A solar moratorium nearly shut down Alabama’s emerging solar market before most of the industry even saw it coming.

For years, the prevailing assumption has been that clean energy growth would be concentrated in politically progressive states while places like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi lagged behind.

But that’s not what Monika Gerhart is seeing (and doing!) on the ground.

As Executive Director of the Gulf States Renewable Energy Industries Association (GSREIA), Monika operates at the intersection of policy, infrastructure, resilience, and market development across some of the most politically and operationally complex energy markets in America. And increasingly, she says the future of clean energy growth is being shaped locally — through trust, coalition-building, reliability concerns, and resilience planning.

In this conversation, Nico and Monika unpack the fight that nearly derailed Alabama’s solar market before most of the industry even noticed, how Hurricane Ida transformed the conversation around distributed energy and microgrids in Louisiana, and why resilience infrastructure is rapidly becoming a life-safety issue across the Gulf Coast.

They also explore:

why state-level advocacy increasingly determines whether markets survive long enough to mature
how local relationships shape energy policy more than national narratives
the emerging role of neighborhood-scale resilience planning and community microgrids
why lawmakers are becoming more open to renewables as electricity demand accelerates
and what developers, manufacturers, investors, and operators should understand about building durable markets in politically complicated regions

This is a conversation about far more than solar policy.

It’s about how energy markets are actually built — and why some of the industry’s most important battles are happening far from the headlines.

Are there other technologies you’ve scouted on the frontlines of the Clean Energy Revolution that you think we should be covering here on SunCast?

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