According to the International Energy Agency, the world is expected to build more renewable projects in the next five years as we have in the past 20. But this rapid and massive growth in the renewable energy space has proven increasingly challenging for insurers of these assets, who are struggling to deal with mounting losses from natural disasters (which themselves are often driven by climate change) as well as growing demand for new products that insure against other emerging risks such as production and revenue variability. In this episode, Chad Reed sits down Jason Kaminsky, CEO and co-founder of kWh Analytics, perhaps the leader in delivering data-enabled Climate Insurance for zero-carbon assets. In the discussion, Chad and Jason get into the weeds on the recent evolution of the Climate Insurance industry, kWh’s Fifth Annual Solar Risk Assessment as well as data-enabled solutions to address the most pressing risks facing the U.S. solar industry today.
According to the International Energy Agency, the world is expected to build more renewable projects in the next five years as we have in the past 20. But this rapid and massive growth in the renewable energy space has proven increasingly challenging for insurers of these assets, who are struggling to deal with mounting losses from natural disasters (which themselves are often driven by climate change) as well as growing demand for new products that insure against other emerging risks such as production and revenue variability.
In this episode, Chad Reed sits down Jason Kaminsky, CEO and co-founder of kWh Analytics, perhaps the leader in delivering data-enabled Climate Insurance for zero-carbon assets. In the discussion, Chad and Jason get into the weeds on the recent evolution of the Climate Insurance industry, kWh’s Fifth Annual Solar Risk Assessment as well as data-enabled solutions to address the most pressing risks facing the U.S. solar industry today.
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From Niche to Necessity: Insuring Renewable Energy
Episode recorded October 31, 2023
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Jason Kaminsky: We've been publishing the solar risk assessment for the last five years. To your point, it's almost more important for the next five years because we're going to have a lot of new people who are looking for resources, looking for best practices. I guess my call for other peers in the industry is, let's keep our industry out of trouble. To the extent there are best practices that you know and can share, I think like all ships rise, we know people are going to come in and take advantage of the transfer, so how can we collectively help educate the market?
Chad: According to the International Energy Agency, the world is expected to build more renewable projects in the next five years as we have in the past 20. But this rapid and massive growth in the renewable energy space has proven increasingly challenging for insurers of these assets, who are struggling to deal with mounting losses from natural disasters (which themselves are often driven by climate change) as well as growing demand for new products that insure against other emerging risks such as production and revenue variability.
In this episode, I sit down with Jason Kaminsky, CEO and co-founder of kWh Analytics, perhaps the leader in delivering data-enabled Climate Insurance for zero-carbon assets. In the discussion, Jason and I get into the weeds on the recent evolution of the Climate Insurance industry, kWh’s Fifth Annual Solar Risk Assessment as well as data-enabled solutions to address the most pressing risks facing the U.S. solar industry today.
Chad: Jason, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a real pleasure to have you.
Jason: Thank you, Chad. I'm glad to be here.
Chad: Well, first, I'd like to start with a question that I like to ask all of our guests, and that is, how did you find your way into the climate space? Were there any specific formative experiences that compelled you to devote your professional career to protecting our planet for future generations?
Jason: I guess it starts back in undergrad when I studied-- Turns out I studied a climate change degree before climate change degrees existed. I was at UCLA. It was called Atmosphere of Sciences at the time. Although now I think they call it climate change. It was basically like, I like science, and I hated biology. It was one of the few degrees you could get without having to take biology, so I did that and I did math. It was sort of my formal training in this space. Like, I don't know. It just seems like such an important-- That I was like, "How can I apply my career?"
I was an undergrad. I didn't know a lick about what I was going to do. I was like, "Policy feels way too long and unattractive and not my personality. Being in a lab doesn't really suit my personality." I stumbled upon an article about MBA programs that have sustainability themes. I have exposure to business, but I was in college, so not a ton. I am going to business school and there I was like, "Great. Now, I have business, but it's a big funnel. How do I best apply that within the space that I want?" I did my MBA. I did a master's in energy systems, as it turns out, but energy within all of that, I spent a year looking at corporate social responsibility and carbon credits and all these.
This is 15 years ago. Energy just felt like it touched on a lot of topics that were important to me. Obviously, environmental theme being an important one, economics, the military-industrial complex, again, as the oil. It just hit a lot of themes and felt like such an obvious place to have a big leverage point. I wouldn't say there was a single formative moment. It always just felt like an obvious thing that people needed to work in. I guess I was privileged to have the opportunity to say, "I don't need to be a lawyer, and I don't need to be a doctor.
