Jon Powers (00:02):

Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. I’m the co-founder of Clean Capital and served as president of Obama’s chief sustainability officer. On this podcast, we explore solutions to climate change by talking to industry leaders about the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance. You can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. Welcome back to Experts Only. I’m your host, Jon Powers. As I mentioned on the previous episode, we are really just getting our show started again after a hiatus in 2025. I spent a lot of time in Washington helping to shape policies and trying to make sure that we can have a future of our industry in light of the current administration. I’m excited about the conversations that we’re having around the future of where we’re headed. And today’s specific conversation I’ve been trying to have for a year because of the amazing leadership of Sarah Kane, who’s at the CAC Group, which is a Baldwin group company.

(01:04):

Insurance may not seem like the most exciting conversation. I come from a family of insurance folks. My dad was an insurance agent. My brother’s in the insurance space. I didn’t go down that path, but it is vital on how we are looking at the growth of our industry, the growth of the assets, how we’re addressing climate change, because they really truly understand risk and managing risk. And we’re going to talk to Sarah about that growth, her personal growth, the growth of the industry, and where it’s going, and to include some incredible work she and her colleagues have been doing in third world countries to help empower communities. And they recently came back from a trip to Nepal with some of my colleagues at Clean Capital. We’ll talk about that as well. I hope you enjoy the episode. You can get more at cleancapital.com. Sarah, thanks for joining me at Experts Only.

Sara Kane (01:49):

Thanks to be here.

Jon Powers (01:50):

You know I’ve talked about this before, but I’m going to talk about it on the show. And I come from an insurance family. My dad was one of the first Allstate agents recruited out of Sears. When he was in the Army, Sears recruited army officers to be Sears managers, and then Allstate recruited Sears managers to be agents. So he was literally, well, now well over 50 years ago. One of the early Allstate agents. And my brother works in the industry, worked for my dad at one point now is actually all within the same place you are. I am the Black Sheep of the family, didn’t follow that path, but have really grown to appreciate and understand the impact and relevance that the industry has on everything we do, but especially in the industry we are in today. And I want to get into that, but I sort of want to get into you first.

(02:40):

You’re got a fascinating background. You went to Duke. Where’d you grow up?

Sara Kane (02:45):

Well, suburban New York, outside of New York City, a town called Suffron.

Jon Powers (02:50):

Oh, Suffron. Yeah. So you can say upside. I’m from Buffalo.

Sara Kane (02:52):

I know. That’s why I had to temper it.

Jon Powers (02:58):

So how’d you end up a Duke from upstate New York?

Sara Kane (03:02):

My dad didn’t want me to go west of the Mississippi. That was the only rules really I had. I went to see Duke. I fell in love with it immediately. They had an environmental science and policy program, kind of knew out of the gate that that’s what I was going to major in. Amazing.

Jon Powers (03:14):

I

Sara Kane (03:14):

Mean, if you’ve ever been on the campus-

Jon Powers (03:16):

Why did you know out of the gate that’s what you wanted to do?

Sara Kane (03:18):

I don’t know. I just grew up knowing that. I was really interested in … I don’t know. I drank some sort of Kool-Aid and just really interested in the natural environment and environmental issues. And yeah, for as long as I can remember, I knew this was the path I was going to go down.

Jon Powers (03:35):

It was actually what

Sara Kane (03:35):

It was going to be, but that’s something in environmental issues. Yeah.

Jon Powers (03:39):

Did you spend a lot of time outside as a kid?

Sara Kane (03:42):

Not particularly. I think camping, but yeah, it’s really hard to know how I ended up with this kind of passion, but it’s always been

Jon Powers (03:49):

There. Yeah, because then you went to Yale and you went to the school forestry- I did. I did the

Sara Kane (03:52):

Joint degree at

Jon Powers (03:53):

Yale. Yeah. And so how did that lead to insurance? It’s a

Sara Kane (03:58):

Great question and it has pretty nerdy answer. So I’d studied a lot of environmental economics and I’d always been interested in the externality of pollution. How do you put a price on pollution? Why is it an externality in the first place and where can that be changed? And the best example of that is in pollution liability insurance. So all the 1970s eras laws that created consequences for polluting.

