- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Sunrun CEO Mary Powell about the future of energy in the U.S.
- The big story: Trump caves on Powell and China
- The markets: Investors love it when the president does a U-turn.
- Analyst notes from Convera on the dollar, JPMorgan on Alphabet, and Oxford Economics on tariff uncertainty.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Sunrun CEO Mary Powell shared an interesting video with me when we met recently after the Los Angeles wildfires. It showed some of her customers talking about having electric power in neighborhoods with outages because they had Sunrun’s solar and home backup storage. The company now has a partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) to tap such homes for load relief in neighborhoods with constrained electric grids. But this is a challenging time to be in the renewable energy industry. While solar is being whacked by tariffs, wind power has arguably been especially hard hit as the Trump Administration has made moves such as halting Equinor’s turbine project in New York.
Powell likes to talk about Sunrun as “America’s clean energy company” by embracing a storage-first strategy that brings a gigawatt of capacity to the grid each year. Her message to policymakers: “We are about bringing Americans not just energy independence, but control of their energy future,” she says. “I also say we are building America’s largest distributed power plant because all those residential customers can export energy back to the grid when the grid needs it the most.”
Talking about energy security resonates in a way that climate change and “clean” energy do not. (Raise your hand if your company trumpeted its sustainability efforts to mark Earth Day yesterday.)
That’s not always the case in the rest of the world. Earlier this week, I met with Sumant Sinha, chairman and CEO of India’s ReNew Energy before he headed to Washington for the IMF World Bank Spring Meetings. Like Sunrun, he listed the company on Nasdaq, only to see its stock price fall amid headwinds from inflation to shifting trade policies. That’s why Sinha has taken part in discussions to go private. But he’s optimistic about the growth picture for renewable energy in his home market.
While the U.S. may be pulling back on some types of renewable energy, he argues, “I think the rest of the world is just going to carry on.” What gives me hope are initiatives like Yes SF, an innovation challenge launched by the World Economic Forum, Citi, Deloitte, Salesforce, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to revitalize downtown San Francisco. Yesterday it announced its second cohort of innovators and is now going global.
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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