Ruggedized solar power for the hard places

There are some circumstances — think disaster recovery zones or forward military bases — that cry out for portable, reliable, resilient power. I talk with Lauren Flanagan about Sesame Solar’s self-contained nanogrids, which use solar PV, batteries, and hydrogen storage to provide energy that works around the clock in remote or inclement environments. 📌 Instructions to add paid episodes to your preferred podcast app via mobile / desktop (PDF transcript) (Active transcript) David Roberts Hey. Hi, everyone. This is Volts for April 10, 2026, “Ruggedized solar power for the hard places.” I’m your host, David Roberts. Way back in 2011, roughly 400 years ago, I wrote a piece for Outside Magazine about Marines in Afghanistan’s Helmand province using portable solar panels in the field. The pitch was simple: fuel convoys are targets, liquid fuels are a liability, and solar panels can make soldiers more mobile, quieter, and harder to kill. The underlying insight extends beyond the battlefield. There’s a whole category of places — disaster zones, remote clinics, island nations, forward operating bases — where liquid fuels are a cost and logistics nightmare, and where conventional solar systems aren’t quite up to the job. These environments need something more rugged: power systems that can be rapidly deployed, run autonomously for months at a time, and don’t depend on a supply chain that may not show up. Lauren Flanagan has spent the last decade building something for those times and places. Her company, Sesame Solar, makes mobile nanogrids — self-contained power systems that run on solar, battery storage, and hydrogen — that can be deployed by one person in fifteen minutes and run, with minimal intervention, for months on end. The only fuel supply chain is the sun. Today we're going to talk about what it actually takes to deliver clean, reliable power to the places the grid doesn't reach — and who, ultimately, gets access to that kind of power. With no further ado, Lauren Flanagan, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming. Lauren Flanagan Thank you, David. I loved that intro. I didn’t know about that 2011 article, but how prescient of you. David Roberts I know, it’s funny that it’s coming back now, 15 years later. It made me wonder, what is the state of that program in the Marines? I haven’t checked up on it in a long time. I guess where I’d want to start is trying to get a sense of what business nerds call the total addressable market here. Who exactly are we after? When I threw this out on social media that I would be talking to you about portable, rugged solar systems, a lot of people said, “Oh, rural Africa,” or, “Oh, I want one for my rural home,” or something like that. I was trying to explain to people, no, for that you just buy normal solar panels and batteries — that would work fine. This thing is designed to be bombproof, bulletproof. This is an extreme bit of engineering designed for extreme circumstances. I want to start with what are those circumstances? What is the market here? What are the kinds of places where this technology would be useful? Lauren Flanagan At Sesame, we’re riding two huge tailwinds. The first one is the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events — hurricanes, wildfires, floods, atmospheric rivers — which knock out power, communications, water. The second is it’s increasingly a world of robotic warfare where we need UAS, USV surface vessels, ground vehicles, and we need power everywhere. As we can see in the Middle East, we have oil supply disruption. Having fuel supply disruption, the need for power everywhere, and all of these cataclysmic events happening worldwide, there is a huge need — it’s a $100 billion plus need — for mobile power that is ruggedized, fast to deploy, easy to use, and can run without a fuel supply. That’s the market we’re at. It’s not Jane Doe prepper or your home solar system. This is really solving fundamental life and death Maslowian survival problems. David Roberts Which is important to remember later in the conversation when we talk about costs and price and everything else. Just to give people a little background, talk about the cost of liquid fuels in some of these environments you’re talking about. This is one of the things I remember from that 2011 piece — the mind-blowing final cost. Out in Afghanistan, out on the battlefield, they’re using jet fuel. They’re not importing diesel; they all use jet fuel. The all-in cost of jet fuel, once you make it, buy it, transport it, convoy it to the troops, is mind-boggling. I don’t remember the number, but it knocked my mouth open. What price levels are you competing against? Lauren Flanagan It’s not only the astronomical price of transport, whether by land, sea, or air — going higher right now with various blockages in the Middle East — but it’s the cost of life, the life of humans in a fuel convoy who, once you track the convoy, you follow them to the target and blow everybody up with the fuel. David Roberts Yes. Lauren Flanagan There are really two, and then you can’t always get that fuel when you need it. Increasingly, our military is looking at small teams of specialized war fighters that they can drop in a location for a mission of 30 to 60 days and pick up. They don’t want any fuel supply chain; they want it to be able to endure for the mission. You’ve got a wide open world where the issues are in the Indo-Pacific and the Arctic, where they suffer from what we call the tyranny of distance. It’s such a long way to transport it that not only is that cost per gallon high, but that logistics travel from a C-17 or a C-130 or even a ship or a combination and then on a truck is just massive. David Roberts I think in one of the stories I read — they’re all blurring together now — but you were talking about, I think maybe it was in one of these Arctic places, but they’re bringing in diesel by helicopter and it’s coming to something like $400 a gallon. Lauren Flanagan Absolutely. David Roberts Or something along those lines. Which is good to keep in mind when we talk about the cost of this thing later. The alternative is not diesel at the gas station. The alternative is very hard to get. Lauren Flanagan Very hard to get fuel, and an increasingly unfriendly world that might not let us stop at their port to get it. David Roberts Yes. Nobody’s really enjoying what’s going on in the world right now, but it’s good for resilience businesses, I guess. Lauren Flanagan That’s the irony — this administration doesn’t want to talk about climate change. On the other hand, they’re one of the largest users of fossil fuels. If we can make a dent by having renewable energy when and where needed just to solve operational energy needs, the byproduct will be a dent in CO2 emissions and greenhouse gases. But you can’t talk that way. You’ve got to talk about mission endurance and operational efficiency and logistics being streamlined. David Roberts Geopolitics too. Lauren Flanagan Oh, yeah. David Roberts One of the points I keep making to people is, if nothing else, Trump is showing the world the dangers of being reliant on another country for liquid fuels — showing our enemies and our allies at once how bad that is. No one is enjoying being dependent on someone else for liquid fuel these days. Lauren Flanagan We just need to keep our war fighters safe and they need the power when and where they need it — however it can be provided. It’s an all-of-the-above strategy. We’re not going to replace it overnight, but we’re a piece of filling in those missing locations and ability to have it when needed. That’s a massive market, as I mentioned, not only our US but our allies. With all these global catastrophes due to extreme weather. David Roberts The two markets you describe in that first answer are very different and we are going to return to that in a minute. Before that, for listeners’ sake, let’s just talk about what is — what are we talking about? What is th…