This episode of the Energy Gang was recorded before the Russian attack on Ukraine had begun. As you’ll hear, we were talking after Russia had recognised the independence of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, but before the full-scale invasion. We will have a lot to say about the implications for energy of the conflict in Ukraine in our next episode. But this time, we were talking before the full extent of the crisis had unfolded. The catastrophic blackouts that plagued Texas last year...
Feb 25, 2022•53 min
In recent years, news headlines are frequently filled with announcements of financial institutions, funds, and corporations making hefty pledges to transform their portfolios to ensure that they stay in line with net-zero targets. Is this new wave of support for the energy transition motivated by making a quick buck or has there really been a change of opinion on the opportunities in which going net-zero really has to offer? How is the changing climate affecting investments? How are investors dr...
Feb 11, 2022•1 hr
President Bidens Climate agenda has been reformed, and with the Build Back Better Act in a stalemate, should Americans give up hope on expecting anything to come of it? To discuss this and more, Ed Crooks is joined on the show this week by returning guest Dr. Melissa Lott from Columbia University, and Robbie Orvis from Energy Innovation, who makes his Energy Gang debut. The Build Back Better Act is up first. There’s a glimmer of hope on the horizon for the climate policies within the climate pac...
Jan 28, 2022•56 min
It’s the first Energy Gang of the year. Ed Crooks is joined by Emily Chasan of Generate Capital and Amy Harder, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and Axios, now at Breakthrough Energy, which is the net-zero initiative founded by Bill Gates - find out more here: Cipher: Overview | LinkedIn - who joins the gang for the first time to kick off 2022 with a bang. With air travel over the holiday season bouncing back – despite the Omicron variant – what are the best prospects for taking the emissions...
Jan 14, 2022•53 min
Achieving net zero emissions requires collaboration from a multitude of government organizations and businesses. For a country the size of Australia, 24% of electricity coming from renewables is a huge accomplishment. But it does not come easy. Australia has two large interconnected energy networks, the National Electricity Market along the East Coast, with demand of 30-35 GW, and the Western Australia Electricity Market, with demand between 2-3 GW. Both networks are receiving a huge update of d...
Dec 31, 2021•36 min
It’s a special edition of the Energy Gang this week, with the last episode of 2021 recorded for Wood Mackenzie’s Grid Edge Innovation series. Ed is joined by Emily Chasan from Generate Capital and Amy Myers-Jaffe from Tufts University, to look at how smart devices are changing energy retailing, and the role of SPACs in financing clean energy deployment. The gang wraps up 2021 with their top 5 stories in energy for the year, looking back on the success of investment company Engine No.1, developme...
Dec 17, 2021•56 min
Zero-emission, low-cost electricity, delivered to the grid from natural-gas fuelled technology. A wright-brothers first flight kind of breakthrough in energy? The gang discuss the possibilities and scalability of NET Powers Technology, a Texas-based energy company who’ve made this exact claim. Ed is joined as usual by Melissa Lott from Columbia University, and Emily Chasan from Generate Capital. The other big story of the week was the collapse of British energy provider Bulb, the 6th largest pro...
Dec 03, 2021•48 min
The COP26 circus has left town. Across 2 weeks of talks in Glasgow, what were the successes, and what were the failures? With current commitments putting the world on track to 2.4°C of warming, the cost of inaction on climate and health will vastly outweigh the costs of acting now, so which countries are snapping into action? Host Ed Crooks is joined by regular Melissa Lott, Director of Research at the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and Amy Myers-Jaffe, Managing Director ...
Nov 19, 2021•57 min
COP26 is under way in Glasgow. It has been billed as the “last best hope for the world to get its act together” on climate change, but what is the real significance of the talks? Host Ed Crooks is joined by new regular co-host of the Energy Gang Melissa Lott, Director of Research at the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, to discuss the key issues and outcomes of the conference. Also joining for this episode is Emily Chasan, Director of Communications at Generate Capital, and ...
Nov 08, 2021•50 min
Some news for this podcast: Ed Crooks , VP of the Americas for Wood Mackenzie, will be taking over the show as our new host. Co-hosts Katherine Hamilton and Stephen Lacey will be moving on. Wood Mackenzie will be producing the podcast from now on, bringing on a range of new voices to join the gang. We discuss the transition in the first half of the episode. Later in the show, Katherine, Stephen and Ed explore the range of expectations for global climate talks in Glasgow. See Privacy Policy at ht...