(04:23):

You could actually build an insurance policy around that once there’s a consequence. And so all those laws effectively say if you pollute, then you’re legally responsible for the cleanup. And so AIG actually pioneered the concept of pollution liability insurance. They did a lot of brownfield redevelopment. And if you’re in the chain of title for having ever halt a piece of property that had a pollutant, you were going to be responsible for that. So how do you incent development knowing that that’s kind of hanging over folks’ head and you can use the insurance markets for it. And so I was finishing Yale in 2007. I was really interested in this question, especially-

Jon Powers (04:58):

Did you go straight from due TEO?

Sara Kane (05:00):

No, I took two years in between.

Jon Powers (05:02):

You did okay. I worked at ITF for

Sara Kane (05:03):

Two years in DC.

Jon Powers (05:05):

Oh, excellent.

Sara Kane (05:06):

And so interested in how you could put a price on environmental risk, specifically carbon dioxide. The time in 2007, a carbon tax seemed a real possibility, and I felt like it would be a great opportunity to learn how it had happened in traditional pollutants. And if CO2 became named as a pollutant, you could similarly imagine you could create an insurance policy around that. If you admitted more than you were allowed to, how do you use insurance to bridge that? So that’s how I ended up at AIG in 2007. Really interesting time to be there. At the time AIG was … I know.

Jon Powers (05:40):

Fascinating.

Sara Kane (05:41):

AIG at the time though was the only US insurer actively lobbying the federal government for legislation on climate change. They had an office of climate change. I don’t remember what it was called, but I kind of got to moonlight in that office while I was working in AIG Environmental. Kind of a bit of a made up role at the time. I wasn’t an underwriter.

Jon Powers (05:59):

Oh, the role was in AIG environmental. That’s fascinating.

Sara Kane (06:02):

Yeah. Yeah. And really great leaders who kind of took me under their wing. I got to go to meetings that I should not have been at at that stage of my career, but just learned a lot about how the organization was structured. And I worked on a partnership with our energy team on the first carbon capture and storage project that we built an insurance policy around. It was a pilot project at the time.

Jon Powers (06:25):

What timeframe was this? Safety and-

Sara Kane (06:27):

2007, early

Jon Powers (06:28):

2008. Yeah, so before the world came crashing down in 2008.

Sara Kane (06:31):

Yes. Yeah. So 2008 was really obviously, I’d only been out of school for a minute, tons of debt. The AIG’s kind of collapsing around us. And I learned a ton there. I mean, such great leadership of my team who led us through that. But really what it woke me up to is a bunch of our leaders and teammates left to form another company, but having not been an underwriter at the time, I was kind of in this made up role. I couldn’t really add a lot of value. And so I really immediately realized that if I really wanted to understand how the mechanism worked, I needed to get into underwriting. So I moved into

Jon Powers (07:05):

Solution

Sara Kane (07:05):

Underwriting for a bit, but then gets to 2009, 2010, and we’re in the stimulus bill era and we’re starting to see some large projects out west. And I had the opportunity to move from pollution underwriting to renewable energy property underwriting, which felt like it was going to be a lot closer to my long-term goals at that point,

Jon Powers (07:24):

Especially that- And the industry was just really emerging then. I mean, for real.

Sara Kane (07:28):

Exactly. Yeah. And these were our first really large scale renewable energy projects out west. And the market wasn’t … There definitely were renewable energy property underwriters active in the market at the time, but it was very nascent and it was a great opportunity. I liked to think at the time that environmental insurance was a very niche insurance for traditional industry. And then when I went to renewable energy property, it was very traditional product, property insurance, but for what the time was a very niche industry. And that felt like the right moment to flip. So I started doing that in 2010, first at what we call an MGA, then at a company called Axis, where I was for five years, where we were starting to see some really big projects built and we were trying to figure out how to underwrite it.

