Cohort 9: The Rise of Electrify, Giggle, Repeat
A new version of our flagship course is ALIVE! And FREE.
Welcome to My Next Electric, a newsletter about the future of energy and going electric. We cover:
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Vehicle design and grid integration @ Night Shift Bikes
How it all works & what to do about it @ My Next Electric
Today, we launch Cohort 9 of our course on the future of energy & going electric!
2025, What is your deal?
It’s hard to stay focused — much less psyched — about the future of energy and electrification in 2025. The energy progress bummers keep coming, like this week’s layoffs at the Dept. of Energy. I don’t know where your head’s at, but mine’s all over the place:
I need to get in a cohort
My happy place in times like these is a cohort of curious people learning something new — like any of the past 8 cohorts of My Next Electric.
There are things to stay happy about. Like the inevitable, exponential math of renewables and electrification. Especially the ones we nerd out on here: EVs, solar, and storage. Not much can stop the science and the scale economics behind each of these.
But they can be slowed down, and maintaining their huge momentum will take more preparation, precision and mental toughness than it did in 2024.
My friend Glenn Liebeck says times like these call for…a training montage.
That’s a pretty good way to think about the newest cohort of My Next Electric sequence — a damn-I’m-glad-we-did-that training sequence. Minus the light sabers.
How we got here
If you’re new to the newsletter:
I’m so psyched you are here! Thank you.
Let me catch you up on the course.
30 years ago, I became a teacher.
I’m a teacher first. Middle school, actually. Math, Spanish, some sports, the math team. Most of my day jobs since have been about teaching and learning, not energy. I try and keep up with people I admire — like Nicole Jarbo, the CEO of 4.0. Her new podcast, Pitch Playground, has already inspired upgrades you’ll see in the course.
20 years ago, I became a motonerd.
A few weeks after I moved to New Orleans, I bought a $30 pdf then spent a year of late nights converting my first gasoline motorcycle to electric.
I’m still building bikes; this one was on a TV show and in a book on the future of transportation.
This one’s part of a permanent installation in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood.
This year, I electrified my first car.
6 years ago, I became an investor in solar and batteries.
In 2019, a good friend, Freeman Hall, started adding used EV batteries to the solar farms he’d been building. Battery prices had been plummeting. This part I knew; I’d been buying them off eBay and Craigslist to jam into motorcycles.
What I didn’t know was how important batteries could be to the energy grid. Solar generation was growing so fast in California that, in the early afternoon on super sunny days, solar operators were paid not to generate power; the grid didn’t need it.
But every night, like clockwork, operators of solar farms were left on the sidelines just as residential energy demand spiked (boot up Netflix, kick up the AC, cook some dinner). If solar plants only had batteries, they could save up some extra mid-day energy until people needed it most.
Freeman understood the duck curve and moved when the math on batteries worked. B2U now runs the biggest used EV battery pack power plants in the US. I’ve learned a lot from him. Thank you, Freeman.
3 years ago, I started teaching a class called My Next Electric.
By 2022, I’d learned so much from Freeman and others, I felt compelled to share it with anyone who’d listen. So I put up a website and started sharing what I’d been learning.
A few months later, The Inflation Reduction Act passed, and things got busy. People were hungry for details on the biggest climate bill in history, especially the incentives on cars, appliances and storage. I scrambled to update the class, and it grew quickly.
My inner teacher was amped; it felt like middle school again.
But my inner motonerd and investor were bummed. There was no time for them to do their things. So I took a break from the course and explored. Since cohort 8, I’ve:
invested in ten more startups
been named an all-star mentor at Techstars EnergyTech
built a robot and started volunteering for a high school team
helped build a network of solar+storage microgrids in New Orleans
studied how Meta’s big datacenter came to my state
stumbled on a fun way to meet founders — Park Bench Pitch
electrified the Fiat
I’ve learned something about myself, too — that being in a cohort with other curious people might be where my inner teacher, inner motonerd and inner investor are happiest.
So yeah, all three of us are pretty amped right now. We’re working hard on this one.
3 hours ago, I we launched Cohort 9.
The pacing’s new — fast out of the gate as we build energy intuition, then slower so you can work at your pace on specifics. There’s stuff straight from the energy transition frontier — sites visits, interviews, pods, reads, datasets. We’ll talk to real people — from alumni electrifying their stuff to folks at non-profits and companies going electric in wild new ways.
We’ll do some engineering, policy, design, a little history. Even math. But the foundation of this course isn’t science. It’s laughter.
Cohort 9: The Rise of Electrify. Giggle. Repeat.
My favorite memory of going electric is more than ten years old now. EV builders have a name for what happens on these Frankenrides — the EV grin. For me, it was an actual giggle. Jed Lipinski was there when it happened.
The unbridled joy of experiencing one of these glimmers of a better energy future — even if it’s held together with sketchy welds and actual duct tape — is what this course is about. There is rigor here, for sure. I want you to see the math on going electric. And the design principles that make electric vehicles so much more efficient.
I want you to giggle, too — when you feel how much better these solutions already are. For you, your wallet, and your community.
Like Community Lighthouse. I wish you could’ve been inside that fellowship hall when we switched from the grid to batteries. Audible gasps. Then cheers. Then, the giggling.
What if this is the way?
Electrify.
Giggle.
Repeat.
What if we tried it? Together.
Sign up now at mynextelectric.com!
Good energy right when we need it. Thanks, Matt!
Love the vibe!