Oct 29, 2021•39 min
The U.S. Department of Energy is crucial for funding, researching, and testing emerging energy tech. Now, in the Biden era, the agency is orienting itself toward deployment. How difficult is that transition? Our former co-host Jigar Shah joins Stephen, Katherine, and Ed to discuss his experience running the Energy Department’s loan programs office. In March, Jigar left his position at Generate Capital (and this podcast) to head into government service and run the loan programs office. Jigar has ...
Oct 21, 2021•1 hr 4 min
EIA and IEA are out with projections for emissions and fossil fuel consumption. And they don’t look good. On our current policy trajectory, there is no peak in sight, according to EIA By 2050, we will likely see a 50% increase in energy consumption. And even though renewables will be the fastest-growing new source of energy, hydrocarbon liquid fuels will meet the majority of demand . That means emissions could rise through 2050, absent massive changes to policy. In July, the International Energy...
Oct 14, 2021•47 min
Suddenly everyone is talking about green hydrogen. From South Africa to the United Arab Emirates. From China to Utah. Governments and developers are eyeing hydrogen as a decarbonization tool. But the rush is also raising lots of questions: Where will hydrogen be most useful? How do you create a supply chain to support it? And how can we ensure it has climate integrity? For answers, we turned to two experts who are obsessing over the future of hydrogen: Janice Lin and Stephen Lamm. Janice Lin is ...
Oct 14, 2021•27 min
Ride sharing has swept transportation systems over the last decade -- bringing convenience, but also congestion, inequities, and political fights. Now a new category of transportation networking is emerging: TransitTech . It makes up a class of companies that are using tech to help maximize public transit systems. So what does TransitTech look like post-pandemic? Tiffany Chu joins Katherine and Stephen this week to discuss the path forward for transit. Tiffany is the co-founder and CEO of Remix,...
Oct 09, 2021•59 min
All around us, hidden inside our buildings, are a series of choices and tradeoffs -- choices with direct impacts on our health, our money, and our energy use. Our buildings are wasteful and are filled with a lot of “embodied” carbon . As a result, buildings directly and indirectly account for 40 percent of global emissions. How do we make those choices with better building science? And how do we use that science to design carbon out of our buildings? This week, Katherine and Stephen are joined b...
Oct 01, 2021•57 min
Carbon capture has long been criticized as too nascent, too expensive, and too distracting. Is that changing? This month, the Swiss company Climeworks officially launched a direct-air capture plant in Iceland, called Orca. The company has already signed deals with SwissRe, Bill Gates, Stripe, and Shopify to sell them credits from the plant. But the tech is still pretty expensive and relatively small scale. Climeworks wants to build megaton-scale plants by the end of the decade. Lots of other pla...
Sep 21, 2021•54 min
The electric grid is a central pillar of a zero-carbon economy. But in an era of unrelenting weather extremes, it’s also one of the most fragile. This week: what does power after carbon look like? Katherine and Stephen are joined by Dr. Peter Fox-Penner, author of a new book called, “ Power After Carbon .” Peter is the founder of the Boston University Institute of Sustainable Energy. And he’s a partner and chief strategy officer at the VC firm Energy Impact Partners. At the turn of the last deca...
Sep 14, 2021•55 min
The world’s most scrutinized and peer-reviewed document is out: the IPCC report on climate change. Thousands of scientists have spent decades pouring over every measurement and research report known. The findings are clearer than ever : It is “virtually certain” that the increases in extreme temperatures and droughts are caused by human activity. The economic and human toll from climate change is here. So how is this report different from previous IPCC reports? Plus, is the push for hydrogen a r...
Aug 27, 2021•1 hr 10 min
This episode originally aired on The Interchange. Back in 2016, Mateo Jaramillo left Tesla, where he was leading the stationary energy storage business, and started looking for a new challenge to tackle. He took on long-duration energy storage -- not long duration like 8 hours or 12 hours, but days or weeks or more. In 2017 he came on the show to talk about it . He formed a company, now Form Energy, that has been toiling on this problem in stealth mode. Apart from saying they were building a "me...
