How Choosing Curiosity Over Comfort Launched a Solar Career: Nico’s Story

What happens when you choose the uncomfortable path over the easy one? 

In this snippet from an interview at the 2025 NABCEP Conference, HeatSpring’s Brittany Heller sits down with Nico Johnson to explore the pivotal moment that launched his clean energy career. If you’re in solar, you know Nico – he’s the founder of SunCast Media and the voice behind the #1 solar podcast that’s been around since 2015.

Nico’s journey wholly embodies the transformative power of education and curiosity – the heart of HeatSpring’s Stay Curious campaign. Sometimes all it takes is one professor, one piece of advice, and the courage to step into the unknown to change not just your career, but your entire life’s purpose.

From a crucial decision during his MBA program to building a media platform with over 5 million podcast downloads, Nico’s story shows how embracing learning opportunities creates ripple effects that transform careers, organizations, and in this case, the entire clean energy industry.

Do you have a great story about how education impacted your life and career trajectory? HeatSpring’s Stay Curious campaign is looking for individuals to share how education transformed their clean energy careers and impacted their communities. Selected participants receive $1,000 and have their story featured across HeatSpring’s platforms.

Watch the first part of Nico’s story below or head over to Suncast Media to hear the full interview. Then consider sharing your own – because your journey might be exactly what inspires someone else to take that leap into clean energy.

Transcript below.

 Brit: Hey everyone. My name’s Brittany Heller and I’m from HeatSpring, and today I’m flipping the script on Suncast Media and interviewing Nico Johnson himself. 

At HeatSpring, last year, we launched a campaign called Stay Curious. The whole idea behind it is really looking at the transformational experience of education and this idea that if you’re always staying curious and always looking to learn new things, you’re going to get better. You’re going to be in a better position for your family. Your company’s going to be in a better position, and the community at large raises up as we all learn more. 

I couldn’t think of a better person to ask about this than you, Mr. Suncast, who has developed this whole educational platform around your podcast.

To kick us off, before Suncast became what it is today, what was your educational and career path that led you to renewable energy? 

Nico: Hmm. That led me to renewables? That’s interesting. So I was a Peace Corps volunteer in 2002 to 2005. It was a part of a Master’s International Program.

I have these sort of life goal buckets, and I wanted – by the age of 25 – I wanted to have lived in California, spoken a foreign language fluently, lived in a foreign country, and there were two other things. I can’t remember now. I usually can remember…oh, and gone to grad school.

So I was able to tick off move to California, go to grad school, move to another country, and speak a different language, all through one program called the Master’s International Program, which is offered by the Peace Corps, where you can basically do a year of grad school, two years of Peace Corps, and come back and finish grad school.

I had the incredible fortune of doing that in a place called Monterey, California. Not too shabby. My last semester when I came back from Peace Corps was focused on our entrepreneur semester project. I had been in the music industry prior to that. So safe to say, I’ve always been a performer and comfortable in front of the camera, and I thought I wanted to stay in the music industry.

It was one of those strange fork in the road moments in my life where my entrepreneur professor, who was probably one of the greatest mentors of my life, presented to us as a class two projects. The class of 20 was going to split into 2 groups of 10. 

The first project was the world-renowned Monterey Jazz Festival, one that I would knock out of the park. I was like, okay, this is me. I’m going to do Jazz Festival. This is a piece of cake. The other was this really unknown company local to a place called Hollister, California, about a 30 minute drive from Monterey. An entrepreneur, sort of one-man business, a guy named Ed Bless who had a company called Blueline Power.

Blueline Power was actually a DBA [doing business as] for H2 Solutions. When I met Ed, I saw this opportunity that was really nascent at the time – this was 2006 – called clean energy, and Ed had this idea around mapping clean energy opportunities for farms. He was working on this project called Paicines Ranch, and it seemed really interesting, like mapping energy. He was talking about these energy modeling programs, like HOMER, and I’m like this is all like way outside of my area of expertise. 

I go and sit with my professor, Dr. Frederick Crop, and Frederick said something to me that changed the course of my life. He said, “you’re never going to regret going to do something comfortable like the Monterey Jazz Festival because you can easily progress there. You’re going to knock it out of the park. You’ve got all the skill sets, even the network.” I had been working in the music industry for 10+ years. “Why don’t you try something different? It’s one semester. What’s one semester of your life? Go try something new. The worst that happens is this is a terrible project. You don’t enjoy it at all. And you go back to the music industry.” 

Well fast forward, within a month was asked by Ed to become a co-founder of Blueline Power. We became one of the early solar installers in Central California. We did the first power purchase agreement in Monterey County, which is the largest county in California.

That’s cool, like it’s the largest county. And I was the first to do a PPA. We did the first 100% solar powered newspaper in the nation, Monterey County Weekly. There’s nothing like being 26 years old, walking into the office of an entrepreneur who hands you a $270,000 check, which I’ve never seen that kind of money in my life. And he says, “you’ve got four weeks before our S Chip incentive expires. Good luck, son.”

Now, this is the beginning of my not just solar but entrepreneurial journey because it’s just this process of figuring things out, that as an industry we’re all well familiar with now, but at 26 years old, having not even freshly minted my MBA – I was in a totally different element.