A weekly podcast featuring veteran investor Shayle Kann interviewing experts about the state of the energy sector and the technologies powering decarbonization.
Shayle Kann is asking the big questions about the ways we power our world: How cheap can clean energy get? Where is the smart money going on new technologies? How will the AI boom both help and hinder us on our journey to decarbonization? Every Thursday on Catalyst, Shayle dives deep into the world of energy with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives to unpack both the solutions and the challenges at play in this ever-changing landscape.
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To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, is planning to expand its fleet of natural gas plants. And Microsoft signed a deal last September to re-open Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant But could we meet a portion of that load growth with distributed energy resources? Pier LaFarge thinks so. In this episode, Shayle talks to Pier, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund. (Energy Impact Partn...
If you’ve followed global lithium prices over the past few years, you know what a wild ride it’s been. Chinese spot prices shot to record highs in 2022 and then came crashing back down by 2024 — with big consequences for batteries and EVs that depend on the mineral. So what happened? And what could happen next, especially as EV sales have been slower than expected? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ernest Scheyder , author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Liv...
Editor’s note: For the holiday break, we’re bringing you one of our most popular episodes of the year — a conversation about Tesla’s Master Plan 3 with Drew Baglino, who stepped down as the company’s senior vice president for powertrain and energy in April. Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 lays out the company’s model for a decarbonized economy — and makes the case for why it's economically viable. It outlines a vision for extensive electrification and a reliance on wind and solar power. In this episo...
A mismatch between suppliers and buyers is making it hard to grow the supply of low-carbon products like cement, steel, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). If you want to produce a product like SAF, you want to find the cheapest place to do it — someplace where there’s cheap, low-carbon hydrogen, for example. But the buyers who have the incentive and money to pay for those products might be halfway across the world. Or say you’re a supplier of a low-carbon building material . Risk-averse contra...
Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy. So what went wrong? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe , principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like: Wha...
Security experts often say there are two kinds of companies. “There are those companies that have been hacked, and those that don't know that they are being hacked – especially when we look at the energy industry,” says Bilal Khursheed executive director of Microsoft's global power & utilities business. Khursheed works with companies to deploy digital technologies to speed up the clean energy transition. And he also focuses heavily on a threat that could derail the transition – cyber attacks...
Every data center company is after one thing right now: power . Electricity used to be an afterthought in data center construction, but in the AI arms race access to power has become critical because more electrons means more powerful AI models. But how and when these companies will get those electrons is unclear. Utilities have been inundated with new load requests, and it takes time to build new capacity. Given these uncertainties, how do data center companies make the high-stakes decisions ab...
In the next five years, Arizona Public Service estimates peak demand will grow by 40%. In order to meet that peak, the utility is increasingly turning to demand-side flexibility. A few years ago, APS started working with EnergyHub to experiment with smart thermostats as a resource to manage peak demand. The initial resource was modest – a few megawatts, and then 20 megawatts. That program eventually turned into a 190-megawatt virtual power plant made up of smart thermostats, behavioral demand re...
Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil used this Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Since it was published in June 2022, there has been increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors , especially for sustainable aviation fuel. Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more. And you ca...
Shayle and his team at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) review a lot of climate-tech pitches. The best kind of pitch uses a solid techno-economic analysis (TEA) to model how a technology would compete in the real world. In a previous episode, we covered some of the ways startups get TEAs wrong — bad assumptions, false precision, focusing on parts instead of the system, etc. So what does a good TEA look like? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleagues, Dr. Melissa Ball, EIP’s associate director ...
This episode delves into the complexities hindering widespread heat pump adoption, focusing on difficult customer experiences, surprisingly high installation costs, and installer reluctance. Shayle Kann and Quilt CEO Paul Lambert explore how a vertically integrated approach, emphasizing innovative product design, user comfort, and streamlined sales, can revolutionize the market. They also discuss the crucial role of rebates and a strategic vision for scaling heat pump solutions effectively.
The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide does. The good news: We’re in the middle of a global effort to replace them with lower impact alternatives. Will we replace them fast enough to hit climate targets? And in the meantime, can we prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ian McGavisk , senior advisor at RMI for carbon-free buildings. An industry ve...
This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA. Before a startup proves its technology is commercially viable, it models how a technology would work. These TEAs include things like assumptions about inputs, prices, and market landscape. They help investors and entrepreneurs answer the question, will this technology compete? TEAs are important to the success of an early-stage climate-tech company. And a lot of startups get them wrong. As an investor at Energy Impact Partne...
We capture concentrated methane emissions from point sources like dairy barns, landfills, and coal mines. Mitigating methane emissions is essential to hitting net-zero targets, but could we capture diluted gasses straight from the atmosphere, too? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus , Chief Scientist at the Institute For Governance & Sustainable Development, about a National Academy of Sciences report on the unexplored area of methane removal . Gabrielle chaired the commit...
AI is enabling a multitude of solutions across power, industry, and transportation. But AI energy demands are increasingly stressing the electric grid — creating a bottleneck for growth and new challenges for clean energy supply. The mounting tension highlights the need for an energy-first approach to computing. Developer Crusoe is building AI infrastructure that takes advantage of clean energy to power workloads for AI modeling. Likewise, Nvidia, Crusoe’s primary GPU supplier, has been consiste...
Getting the construction industry to try a novel form of cement is like turning a giant ship. It’s hard to redirect the immense momentum behind existing ways of doing business, especially involving cement, the most energy-intensive ingredient in concrete. Industry insiders point to tight margins, concerns about messing with the ingredients that literally hold up buildings, and the long list of stakeholders will agree to try a new material. So how do you get a risk-averse construction supply chai...