I could be a little bit more creative in my career, which is definitely a privilege that I acknowledge." And through a set of, I guess, self-exploration ended in business is the way to apply that. Then, within that, the energy space. That was probably 20 years ago. At this point, I've been working in the solar industry ever since.
Chad: Now, let's turn to the company you co-founded and run, kWh Analytics, which is a leader in climate insurance. Specifically, you deliver data-enabled insurance for zero-carbon assets. You've been there for nearly a decade after you spent some time at Wells Fargo in environmental finance. Talk us through why you co-founded the company and how your business model has evolved over this last decade.
Jason: That's right. Actually, before that, I was a solar developer out a business school. Then, I ended up at Wells Fargo doing tax equity. Little did I know how esoteric tax equity is within the project finance space, but it is. I learned a lot. Yes, now, about 10 years ago, left to co-found kWh. Really, the thesis at the time was, as an industry, we're lacking data to make data-driven decisions. It's a high-level concept. What does that mean? It's a company we didn't really know at the time, but we set about building tools and software to essentially help financial investors help manage their investments.
If you're a tax equity investor, you get paid back based off the revenue that the project sells. That's the whole concept of project finance is you're lending to an asset. There's a whole bunch of monitoring asset management requirements. Then it turns out once you're passing a hundred assets or a couple of hundred assets, it gets really hard to do in Excel. We built tools essentially for banks, built risk management tools on top of that, launched reports like our solar risk assessment. Probably 2015 era, we got an award from the Department of Energy to apply our data to about 30% of operating data in the U.S. into modeling about long data production risk.
That project transformed itself into the first product that brought us into insurance, which is called the Solar Revenue Put. At a very high level, what we're doing is we're taking production volatility. We're offloading it into the insurance markets and helping our clients, which are the asset owners, get preferred financial treatment from their banks as a result of that - where project finance 101 is identifying structural risk at the entity that holds it best.
We believe our model has the best view of long-dated production risk in the market. We're using that to underwrite this risk. Then a couple years ago, we actually got pulled into the property insurance market. This is still renewables, still predominantly solar, storage, little bit of wind, predominantly non-residential, so rooftops, ground mount, but now for physical damage. Our production products are all about the things that can go wrong that aren't the catastrophes. [laughs] This is more now what can really, really go wrong within the business.
Things like fire, flood, hail is a big topic. Those are now the businesses that we're in the market of insuring. Our business model is that we represent carriers. We underwrite risk on behalf of carriers, we sell insurance products through brokers. One of the top pain points, the reason I got the call was they said, "Hey, look, insurance, frankly at a bank had never really been on the radar screen." In my four years at Wells Fargo, I maybe cumulatively spent an hour thinking about insurance. It was like we had language in the docs, people never negotiated it. It was fine.
The call I got was like, "Hey, this has come from something we don't think about to a top three credit issue." It's a major pain point with us and our clients because the insurance isn't available in the way that we need in order to finance this asset.
Chad: Now let’s get into how the insurance industry, especially relates to solar and other renewables, has evolved. You have a good blog post where you talk about a change that happened around 2019. Before that and part of the reason you probably never thought about insurance before then is becauseit was really easy to procure for the most part. I actually worked for TerraForm Power for a few years and for whatever reason I was actually in charge of procuring property and casualty insurance for a year or two for TerraForm. That's how I actually got to know Sara Kane, who I know that you're connected with as well. Talk us through how property casualty insurance in the renewables industry has evolved over the last few years, which led to your company's entry into the space.
Jason: I'll take a note out of Sara's book. Sara likes to say that in renewables we have a correcting market within a hardening market. Let me explain what both of those means. Let me start with hardening market. Renewable energy insurance sits within the broader property insurance market. The same carriers, the same reinsurance carriers that are providing insurance to renewable energy, do it for commercial buildings, do it for autos, do it for homes. In many instances, it's all big pools of capital that aggregate up risk. Within that market, there have been significant losses that have seemed to get worse every year as the "billion-dollar natural disasters happen every year".
That insurance has got more expensive. Carriers are pulling out of California because of wildfire risk, like Florida's an awful market because of hurricane risk. That's the hardening market. Hardening market just means rates are going up. Then we have the correcting market. This is the 2019 example. Midway, maybe the most famous asset in the little part of the market that I'm in was an asset in Texas that had a big hailstorm hit it and caught a bunch of carriers by surprise. Because carriers had never heard of micro cracks, hadn't really experienced a lot of hail losses.
