Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? Here are three things to know. First, connecting a wind farm, utility-scale battery, or other big source of power to the grid means getting in line. A typical project’s wait time has increased from around two years in 2005 to four years in 2020 , according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Second, the interconnection queue is a crowded place . In 2020 there were 1.44 terawatts of projects in the queue. That’s more than the U.S.’s current fleet...
Nov 03, 2022•59 min
Utilities in developing countries are juggling a complex set of problems: How to extend electricity to those who don’t have it; how to deploy large-scale power generation to power economic growth; and how to pursue these goals while decarbonizing. In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks to Kate Steel , CEO of Nithio, a finance company focused on off-grid clean energy in Africa. Kate and Lara discuss the options for separating economic growth from fossil fuels. And she argues that we hav...
Oct 27, 2022•48 min
In this episode, produced in partnership with CohnReznick, we explore the market implications of the Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act is an incredibly important win for climate. It puts the U.S. back on the global stage as a serious climate negotiator. It puts the country within reach of a net-zero grid. And it will put hundreds of billions of dollars toward renewables, storage, carbon-capture, and hydrogen. In reality, it’s a very practical – and very complicated – tax bill....
Oct 24, 2022•16 min
Europe’s hydrogen economy is so close to becoming a reality. Billions in public and private dollars are lining up to invest in a wave of newly planned hydrogen facilities. EU policymakers are finalizing new regulations and subsidies. And the region’s energy crisis–sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine–has accelerated the need for alternative energy sources like hydrogen. But an unexpected twist: The U.S. passed the Inflation Reduction Act, with subsidies for hydrogen production and far looser ...
Oct 20, 2022•44 min
So you want to build an offshore wind farm. Are you prepared to manage the marine ecosystem impacts of construction? What about monitoring and protecting underwater electrical cables? Or maybe you want to decarbonize shipping. Do you know how to trace low-carbon fuel through ports or maintain storage tanks in marine environments? How about managing worker safety on the ocean? These are the kinds of questions that crop up at the intersection of climatetech and something called bluetech , the rang...
Oct 13, 2022•37 min
Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. There’s a buzz right now about paying farmers to trap and store emissions. Soil is a carbon sink, and certain farming practices accelerate carbon capture while others hurt it. Enter soil carbon credits to incentivize sequestration through methods like cover cropping, no-till farming and agroforestry. These are practices often inclu...
Oct 06, 2022•35 min
Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. Depending on which headlines you read, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will either hurt U.S. electric vehicle sales by replacing existing tax credits with complicated new ones or build out a North American battery supply chain and rev up EV sales . So which is it? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, vice president of batt...
Sep 29, 2022•45 min
Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. Winter is coming. The energy crisis that is afflicting Europe and other parts of the world is worsening as Russia weaponizes natural gas. This energy crisis has effects across climate tech, and so today we’re bringing you an episode of Columbia Energy Exchange , a podcast from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. O...
Sep 22, 2022•54 min
Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. We designed our power plants, refineries, and other energy infrastructure to depend on water. But not just any kind of water—water that’s available at the right quantity, quality, place and time. When water falls outside of this Goldilocks zone, energy systems can unravel, sometimes in unexpected ways. Low water levels strain hydro...
Sep 15, 2022•39 min
Drill down far enough anywhere in the world and you reach temperatures hot enough to generate firm, reliable zero-emission electricity. That’s the hope for new geothermal technologies that could scale the industry beyond well-known geothermal hot spots like Iceland. But first the industry needs to overcome major challenges in financing and technology. It has also to deal with the public opinion around the oil and gas industry, which may be an essential partner in scaling geothermal because of it...
Sep 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Soil is a massive carbon sink that’s stored away emissions for centuries. But years of destructive farming practices have released much of this carbon. Could incentivizing farmers help restore—and expand—soil’s carbon-carrying capacity? In theory, yes. But the market for soil carbon credits—literally paying farmers to improve their practices—needs serious reform. In this episode, Shayle talks with Freya Chay , program manager for carbon removal at CarbonPlan. The fundamental problem is that the ...