Jon Powers (08:18):

So I

Sara Kane (08:18):

Was really fortunate to be among the early underwriters of renewable energy property. And candidly, we were all learning it together. We thought about solar projects at the time and we’re like, “Well, what can happen? They just kind of lay there in the sun.” I mean, we’ve since learned. And so we were doing a lot of wind, a lot of solar starting in 2010 timeframe, and then we were moving into energy storage. So we’re kind of still there and obviously a lot has been learned.

Jon Powers (08:45):

Yeah. I mean, you’ve really seen the industry blossom over that time, but I want to get into that for a second, but I think you covered some of this in the beginning, but as I think folks don’t always think about insurance and the role it plays in climate … Actually, one of our investors, our early investors at Clean Capital was a guy in the insurance space. He’s really helped educate me on this. And at one point he was the chair of series, Barney Schwabel. And understanding that whether it be thinking about right now in Florida, it’s really hard to get a home insurance because they understand the risks. That understanding of risk, whether it be looking at floodplain maps, that at one point where a hundred-year floodplain is now coming every 15 years versus every hundred years, and how do you ensure that? Where have you seen the industry, not our industry, the insurance industry understand and mature in that space?

Sara Kane (09:37):

Oh, that’s a good question. I mean, like I said, when we first came at it, it was something growing. It was a bright spot. There was a lot of talk about corporate social responsibilities. I was like, “Of course, we’re going to have a renewable energy underwriting team.” But it was a small part of what everyone was doing. And we started to see the losses come in. And I think at the time, because we didn’t have this huge body of data, but we were pretty reactive. So though this particular make and model is not failing, we’re seeing all these gearbox failures. Okay, so we’re not going to write those. We’re going to increase deductibles for those. But over time, you saw insurers start to add on engineers. I mean, the best example is in the storage space. So I think it was 2011, the Kahooku Fire Loss, which is a large wind project in Hawaii, and it had a early stage type of battery chemistry, and that failed.

(10:28):

And it was a very large loss. At the time, I think it was the largest loss that the renewable energy property underwrite market had faced, something like $38 million claim. And so for a while, you couldn’t get storage insured at all. And it was just like, we don’t know how to do it, we’re not going to do it. But that was obviously shortsighted and folks very quickly woke up to, this isn’t going to go away.

(10:51):

The renewable energy industry is going to continue to adapt around that and we have to keep up with it.

Jon Powers (10:55):

And so

Sara Kane (10:55):

You just started to see the renewable energy niche catch up to the bigger power niche at that point and bringing on loss control engineers and really starting to mine data less anecdotally and thus knee-jerk reaction, but what is the long-term trends telling us? And then at the same times, you had that large mechanical breakdown issue, but a property policy also largely covers for natural catastrophe. And we were seeing obviously an increase in frequency and severity of natural

Jon Powers (11:22):

Catastrophe

Sara Kane (11:22):

Events, and that’s basically what property insurance is for. And that moves the needle way more than any sort of mechanical losses that we’ve seen for any of the assets that we look at. And so very- And

Jon Powers (11:35):

That, by the way, goes well beyond just renewable asset. That’s people looking at property that’s like- You’re building an Amazon warehouse in a floodplain, you really think about where you’re building it. By the way, when us at the military, us at the Pentagon, we were beginning to implement some of that military construction work, that same mentality. We actually at one point brought some of the insurers in to talk about what they were doing so we could educate the engineers because these are 100-year buildings in military’s building. If you’re building it in a floodplain, it’s a terrible idea. And so having to think through that stuff long-term.

Sara Kane (12:04):

Yep. But what was interesting, I think, I guess it was, I’m not going to get the year right, maybe 1560, we had a lot of … No, it was earlier than that when we had a very large hurricane year in North Carolina. And just because of the state incentives in North Carolina, we were seeing a ton of projects there. So it kind of outsized and they just kept coming. And the year that we were seeing all of those claims, all of those storms, the storms were actually more inland than coastal. And there had been this thought that, oh, the coastal communities are the ones that are more prone to hurricane loss, but that actually wasn’t what the data was showing us. So we really were starting to rethink, how do we think about deploying windstorm limits? And to your point, renewable energy projects are competing with every asset class for windstorm limits and for hail limits and earthquake and all of those things.

