Investor Shayle Kann is asking big questions about how to decarbonize the planet: How cheap can clean energy get? Will artificial intelligence speed up climate solutions? Where is the smart money going into climate technologies? Every week on Catalyst, Shayle explains the world of climate tech with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives. Produced by Latitude Media.
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The U.S. Treasury proposed guidance last Friday that would significantly restrict what battery parts and materials can qualify for incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. The rules label China and several other countries as “foreign entities of concern.” These rules will prevent materials and parts sourced from those countries, starting in the next few years, from counting toward the IRA’s electric vehicle tax credits. The new rules are meant to push battery companies to develop supply chains...
For those of us in the U.S., Europe's strong electric vehicle market might offer a glimpse into the future of EV charging. In 2022 the electrification haven of Norway had a whopping 166 plugin-in electric vehicles per 1,000 residents. Germany had 20 per 1,000 residents and Europe’s largest fleet, based on reporting by Euronews . That’s far ahead of the U.S., which averaged 8.6 in 2022, according to Argonne National Laboratory . So, it stands to reason that these countries must have insights into...
Shayle Kann and Dr. Jessica Lovering explore the reasons behind the drastically different costs of nuclear power plant construction worldwide, from South Korea's efficient builds to the expensive US projects like Vogel. They discuss factors driving costs, including regulation, project management, and the lack of demand-pull policies in the US. The conversation highlights the potential of small modular reactors (SMRs) and passive safety features to reduce expenses and addresses the recent NuScale project cancellation within a broader, still optimistic, outlook for nuclear's role in decarbonization.
It’s about that time again. You sent in great questions for Shayle, and in this episode we’re tackling them with the help of Sarah Golden , vice president of energy at GreenBiz. Together Shayle and Sarah cover topics like: Load growth and whether data-center demand is good or bad for decarbonization. The crash in photovoltaic module prices and what it means for the solar industry. The impact of interest rates on climatetech. The challenges of siting carbon dioxide pipelines. Why there’s no clear...
Some technologies grab the spotlight even beyond #energytwitter, and some fly under the radar. Which ones are getting more attention than they deserve, and which aren’t getting enough? This is the episode you never knew you needed: Shayle talks to Volts host David Roberts about the most underhyped and overhyped trends in climatetech right now. David has written about clean technology for the past two decades, first at Grist and then at Vox. He now writes a newsletter and hosts a podcast of the s...
Shayle Kann and Tim Hade delve into the world of microgrids, clarifying their definition as distributed energy resources that can island from the main grid. They explore essential components like solar, storage, and switchgear, highlighting bottlenecks in supply chains and the often-undervalued societal need for resilience. The conversation also covers the economics driving microgrid adoption, the pivotal role of energy storage, and challenges posed by current tax credit structures that disproportionately favor larger utility-scale projects.
Heat pumps in 140 million U.S. homes by 2050 — that’s the goal laid out in Rewiring America’s recent report on the pace of home electrification. It’s a daunting target for a country that had heat pumps in only 17 million homes in 2020. But we’re not that far off. According to Rewiring America, the U.S. is currently on track to install about five million heat pumps by 2025, only about two and a half million short of the pace we need to reach 140 million homes by midcentury. So what can we do to c...
In climatetech circles, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was a big deal . The expectation was that, combined with other parts of U.S. industrial policy like the CHIPS and Science Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the IRA would transform the American economy and ultimately slash U.S. carbon emissions. We can’t see the impact on carbon emissions yet, but we can measure the initial effects on the economy. So how’s it going so far? In this episode, Shayle talks to Trevor Houser , partner at th...
This is a partner podcast episode, brought to you by DNV. Wes Whited and Angie Ziech-Malek work for DNV designing efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization programs for utilities. And lately, they’ve been paying attention to electric forklifts. There are 1.5 million forklifts sold in the U.S. every year. And converting that vast fleet to run on lithium-ion batteries could be a cost-effective way to boost electrification – and add a helpful resource for demand management to the grid. Speed...
We have a flash sale for Transition-AI: New York through October 9th. Use the code FLASH30 to get 30% off your ticket price to our event on AI + energy. Spots are limited, so don't miss out! This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA. Before a startup has proven that its technology is commercially viable, it models how its technology would work. These TEAs include things like assumptions about inputs, prices, and market landscape. They help investors and entrepreneurs...
It was 2020 and plant-based meats were hot. Sales were up 45% that year and expectations were high. The industry set its sights on performing as well as plant-based beverages, which had reached about a 15% dollar share of the U.S. cow-based milk market at the time. In the $300 billion U.S. meat market, a 15% share would be a massive $45 billion prize. But then, starting in 2021, plant-based meats hit a wall. U.S. sales began three consecutive years of declines. Headlines described plant-based me...
Everything's bigger in Texas—the hats, the boots, the convenience stores . But its interconnection times? They’re surprisingly short. In the U.S. it takes power generators four years on average to get approval to connect to the grid, and in some places, it takes far longer. In the Texas electricity market, it takes only about 1.5 years between interconnection request and agreement. And it costs way less to interconnect, too. The results are telling. The Texas grid, operated by the Electricity Re...
Solar geoengineering is a hot (er, cool?) topic these days. One method involves injecting a form of sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect solar radiation and help reduce global temperatures . But it could also cause unpredictable changes to ozone, rainfall, and ecosystems. So when a rogue startup began sending balloons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere earlier this year, it sparked outrage. But here’s the thing: We’ve been geoengineering our atmosphere for decades, just not intentionally. Sc...
Last time we talked to Dr. Michael Webber, we dug into the nexus between water and energy . This episode we’re diving into food. The connections are myriad. Food itself is just a means of energy storage, and a particularly good one at that. While photosynthesis is remarkably inefficient—averaging only 0.3% globally, compared to 90% or more in an electric motor—it stores energy for weeks to years. In the U.S. we use around 12% of our energy to produce food, in the form of inputs like diesel, fert...
Here’s the dream: Millions of EVs plugged into their charging docks, working in concert to relieve stress on the world’s power grids. They reduce charging load or even inject energy back onto the grid. They back up renewables when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. That’s the vision for managed charging, or V1G, and vehicle-to-grid, or V2G. There’s also a third technology called vehicle-to-home that allows an EV battery to power a building, just like a home battery. Collectively the...
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...
Electrification should be a field day for utilities. As we electrify the economy, adding gigafactories, charging stations, and green hydrogen hubs to the grid, the demand for power is growing for the first time in decades. For savvy utilities, there’s a lot of money to be made. But only if they can keep up. Utilities face massive challenges to deliver the power needed for electrification – years-long interconnection queues, a shortage of transformers, an uncertain regulatory environment—the list...
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 ...
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 da...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 pe...
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...
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...
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...
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 t...
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 qu...
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...