Aug 18, 2021•51 min
We started the Covid pandemic at negative oil prices. Today, benchmark prices are above $70. And top oil companies are reporting billions of dollars in profits. And now there is more scrutiny than ever on how they’re going to spend that money. Activist shareholders are starting to get climate champions on oil major board seats -- most notably, climate tech investor and former wind executive Andy Karsner on Exxon Mobil’s board. A dutch court is now forcing Shell to reduce the emissions from its p...
Aug 10, 2021•1 hr
We're at a new phase of the clean energy transition. Extreme heat, drought and floods are increasing in frequency. Public attention on clean energy is stronger than ever. The Biden Administration is putting zero-carbon energy at the core of its policies. And there's another powerful force: making sure the energy transition is as racially and economically just as possible. Anton Cohen is a partner at CohnReznick LLP, and national director of the firm’s Renewable Energy Industry Practice. He's bee...
Aug 10, 2021•16 min
After 30 years of R&D and commercial proof, hundreds of billions in institutional dollars are pouring into now-conventional tech like wind, solar and batteries. But there’s a whole class of technologies that are ready to scale. And investors who are increasingly ready to back them. As we heard in our previous show, there was a record $17 billion in venture capital going into climate tech in 2020. With all this money dropping into the space, where can it have the highest impact? What are the ...
Aug 03, 2021•54 min
During the height of the pandemic in 2020, venture capital poured into climate technologies at record levels. It was a happy surprise amidst a collapsing economy and years of investment stagnation. Venture investments in climate tech topped $17 billion in 2020 across more than 1,000 deals. Five years ago, it had fallen to $5.2 billion — a 30 percent decrease from a previous peak in 2011. Our guest co-host this week is Emily Kirsch, the founder and CEO of Powerhouse. She’s also the host of Watt I...
Jul 21, 2021•55 min
In March of 2020, Covid shut down economies, closed off supply chains, and sent unemployment to historic levels. No one knew what would come next for energy. Oil prices went into negative territory. Industrial electricity use plummeted. Residential demand shot up. And there were big pipelines of renewable energy projects waiting to get built. “I think we were all a little bit nervous about how COVID was going to affect all of the deal flow in the market,” says Britta von Oesen, a managing direct...
Jul 20, 2021•14 min
It’s been a very intense year for America’s power grid. Across the country, the electricity system just faced another stress-test as extreme heat taxed power plants and grid operators in the Pacific Northwest , Texas , and New York . Since 2000, outages across the U.S. have increased by 67% . Is the power system ready for tomorrow’s extreme weather -- today? Stephen and Katherine are joined by Dr. Melissa Lott , a senior research scholar and the director of research at the Center on Global Energ...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 5 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 recent h...
Jun 29, 2021•51 min
This week, we are offering the first episode of a new podcast: The Big Switch . It’s a five-part series about how to clean up the energy system -- told in a clear, understandable and fun way. The show is hosted by Dr. Melissa Lott, research director at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. Stephen Lacey is the show's executive editor. Listen to the first episode of The Big Switch right now -- and subscribe to the show on Apple , Spotify , and any other place you get podcasts. See...
Jun 21, 2021•38 min
We can measure the energy transition in any number of ways. The hundreds of millions of solar panels and wind turbines installed. The gigatons of carbon reduced. Or the number of jobs created. But how do we measure the equity outcome? Our guest co-host, Dr. Destenie Nock , is focused on exactly this question. She is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Nock is creating new models for energy-systems planning that factor in positive socia...
Jun 16, 2021•49 min
America gets 20 percent of its electricity from coal. That’s a 50 percent drop since the peak in 2007. But if coal is becoming so economically uncompetitive, why does it still make up so much of our grid mix? This week: Coal is no longer king. But it still has a lot of power across the land. How do we banish it for good? Katherine and Stephen welcome Joe Daniel as a guest co-host this week. Joe is a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Joe joins us to talk about the proble...
Jun 11, 2021•59 min
What if someone told you that we have everything we need to decarbonize most of the economy? We would just need to start electrifying every new car, furnace, water heater, drier, and cookstove, and industrial process starting right now . And yeah, and put solar on every roof that can handle it. This week: a wartime plan for winning the climate fight with clean electricity. What’ll it take? How possible is it? Saul Griffith is our guest co-host. He’s the founder and chief scientist of Rewiring Am...
May 23, 2021•1 hr 6 min