Chinese battery companies are manufacturing the cheapest cells in the world right now, and it’s not just because of cheap labor and state subsidies. They’ve streamlined the process in a way that has industry experts wondering how international competitors can ever catch up. In this episode, Shayle talks to James Frith, principal at the battery investment firm Volta Energy Technologies . He argues that there are multiple factors behind Chinese manufacturers’ efficiency and speed, like the know-ho...
Tannice McCoy grew up in a mining family, but she never imagined herself in the mining business. Today she’s the president and general manager of NewRange Copper Nickel. Jenna Lehti never imagined herself in the mining industry either. She’s a member of the Bois Forte band of the Ojibwe tribe in Northern Minnesota, and grew up on a reservation adjacent to the Iron Range, a collection of mining districts around Lake Superior. Today, she’s the tribal relations advisor for NewRange. Together, they’...
The world’s first large-scale, commercial direct-air capture (DAC) plants are coming online – or are about to . How soon will we see a boom in high-quality, durable DAC supply? In this episode, Shayle talks to Andreas Aepli, chief financial officer of Climeworks, the world’s largest provider of DAC. They talk about Climeworks’ challenges with its two commercial plants – the kinds of challenges Andreas argues the industry needs to be transparent about in order to earn the trust of skeptical buyer...
Editor’s note: There’s some big money flowing into low carbon ammonia right now. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1.56 billion conditional loan guarantee for Wabash Valley Resources, an Indiana low-carbon ammonia facility. In August, oil and gas producer Woodside Energy spent $2.35 billion on a low-carbon ammonia plant in Texas. Both of these facilities will produce low-carbon ammonia while using carbon capture and storage. We thought it would be a good time to revisit an ep...
The U.S. and U.K. could see 500 gigawatts of distributed resources hitting the power system in the next few years. But after years of watching DERs grow quickly, utilities and grid operators are still figuring out how to utilize them. Are we finally reaching an inflection point? “When you move to a world where you have millions and millions of generators, that whole system falls apart. And that's where you need not only digitalization, but also automation. They're the two things that we can't do...
AI is working its way across climate tech, helping companies discover giant lodes of ore , catch battery defects , and monitor energy infrastructure . Could it help us find revolutionary new materials, too? Turns out, it’s complicated. In this episode, Shayle talks to Ekin Dogus Cubuk , or Dogus, a researcher focused on materials at Google DeepMind . DeepMind is one of several players, including Microsoft , trying to discover new materials that could be used in things like better battery chemist...
Deploy or innovate? Scale up an existing technology or develop a breakthrough? Build, build, build, or invent a better mousetrap? The question isn’t which strategy to follow; it’s which strategy to use in which sector. Virtually no one thinks that solar needs brand new tech breakthroughs to scale. Crystalline silicone took the lion’s share of the market years ago from cadmium telluride, amorphous silicon, CIGS and other early solar technologies. But in carbon removal, batteries, nuclear, and oth...
Cutting emissions is essential to avoiding the worst of climate change, but we also have to deal with the impacts of climate change happening now. Fortunately, there’s a growing list of technologies that could help us adapt — and potentially turn a profit for investors, too. Will these emerging adaptation and resilience (A&R) technologies take off as an investment category? In this episode, Shayle talks to Katie MacDonald , co-founder and managing partner at Tailwind. They talk about the are...
Oil producers waste a lot of natural gas. Last year they flared 150 billion cubic meters of associated gas into the atmosphere, equivalent to about half the global carbon emissions of aviation over a 30-year period. So why are oil producers burning a valuable commodity like gas? In this episode, Shayle talks to Tomás de Oliveira Bredariol , an energy and environmental policy analyst focused on methane at the IEA. So far, multiple major global initiatives haven’t made a dent in flare volumes, whi...
Hydrogen has two big problems: cost and supply. As a low-carbon feedstock, it could decarbonize planes, industry, and power plants. It could even replace the oil in plastics and chemicals. But the leading contenders for low-carbon hydrogen production — like using zero-carbon power for electrolysis and methane pyrolysis — just haven’t cut it yet. So far, the price points are too high and the scale of production is too low to spur a hydrogen revolution. But instead of synthesizing hydrogen, what i...
Editor’s note: There’s new interest in nuclear power from electric utilities , the White House , and the public . While NuScale’s deal to build a small modular reactor failed last year, TerraPower is currently building the U.S.’s first advanced non-light water reactor in Wyoming. So we’re revisiting an episode from last November with The Good Energy Collective’s Dr. Jessica Lovering unpacking one of nuclear’s biggest challenges: cost. Nuclear construction costs in the U.S. are some of the highes...
America’s green bank – officially known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – is ramping up. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is sending $27 billion to a network of non-profit organizations, state green banks, and local private lenders to fund distributed energy projects. The pressure is on to invest those dollars quickly and efficiently. The GGRF won’t be considered successful if it only deploys that $27 billion – it will be successful if it catalyzes 5x more in ca...
Shayle Kann and Rob Gramlich discuss the U.S. power grid's severe transmission issues, covering the three major challenges: congestion, interconnection, and buildout. They delve into the historical lack of investment, the economic impacts of a constrained grid, and the "process disaster" of current interconnection queues. Gramlich highlights past successes and potential solutions in planning, permitting, and funding to overcome these bottlenecks and meet growing electrification demands.
Little-known fact: The primary product of steel mills is CO2. A conventional blast furnace produces almost two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of steel. And with almost two billion tons of steel produced annually — roughly 500 pounds for every human, every year — that’s a lot of carbon: about 8% of global energy system emissions. And yet, steel is vital for vast parts of the economy, including the energy transition itself. So why does steel production emit so much CO2? And what are the path...