Frankly, it makes sense, if you look at the charts of how Texas has grown relative to the rest of the country, Texas has come out of nowhere to become the number one market in the U.S. as far as installed capacity. By the way, there's a ton of hail in Texas that we never see out here in California where I live. You are building assets in more hazardous regions. At the same time, our industry is super good at squeezing every penny out of what you're building. You have thinner glass, you just have more vulnerable equipment, and those worlds collide and you have a lot of losses.
The reason that this was becoming an issue for the banks and actually now an issue for the clients is like a few fold. One is rates are going up, so it's becoming a much more material expense. Second is carriers that have limited capacity to deploy in any asset class around the world. Just like why load up on a bunch of Texas hail risk if there's other ways you can get a rate that's less concentrated? You have a confluence of factors that are all leading to this. It's global. Insurance in many ways is like global pools or structured finance capital. They're all just spreading risk around. It's great you brought up Sara because she's always like, make sure you attribute that to me, the correcting market and the hardening market, which I will also thank you, Sara.
Chad: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more please visit HASI.com
Chad: You now have over a decade of data on the operational performance of solar assets. How do you leverage that to better I guess model the risks that insurers are taking with regard to these solar projects?
Jason: One of the challenges we face as an industry, if you're generally speaking modeling an asset, you're looking at what's the risk of an event happening and then how does that affect your asset? A lot of the data we have now is about how does it affect the asset, so physical loss data that we put through the models. What you want to know is ultimately what are those factors that affect the assets? One of my big themes, and I do post on social media a lot, I've gotten big into LinkedIn, is about resilience. Is how do we build more resilient assets in the ground? Because there are decisions you can make as someone building, and operating assets that really affect the risk.
I'd say most carriers are maybe even one step naive on that. If they're modeling it, the knowledge of what kind of equipment is better. What operating decisions are better doesn't always go into their rating models and their pricing models. Some of these underwriters sit in London. They've never been to a U.S. solar project. The way that this risk gets transferred is opaque to most end users, myself included before I have a company that operates in this market. We use our data directly in our underwriting methods to say, "What do we believe make more resilient assets? How do we give that feedback to clients via other brokers? How do we rate on it?"
I want to get back to an earlier question which was, what is climate insurance? Which I think it could mean different things to different people. To me it is insurance that supports, I'll call climate positive assets in the ground. There's a lot of companies under this umbrella that could satisfy this. There's companies like ours, which represent basically insurance companies. Energetic - they help support credit risk, but help to get deals financed. There's a couple companies that are doing carbon credit insurance. If you buy a carbon credit, and the tree that they planted burned down or whatever, they pay you out for that, so ensure the quality of the carbon credit.
There's a handful of companies that are doing the modeling. Advanced wildfire modeling, taking the IPCC models and trying to build climate models on top of it. Renewables is this interesting thing, because it's exposed to climate driven natural disasters, but it's also meant to address climate driven natural disasters. Anything that's in that mix, to me I would say renewable energy property insurance is the most exciting. That's obviously where we play, but it's a very big market globally. Swiss Re says there's hundreds of billions of dollars of renewable energy premium that will be traded over the next 10 years.
If you're a carrier looking at where do you need to get smart, all of their books are shifting from traditional thermal, traditional fossil fuels into renewables. A lot of my narrative is back to the carriers as, "Hey, this is a segment you really need to pay attention to, deploy more capacity into." It's good business for me, but it's good business frankly for us as a, I'll call it as a renewable energy community, because we're putting assets in the ground faster than carriers are deploying balance sheets toward it. Everyone can come in and participate, and there's still probably going to be more demand than we can satisfy.
It's the drum I've been banging feverishly to the insurance and reinsurance community as well as trying to educate our market about, how do we educate the carriers? How do we build more resilient assets? It's pretty critical.
Chad: Absolutely. To that point, the organization publishes every year anannual solar risk assessment, which is a comprehensive report designed to provide an objective and data-driven evaluation of the risks based by especially solar projects. While the industry itself enjoys a number of tailwinds that have been driving its growth, including Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a number of long-term incentives to build these projects. There have been efforts to freeze tariffs that were put in place previously. Supply chains have come back to a decent extent in the industry, which has obviously helped.
