It’s the highest-intensity solar power you can get. It’s available 24/7. And you can send it anywhere on earth. All you need to do is launch a ten-by-ten kilometer array of solar panels into geosynchronous orbit, capture solar energy, and beam it to earth using a massive antenna array. Then set up a receiver a few kilometers in diameter on earth to collect that power and send it to the grid. Sound like science fiction? You wouldn’t be far off (looking at you, Isaac Asimov). But the reality is th...
Aug 10, 2023•49 min
This week we’re bringing you a special crossover episode from With Great Power. It’s a show about one of the most complex machines ever built – the power grid. It’s a machine that’s changing faster than ever. With Great Power is about the people driving that change: A third of the world's largest companies now have net-zero targets in place for carbon emissions. Google was ahead of the curve. Back in 2007, it had already achieved its goal of going carbon neutral across all of its offices and dat...
Aug 04, 2023•28 min
The good news: The Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) contains more nickel and cobalt than the rest of the world’s land-based reserves combined. It also has significant resources of high-grade lithium, copper and rare earth metals—all of which are critical for the batteries the world needs to meet Paris Agreement targets. The bad news: The CCZ lies at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and contains biodiverse ecosystems we know very little about—and that we could profoundly harm if we mine them. The CCZ...
Jul 27, 2023•50 min
Carbon capture and storage. It’s a controversial tool in the energy transition that we don’t want to use, but probably have to. Most of the scenarios in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report include capturing and storing hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide between now and 2100. When people say carbon capture and storage, or CCS, they often mean different things. It’s a term that covers multiple technologies used to capture CO2—such as point-source and direct-air capture— and different approaches...
Jul 20, 2023•43 min
Before hydrogen makes it big, we have to overcome a massive, ocean-sized challenge: Transporting the fuel between continents. The places that will be best suited to produce hydrogen via renewables-powered electrolysis, like Australia and Egypt, will have to ship that hydrogen to demand centers in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere. And it turns out that shipping hydrogen is way harder than shipping oil or natural gas. Hydrogen has a very low volumetric energy density. Compared to one barrel of oil, th...
Jul 13, 2023•44 min
More than a third of the world’s current greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels go through underground networks of fungi, according to a new peer-reviewed study in Current Biology. That’s a whopping 13 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. Mycorrhizal fungi act as a symbiotic partner of plants, seeking out nutrients and bringing them back to the plants’ roots. In return, they accept carbon in the form of carbohydrates—which they then lock away in the structure of the fungi. This s...
Jun 29, 2023•36 min
Everything, everywhere, all at once—that’s the state of the U.S. solar industry right now. Suppliers are rushing to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous domestic-manufacturing incentives. Major manufacturers like First Solar and Enel have announced billion dollar investments in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Lawrence County, Alabama. But tariffs on the import of some Chinese-made parts may resume at the end of 2024; and the industry still faces supply chain shortages and per...
Jun 22, 2023•45 min
The list of potential uses for AI in climatetech is growing fast: developing better materials, optimizing solar farms, integrating renewables and microgrids. But many of these are still theoretical. We wanted to find a real-world application that changed the way we make climatetech. So we decided to come up with our own test run. Back in March Duncan Campbell, vice president at Scale Microgrids, used ChatGPT to code some battery dispatch software and tweeted about his experience. Duncan isn’t a ...
Jun 15, 2023•1 hr 21 min
Voluntary carbon credits are a lot like used cars; you really have no idea what their quality might be. Or maybe they’re more like expensive bottles of wine. Most people (or at least Shayle) can’t tell if they’re buying good quality wine. If it’s expensive, it must be good, right? That’s the logic that has plagued voluntary carbon markets for years. A carbon credit can work in two ways. First, it can avoid 1 metric ton of emissions that would have otherwise happened by, for example, preventing d...
Jun 08, 2023•49 min
The energy transition is fueling skyrocketing demand for copper, an essential metal for renewables, batteries, and other climatetech. But supply isn’t keeping up. There’s more than enough copper in the earth’s known reserves to supply our growing demand for the metal, but supply is stagnating due to rising extraction costs and decades-long lead times to open new mines. A July 2022 report from S&P Global predicts that demand could begin to exceed supply in just a few years.. Without action, a gro...
