In a year when clean energy and clean vehicle jobs were supposed to increase by some 175,000, we are down by half a million jobs. We will tell you why, and explain the numbers. What will reverse the decline? Then: Did New Jersey just pass the most sweeping environmental justice law in the country? The new law will mean big changes for industrial sites -- and the neighborhoods that often feel their worst impacts. And last: What about all that nice, flat water in hydropower reservoirs? Could we fl...
Oct 16, 2020•47 min
Manish Hebbar architects billions of dollars worth of equity and debt deals in clean energy. He’s able to stay methodical and calm in the middle of deals that are very stressful, involving multiple buyers and counter-parties. “M&A transactions are those types of deals, where it's a fast-paced environment, every minute and every hour matters. It's really about who can stay the course and work through each round of progression.” That skill goes back to his time as a Lieutenant in the Navy. It’...
Oct 14, 2020•11 min
What does it mean when the world’s largest generator of wind and solar outpaces the most iconic oil company in market value? We’re talking about NextEra Energy and ExxonMobil. What does the flip tell us about the energy transition? Plus, reporters at Bloomberg got their hands on documents that show ExxonMobil plans to pretty significantly ramp up emissions in the coming years. Is this the planet’s most recalcitrant company? Then, the flattening of hydrocarbon growth will change global political ...
Oct 09, 2020•59 min
China, the country currently pouring the most carbon into the atmosphere, is making a promise to get to zero emissions – 40 years from now. Is it a breakthrough? Or is it a plan to keep burning coal? Is it both? We’ll hash it out. Then, the Governor of California wants to stop selling any new cars that run on gasoline – in 15 years. It’s ambitious, can it be done? Is it legal? What will that take? And last, a flurry of serious commitments from top American brands – Walmart, Google, Apple. Each o...
Oct 03, 2020•51 min
Does the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean the future of federal climate policy is in jeopardy? What will a changed Supreme Court mean for climate change, and for the all-important endangerment finding? The Gang weighs in. Then, the great plastic cover-up. How important are plastics to the profits of fossil fuel companies? We dive into an important investigation from NPR and Frontline into how fossil fuel companies hoodwinked the public on plastics recycling. Then last, the Federal Energy...
Sep 25, 2020•1 hr
This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Michael Liebreich. You may know Liebreich as the brain behind New Energy Finance, which was sold to Bloomberg in 2009. But before that company, Leibreich started a ski-based travel startup and invested in a portfolio of companies that lost 90 percent of their value in the dot-com bust. After that, he was "unemployable." But he used a team of interns to begin compiling data on clean energy investment. in this episode, he tell...
Sep 22, 2020•57 min
In the first half of 2020, renewables beat out fossil fuels on the grid in Europe for the first time. They didn’t only beat out coal -- they beat out all fossil fuels put together. We’ll look at what the milestone means. Then, 30 major companies have come together in a new joint lobbying organization to flex united power for clean energy. Will it make renewables a bigger political force? And what will they be fighting for? Then, your view of Texas is probably out-of-date. We look at the dawn of ...
Sep 11, 2020•50 min
This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with green jobs pioneer Van Jones. Jones may be best known for “The Van Jones Show” and “The Redemption Project,” which both air on CNN. He is also the author of three best-selling books, including “The Green Collar Economy.” But long before the high-profile Green New Deal, Jones was also a powerful voice for bringing clean energy jobs to black and brown communities. He helped spearhead the Green Jobs Act of 2007, the first time ...
Sep 04, 2020•1 hr 6 min
We are just over two months away from America’s presidential election. And that means we are days away from one of the most consequential political moments ever for the planet. Joe Biden put climate and cleantech jobs at the top of his priorities in last week’s nomination speech. His VP pick, Kamala Harris, says she’ll use her background as a prosecutor to hold industries accountable for climate change. And climate donors are pouring millions into their campaign. Meanwhile, Trump was in Pennsylv...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Last week, short-term blackouts rolled across an overheated California after the grid operator said there was not enough power to meet demand. This wasn’t supposed to happen again. Not after the Enron scandal. Not after 19 years of reforms. We have a very different grid now. Renewables skeptics, including President Trump, are seizing on the incident. What really happened? Where do we place blame? We explain the confluence of grid-management factors. Then, coal power generation in the United Stat...