(12:51):

So an insurer is only going to decide to put up a certain amount of windstorm aggregate in a year. And so you have a renewable energy project who’s effectively competing for windstorm limit, which is a finite commodity with the likes of large hotel chains and big box stores and all of that.

(13:09):

That’s the commodity that’s out there. And then a lot of my clients and myself too, it’s like, but we’re trying to be part of the solution and we’re getting dinged by the same macro pressures as everyone else. And that’s not going to go away anytime soon, but it just puts the onus on us on the renewable energy industry side to make better and more resilient projects. And we’ve absolutely seen that. So it becomes this, it’s meant to be this feedback loop of how does insurance pricing create the signals that then make for more resilient and safer project?

Jon Powers (13:44):

Yeah. I mean, we’ve included in now, as we get into our underwriting and look at new projects that we’re buying, we actually often probably reach out to your team. “How are you guys looking at this market? How should we make sure we’re not going to be shocked by a massive insurance bill here?” So pause on the macro for a second and getting back to your career. So when did you join CAC Group?

Sara Kane (14:05):

So that was in 2021. For

Jon Powers (14:10):

Folks that aren’t aware, could you just talk about what CAC Group is and which is now a Baldwin company, but just talk about what you guys do?

Sara Kane (14:17):

Yeah, CACU was started in 2019. My team was the power and renewables part of that. And CEC is a boutique insurance brokerage, so meaning we help our clients navigate the insurance markets for things that are a little bit more specialized. So whether it’s a specialized industry or a specialized product, that’s where we have our expertise. And we like to think about ourselves and in the best cases we are more than just someone who helps to transact the insurance policy. We really like to think about what we do as risk management advising. And to your point, how do you get in front of it? How do you think about these long-term assets? It’s not, yes, you have to buy your insurance every year, but how do we get smarter about the process? And so I’ve been doing that-

Jon Powers (14:57):

We are customers. You are

Sara Kane (14:59):

Customers, one of my favorites.

Jon Powers (15:00):

Zoe from our team works very closely with Sarah and you’re 100% right. We look at the work that you guys do. And like I said, we brought it forward in our underwriting because it’s such a critical part of how we’re thinking about risk.

Sara Kane (15:12):

And that’s the dream. And that’s what we really try to do. Yesterday I was in your offices that Zoe helped organize. We did two different training sessions for two different of your teams, how to work with us, when to think about us, what we can do to help. So some of it on the development and sighting side, and then some of it on the financing side. And then we did an insurance 101. And we always laugh that people are like, “Oh, I’m going to go do three hours of insurance meetings.” And people are like, “That sounds like the worst.” But we end up going over, people ask really good questions. I think it’s more interesting than people expect it’s going to be. And to your point, it impacts everything around the decisions that you make.

Jon Powers (15:45):

Interesting enough, I wanted to have you on my podcast.

Sara Kane (15:48):

That’s right. Thank you.

Jon Powers (15:50):

So let me ask you a question. So I know Zoe’s heading over to Europe with you guys in a couple weeks, so that when we bring you a portfolio and say, “We’re considering investing in this portfolio or we’ve got this, ” what’s next? Because you guys aren’t actually the insurers, you are brokering that to who and how are you educating those folks in the state of the industry and their thoughts of where we currently are?

Sara Kane (16:13):

That’s a really good question. So when we work with a client, there’s two different things that we think about. One is our annual insurance program. So that is generally speaking for operating assets, you buy your insurance once a year, and the most cost-effective way to do it is on a portfolio basis. And so we look at the aggregate of projects and we place that every year. Sometimes you can see multi-year policies, but generally speaking, we do that annually. And then every day we’re dealing with a client like you because there’s midterm acquisitions. And so how do we then take what happens outside of the renewal cycle, think about the insurance for those assets, whether it’s something new that we have to place or it can be bolted onto what we’ve already placed. And so that’s why- Or

Jon Powers (16:52):

Something growing through the development chain, right? It’s ready to turn on.

