The Climate Fix

Unlocking investment for renewables w/ Phillip Bruner from Enian

Episode Summary

Planning for a renewable energy plant is a hot mess! Lots of google searches, map queries, phone conversations, and ad-hoc data sets glued together with spreadsheets. It makes it hard for insurance companies to evaluate your risk and banks to lend you money which means less renewable sites get built. ENIAN has built a platform that makes it easier for companies to plan and finance renewable energy.

Episode Notes

Imagine building a car completely from scratch, you won't build that many cars. Now imagine building a car using a stock set of components, you'll build a lot more, banks will be more willing to lend you money, insurance companies will be more willing to insure you.  

It turns out the process of planning for a renewable site is bespoke, it involves a lot of google searches, a lot of random bits of data that are hard to find and even harder to verify. This makes it difficult to secure financing or insurance for your projects. Enian is building a platform to make it easier to plan renewable sites and in today's podcast, I spoke with Phillip Bruner to find out more.  

Phillip co-founded his first start-up in 2009 called SCENE – a social enterprise that accelerates renewable energy and ICT access for communities worldwide.  

Then in 2012, he was recruited by a commercial law firm to develop and execute large solar PV, wind, and small-hydro plants across the UK and India.  

At the same time, he founded and led the Green Investment Forum, a private dinner club of c-level professionals overseeing a combined $200bn in green assets.  

His thought leadership has been featured in MIT Sloan Review, the FT, and Johns Hopkins University Series on Sustainable Entrepreneurship as well as for the IIED and Oxford Research Group.  

He is also an EPSRC-funded PhD candidate in Geography at the University of Edinburgh.

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