Aug 21, 2020•1 hr 3 min
“Electrify everything” isn’t just a good slogan. It’s the fastest way to decarbonize and create tens of millions of jobs -- and it can be done using off-the-shelf technology. A respected squad of researchers did the math on a swap-out of every aging boiler, truck and power plant -- and replacing it with equipment that won’t burn fossil fuels ever again. We’ll dig into a new analysis from Rewiring America . Then, BP has more details around its plan to become the first oil major to transition away...
Aug 14, 2020•1 hr 1 min
On this week’s episode of The Energy Gang: big energy companies are putting together bids for multi- renewable power -- and it’s merchant. Global investment in offshore wind more than quadrupled in the first half of this year. More new wind farms were approved at the height of the pandemic than during all last year. Some of offshore projects include storage, and even hydrogen. Some of them include floating solar panels. Is this what the future of projects looks like for oil & gas majors? The...
Aug 07, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Dan Yates and his co-founder Alex Laskey built Opower, an efficiency company that saves more energy every year than the hoover dam can generate. It was based on cutting-edge behavioral science -- but it wasn’t always clear how the science would play out. “It wasn’t okay with us to just know that there was going to be a result. It had to be a certain level, otherwise it wasn’t economic. And in the first few months, the results came in and they weren’t changing behavior. The floor fell out from un...
Jul 29, 2020•53 min
Joe Biden just released a plan to address climate change on a trillion-dollar scale. Along with focusing on rapid deployment of renewables, it also devotes resources to environmental justice, sustainable housing, clean transportation, and networking. What would it mean? And who's informing the ideas? We’ll dig in. Then Facebook's disinformation problem. We look at why Facebook is rejecting the conclusions of its fact-checkers on some articles about climate change. We’re joined by Emily Atkin, cl...
Jul 24, 2020•1 hr 1 min
A group of House lawmakers recently released a 547-page report on climate change. Reporters at E&E News call it “arguably the most comprehensive climate policy plan in American politics.” The report spells out in great detail how to use Congressional policy to decarbonize the economy. It was the result of nearly a year of input from hundreds of experts, 17 hearings, and thousands of meetings. This week, we’ll discuss why this report is so significant. We’ll also look at a companion infrastru...
Jul 17, 2020•1 hr 5 min
A rivalry is emerging between two companies trying to clean up the trucking industry: Nikola Motor versus Tesla Motors. Tesla thinks battery-electric semi models are superior. Nikola thinks hydrogen is the best choice. Neither company actually has a semi model on the road. But Elon Musk and Trevor Milton are talking up their visions for the future of heavy-duty trucks, with the hope of getting vehicles to customers in the next couple of years. This week on The Energy Gang : Which company is best...
Jun 26, 2020•58 min
This is an original, branded podcast from GTM Creative Strategies, produced in collaboration with CohnReznick. In 2004, Ted Gunther started a new job at a big accounting firm. He led the team overseeing transactions in newly-deregulated electricity markets. On his first day, he met the "Green Book," a thick, complicated book that sets standards for derivatives, hedging strategies and contracts structures. “I still remember it vividly. [...] I remember the partner at the time putting that book on...
Jun 25, 2020•13 min
Most decarbonization proposals play out over 30 years, aiming toward 2050. But a new roadmap from researchers at UC Berkeley and the policy firm Energy Innovation shows the grid can get 90% clean in just 15 years. No new fossil fuel plants. Lower rates for consumers. 85,000 lives saved. 500,000 additional jobs. Region by region, they lay out exactly how. Prices have fallen so quickly that our understanding of what’s possible hasn’t kept pace. And now, say researchers, we have the chance to decar...
Jun 19, 2020•1 hr 5 min
We’re back with another live show from quarantine. Europe is crafting a €750 billion recovery package in response to the economic impact of coronavirus. It will devote more than €200 billion directly to low-carbon infrastructure projects. That could enable hundreds of billions more for renewables, efficiency, clean public transport, and hydrogen. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., our recent stimulus sent billions of dollars to debt-laden oil producers. With potentially one shot left to pass another r...
Jun 11, 2020•1 hr 3 min
This week: as anger over police brutality explodes into the once-empty streets, we tackle an equally oppressive force for black Americans: environmental racism. Coronavirus has exposed an unsettling reality for black and brown people, who are dying at higher rates in the country’s most polluted communities. We’re suddenly talking again about structural racism in policing and criminal justice. But the story of race, energy and the environment is also very important to understanding the anger of t...
