Kristy Jansen, renewable energy developer and former executive director of The Optimist Daily, returned to the show’s podcast on 21 August 2026 to describe four and a half years back inside the clean energy industry, and the personal upheaval that led her from California to Mérida, in the state of Yucatán, México.
From a sleepy conference to 25,000 attendees
Jansen first worked in solar development in the early 2010s, helping to site solar farms on drought-stricken farmland in California’s Central Valley. She left that work to join the World Business Academy, the parent organisation of The Optimist Daily, in 2017. Then, around 2022, someone she had worked with back in 2010 and 2012 invited her to return to the field.
The industry she walked back into bore little resemblance to the one she had left. When she first attended the sector’s major annual conference in 2012, it drew roughly 3,000 to 4,000 people and had a regional feel. By 2022, the same event drew between 23,000 and 25,000 attendees in Anaheim, and the crowd included, in her words, ‘oil guys from Texas and Oklahoma.’ The cost of solar panels had fallen far enough that solar had become the cheapest form of new electricity generation to build, and battery storage had changed what was possible. ‘We were building the future,’ she said of that moment. ‘That was how it felt in 2022.’
The excitement did not last. Jansen describes two structural problems that ground the optimism down. The first is the transmission queue. Connecting a new project to the US grid requires studies that are, she says, taking five or six years to complete, longer than it actually takes to build the solar farm itself. ‘Time is money, and you want to also be certain,’ she said. The second is what she describes as perverse incentives inside investor-owned utilities, which she argues are structured to reward new infrastructure spending over efficiency, because that is what generates a fixed rate of return for shareholders.
On top of those structural frustrations, the shift in federal policy after the change of administration added another layer. ‘They’re not just not supporting it,’ she said. ‘They’re actually actively stopping projects, and I don’t understand that.’
Kristy Jansen renewable energy optimism, even from abroad
Despite those obstacles, Jansen says the global transition is not in question. She pointed to a headline the team had shared, describing 2025 as the year renewables finally outpaced global electricity demand growth, as evidence that momentum sits well beyond any single country’s policy environment. She is direct about why: building a natural gas plant takes three to five years in construction alone, and there are not enough turbine manufacturers to meet projected demand in the timeframe being discussed. Solar paired with batteries is, in her assessment, the only technology that can be deployed fast enough to meet what is coming.
‘The transition is happening no matter what,’ she said. ‘You can’t stop it. It’s already happening.’
Leaving California: a decision made on their own terms
While the energy industry was shifting, so was Jansen’s home life. Her husband, a Mexican citizen working as a master electrician in the United States, faced an insecure immigration status. The anxiety of potential enforcement action (she mentions a construction worker who was shot during an immigration stop) made staying feel untenable. ‘My husband and I decided that it made more sense to leave on our own terms,’ she said.
Her husband moved to Mérida in November. Jansen followed this March, travelling with a truck carrying their belongings and their 90-pound dog, Tucker, through the southern United States and across the border. It was not a destination either of them had planned for.
Life in Mérida now looks, by her own description, genuinely unhurried: tai chi on Tuesdays and Thursdays, early mornings with geckos and birds loud enough to serve as an alarm clock, Spanish practice with a shopkeeper named Mario, yoga, swimming in the pool, and feeding overripe bananas to a family of iguanas that have taken up residence in the car shed. She is also grappling with something harder: her mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which accelerated during the COVID lockdowns and led to a move into a full-time memory care facility at the end of last year. That experience, she says, will be the subject of a second episode.
For now, she is clear about what she wants next. ‘I needed this downtime,’ she said, ‘but I feel by the end of this year, I want to be back working again, doing something productive and positive for the world.’ She is already eyeing solar panels for the house in Mérida, where power outages during thunderstorms have given the former grid developer a new relationship with the infrastructure she spent years building. The freesound.org recording of a bird in a rainforest that opens the episode turns out to be a reasonable approximation of her mornings.
