Well, I am standing in the middle of the trade show floor at RE+ in Las Vegas – the largest renewable energy tradeshow in the U.S. – surrounded by thousands of people and these crazy big booths with company names suspended from the ceiling, as far as the eye can see.
The buzz is absolutely electric, on all kinds of levels. Yes, renewables are facing no end of political and economic headwinds – the clawback of federal tax credits and other funding, siting and permitting roadblocks, tariffs, executive orders and endless misinformation – but no one here is ready to roll up, roll over or go home.
If anything, all President Donald Trump’s efforts to slow down the growth of solar, wind and energy storage are only making the companies here more determined to stay the course. The industry is getting lean and mean, and the air is crackling with innovation.
What follows is a very small and random sampling of the clean tech on display at RE+, which sprawled over a couple acres in three exhibition halls at two hotels. It was three days of total sensory overload and lots of walking.
In some cases, I had been invited to visit booths; in others, I was cruising the floor and got curious about something that looked cool and fun. No personal or professional endorsements are intended.
That said, I was definitely curious about TerraWise, a start-up spun out of UCLA, which has produced an artificial intelligence-driven robot, called the Rover, that can inspect solar panels at large-scale projects that may cover tens or hundreds of acres. The company won a start-up pitch competition on the second day of the conference.
Shuwang Zhang and the TerraWise Rover at RE+
What’s majorly cool about the robot, according to Shuwang Zhang, Terrawise’s founding AI engineer and recent UCLA grad (pictured here), is that it has sensors that can detect cracked panels, dirty panels and “hot spots” where wires may be exposed or broken. Unlike other robots doing similar work, no human control is necessary. The TerraWise system incorporates an onsite charging station and has maps that tell the robot where to go.
Data collected at a project site can be stored and downloaded daily or, in the case of a potential emergency, sent in real time via a WiFi link, he said.
The company currently has five Rovers in the field, two in Asia, one in Germany and two in California. Zhang said the next steps will be finding the funding to expand production and keep improving the system, adding wider wheels for more uneven terrain and more sensors that catch even more potential problems.
AI everywhere
The TerraWise Rover is just one example of the increasingly pervasive use of AI to streamline processes and cut costs in almost every facet of the clean tech industry. Start-ups are everywhere. Ask for a demo, and the entrepreneurs who are launching these companies will go into extensive detail on just how cool their products are and everything they can do.
I spent over a half hour with Tal Chalozin and Scott Rosenberg, the co-founders of a company called 257, who were at RE+ to preview their new AI platform, called Pink, which is aimed at accelerating the home electrification market.
(257 is an homage and reference to 257 Pearl St., the New York City location of Thomas Edison’s first commercial power plant, which opened in 1882.)
As Talozin explained it to me, he and Rosenberg have created digital twins, or copies, for more than 130 million homes across the country. This mammoth database can then be used to zero in on specific customers in specific towns or cities who might be likely to install rooftop solar, storage, an electric vehicle charger, a heat pump or other home electric appliances.
On a test drive of the platform, Talozin drilled down into homes in Imperial County in Southern California, filtering through tens of thousands of sites to find around 5,000 low-income homes that would be good prospects for solar. Pink can even go down to the block level, pinpointing homes on individual streets.
After identifying these prospective customers, a solar company using the software could then immediately send out marketing messages via social media, text messages or direct mail. The businesses would only pay for the service if it works for them, Talozin said. Prelaunch, 257 has been field-testing Pink with a couple dozen customers, ranging from solar installers to utilities marketing energy efficiency programs.
Adib Naslé, the CEO of Xendee, ran me through his company’s more mature platform, which is focused on streamlining the development of distributed energy resources – industry jargon for projects like microgrids or virtual power plants or solar and storage projects. Users can input the kind of project they want to develop, and the platform will find the best sites for it, then design it – providing technical drawings and financial analyses – and continue through operation and improving performance.
Naslé told me the platform is set up to plan and design projects across 27 technologies, from solar and storage to fuel cells and combined heat and power and even natural gas. Xendee has already worked with the U.S. Department of Defense to design microgrids for military bases, and its platform has been used to help design the NEOM megaproject in Saudi Arabia, to be powered by clean energy.
To keep up with fast changing economic, regulatory and policy changes, Xendee is updated every two weeks, Naslé said, pulling up a list of the most recent updates. After 45 minutes, his assistant literally had to tear me away while he was showing me one last feature.
So, based on the abundant evidence at RE+, solar and clean energy in general are getting smarter and cheaper and aren’t going anywhere.
The U.S. market is going to grow, maybe not as fast as it might with federal support, but it’s the market everyone wants in on – from sheep farmers in Minnesota to solar panel and electronics manufacturers in China and India.
I met David Arnold, a farmer from Northfield, Minn., at an agrivoltaics exhibit in a relatively quiet corner of the trade show where he was keeping an eye on four very cute sheep chomping on hay under two big solar panels.
Solar sheep: Warm, fuzzy industry ambassadors
Solar grazing has become a well-established and extremely photogenic sector of the larger solar industry. According to the American Solar Grazing Association, which organized the exhibit at RE+, over 113,000 sheep are now managing the vegetation at 506 solar projects covering close to 130,000 acres in 30 states, red and blue.
Another less-known part of the industry is what is known as “balance of system” – all the nuts, bolts and other equipment that aren’t actually panels.
These companies tend to have smaller booths on the periphery of the show, which is where I found CFriend Electric, a Chinese company that makes all the different kinds of fuses used for solar projects, storage projects and electric vehicle charging.
A little-known part of clean tech: fuses
With its Chinese-made products, the company would have a hard time breaking into the U.S. market, given Trump’s tariffs and the increasingly tight regulations about domestic content, but showing up at RE+ is a first step, a signal of intent.
Other Chinese companies were on the main floor showing off some very cool and fun products that could draw wide interest from consumers, if and when they are available in the United States. Possibly one of the neatest, most creative things I saw at RE+ was a solar EV charger from a company called Gaotu New Energy. Flexible solar panels are folded up in a rooftop compartment on an electric vehicle and then unfold over the hood, roof and trunk to charge the vehicle.
Charging an EV off the panels can provide 50 miles of range, enough for the daily short trips that make up about 80% of a household’s annual mileage, according to the company’s marketing materials. And the panels can reduce heat absorption on hot days, keeping vehicle interiors cooler.
Have solar panels, will charge and travel.
Other companies aren’t waiting. UZ Energy, a Chinese company producing AI-driven home and commercial battery storage systems, will soon hit the U.S. market via its acquisition by SES AI, a Massachusetts-based company that also produces AI-integrated battery storage. According to the SES announcement,, the acquisition is targeted at combining the two companies’ technologies to provide storage for the data center market.
It is a truism of the electric power industry, that technology moves faster than policy and regulation. Based on what I saw in Vegas, clean tech is in for a wild and bumpy ride, but the industry clearly intends to out-innovate, out-AI and outlast Donald Trump.
Once again, ante up!