Episode 917
917: What Happens When Your Market Disappears? (The Story of Small Wind) | Michael Bergey
What do you do when your entire market disappears?
That’s not a thought experiment for Michael Bergey. It’s the story of his career.
Long before solar dominated rooftops, distributed wind was solving real problems across rural America — lowering energy costs for customers who didn’t care about climate narratives, only outcomes. Then policy support vanished. Oil prices collapsed. And later, cheap solar took over.
Most companies didn’t survive.
Bergey Windpower did.
In this conversation, Michael walks through what it actually takes to stay in the game when incentives disappear, competitors pivot, and the market moves faster than your business model.
But there’s a deeper takeaway here.
The customers driving distributed energy today don’t all look the same — and they don’t all think the same either. Wind and solar, once seen as separate paths, are now serving the same need: control, resilience, and economics that work.
Expect to learn:
⚡ What really happened to small wind after the 1980s policy collapse
⚡ How solar’s cost curve forced a complete reset of the business
⚡ The engineering decisions that made small wind viable again
⚡ Why farmers — not homeowners — are driving adoption today
If you’re building in clean energy right now, this may give you a new perspective on staying power and resilience.
👉 Press play to see what happens when the market turns against you.
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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