Enabling ordinary people to invest in renewable energy projects

Historically, investing in energy infrastructure has been the exclusive province of wealthy individuals and large institutions. But that’s changing, and my guest today is part of it. I’m joined by Energea co-founder Mike Silvestrini to discuss how his platform allows retail investors to back international solar projects with buy-in as low as $100. We talk about the unique risks and rewards of building microgrids in emerging markets and why an unapologetic, yield-driven approach might be the best way to do real good in the world. 📌 Instructions to add paid episodes to your preferred podcast app via mobile / desktop (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hello, everyone. This is Volts for April 29, 2026: “Enabling ordinary people to invest in renewable energy projects.” I’m your host, David Roberts. Investing in energy infrastructure has generally required a lot of money, which has made it the province of wealthy individuals and large institutions. But that’s starting to change, at least a little bit. A handful of companies have been using a corner of US securities law called Regulation A to let ordinary people invest directly in solar projects — not stocks in solar companies, but the actual projects themselves — with minimums as low as a hundred bucks. One of the more interesting versions of this is a company called Energea, which has a specific twist: rather than focusing on domestic projects, it goes where institutional capital tends not to — rural areas in Brazil, South Africa, and, as of a few weeks ago, Colombia — on the theory that the best solar returns are in markets where capital is scarce but sun is plentiful. As a bonus, the projects extend access to reliable electricity to some of the people in the world who need it most. Since launching in 2020, Energea has grown to hundreds of millions of dollars in assets across nearly 200 projects in six countries. Mike Silvestrini is its co-founder and managing partner. Today we're going to talk about how this model works, whether it delivers what it promises, and whether it can ever matter at scale. With no further ado, Mike Silvestrini. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Mike Silvestrini Hey, Dave, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. David Roberts Earlier in this century, you were in the conventional renewable energy biz. You’d say you were a renewable energy developer working on big-scale projects with big-scale investors doing the normal thing. Then in 2020, you pivoted to this, which is allowing what they call retail investors, small investors, to get involved. What was your experience there in the 2010s that led you to this? What was the dream here? Mike Silvestrini I think that in a lot of ways, Energea has been in the works my whole life. It really brings together my love of travel, my fearlessness to go into other countries and explore them and talk to people and meet people and see what makes them tick, but also my profession, which is renewable energy. In 2017, I had sold that first company. It was called Green Skies. My partners and I exited. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have any solar panels or engineers or capabilities or accountants. My whole company was gone with a swipe of the pen. But I did have some capital. What we decided to do as a family was to travel. Packed up our bags and my wife and at the time two kids, now three, we hit the road and traveled. I couldn’t help myself but to stop and meet with solar energy companies in the countries that we visited in Asia and Africa and Europe, South America. I kept hearing the same story, that there were these perfectly capable solar developers, sophisticated guys who had real projects and could not find access to capital. Having just come fresh off an exit, I kept thinking to myself, “Geez, I would buy this. I’d rather own this project with Unilever in Singapore than some stock.” Maybe that was, in retrospect, not the greatest vision because the stock market has done pretty damn well since then. But at the time, it’s just an asset class that I know. I know how to underwrite it. I know if it’s likely going to make any electricity or not. I know if the customer is likely going to pay us or not. It just seems like it’s the comfortable place for me to park my own capital. At the same time, my lifelong buddy Chris Sattler had just sold his energy company as well. We were at a board meeting in Kenya for some wildlife conservation work that we did during that time period, still do. He was in the same situation. We said, “Why don’t we invest together?” Energea was really born as an opportunity for Chris and me to invest in the asset class that we know best in lieu of other investment options. Having come off these exits, that quickly grew into a friends and family type of opportunity because we discovered what was going on in Brazil and it was just a white-hot solar energy market. Because we’re used to this industry, it didn’t take us long to accumulate a couple hundred megawatts worth of inventory to invest in. We had outkicked our own capabilities and called in some friends and family, mostly people who were part of our first enterprises and who had done well by us in the past — the low-hanging fruit, if you will. We really enjoyed it. I really liked communicating with them about the projects that we were investing in. I would go and visit the projects and make little videos and show them, “Here I am. This is the project, this is its location. Here’s the town nearby in Brazil,” trying to show them that it’s not as wild as it sounds to park some capital in this place. While that was going on and I was falling in love with servicing individual investors, we did bite the forbidden fruit once again in pursuit of some institutional capital. When you have a couple hundred megawatts of inventory, you dial for dollars and you call some of the big boys and you bring home some capital to make these projects real. We did that. We did a couple of deals. We did a deal with Brookfield. We did a deal with a listed trust called Victory Hill on the UK Stock Exchange. We did a deal with BTG Pactual, which is a big private equity company based in Brazil. The usual suspects for that particular market. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I really preferred serving my friends and family and the individual clients that we had directly than I did working with the large institutions. Not only did I like it more, but it was getting better results. These institutional dollars come with all sorts of restrictions and strings attached. Especially in emerging markets, you have to be quick on your feet. They are just not quick on their feet, Dave. It took us only a couple of years of seeing these two forms of capital directly in competition with one another to realize that the direct-to-consumer investments were outperforming the institutional investments. We liked it better. David Roberts It was outperforming. We’ll get into this later. But outperforming because of the lack of restrictions. I’m trying to figure out why one pool of money is going to do better than another pool of money. It’s just you are able to use it more freely. Mike Silvestrini Exactly. If a decision needed to be made — I need to fire a guy, I need to hire a guy, I need to buy a different module, whatever it is — I just do it. That’s what you need to do to move in these types of emerging markets, especially. But really it’s also the same in the US — that flexibility to be the manager, what we would now call a general partner. In the days we just looked at it as we’re solar guys, we know what we have to do here and we know more than the sources of capital that we were using. I go to Brazil, Chris moved to Brazil. He stood up our Rio-based office. We had a 35-person, at the time, Brazilian team. We knew Brazil and we knew these projects and the capital over in the UK didn’t. That made the difference in the performance of the portfolios that we managed without…