But as you note in the report, the industry continues to face a number of risks, and you delineate three specific types of risks. One, financial modeling. Two, operational, and three extreme weather related, which we touched a little bit on earlier, but we'll dig into that a little bit more as well. First I want to get into the financial modeling risks. I think the biggest one here is in terms of the generation capacity of these projects, which of course drives their ability to generate revenue and their finance ability (as a result of that revenue as you previously noted). We've been wildly really overestimating the production capabilities of these assets. Tell us why this has happened and the broader implications of this for the industry.
Jason: Appreciate the overview of the report. Before I get into your specific question, I'll state a thesis that I haven't put on the record yet, but that I'm curious
how others will react to it, which is with the Inflation Reduction Act and the ability to transfer tax credits, I think one of the consequences of that is if they go to drive down the barriers to entry of who can build and finance assets. Like, if you don't need to meet the requirements of tax equity, then you should be able to be a mom-and-pop installer and go get financing.
My macro concern as an industry is that we're going to make a lot of the same mistakes, or new entrants will make the same mistakes that we've made and learned about over the last 10 years. We've been publishing the solar risk assessment for the last five years. To your point, it's almost more important for the next five years because we're going to have a lot of new people who are looking for resources, looking for best practices. I guess my call for other peers in the industry is, let's keep our industry out of trouble. To the extent there are best practices that you know and can share, I think like all ships rise, we know people are going to come in and take advantage of the transfer, so how can we collectively help educate the market?
Your podcast is a great forum, an example of that. Now, to your actual question, which is about financial modeling and production forecasting. One of the key assumptions into a project finance model is how much is your asset going to produce and how much revenue are you going to generate. To your point, Chad, as an industry, we put out another comp-like sister report called this solar generation index. Our findings were that, on the whole, if you compare forecasted numbers to actual generation numbers, there's about an 8% delta.
Across the country, not every asset is going to perform like this, but some are above the mean, some are below the mean, 8% is the average under-production. Why is that? It's a good question. Part of it is technical, and the cynical part of me will say part of it is commercial. I think we have the tools to model things pretty well. Everyone uses PVsyst and related products to that. In a world of ITC of the investment tax credit and, frankly, loans sized to revenue streams, the cynical part of me says the higher your number, the more financing you get.
It's not really been an issue that the industry's been terribly concerned about solving. Now that being said, if I go back to the Inflation Reduction Act in a world of PTCs if I'm the CEO of a developer--
Chad: Which are production tax credits, which - just for our listeners- tax credits are different whether it's an investment tax credit, ITC, or production tax credit, PTC. T Production Tax Credit is based on not the amount of the capital invested but the production of the facility over often a period of 10 years or so.
Jason: Thank you for clarifying that. That's exactly right. In a world of production tax credits, which the Inflation Reduction Act also enabled, if I'm the CEO of a developer, my decision to elect an ITC or PTC hinges heavily on that number. Heavily on, is my team accurate in the production forecasting? My hope for the future is that as an industry, we condense that gap from 8% down to 1% or 2%.
Chad: And its the independent engineers, the IEs, who are the ones who sign off on these production estimates that we've determined have been overestimating by an average of 8%, which is pretty significant. If I got 8% less than my salary for this year, I would be pretty upset about it. If that happened year after year after year, I might not be too happy with the folks who told me I was going to get my full salary instead of 92% of it. What role do the IE have here, the independent engineers, and how can your report and your analysis better inform their efforts?
Jason: It's even worse than that, Chad because if you have a mortgage and a car payment and all that, you're actually paying 80% of your salary to other people. Your 8% shortfall, all your discretionary income goes down.
Chad: That's just on a gross basis. On a net basis, it's far worse.
Jason: Which is how all this stuff works. Money is going out the door to pay off your loan, pay off your tax equity. The equity is much more exposed. In the solar risk assessment, ICF contributed, I think the independent engineers are getting a lot stronger at getting data back from the system that they model then using that to inform their underwriting. ICF said 99% availability, and let's be honest, it's not actually happening out in the field. They, and one of the articles in this year's solar risk assessment is that it should be lower than that. They presented some data to present to the market. It's not any singular factor.