Sara Kane (16:55):

Exactly. And that’s why we like to spend a ton of time with our clients upfront trying to get a sense of what’s coming in the next 12 to 18 to 24 months so that we can build something for that larger program that can be as flexible as possible. Now we were in a really hard insurance cycle, insurance market for the last few years, which I can talk about in a bit, but we’re coming into a softer market net right now for a variety of reasons, which makes it a better environment to buy insurance. And so we can start to, again, think more flexibly or more creatively about how to get more flexibility out of the insurance product. But generally speaking, the property policy anyway is a very broad policy. It covers most things and you’re really

Jon Powers (17:33):

Trying- When you used to find a softer and harder market, you’re saying basically it’s harder for … We’ll be paying more for insurance because there’s less tolerance for the risk in the market at the time, and now people are back to understanding risk is.

Sara Kane (17:46):

Or at least being more- We happen to have a pretty light net cat year globally last year, so that frees up a lot. And then also we’ve had five or six years of pretty high prices around renewable energy assets for insurance, certainly higher than the industry had experienced in the past. And as a result, we got more people off the sidelines. We have more markets now. And so that kind of puts a natural lid on how much insurers can continue to jack up the prices because you have these competitive pressures now as well.

(18:16):

And so altogether it comes into, it’s a good moment to be a buyer of insurance, but the last few years have not been a good moment to be a buyer. That’s been hard. So that’s how we think about that. But yeah, so what we try to do in the renewal cycle, and the reason we’re taking Zoe over to London, we have a lot of trading partners in London. There’s a really vibrant market out of Lloyd’s, but then also some company markets. Lloyd’s historically has been something that anytime it was a really difficult thing to get placed, anything that’s- The Titanic, right? What was that?

Jon Powers (18:46):

The Titanic.

Sara Kane (18:47):

Exactly.

Jon Powers (18:47):

Yeah.

Sara Kane (18:49):

Or like-

Jon Powers (18:49):

My brother wrote a whole LinkedIn article about the Titanic and the insurance. So I know about

Sara Kane (18:53):

This

Jon Powers (18:53):

Stuff.

Sara Kane (18:54):

Yeah, there’s a cool … If you get a chance to go into the Lloyd’s building, there’s a museum of all the cool things that they’ve

(19:02):

Covered. So what grew out of … So it used to be wind turbines, those smaller early generation wind turbines could not get insurance out of the traditional markets, name brand insurers that you’ve heard of, but Lloyd’s developed as a market that would accept that risk and really learned. And everything has kind of grown out of that. So you have a lot of renewable energy underwriters based in London, in the London market. And so when programs get to be a certain size, we absolutely want to take advantage of the London space. We do that in combination with the domestic markets as well. And as programs get bigger, a way that commercial insurance differs from personal lines insurance that sometimes people miss is as your portfolio gets bigger, you need multiple insurers. We call it a quota share, but it’s basically a subscription model. And so people take a percentage of the risk.

(19:47):

And so we can have, on some projects, some very large projects, we might have something like 40 different underwriters taking two to 3% lines to get a whole program placed.

Jon Powers (19:58):

So without naming names, you talk for a second about … Obviously we are now the second largest owner of distributed assets in the country, but we’re an IPP. Are all your customers IPPs, you work with developers? Who should think about calling you when they need insurance?

Sara Kane (20:12):

Yeah. Most of our clients are the owners and operators. The folks who have to … So when I think about me, my team specifically, we handle the property and casualty. CEC more broadly, I think about how

Jon Powers (20:23):

We can- I’m not calling you for my

Sara Kane (20:24):

Car. Exactly. But I think about it. We’ve built the team specifically for all of the type of products that someone in your seat might need. So I handle PNC. That’s really the crux of this conversation. But when you think about the tax insurance market, you can think about directors and officers liability, cyber insurance, surety. We kind of have all of that under one roof. And so that’s … I lost the thread of the question. What was the official?

