driving the storage pivot
EU's new 200 GWh battery storage target for 2030

Takeaways:
2025 was a record year for solar with 664 GW installed globally, up 12% YoY.
China is moving PV developers from secured tariffs to market-based electricity pricing, partly due to emerging grid constraints.
Europe expects its first-ever installation decline in 2026, driven by falling residential subsidies and utility-scale developers pausing amid curtailment risk.
Battery storage is now the critical enabler for renewed solar growth from 2027 onward.
Solar's 2025 generation could cover five years of LNG shipments to the Strait of Hormuz — a striking energy security data point from the report.

Resources:
SolarPower Europe - Official Website - https://www.solarpowereurope.org
Global Market Outlook for Solar Power 2026-2030 - https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks/global-solar-market-outlook-2026-2030
European Battery Outlook 2026-2030 - https://www.solarpowereurope.org/insights/outlooks

📲 Follow Soliverse and Peter for more insights and updates:
Peter on LinkedIn: https://itl.ink/soliverseLI
Soliverse X (Twitter): https://itl.ink/soliverseX

🎧 Listen on Buzzsprout: https://itl.ink/soliversebuzzprout

🎙️ New episodes release bi-weekly.

Produced by APodcastGeek https://itl.ink/APodcastGeek

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