The thing about PVsyst is you can have-- There's a hundred different knobs you can pull, and you can put any weather file you want into there. It's really about using data to help inform what are those assumptions that are driving this and being judicious about modeling it accurately. I know that's not a silver bullet solution, but to your point, the IEs are the ones often on the front line sitting between a developer who may have some financial incentive
to get a number and the bank who's underwriting that. I guess my hope is that as we move towards PTCs and we move towards better data using in the underwriting process, those numbers will begin to line up a little bit more closely.
Chad: Right. You mentioned your solar revenue put as your first product, I believe that your company released which--
Jason: You could buy the solar revenue to put a floor on it,
Chad: It helps address this risk. I'm going to let you pitch that product here right now, or if you want to do so for a minute or so.
Jason: Yes, no, absolutely. Appreciate the opportunity. The solar revenue put will put a floor on that figure. We use our own data-driven underwriting model. We have a production forecasting model that's sort of like PVsyst an open source version of PVsyst, validated by thousands of projects. We know based off location and technology and DC/AC ratios and et cetera, et cetera, what that plant is likely to do over the next 10, 15 years.
You can come to us, we'll find an insurance carrier to underwrite the risk, and if you fall below a certain trigger point, below a certain megawatt hour threshold we make you whole for that. That's a financial mechanism to shift some of that risk as well into a third party market. If you're worried about either your own cash flow or if your bank is worried about underwriting a number, it works in either of those regards.
Chad: Better informing the IEs and the solar revenue put are ways that can better help us address this risk.
Jason: There you go.
Chad: Our next challenge are operational risks. Your report details that one of the primary drivers of plan underperformance is unscheduled equipment maintenance and failures, which obviously can lead to downtime and lost energy production and lower overall project returns. According to your research, when you looked at which equipment is the most culpable for this, you find that it's very often inverters, which are obviously required in all solar projects,and they result in nearly half of these energy losses, obviously higher than any other single component. Tell us more about this risk and its implications for the industry.
Jason: Yes, inverters are pernicious. I don't know how else to put it. Yes. I've come to learn as well from peers in the industry. Inverters also just exhibit a lot of the failures, even if they sit upstream on the DC side. You can have a ground fault because of a wiring issue and your inverter trips and there you go. I would say inverters on the whole absolutely as you said, are a big cause of the problems. Part of it as well is that the inverter manufacturers used to when I entered the industry, allow third party techs to go service the equipment and they pulled back from that.
You have supply chain issues and you have a lack of qualified techs that can go out and fix the issues. Then you also have one of the other articles in the solar risk assessment is that if you actually look at their efficiency, inverter efficiency in different environments, most of the places either deploy they're actually not performing at the efficiencies that the inverter manufacturers are saying. I feel like at least in the reliability of assets, so when we talk about resilience, which is the physical asset, I'll call it property insurance, I think of modules as a big driver.
I think about reliability, which is the ability of the asset to hit its uptime targets and generate that power. I think inverters are the big culprit. I'm sure you've seen it Chad and all of the work that you guys do, it just seems like every tech in the world bangs their head against the wall to try to get their inverters to perform. I saw on LinkedIn it's like, "Oh, we pushed a software upgrade and now our inverters aren't working, or even worse, they're failing out at a very dramatic fashion." Yes, I don't know how to say it other than it's a problem. Paying attention to the inverter reliability is pretty critical, I think.
Chad: Then finally, we did touch on extreme weather risks earlier, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about the most common extreme weather risks that solar projects face and the lessons learned in terms manufacturing processes that we can use to address these risks going forward.
Jason: Absolutely. On the extreme hazard side, I'd say solar projects are exposed to all of them based on where they're deployed. The ones that are probably top of mind-- well a lot of them are top of mind, let's say hail, we'll talk about hail for a minute, fire we'll talk about for a second. Then the ones I won't spend so much time on are flood and hurricane. Then there's winter storm, which is basically heavy snow on the panels and then earthquake. I'll start with hail because that's the one that keeps everyone up at night. We touched on earlier in the podcast that we're building assets in hail prone regions, right? How do we address that?
Fortunately, there's been a lot of research that
shows that you can at least mitigate it with good operational practices and better equipment selection. On the operational practices side, hailstone has become quite an important theme. Which basically says if a hailstorm is coming and you tilt your panels out of the way, use your tracker to basically put it in wind storm but similar either for hail it does two things. It takes the amount of physical glass facing the sky like the physical amount of surface areas reduced, but then also if your hail hits it, it's more of a glance and blow.
