In the 90s batteries powered your camcorder and boombox. Then your phone. Now they’re running your electric vehicle (EV), and in some cases, even your house. At what scale will batteries meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions? We may be nearing an inflection point with electric vehicle batteries, but we’re nowhere near as close with grid storage technologies. What’s it going to take to get there? Guest host Lara Pierpoint explores this question with battery expert – David Schroeder , chief...
Mar 17, 2022•58 min
For nearly two decades, the terms "smart grid" and "grid edge" have been used to define the digital layer of the electricity system that can help integrate more rooftop solar panels, EVs, smart meters, and home batteries to avoid outages and save customers money . But even with massive increases in computing power, utilities are still lagging in technology to communicate with DERs (also known as grid-edge assets) and the computing power to crunch all that data. In this episode, what can the grid...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr 1 min
It may not get the same attention as higher-profile sectors, but cooling accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gasses emissions. That's more than even aviation or shipping. Demand for cooling is expected to triple by 2050. In places where global warming is triggering intense heat waves, cooling has become a matter of life and death. And yet, cleaner, more-efficient air conditioning technology exists. Why aren’t we using it? And how do we make it affordable and widely available? In this episode, g...
Mar 03, 2022•50 min
Traditional nuclear power is bogged down by cost overruns and concerns about safety and waste. But does it have to be that way? Could we deploy scaleable reactors that are cheaper, safer, and that produce less waste? Advanced nuclear startups in the U.S. certainly think so. In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint speaks with Jake DeWitte , co-founder and CEO of Oklo , one of many advanced nuclear companies that have emerged in recent years. Lara and Jake survey the polarized landscape of nucl...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 8 min
We buy insurance for everything – our cars, our houses, our health. But climate tech insurance? That’s a new one. When Jeff McAulay was working in solar, he discovered one major roadblock to scaling up climate tech. Solar developers didn’t have the right kind of insurance to cover their risks. So Jeff co-founded Energetic Insurance . Turns out, insurance solves problems beyond solar. Jeff says there are unaddressed risks associated with many new climate technologies that can prevent developers f...
Feb 17, 2022•48 min
This week, we're featuring an episode of The Carbon Copy . Batteries are everywhere. In our electronics, our power tools, our electric grid, and in our cars. And almost all those batteries use a lithium-ion chemistry. The Imperial Valley in southern California is home to the Salton Sea, a land-locked body of water that contains vast reserves of lithium. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the region the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium." If mined, it could completely reshape the global supply chain....
Feb 10, 2022•21 min
There’s momentum building for electrification. But when will electrification take off as a mainstream movement? And what companies can provide electrification solutions to consumers at scale? One strong candidate is Sunrun. It’s the leading residential solar company in the U.S., after SolarCity years ago, and acquiring its next-biggest competitor Vivint solar more recently. Sunrun has also become a major player in residential batteries. And it started to push its way into the residential EV char...
Jan 31, 2022•46 min
Chemicals might be the most daunting industrial sector to decarbonize. Unlike concrete and steel, where the end products are largely uniform, refineries spit out thousands of different chemicals through a dizzyingly complex set of processes. These end products are, in turn, used in everything from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals to clothing. The International Energy Agency predicts that chemicals will be the largest source of demand growth for oil through 2050. A wide range of approac...
Jan 24, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Biotech has enormous potential across a wide array of climate solutions. It can be used to create alternative proteins, remove carbon from the atmosphere, clean up fertilizer, or to create renewable fuels. But it also comes with some scaling challenges. This week, Shayle talks about the intersection of biotech and climatetech with Arye Lipman . Arye is a biologist and a general partner at MarsBio, a bio-focused early-stage fund. He also writes a Substack newsletter on biotech called The Last Gre...
Jan 18, 2022•43 min
First-of-a-kind projects are, by definition, unproven. Despite the abundance of capital in climate tech these days, the valley of death for new technologies still exists. But there are solutions. And this week on Catalyst, we have a case study of one of them. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has $40 billion of capacity to help solve this exact kind of problem. It just announced its first conditional commitment for a $1 billion loan guarantee to help Monolith scale up its firs...
Jan 10, 2022•49 min
The common trope about fusion is that it has always been – and will always be – a decade away. So is something different happening now? Recently, we’ve seen technical achievements in fusion, like near ignition at the National Ignition Facility in August, yielding “a record 1.3 MJ in fusion energy, releasing, for the first time, more energy than the fuel capsule absorbed.” Fusion startups have also enjoyed a recent barrage of mega-funding . First, General Fusion raised $130 million . Then Helion ...
Dec 23, 2021•48 min
What exactly counts as “climate tech”? Basically all human activity is responsible for emissions, directly or indirectly. So nearly every new technology trend or capability has at least some role to play in curbing those emissions. Robotics? Sure. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, of course. Synthetic biology? Definitely. But here's a really interesting one: quantum computing . Mark Cupta is convinced it may actually be one of the most important technologies we'll invent to mitigate ...
Dec 16, 2021•51 min
There are many pathways to decarbonize natural gas. Do we replace it, full stop? If so, with what? Or do we blend natural gas with alternatives, or rip up the old infrastructure and replace it with something new? There's a lot to unpack here. But also a lot of opportunities for innovators in the climatetech world. To dig into it, Shayle turns to Andy Lubershane , the senior vice president for research & strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Andy and Shayle talk about natural gas’ existential t...
Dec 09, 2021•47 min
Aviation represents 2-3% of global GHG emissions. If the aviation sector were a country, its emissions would rank around 6th in the world, somewhere between Japan and Germany. If you add the additional warming impacts of aircraft contrails and estimates are that aviation contributes something like 3.5% of total anthropogenic warming. It's also another one of those notoriously tough-to-abate sectors. Jet fuel (a.k.a. kerosene) is pretty magical. It has enabled the movement of people and the globa...
Dec 02, 2021•50 min
Stripe, a fintech startup worth $100 billion, is trying to kick-start a $1 trillion market for carbon removal. The company is being extremely transparent about its processes, which means we get a window into the exciting, messy, often very experimental world of removing gigatons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. Traditionally, carbon removal has involved planting lots of trees. There have also been a select few companies toiling away at expensive-but-promising direct-air capture . But it tur...
Nov 18, 2021•39 min
Can investors win by betting on early-stage innovations in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as energy, transportation, agriculture and heavy industry? The answer doesn’t matter only to venture capitalists. If you believe that we need fundamental science and engineering innovation to climb our way out of the climate crisis, it's an important question. Plenty of reasonable observers say the answer is no. Case in point: The 2016 MIT report Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean En...
Nov 11, 2021•51 min
Shayle Kann has been thinking about the technology and market fixes for climate change for almost two decades. On Catalyst, he brings on the smartest people in climate tech to think through those hard problems. This show is about how we overcome the climate challenge. Not just at a theoretical level, but using actual technologies, tackling actual market structures, and accounting for the biggest variable of them all -- money. Subscribe everywhere. The show is a co-production of Canary Media and ...
Nov 02, 2021•1 min