Jon Powers (20:52):

Yeah, no, no, that’s who’s calling you. It’s owners operators, it’s folks-

Sara Kane (20:56):

So mostly owners and operators insurance. Yeah. The bulk of the spend is going to be property. If there’s a tax insurance requirement that maybe tax equity is putting on you, that’s a big part of the spend. And then surety could be a really meaningful part of the spend. The other

Jon Powers (21:10):

Lines

Sara Kane (21:10):

Typically for IPPs don’t move the needle. I mean, they’re very important coverages, but that’s not the bulk of the premium spend. We do handle some utility business. Outside of power and renewables, we handle oil and gas clients, mining clients, metal. So we think very broadly about the energy landscape, but my team specifically is around power generation. Developers, I think though is a really important part, and we’ve actually developed some solutions so that we can provide some consulting advice to developers. They typically, at that stage, you’re not buying the insurance for the operating or the construction asset or operating asset, but you’re making all the decisions that are going to impact future insurability. And in some cases, when the developer is not integrated into a broader, bigger team or down the lifecycle, they were making those decisions in the absence of any insurance advice. And that

Jon Powers (21:57):

Was- With no long-term view because they just want to sell it and get out. Yeah.

Sara Kane (22:00):

And that was a big problem when the market turned on us in 2019. And so we really tried to figure out how do we unbundle the advice that we could provide from the placement so that we could sell just the advice part to the developers. And we’ve had some uptake on that. Yeah.

Jon Powers (22:14):

So I want to switch topics completely in one second, but if you sat in the seat in 2030, which isn’t that far away, how have you seen the market change from this conversation to them?

Sara Kane (22:29):

That’s a good question. I think what I’m seeing, and I don’t expect this to change … Well, let me back up. So when the market turned in 2019, and just to back up, we’d had year-on-year of soft market prices going down every year, the expectation that insurance prices were going to go down every year, but that was really unsustainable. And it took a very large hail event in 2019 to really turn the market upside down. And really what happened is folks got much smarter about when we were putting projects in HailProne locations, like how they were going to respond. So for that peril in particular, but it was kind of a moment for underwriters, I always say they were kind of re-underwriting their books in the shadow of that large event because there were other

Jon Powers (23:12):

Things

Sara Kane (23:13):

That were driving the market to unsustainable rates. And so we saw year-on-year pretty challenging increases. Insurers asking a lot more questions, the process becoming a lot harder. And like I said before, now we’re kind of at a period where we’re at the top of that cycle and we’re coming back down. So what people, I think, learned in the last six years is really, if you didn’t buy into it before, you very much understood how important insurance was going to be to the profitability of your project. And so most people who hadn’t cared about insurance before because it was cheap and you could do it last minute and whatever, now they’re like, oh, this is actually really important. If you think about the ongoing operational expenses of a renewables project, it’s one of the biggest. And so let’s give it its due. And I think having been a renewable energy underwriter for a while, there was very much like a little chip on our shoulder, nobody cares about what we have to say, right?

(24:03):

But we’re sitting on a ton of data. We know a lot of what works

Jon Powers (24:06):

And what doesn’t

Sara Kane (24:07):

Work. And I think what we saw in the last six years is much more of, even though it was hard, much more of a partnership between insurers and the owner community. And let’s bring those two together so we can share information. And it’s not just insurers. I think this is also a misconception. A lot of my clients sometimes think, what do insurers want to see us do in X, Y, or Z place? And they might have some opinion on that from what they’re seeing for some of their other clients, but they’re really interested in learning. The folks who are doing the development are really out front and thinking through what could make this a more resilient project. And let’s share information both ways. So we’ve seen that in the last six years, and it’s been, I think, really gratifying. And I think those of our clients who’ve really embraced that have the best results out of the market.

(24:50):

So I think the potential is that now if we’re coming into a softer market, maybe people would forget how valuable the insurance

Jon Powers (24:56):

Market

Sara Kane (24:57):

Could be in their development decisions. And I would really hope that we can retain that level of collaboration.

Jon Powers (25:04):

Yeah. That’s why you got to be out on podcasts having these conversations. So I would love to ask you a bunch of questions about the craziest things you’ve seen in the insurance industry around solar panels, but I want to talk about something that I think is very near and dear to your heart, which is the work you recently did in Nepal. Can you talk a little bit about the organization that you’ve been supporting around this and the work and really the impact you’ve seen from that experience?