Jun 05, 2020•56 min
Gia Schneider and her brother Abe started Natel Energy based on a hydropower turbine their father designed. And after more than a decade of R&D, pilots, software development and a project for Apple, Natel is preparing for the next level of scale. “Our objectives have actually not wavered. But they haven’t wavered because of rigid adherence to dogma, they have not wavered because we check in consistently about ‘is this the right problem to solve?’” says Schneider. Natel is commercializing a t...
May 29, 2020•52 min
This week, we cover some hopeful signs amidst the economic destruction. First, we’ll look at the record-breaking activity in battery storage. A coal plant in North Dakota will be replaced in part with a one-acre battery array from Form Energy that uses a new technology capable of discharging for 150 hours – that’s more than 30 times longer than lithium batteries. Hawaii’s electric utility just awarded contracts for 16 projects that add up to more than 3 gigawatt-hours of storage, in order to rep...
May 22, 2020•51 min
This week, we look at sky-high layoffs in clean energy. How do we get people back to work? The first major analysis of unemployment in the clean energy sector has been released for April. According to E2 and BW Research, nearly 600,000 jobs were lost in energy efficiency, manufacturing, electric vehicles and clean power and fuels. We’ve seen a 17 percent drop in the green workforce since the start of the year. Those losses amount to double the employment growth in clean energy for the last three...
May 15, 2020•55 min
This week: while the country is distracted by infection rates, deaths and protests, what else have we been missing? We peek out from behind the quarantine curtain to see what the Trump administration has been up to on the energy front. The Trump administration has declared a national emergency over cyber threats to the power grid. Equipment vendors “where a foreign adversary has an interest” will be banned. Most transformers are built in China. Will this create uncertainty or slow grid work? The...
May 08, 2020•1 hr 1 min
This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Saul Griffith, the founder and chief scientist at Other Lab. Saul Griffith has a PhD in materials science and information theory. He’s co-founded over a dozen companies. And now he’s determined to prove that we already have what it takes to decarbonize the economy. “The reality is I think it's still possible to completely decarbonize by 2030 and save everyone money. And we just got to start thinking about it correctly,” says...
Apr 30, 2020•1 hr 7 min
This week, we bring you a joint episode of The Energy Gang and The Interchange , recorded in front of a live audience from our quarantine quarters around the country. When we started making our podcasts seven years ago, it was clear that the energy transition would be a difficult one. Both shows were designed as a forum to grapple with tough issues in an accessible, candid way. The clean energy industry has faced its share of crises over the years — but nothing quite like the current pandemic an...
Apr 24, 2020•1 hr 23 min
We’re doing a free live show from our homes! Sign up here to join us on Wednesday April 22nd. You can watch a behind-the-scenes recording with The Energy Gang and The Interchange . This week: The many ways that dirty energy has controlled the politics of clean energy. Dr. Leah Stokes, an expert on interest groups and their influence over policy, joins the gang. Her new book, Short Circuiting Policy , is the focus of our episode. Who are the truly bad actor utilities? How have they held back clim...
Apr 18, 2020•1 hr 5 min
The world is experiencing a sudden, dramatic drop in all kinds of air pollution. The skies are dramatically different. People can hear birds they didn’t even know were there, and see landscapes that have been shrouded for decades. It’s saved thousands of lives in averted asthma and heart attacks. When this is all over, will people clamor for cleaner air? We discuss the potential long-term impacts on this week’s episode. Then: the 2020 climate summit is postponed. Could that be a good thing? What...
Apr 10, 2020•46 min
This week: The coronavirus shockwave brings staggering losses of lives, jobs, and money. So many applied for unemployment last week – 5 times more than ever before – that it was hard for graphic artists to draw a Y-axis that would fit them in historical comparisons. We’re now at 10 million unemployment claims. With so much turmoil and uncertainty, we are going to dig back into some of the big themes of the week. First, we’ll have a recap of stimulus activity. The day after the unprecedented unem...
Apr 03, 2020•59 min
This is a special crossover episode between The Energy Gang and Climate 2020 . Coronavirus brought the 2020 election to a screeching halt. Climate was once a top issue in the Democratic primary, but it’s been overtaken by a virus and a looming economic apocalypse. Primaries are delayed. Traditional campaigning has stopped. Biden is hiding out, preparing for the general election. Bernie Sanders is hanging on. And the way we think about all kinds of issues has totally flipped. So how will climate,...
Mar 27, 2020•1 hr 4 min
