As Part of Climate Week New York in September, Invenergy’s CEO and founder Michael Polsky sat down with Blackstone Infrastructure Partners to discuss innovation and decarbonization and Invenergy’s mission to deliver cleaner, more reliable, more affordable energy. You can read some excerpts below or watch the full video here. On Polsky’s work in innovating cleaner energy sources, he said: “By my nature, I'm a developer…We facilitate the energy transition by developing more and more of those projects… We approximately serve 10% of the U.S. market on renewables.”
On battery storage, Polsky said: “Battery storage allows us to do different things... One of the easiest ways to understand it is if we produce too much energy at certain times, we can store it and release it at other times. So effectively, if we have too much solar during the day, we can shift that solar electricity from the daytime to nighttime. When there is no solar radiation, that’s just one of the simplest ways batteries...allow more renewables on the grid.”
On supply chains, Polsky said: “One of the important areas of the energy transition is supply chains ... We want to bring manufacturing here domestically instead of relying on China and other countries... And particularly with the solar industry… there is a whole supply chain...culminating with solar panels.”
On Invenergy’s work to advance manufacturing and onshore the solar supply chain, Polsky said: “We decided that because we're one of the largest solar developers and... in order to control our own destiny, we had to basically bring domestic manufacturing back to the United States. So we decided to build a solar panel factory, and we made a decision...that it would be the largest solar manufacturing facility in the United States...and one of the most, if not the most, technologically advanced...facilities in the world making solar panels.”
On Invenergy’s pipeline to deliver cleaner, more reliable, more affordable energy, Polsky said: “We have very large pipeline of renewables...We are busy, and we will be staying busy…for a lot of years to come.”
On the criticality of transmission, Polsky said: “The energy transition is not one thing. It's multiple things… renewable projects like wind, solar, offshore wind, better storage…but also transmission lines because… in order to bring more renewables into the grid and in order to operate grid more efficiently, you have to build out the grid.”
On transmission, Polsky continued: “Transmission development, particularly long-distance transmission that interconnects very large geographies of the United States…is very fundamental... even if you add storage, you still cannot eliminate the impact of the weather. So, in order to eliminate or reduce the impact of the weather, you must be able to connect very large geographies.”
On the future demand for energy, Polsky said: “Decarbonization is a very good business…Regardless of...what government tells you to do, it just makes sense.”
Polsky continued: “I do believe that the future is zero carbon…we are dealing with the large problems and large solutions and…we at Invenergy are very excited by solving big problems.”