Sara Kane (25:31):

Yeah, I’m happy to. We actually just yesterday got our professional video from our Nepal trip was sent to

Jon Powers (25:37):

Us. Oh, nice. A three

Sara Kane (25:38):

And a half minute video that I’ll make sure you get.

Jon Powers (25:40):

Yeah. We’d love to share it if we can when it sits around. Yeah.

Sara Kane (25:43):

So we work with an organization called GivePower. We were introduced to them a few years ago by actually one of our clients who had worked with them. The founder of GiftPower came out of the solar industry. So I think there’s a lot of your listeners who will be familiar with their work. And they organize Treks typically of about 12 people, although we’ve challenged them to think about bigger groups so we could have a bigger impact. And they operate in a handful of countries around the world. And so we did our first trek two years ago. We went to the Philippines, could not have felt further away, literally a rock in the ocean, very small community that didn’t have reliable power. And we built a small microgrid at their local school. Amazing. And then for that one, I think there were about five of us from CAC.

(26:32):

One of our London trading partners joined us and then our client sent a few people as well. And largely championed by my boss and mentor, Erin Lynch, who was really bought into this. And she’s like, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to figure out how to make this happen.” When we came back, our chairman was really moved by it. His name is Paul Sparks, and he’s like, “How do we do this in a bigger way? And how do we invite our clients to join us and open the opportunity to more of our employees?” And so last year we went to Kenya, we doubled the size of the trek, and so we had about 20 some people. Some of our teammates brought family members. I was fortunate enough to be able to bring my 10-year-old son, and we invited some clients to join us on that.

(27:12):

That was a really fun day when I called three of my clients and I’m like, “You want to come to Kenya?” They’re like, “Is this a joke?” I’m like, “Nope, come to Kenya.” And that was really powerful. In that case, we were working in a really impoverished village. We did two solar installations, one on the school and one on what they call the dispensary, but the health clinic. This village was a two-hour car ride from the nearest village that had reliable power in a hospital. And so-

Jon Powers (27:38):

Incredible.

Sara Kane (27:40):

The nurse who was stationed in our village would tell us stories about how prior to our work there, she would deliver babies in the middle of the night with a flashlight in her mouth because they didn’t have power. Otherwise, women would have to take a motorcycle ride two hours along bumpy roads to get to healthcare. So really meaningful. And actually, as we were leaving, the villagers kind of implored us to think about their water sources. They were showing us that the water was not clean. And GivePower has the ability to do solar powered decel plants

Jon Powers (28:14):

In Kenya.

Sara Kane (28:15):

And so some of the trekkers on my team, I wish I could say I did it, but they had the idea and the energy and they did a fundraiser and we raised an additional $80,000 to fund a water decel plant for that village that really just made a big impact in all of our hearts. And then this year we went to Nepal, so that we did that in November, and I was fortunate to bring two of your teammates to join us on that. They were our only clients who joined us this year, and we opened it up to more of our employees. We had people apply via video essay, why they want to go, why this would be meaningful to them.

(28:51):

And we really wanted to make sure a lot of my teammates in the power space, it kind of reads that those are the people who’d want to do it, do the program. But we had people from across the organization who just really just spoke to something about their personal values and the opportunity to see the world and do something helpful. And so I guess the … I mean, I can’t say enough good things about how the program is run, the organization, everyone we’ve met there is just fantastic. You have local EPCs, so local talent being hired with your donation to do the work. I mean, because that’s be honest, I work in solar, but I can’t build things. I get it. I don’t know what I’m doing. And just a chance to get out

Jon Powers (29:28):

From- You don’t me plugging it in.

Sara Kane (29:30):

Yeah, exactly. And see one, what it can do, how it can change lives. It’s pretty powerful. And then you get to … I shouldn’t say just. I mean, I think a really big part of it is what you’re doing for the community, but it’s a lot of what the community does back for you. And so in apology-

Jon Powers (29:48):

We did slide a presentation to our company at our all hands in December with our two teammates that went, and the thing that they were most … It was fascinating, the conversation they had around the dancing at the end, it was all night dance part Party to celebrate having power at the school and what it really meant to the community was just so incredible. Is there a website for GitPower? Do you know?

