This week: our pre-thanksgiving intellectual feast. It’s a four-course meal as usual. For the hors d’oeuvres, we’re serving up something new: a roundup of the new entrants into the presidential race, and how they stack up on environmental issues. For the side dishes, we’ll reheat some leftovers. We’ll look at the climategate debacle 10 years later. And for the main course. What people or companies will we choose as the top turkeys of the year? We’ll end with a little aperitif — our free electron...
Nov 22, 2019•52 min
As we reckon with the dark side of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, there’s more scrutiny into how these companies are assisting climate denial and obfuscation. We’ll look at a few different stories: Climate and clean energy are getting disadvantaged by Facebook and Twitter’s different policies on political ads: how do we define issue ads and political speech? Google, Facebook and others are getting called out for their support of groups that spread extreme climate denial: How much criticism do the...
Nov 15, 2019•1 hr 3 min
This week on Watt It Takes : how a would-be priest made it his mission to spread the gospel of battery storage. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy. Form is working on a new kind of long-duration battery. And Mateo has one of the longer-duration careers in the storage industry. In the early 2000s, he deployed the first behind-the-meter systems in New York for demand response — seeing the grid services potential well b...
Nov 08, 2019•1 hr
We recorded this episode on Halloween morning. We woke up and felt like celebrating the theme of the holiday. If you’re listening after Halloween, don’t fret. There’s still plenty of newsworthy stuff in here. First up, we’re choosing the story from 2019 that is most worthy of its own horror movie. As a bonus, we are also choosing the genre of horror. Then, we pick the zombie story or trend of the year that just won’t die. And finally, the company or person that deserves a treat. We’ll end with s...
Oct 31, 2019•42 min
Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content: bit.ly/gtmpodcast This week: it’s the oil industry versus the world. We’re examining two legal battles for oil majors playing out in states. One involves electric cars and one involves responsibility for climate change. We’ll start first with a story from POLITICO’s Gavin Bade . Advocacy groups backed by oil companies are increasingly lobbying against utilities that are trying to support electric vehicles...
Oct 26, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content: bit.ly/gtmpodcast The world’s fifth-largest economy looked more like a developing country last week, as PG&E purposefully cut power to millions of people in Northern California for days. We knew this was coming. The growing safety and financial risk of wildfires in the state mean mass power outages will become more common. But in this case, PG&E was slammed for the way it handled things. We’ll dig...
Oct 19, 2019•51 min
This is a branded podcast made in collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and GTM Creative Strategies. As grids get saturated with wind and solar electricity, there’s pressure to find new ways to store that energy across daily, monthly or seasonal variations. Could the answer be a billion-year-old microbe? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and SoCalGas are currently testing a new bioreactor that could turn renewable electrons into renewable methane -- allowing exces...
Oct 15, 2019•30 min
Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content: bit.ly/gtmpodcast This week on Watt It Takes: how a computer nerd who loved assembling electronics became obsessed with designing a solar-storage system to light up Africa. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Xavier Helgesen, the co-founder and chief technology officer at ZOLA Electric. Zola is a provider of solar and storage systems in Africa. Since its founding in 2012, the compa...
Oct 02, 2019•1 hr 4 min
This is a branded podcast made in collaboration between CohnReznick Capital and GTM Creative Strategies. Britta Von Oesen knows risk. As an intern in Lehman Brothers’ global energy unit in 2008, she watched the collapse of the investment bank in real time. Later, she watched European markets grind to a halt after feed-in-tariffs were reversed. And in the U.S., she’s monitored the ever-changing tax policies and regulations that impact wind, solar and storage. Today, Britta is a managing director ...
Sep 29, 2019•20 min
The Bonneville Power Administration, the government-owned “power marketing agency” that serves the Pacific Northwest, is facing a strong current of problems. As cheap renewables make hydro less competitive in the region, BPA is now bleeding money. There’s now concern that its utility customers will stop buying hydro after contracts expire. Meanwhile, the cost of rehabilitating salmon populations is mounting. As the power provider grapples with $15 billion in debt, some are calling for a reformat...