If you're looking at your physics the kinetic energy going into the module's reduced. That's all good and well. I think the key challenge for the asset owners that are listening is how do you operationalize those practices? I think now people who are paying attention to insurance what's going on in the markets or listen to podcasts know about hail-stow, but you got to know the hailstorm is coming. You need to have an escalation plan as to say add certain thresholds. We're going to hit the button and go into stow. If Jason is on vacation, Chad needs to know to step in and do it, how to operationalize that is where we see a lot of people still having some missteps.
That's a key theme, is how do you operationalize your hail-stow procedures. I think looking forward there's also going to be an equipment selection decision to say I've I've heard of module manufacturers talking about thicker glass. Can we put thicker glass on the modules? Maybe make it less prone to break through a hailstorm. Within the solar risk assessment, there's research that talks about glass glass modules, [unintelligible 00:26:38] modules, there's actually a thinner glass than glass back sheet modules, so maybe a less preferred solution for a hail prone region.
I think as an industry we're just going to continue to get smarter about how to handle that physical event. Hail takes up all the air in the room because it's now the biggest market, and some of the pictures that come out after hailstorms are just totally gory, Bloomberg picks it up, and then everyone's like oh solar's awful. I think it can be managed if you do it well. The next one I'm going to go to is fire. The main theme there is well twofold. One is it's not typically wildfires. We're not building these in forest but brush fire. How do you mitigate that? If you're designing a plant you can have fire breaks and other things but it's predominantly vegetation management.
Mowing the lawn, pulling out the brush, making sure the local fire station knows how to handle it having water available, but as an operator, you can do a lot to control whether or not your site is prone to that. Now I said I touched on a few other ones. Flood, really important to look at the flood maps for where you're building a location. You can elevate pieces of equipment for the 1-in-100 or 1-in-500-year floodplane. That will be very critical if you're anywhere where there's flooding which these days seems like it's happening more and more. Hurricane, your attachment methods to the racking, making sure you're doing torque test audits, making sure equipment's super secure, just like ahead of a hurricane putting it into wind-stow.
The thing is we build these assets and then sometimes you're not going to replace all the equipment that's out in the site. There's a lot of operational decisions and I think a lot of control that asset managers have to site resilience. That's again one of the themes I'm going to keep banging until as an industry I feel like our competence is high on that, and we're learning more every year. It's an evolving topic.
Chad: Absolutely. Well, we're certainly glad your risk assessment report helps us learn each year about these risks. Jason, we're almost done. But before we end, we have the hot seat. We ask for your immediate reactions to each of the following statements. The first is one thing I changed my mind on is.
Jason: I'll say nuclear. I was pretty down on it 10 years ago, 15 years ago when my climate change class basically said this is a problem for future generations. I think that that was clearly a mis-estimate and it's a problem like now, so I'll say nuclear I'm much more supportive of it than I was.
Chad: Small modular nuclear?
Jason: Just like the concept of nuclear I don't know if I have a preference within that.
Chad: Sure. When I need to recharge I--
Jason: Go look at some redwood trees. I'm in California so I have the benefit of being near redwoods but they're just the most majestic I was going to say creatures, most majestic plants, trees to me.
Chad: The key ingredient to my productivity is--
Jason: I'm going to say sleeping on it. I actually think that there's a lot that I get done by putting something down and coming back to it the next day and looking at it with a new set of eyes.
Chad: Fresh eyes. I want my kid to know--
Jason: I guess that I tried that we're working on it that there's a lot
of us that are working feverishly to get us out of a bad problem.
Chad: Good college try.
Jason: Hopefully better than that. We need as a human species.
Chad: Well you are a Berkeley resident, and I spent two years in Berkeley. Sohe most underrated part of East Bay is?
Jason: I don't know if it's underrated, but maybe, I'd say the least known is up in the Berkeley and Oakland Hills. There's a lot of redwoods and incredible hiking, but also great stuff for kids. We have a farm up there where you can feed the cows that are all owned by the city or the county. There's a carousel, there's a little steam train you can take your kids on. We enjoy that up there, up in Tilden area.
Chad: Oh, excellent. Finally, to me, climate positive means—
Jason: Gosh, a lot of hard work. I think everyone in this industry is just hedged down, working really hard. Nothing comes easy, but I think we’re seeing the tides have changed. It’s given me some optimism.
Chad: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your hard work and your time today, Jason. It’s been a pleasure.
Jason: Yeah, thank you, Chad.
Chad: If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hasi.com
I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.