Jun 01, 2023•50 min
Are you a utility or climatetech startup looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape your company? Come to our one-day event, Transition-AI: Boston, on June 15. Our listeners get a 20% discount with the code PSPODS20. On the Catalyst with Shayle Kann podcast this week: The good news: the U.S. has about 47 days’ worth of energy stored up for later use. The bad news? Virtually all of it is in the form of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. By comparison, if you add up all th...
May 25, 2023•59 min
Are you a utility or climate tech startup looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape your company? Come to our one-day event, Transition-AI: Boston on June 15. Our listeners get a 20% discount with the code PSPODS20. Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the EPA’s first attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. But it also preserved the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The agency just needed to find the right approach. The que...
May 18, 2023•56 min
Depending on who you talk to, Bitcoin mines are either great for the grid or the worst thing that’s ever happened to it. These warehouses of computers essentially turn electricity into bitcoins. Proponents argue that mines can do a number of things for the grid, like: Support grid reliability by reducing demand during peak hours Incentivize new renewable generation by raising the prices that solar and wind farms receive Reduce methane emissions by capturing flare gas from fossil fuel wells and t...
May 11, 2023•49 min
The U.S. power grid is clogged, and it’s holding back the energy transition. Solar and wind farms are waiting four or more years to connect to the grid. Rising congestion costs are driving up retail electricity prices while hurting generator revenues. And the process of approving projects for interconnection is so complicated and expensive that it’s forcing developers to abandon the projects they were planning to build. We need much more transmission capacity and a better process for connecting ...
May 04, 2023•42 min
We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. It’s about a rogue startup that was trying to do something we’ve talked about on this show: solar geoengineering. Last year, Time staff writer Alejandro de la Garza found himself on the floor of a hotel room in Nevada with two guys trying to cook sulfur dioxide out of a tin can. Luke Iseman and Andrew Song are the co-founders of Make Sunsets, a startup claiming to be implementing solar geoen...
Apr 27, 2023•27 min
Hydropower is the world’s largest source of renewable electricity today, according to the IEA. Like gas peaker plants, it’s highly dispatchable, meaning it can complement intermittent renewables like wind and solar. And we could get a lot more of it. The IEA estimates that we could double the amount of energy produced globally. One peer-reviewed study found that global economic potential for hydropower was 21,000 terawatt hours per year, more than five times the current generation today. So how ...
Apr 20, 2023•55 min
The battery manufacturing announcements have been coming one after another—a VW cathode facility in Canada; a Tesla factory in Mexico; a Ford battery plant in Michigan. These companies hope to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s lucrative EV tax credits: Up to $3,750 for strategic minerals mined in the U.S. or its many free trade partner countries Up to $3,750 for battery components produced only in the U.S., Mexico, or Canada. But there’s a catch. A whole bunch of intermediate batte...
Apr 06, 2023•35 min
The run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) earlier this month was a hair-raising experience for anyone in climatetech. The bank catered to entrepreneurs in tech, especially climate. So when news of SVB’s troubled assets hit social media, startups scrambled to withdraw millions of dollars and draft emergency plans to make payroll. But after the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) took over SVB and another troubled regional institution, Signature Bank, the dust started to settle. The FDIC annou...
Mar 30, 2023•41 min
Landfills, dairy farms and wastewater plants all emit methane, the potent greenhouse gas produced when organic material decomposes in the absence of oxygen. But instead of emitting that methane (often called biomethane or waste methane), it’s possible to capture and refine it, resulting in renewable natural gas, or RNG. Capturing methane that would have been emitted anyway (something that’s still up for debate) creates RNG that’s carbon neutral or carbon negative. And using that RNG to displace ...
Mar 23, 2023•46 min
Nitrous oxide or N2O is the third largest source of GHG emissions behind carbon dioxide and methane. Also known as laughing gas, it’s long-lived like carbon dioxide and incredibly potent like methane. And it accounts for about 6% of global warming. So where does it come from? And what do we do about it? In this episode, Shayle talks to Eric Davidson, professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and principal scientist at Spark Climate Solutions. Eric studies the surp...