Sara Kane (30:07):

There definitely is. I’ll make sure to send it to you. You can put it in

Jon Powers (30:10):

Show notes.

Sara Kane (30:10):

Yeah.

Jon Powers (30:10):

We’ll make sure to put it out there so folks can link to it and please donate and support it. It’s amazing. Absolutely.

Sara Kane (30:16):

And my son, I’ll say, I brought my son, he was 10 at the time to Kenya, and it was a big overwhelming trip for him. And I remember at one point we were sleeping in tents there and I kept waiting for him to have this conversation with me about his privilege in the world and looking at these kids who barefoot going to school with no lights and how that … And it wasn’t happening. And I was like, “What is happening here?” And I was talking to somebody on the trek and she’s like, “This is overwhelming for grownups to wrap their heads around.” And he’s 10, but she’s like, “Give him 10 years. He’s going to be thinking about this for the rest of his life. This is a core memory.” And he does. He still talks about it all the time.

Jon Powers (30:54):

Yeah. It’ll change his future, what he wants to do.

Sara Kane (30:56):

I hope so.

Jon Powers (30:58):

I hope so. So I asked the same question at the end of all my interviews, and I want to take you back to leaving upstate New York or even leaving Duke or Yale. And if you could sit down and have a beer with yourself and give yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?

Sara Kane (31:13):

I mean, I so appreciate that you gave me a warning on this question, but this question is so hard one. The best answer I was able to think of this morning is I wish I didn’t drop Spanish. Oh,

Jon Powers (31:25):

Wow.

Sara Kane (31:26):

Yeah. Yeah. I feel that I’ve-

Jon Powers (31:29):

First time I got that

Sara Kane (31:30):

One. Yeah, right. I know. I was like, I probably should do something more compelling than that. But no, I was in high school and first day of AP Spanish and the whole class was in Spanish. The teacher was only speaking Spanish and I did not understand what she was saying. She kept saying one word over and over again that seemed to be a very important word because she used it over and over again. And I was like, “Well, if I don’t even know that, I don’t belong in this class.” So I went to my guidance counselor afterwards. I’m like, “Put me down a level in Spanish.” She’s like, “You can’t. It won’t work with your schedule. It’s either you take AP Spanish or you don’t take Spanish at all. ” I’m like, “Forget it. I’m out of Spanish.”

Jon Powers (32:00):

Oh, wow.

Sara Kane (32:01):

It turned out she was saying ape. She was saying the name of the class. She was saying AP Spanish over and over again. And I dropped Spanish because I didn’t know that word. It wasn’t even a word. And I would say just the opportunity to see the world as an adult now. And I always just wish that I had a language skill so that I could embrace those opportunities more than I do. Someday I’ll get back to learning a language again, but I wish I hadn’t dropped Spanish.

Jon Powers (32:28):

That’s amazing. I’ve traveled from the beginning of the military, I’ve traveled a bunch of my kids. I’m terrible at book languages, like learning in school. I took Latin for a good zillion years. I still couldn’t tell you two words. But being able to communicate, even ordering food or just breaking through to someone locally is just so important. Well, Sarah, I have a million other questions, but thank you for your time this morning. Thank you very much. And thank you for the incredible work you do both obviously for the industry, but obviously impacting the world is really pretty powerful.

Sara Kane (33:00):

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you, Jon.

Jon Powers (33:02):

Absolutely. And as always, you can get more episodes at cleancapital.com. And as I mentioned previously, we’re just really restarting the podcast, so please share your ideas of folks that we should be talking to. This is an incredibly important transitional year for our industry and want to make sure we’re talking about the future and where it’s going. Thanks to Colleen Young for helping to get this produced. And for Stephanie and your team, Sarah, who’s been incredibly patient with me over the last year as we’ve ebbed and flowed to make this happen, I’m glad we could finally make it happen. And thank you for being here. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time too.

Sara Kane (33:36):

All right. Bye-bye.

Jon Powers (33:37):

Thanks.