Aug 25, 2022•42 min
In aviation, there’s a crowd of low-carbon technologies vying for a slice of the market. On one hand, the long-haul portion of the market will likely rely on sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) which still emit greenhouse gasses but could be offset to net-zero. On the other hand, there’s a big share of air traffic that could go completely zero-emissions with the help of batteries and hydrogen. So how soon could you book a ticket on a zero-emissions flight? And what routes are possible? In this epi...
Aug 18, 2022•40 min
Electric vehicles (EVs) are moving quickly toward mass adoption . So how do we make sure that charging infrastructure keeps up? The people who own, operate and install chargers have some big questions to answer: Can public chargers run a profit, and how do business models need to change to accelerate deployment? Why is it so hard to repair broken stations ? Does it matter where we install new ones? When will chargers be as ubiquitous and easy to use as gas stations? In this episode, Shayle digs ...
Aug 11, 2022•45 min
The $369 billion climate and tax bill from Sen. Joe Manchin III and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer caught everyone by surprise. Democrats had abandoned their climate legislation last month after Manchin, a must-have vote for Democrats, signaled his opposition to it. But late last week Manchin and Schumer announced they had revived the deal under a new name – The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. If passed, it would be the most ambitious climate action in U.S. history. And now with support f...
Aug 05, 2022•58 min
We're bringing you something different today. It's an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, called Watt It Takes hosted by Emily Kirsch of Powerhouse Ventures. We talk a lot on Catalyst about how to finance and build climatetech. What we don’t always get into are the personal stories of people who are trying to do that work. That’s exactly what Watt It Takes does. The show tells the stories of founders who are building a zero-carbon world — their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and ...
Jul 28, 2022•42 min
If there were a holy grail of electric vehicle batteries, it would be low-weight, long-range, and fast-charging. It would last a million miles and cost less than anything produced today. So in the booming EV battery market, what kind of battery will check all those boxes? Who will invent it? And do we really need all those features in one battery in the first place? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe , vice president of battery solutions at E-Source. They trace the history of the two maj...
Jul 21, 2022•52 min
In climatetech, the ‘valley of death’ describes the lack of capital for newer solutions, especially those that mainstream investors view as unproven. The climate tech world is full of technologies that would be fantastic tools for fighting the climate crisis, if only they could cross this valley of death and scale. Scott Jacobs co-founded Generate Capital in 2014 to help address this problem. In this episode Shayle talks to Scott about how to successfully finance first-of-a-kind climatetech. The...
Jul 14, 2022•51 min
On the Carbon Copy podcast this week: It’s been over three months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves into global oil markets, causing supply constraints and skyrocketing prices. The conflict has complicated the flow of energy at a time when supply chains were already jumbled up because of Covid. But it’s not just oil. The war is leaving its mark on all kinds of commodities, including the global supplies of minerals and metals. Geopolitical shifts are causing big spikes in the pri...
Jul 07, 2022•21 min
It’s shark week! Or ‘spark’ week? Today we’re bringing you an episode of How to Save a Planet , in which Shayle steps into the shoes of a Shark Tank -style judge. This episode is all about (drum-roll please): Storage! ...Exciting, right? Ok, we’ll prove it to you. Each day, more and more of our electricity comes from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. To balance out our electric grid in the future, we’ll need new ways of storing extra energy, so we can still turn on our lights when the...
Jul 01, 2022•47 min
Within the climate tech world, technology hype is all over the map. In this episode, Lara Pierpoint , director of climate at Actuate, and Stephen Lacey , host of The Carbon Copy and executive producer of Catalyst, join Shayle for a game of “buy sell hold.” They take bets on which technologies are either overhyped, underhyped or just right. They cover a range of topics, including: Advanced nuclear , including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s rejection of Oklo’s reactor designs and shifting opi...
