This is an original, branded podcast produced in partnership with Enel X and GTM Creative Strategies. Electric vehicle chargers now outnumber gas stations in some countries. They’re getting easier to find. They’re easier to install in homes. And they’re getting way smarter. So how can we harness all these chargers for the benefit of the grid and consumers? In this special podcast episode, produced in partnership with Enel X, we’re exploring the vast potential of electric vehicle chargers. We’ll ...
Mar 25, 2020•13 min
This week: how coronavirus could accelerate or decelerate the energy transition. We’re facing an oil shock amid a pandemic, supply chains are still in disarray, economic gears are grinding to a near halt, and countries are scrambling to put stimulus packages in place. How will this shape the energy system? We’re going to break the conversation into three parts: the impact on fossil fuels and renewables; long-term prospects for decarbonization; and a blueprint for a low-carbon stimulus. Where wil...
Mar 19, 2020•58 min
This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Robyn Beavers, the co-founder and CEO of Blueprint Power . Blueprint works with real estate companies to turn their buildings into clean energy power plants. Blueprint developed software that helps building owners optimize their use of co-generation, fuel cells, solar or batteries. Robin has a long history in the worlds of tech, real estate and energy. She was an early employee at Google, and went on to found the company’s e...
Mar 12, 2020•1 hr 7 min
What to do with all this climate money moving around? The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, says he is going to channel $10 billion of his own dollars into climate solutions. Is this the biggest climate philanthropy ever? And where should he be devoting those dollars? We’ll help him spend it. Then, the mushy middle. Our own Jigar Shah’s Generate Capital has raised another billion dollars to fund climate tech that is less attractive to some investors – fuel cells, microgrids and unconventiona...
Mar 05, 2020•45 min
Just weeks after taking over as CEO of BP, Bernard Looney unveiled a series of climate targets. This isn’t the first time BP has tried to make a push into clean energy and decarbonization -- is this time different? In this week’s episode, we’ll look at the pressures that BP is facing. What does it take for a publicly-owned company to reevaluate its core product? And how do you reduce the carbon intensity of a hydrocarbon business? We’ll dig through the details. Then, natural gas is suddenly in t...
Feb 21, 2020•58 min
This week: The cutting-edge business of bringing power to the last billion people on Earth without it. We’ll follow the money, the markets, the business models and ask whether distributed renewables are providing a real alternative to slow grid connections. Investments in off-grid power in Africa and Asia have skyrocketed in the last five years. Thirty times more money went into the sector in 2018 compared with 2013. More than $500 million dollars was invested in electrification in 2018, for the...
Feb 14, 2020•57 min
This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Dr. Christine Ho, the co-founder and CEO of Imprint Energy . Imprint Energy is the company created to commercialize Christine’s invention: a tiny, zinc-based solid-state battery that can be screen printed. It’s being integrated into sensors and other tiny devices across the internet-of-things. Christine’s father was an entrepreneur. She saw the highs and lows of that life. She followed his path -- and has faced her own simil...
Feb 08, 2020•1 hr 6 min
This week: The largest utility in one of the West’s reddest states will go carbon-free by 2050. The power company that has poured tens of millions of dollars into electing friendly regulators and fighting renewable energy says it’s all in for zero carbon electricity — even if the exact pathway isn’t yet clear. Wasn’t APS investing heavily in keeping the Four Corners coal plant open longer? What happened? And how will this impact the way the utility starts planning its resource mix today? Then, C...
Jan 31, 2020•58 min
This week: Microsoft is setting a new standard for corporate climate targets. The technology company promised to remove all of the carbon that it’s ever put in the atmosphere -- going back to when it was founded in an Albuquerque garage in 1975. That includes $1 billion in carbon removal technologies and methods. Can it pull off such an ambitious plan? And will it force other corporates to follow? Then, a landmark climate case. Twenty-one young people who sued the federal government for the righ...
Jan 24, 2020•39 min
The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, is suddenly putting sustainability and climate risk at the center of its investment strategy. “Investors are increasingly...recognizing that climate risk is investment risk. These questions are driving a profound reassessment of risk and asset values. And because capital markets pull future risk forward, we will see changes in capital allocation more quickly than we see changes to the climate itself,” wrote BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in his yearly inve...
Jan 17, 2020•50 min
This week, a look at the bushfires in Australia — their impact to the country, to the grid, and to politics of climate. Then, a big change could be coming to a foundational federal policy in America. Are the proposed changes to PURPA a thoughtful response to market conditions and cheap renewables, or a political play? Finally, we learn to code. Joe Biden is the latest democrat to push the idea that laid-off miners should learn to code. Why did it spark so much derision? Recommended reading: The ...
Jan 11, 2020•49 min
We have some bonus listening as we close out the year! We present one of our most popular episodes of The Interchange : The Deep Decarbonization Draft . It's like fantasy sports for energy nerds. The premise is simple: Shayle and Stephen choose their teams of decarbonization technologies and methods, and then pit them against each other to determine who’s best at saving the planet. Go subscribe to The Interchange anywhere you get your podcasts. It's the perfect compliment to The Energy Gang . Ha...
Dec 26, 2019•46 min
We’re closing out the decade this week with a retrospective. We have been doing this show since 2013. So we are going to share some of our top story lines in energy and cleantech of the last 10 years — many of which played out while we were doing this show. We’ll start with some personal retrospectives. What was consuming us back in 2009? How did that story shake out? Then we’ll choose the most important stories that defined the teens. Katherine will choose the top policy trend, Jigar will choos...
Dec 23, 2019•1 hr 2 min
This week on Watt It Takes: Emily Kirsch sits down with Dr. Etosha Cave , the co-founder and chief science officer of Opus 12. Opus 12 is a team of engineers, electrochemists and materials scientists working on a technology that converts carbon dioxide into useable products. They are developing a metal catalyst that can turn CO2 into synthetic gas for fuels and ethylene for plastics. If the tech works at commercial scale, it would be a vital solution for slashing CO2 from industrial sources. The...
Dec 13, 2019•57 min
This is a branded podcast made in collaboration between CohnReznick Capital and GTM Creative Strategies. Sheslie Royster is the person that big companies turn to when making an acquisition, investing in real estate, or finding a creative way to use tax credits. She’s a tax expert, focused mostly in wind and solar. Those deals include a lot of numbers and math, of course. But Sheslie says the math isn’t as important as it seems. It’s the interpretation of the math that matters. “I'd say a minimal...
Dec 10, 2019•17 min
Truck buyers are historically some of the most brand-loyal auto consumers But recent surveys suggest that loyalty is loosening. Into the picture steps Elon Musk, who dropped the Tesla Cybertruck last month. This space-age truck concept is truly putting the shift in consumer preferences to the test. It’s also tearing a lot of opinionated people apart. In this episode: what is the Cybertruck and where might it fit into the emerging electric truck market? And can it sway truck buyers who don't care...
Dec 07, 2019•50 min
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