Sep 27, 2019•58 min
This week: We’ve gone from drought to flood. People who care about climate change have spent the last three presidential election cycles cajoling, prodding and begging television news outlets to cover the issue. But the more pressure mounted, the more coverage lagged. Across all three debates between Clinton and Trump in 2016, environmental issues got just under 5 and a half minutes of air time. And in all of 2016, the major networks talked about climate for just 50 minutes combined. And then su...
Sep 17, 2019•54 min
America is a place where if you can dream something — no matter how big or ambitious — you can do it. Unless you’re trying to string 700 miles of high-voltage transmission lines to bring wind power from Oklahoma to Tennessee. Our guest this week is Russell Gold, author of a new book about the saga that unfolded when wind energy pioneer Michael Skelly tried just that. The book, “ Superpower ,” is all about Skelly’s attempt to build one of the most ambitious energy infrastructure projects in recen...
Sep 13, 2019•55 min
This week on Watt It Takes : How an energy researcher obsessed with electric vehicles stumbled upon a vast trove of transportation data and built a company that is reshaping infrastructure planning for mobility. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Laura Schewel, the founder and CEO of Streetlight Data . Laura spent her career studying storage, electric vehicles, and transportation systems at the Rocky Mountain Institute, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and then as a research fellow ...
Sep 05, 2019•1 hr 7 min
With flight shame growing in popularity, extreme weather intensifying, and the Amazon burning, there’s more demand than ever for carbon offsets to assuage our guilt and make us feel like we’re doing something. But those credits many not be doing what you think they are — or anything at all. This week, we’re discussing the complicated and frustrating world of carbon offsets. There’s a reason why even the United Nations is now calling out their limitations. This conversation is particularly import...
Aug 30, 2019•52 min
In nearly every corner of the country, energy storage projects are finding their way onto the grid — they’re getting bigger, cheaper, more diverse, and even a little bit weirder. Most of all, they’re just becoming normal. This week, we’re talking about the new normal for power operations. It includes a lot of batteries. And maybe some air tanks, water pumps and cranes too. GTM Staff Writer Julian Spector joins us as a guest co-host to round up the most topical projects and tell us where the stor...
Aug 23, 2019•44 min
Solar and wind sent European utilities into financial disarray, and U.S. utilities are facing a similar fate. Are global oil companies next? A new report from one of the world’s biggest banks, BNP Paribas, says that solar and wind paired with electric cars provide up to 7 times more useful energy for mobility than gasoline dollar for dollar. And that economic reality could hit oil companies sooner than they think. “The oil industry has never before in its history faced the kind of threat that re...
Aug 16, 2019•48 min
This week on Watt It Takes : How a former Apple engineer applied design principles from the iPod and the iPad to smart thermostats — jolting an industry badly in need of change. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Matt Rogers, the co-founder and former chief product officer of Nest. Nest is best known for its elegant learning thermostat, the first major breakout hit in the smart home space. Google later acquired the company for $3.2 billion. In this interview, Rogers talks about his Apple...
Aug 02, 2019•1 hr 6 min
Note: after this episode, we will be on hiatus for a few weeks while Stephen Lacey goes on paternity leave. We’ll be back soon! On July 8, Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House and delivered a speech on his “environmental leadership.” What could he possibly talk about? Onlookers called the speech “Orwellian.” The Trump Administration has tried to pull America out of a global climate agreement, sent officials to try to sell coal at the latest UN climate summit, forced climate sci...
Jul 14, 2019•48 min
This week, we present a special episode produced on behalf of CohnReznick. There’s a bonanza sweeping across North America: cannabis. As more states legalize marijuana, the industry is attracting high-profile investors and bringing in $6.5 billion in yearly sales. But it also faces two major challenges: limited access to banking and high energy costs. Because cannabis is still illegal at the federal level, traditional banks are unwilling to do business with the thousands of companies serving the...
Jul 09, 2019•21 min
This week: we examine the Trump alternative to the Clean Power Plan, look at the gap between red and blue states on climate change, and review the presidential debates. Up first: how Trump's EPA is replacing Obama's major climate rule. Then, the red-blue climate divide. States are putting ambitious new climate plans in place. But they’re almost all in states dominated by democrats -- and the new EPA power plant rule only makes that gap bigger. What are the long-term economic consequences for the...
Jul 02, 2019•44 min
This week on Watt It Takes : How a Ukrainian immigrant quietly toiled away on a new battery chemistry and created a billion-dollar unicorn. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Gene Berdichevsky, the CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. Sila is developing a new lithium-ion battery chemistry that uses silicon in place of graphite — leading to an improvement in battery density by 20 percent. This spring, Daimler led a $170 million round in Sila, valuing the startup at $1 billion. Berdichevsky was t...
Jun 23, 2019•58 min
It’s been a decade since the fracking boom reshaped U.S. energy markets — so when will we ever use our drilling prowess to create a similar geothermal boom? That’s the hope. The Department of Energy just released a massive new report revisiting America’s geothermal potential in conventional hydrothermal, enhanced geothermal, direct use and heat pumps. And the potential is enormous — but it’s just sitting there, largely untapped. We’re going to open up DOE’s report and see which borehole it takes...
Jun 13, 2019•39 min
It may be a couple election cycles late, but we’re finally getting a wave of climate plans from presidential candidates. The issue is now front and center in the Democratic primaries. We’ve spent the last week collecting the plans from leading candidates, surveying the stances of the rest of the field, and monitoring the reactions. We’ll sort through them in this week’s Energy Gang episode. In the first half of the show, we’ll compare and contrast the unique plans from Elizabeth Warren, Jay Insl...
Jun 03, 2019•40 min
A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the world spent $5.2 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017. That’s half a trillion dollars more than in 2015. But it also shows that fossil fuel subsidy spending is down by half since 2012. What gives? How much are we actually spending to make fossil fuels cheaper? We’ll clarify the different ways economists are measuring that spending. Then, U.S. tax subsidies for solar and wind are set to ramp downward as part of a deal struck in...
May 23, 2019•57 min
It took four decades for America to install a million solar systems. And it took just three years to install the second million. From here on out, the U.S. market will likely see a million systems every couple of years, according to the latest data from Wood Mackenzie. To mark this new era of scale, we’re going to look back at the most important trends that got us to the first couple of million systems — and the most important trends that will keep many more millions coming. Then, Tesla has a ne...
May 16, 2019•52 min
For well over a decade, researchers have been modeling the cost of state renewable energy mandates. The results break down in predictable ways: conservative and progressive groups often come to very different conclusions based about costs and benefits. An authoritative 2015 report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that compliance costs for state renewables targets only make up 2 percent of retail rates in most U.S. states. After a lull, the debate over the cost of renewable energy ta...
May 03, 2019•46 min
This week on Watt It Takes : How a product manager at Google saw promise in geothermal heat pumps — and applied the lessons of solar to an underserved market. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Kathy Hannun, the co-founder of Dandelion, a home geothermal company that uses a proprietary drilling technique, simple product design, and financing to cut the cost of ground-source heating and cooling. For seven years, Kathy was on the rapid evaluation team at Alphabet X — forme...
Apr 24, 2019•33 min
This week, we present a special episode produced in collaboration with CohnReznick Capital. How do you broker billions of dollars worth of renewable energy deals — and do it again and again? It takes grit, sure. But it also requires empathy. And that, says Conor McKenna, is the real art of the deal. McKenna is a senior managing director at CohnReznick Capital Markets. He’s helped close 8 gigawatts of wind, solar and biomass projects over his career. We all know “The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trum...
Apr 23, 2019•22 min
The tech giants are all going long on renewables, but Amazon seems to be going long on oil and gas. A new story details Amazon’s budding romance with the fossil fuel industry, while also lagging behind its peers in buying clean energy for its operations. Other tech companies are using their analytics for helping extract more fossil fuels — but is the extent of Amazon’s pursuit unique? Then, a new study shows that three-quarters of all coal in the US is more expensive than new renewables. But the...
Apr 18, 2019•40 min
This week, the Green New Deal ripples through Washington. A few leading Republicans are responding to the progressive climate plan with some ideas of their own: the New Manhattan Project and the Green Real Deal. They’ve gotten a mostly cold response from the left. But have we finally broken the ice for a legitimate cross-party policy discussion on climate? We’ll look at the GOP responses. Then, Trump’s latest verbal convulsion. Speaking at a fundraiser, the president said wind noise causes cance...
Apr 12, 2019•42 min