Mar 16, 2023•48 min
Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. I host the show and we did an episode recently about this urgent climate tech problem: America’s shortage of electricians. To decarbonize the e...
Mar 09, 2023•33 min
Last year’s surge in oil prices brought record windfall profits for oil majors, and a boon for investors. But historic trends don’t favor fossil fuels. From 2010 to 2020, the oil & gas sector underperformed the broader S&P 500 index. The sector gained 6% over that period, while the benchmark S&P index grew 180%. Some called it a "lost decade" for fossil fuel investors. “If anything, oil's been a drag,” says Zach Stein, the co-founder and CEO of Carbon Collective, a company building climate-focus...
Mar 08, 2023•24 min
Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts on April 6 with some very special guests. Get your tickets today. We had so much to cover in Nat Bullard’s monster climate trends deck that we’re back for another episode. Haven’t heard the first part yet? Listen here. Nat was the chief content officer at BloombergNEF until last year. He is now a senior contributor at BNEF and Bloomberg Green as...
Mar 02, 2023•49 min
It’s the first year of what we hope is an annual event: Nat Bullard has released his first climate trends report. He was the chief content officer at BloombergNEF until last year, and now is a senior contributor at BNEF and Bloomberg Green. He’s also a venture partner at Voyager Ventures. There’s so much in this 141-slide deck that we’ve split the conversation into two episodes. In this first part, Shayle and Nat dig into topics like: Land use. For example: we grow 40% of the U.S. corn to offset...
Feb 23, 2023•43 min
Recent announcements in the world of nuclear power might make you think that new nuclear technologies are close to deployment in North America. But look closely and you’ll find that progress is actually painfully slow, weighed down by regulatory challenges. Today’s guest argues that all those rules and regulations need to be overhauled.In this episode, Shayle talks to Bret Kugelmass, CEO and founder of nuclear reactor developer Last Energy. He’s also the host of the podcast Titans of Nuclear. Th...
Feb 16, 2023•47 min
Recent research has raised questions about the global-warming impact of uncombusted hydrogen. When it leaks from storage, pipes and other infrastructure into the atmosphere, new studies suggest hydrogen absorbs more heat than previously understood. And, perhaps more importantly, it extends the atmospheric life of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Proponents argue that hydrogen is a critical climate solution. “Green” hydrogen, for example, is made with zero-carbon electricity, effectively turning...
Feb 09, 2023•44 min
It’s that time of year when we reach into our listener mailbag and answer your questions. And you had some good ones. In this episode, Shayle once again hands the mic to guest host Sarah Golden, VP of energy at GreenBiz Sarah Golden. Together they cover things like: The role of biology in creating fossil-fuel-free materials Whether the marginal cost of electricity is heading toward zero Solving the dilemma of financing first-of-a-kind projects The impact of tech layoffs on climatetech The bigges...
Feb 02, 2023•48 min
Here’s the dream: millions of controllable devices—from EV chargers to thermostats, fridges, and batteries—working together to inject power back into the grid. They reduce load when there’s not enough electricity supply to meet demand. They ease transmission congestion and maintain grid frequency. And these devices, collectively called distributed energy resources or DERs, are all controlled remotely by grid operators. So how far are we from this dream? In this episode, Shayle talks to Mathew Sa...
Jan 26, 2023•47 min
In the U.S. alone, food waste is responsible for the equivalent emissions from 42 coal power plants. Globally it accounts for 10% of greenhouse gases, more than heavy industries like cement and steel. Why? Wasted food means wasted energy. Throwing a piece of food in the trash is like tossing out the fertilizer and fuel used to make it, too. And we waste a lot of it. Nearly one third of all food grown gets trashed. On top of that, when food decomposes in landfills through anaerobic digestion, it ...
Jan 19, 2023•35 min
In this bonus episode, we present With Great Power, a podcast from GridX about the people building the future grid, today. The grid is no longer the biggest source of carbon emissions in America. It's transportation. Electric vehicles are a key part of decarbonizing the transportation sector – making utilities an important force in growing EV adoption. Electric cars will create a new opportunity for power providers to scale their business. But first, they need to get people to buy them. And that...
Jan 18, 2023•22 min