Jun 23, 2022•51 min
In some climate circles, solar geoengineering is akin to a swear word. Also known as solar radiation modification (SRM), it means deliberately modifying the earth’s atmosphere to reflect solar radiation. It provokes forceful pushback , because it’s unclear how it would affect the earth’s agriculture, ozone layer and ecosystems. But it’s been attracting interest because it’s clear it would do one thing well: cool the planet. If we’re not moving fast enough on emissions reductions and carbon remov...
Jun 16, 2022•44 min
We're presenting a trailer for a new show from Post Script Media, called Climavores . Climavores is a show for eaters who don’t want to cook the planet. Each week, journalists Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald explore the complicated, confusing, and surprising relationship between food and the environment. Episodes drop on June 21. Subscribe on Apple , Spotify , or anywhere you listen to podcasts....
Jun 13, 2022•5 min
Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more. And you can engineer it to capture extra carbon dioxide and sequester it underground or at the bottom of the ocean. The catch: The world has a finite capacity for biomass production, so every end use competes with another. If done improperly, these end uses could also compete with food production for arable land already in tight supply. So which decarbonization solutions ...
Jun 09, 2022•40 min
There’s a bottleneck in climate tech that we don’t talk about enough: land availability. It’s a physical resource you need to support biomass, renewables, mineral mining, and other essential tools of decarbonization. So how much is enough, and where do we need it? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, managing director of research at Energy Impact Partners. Andy argues that land—geography, landscape and the rights to land—will be a common constraint among climatetech so...
Jun 02, 2022•40 min
Consumer energy data is vital to the energy transition, especially distributed energy resources (DERs). For example, a rooftop solar company needs consumer energy data to analyze bill savings from a potential solar installation. An electric vehicle (EV) charging company needs it to offer a customer special rates on EV charging. But that data has long been incredibly difficult to access – available only in PDFs and hard-to-access utility databases – often coming in very different formats and stan...
May 26, 2022•50 min
Stock markets are in decline . Inflation is on the rise. Interest rates are up. Private tech companies are laying off workers. Is this the long-awaited market correction that never quite materialized during the bull market of the last 13 years? And what does it mean for climate tech? In this episode, Shayle talks to Saloni Multani , a partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and former chief financial officer for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. Shayle and Saloni place the current moment in historical c...
May 19, 2022•44 min
We’re reversing roles today by taking listener questions for our host, Shayle Kann . He’s usually the one interviewing our guests, but he also has expertise (and maybe a few hot takes) to share. He leads a $350 million fund that invests in early-stage climate startups, so he spends most of his time trying to figure out which technologies and businesses will help us decarbonize as quickly as possible. GreenBiz senior energy analyst Sarah Golden joins the show to ask Shayle your questions and diss...
May 12, 2022•52 min
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is having a moment. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the world cannot meet the targets of the Paris Agreement without removing hundreds of gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere. Big companies like Alphabet, Stripe and others have formed the Frontier Fund, a nearly $1 billion joint-effort to jump-start the market to purchase CDR offsets. Elon Musk is even sponsoring a $100 million X-Prize focused on it. We’re not ta...
May 05, 2022•52 min
A massive green hydrogen project in Utah has won a $504.4 million conditional loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. The project, called Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES), will generate hydrogen from renewables and store it deep underground in what’s called a salt dome . ACES will use that stored hydrogen to generate electricity in a hybrid power plant, running on both natural gas and hydrogen. ACES is one of the many planned hydrogen hubs in the U.S., and o...
Apr 28, 2022•45 min
The metals used to make batteries are in hot demand. In 2021, the price of one form of lithium skyrocketed by over 400% . Automakers are racing to lock up supply deals for key minerals as they roll out new electric-vehicle models. And the market value of companies with mining assets, or new technologies to unlock them, has skyrocketed . What’s behind this scramble for metals and what does it mean for the energy transition? In this episode, Shayle talks to Kurt House , chief executive officer and...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr
