The transition to a low-carbon energy system will need a lot of people with bright ideas for how to do things differently. It is the greatest business challenge of our time, and also the greatest opportunity. In this latest special edition of the Energy Gang for Climate Week NYC, Ed Crooks and Amy Myers-Jaffe host a live taping of the show in front of an audience of Amy’s students at NYU. Joining them on the show are two founders of innovative cleantech companies. Marissa Beatty leads Turnover L...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 8 min
The US is entering a new era of electricity demand growth, after two decades of flatlining consumption. It is a shift that has huge implications for consumers, the industry and climate goals. Ed Crooks hosts a special live edition of the podcast, recorded at NYU for NY Climate Week, to debate the risks and opportunities in this new world for US power. On the panel: Caroline Golin, Global Head of Energy Market Development and Innovation at Google Kate Gordon, Chief Executive of California Forward...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 15 min
We kick off our series of podcasts at Climate Week, by looking at the role that the oil and gas industry can play in the energy transition. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Bjorn Otto Sverdrup, who chairs the executive committee of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a group backed by 12 of the world’s largest oil companies that works on ways to reduce emissions. Oil and gas companies play a crucial role in providing the energy the world needs today. But the transition means shifting to lower-emittin...
Sep 24, 2024•51 min
There’s no transition without transmission, they say. It’s a cliché because it’s true. The US Department of Energy says that the nation will need to expand transmission capacity by 60% by 2030 to meet growing clean energy demand. A recent study found that delays in transmission development are adding $2.5 billion annually in additional costs to consumers due to the inefficiencies of the current grid. So why is building transmission lines in the U.S. so hard? To find out, host Ed Crooks and regul...
Sep 17, 2024•1 hr
The need to meet increased demand while cutting emissions is exposing some fundamental issues in the industry. It’s common knowledge that data centers use a lot of energy, and will use even more in the future as AI applications develop. One thing is not clear, though: who will end up paying for all that extra electricity? US utilities typically used to receive perhaps one or two large customer requests – meaning 20 megawatts or more – each year. Now, they may be receiving one or two of those req...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 8 min
The (shrewdly named) Inflation Reduction Act has been called the most significant climate legislation ever passed in the US. When it did pass, in 2022, the critical vote was cast by senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia. Now in office as an independent, he and Republican senator John Barrasso from Wyoming came together to put forward a bill which advanced out of the Senate committee stage earlier this month. It’s meant to clear away some of the regulatory and legal obstacles that delay and dete...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Proposed permitting reforms could accelerate both renewable energy projects and new fossil fuel infrastructure. Is that a good deal for the climate? The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is seen as the most significant climate legislation ever passed in the US, because of the array of new, expanded and extended tax credits it offers for low-carbon energy. But when it was passed in 2022, the critical vote in the Senate was cast by Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia, and he always saw the IRA as j...
Aug 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Complex, outdated, expensive: concentrating solar power used to be a clunky way of harnessing the sun. What’s changed to now make it viable? Concentrating Solar Power, or CSP, takes energy from the sun, converts it to heat, and uses it to drive a turbine to provide renewable electricity. It has more moving parts than photovoltaic (PV) solar – which has none – so there is more that can go wrong. But it has the big advantage that the heat can be stored for days, weeks and even months, meaning that...
Aug 06, 2024•57 min
As the world struggles to co-operate on the energy transition, international trade rules can be a foundation for the new low-carbon economy. Ed Crooks is joined by regular guest Amy Myers-Jaffe, Director of New York University’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, and new guest on The Energy Gang: Dan Esty, who is the Hillhouse Professor of Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University. Dan goes a long way back in clean energy: he was on the US delegation that negotiated the origi...
Jul 23, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Author of ‘The Price Is Wrong’, Brett Christophers, joins the show to discuss the theories in his book. On a recent episode of the show, host Ed Crooks was joined by Melissa Lott and Joseph Majkut to discuss two books that were generating a lot of interest in energy circles. One of those, The Price Is Wrong , argues that inadequate profitability is the key reason why the transition to low-carbon energy is not moving fast enough to address the threat of global warming. There are plenty of interes...
Jul 09, 2024•58 min
In this third special episode of the Energy Gang from the Reuters Global Energy Transition 2024 conference in New York, we focus on the crucial theme of financing the energy transition. We discuss how various stakeholders are addressing the financial challenges and opportunities presented by the shift to renewable energy. Our first guest is Utopia Hill, the Chief Executive of Reactivate, a Chicago-based company developing renewable energy projects for low to moderate-income communities in the US...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 8 min
In this second special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Reuters Global Energy Transition 2024 conference in New York, we speak with leaders at some of the key companies shaping the energy transition. We hear about how they are tackling the challenge of meeting rising demand for electricity while at the same time reducing emissions. Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, talks about his ambitions in the US market, which are centered around selling the company’s Kraken te...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 17 min
This is a special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Reuters Global Energy Transition 2024 conference in New York. It has a great lineup of speakers from the worlds of business, finance, and government, giving us an opportunity to talk to some of the key people who are driving the energy transition. One of the panellists on the first day was Kristina Skierka, CEO of Power for All, a campaign group working on energy access in low-income countries. Host Ed Crooks talked w...
Jun 26, 2024•35 min
Two books that are essential reading for energy wonks give contrasting views on how to tackle climate change. The hot book in the energy world right now is Brett Christophers’ The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet . It’s a detailed look at the structural issues in electricity markets and the challenges of generating returns on renewable investments, arguing that inadequate profitability is the key reason why the transition to low-carbon energy is not moving fast enough to addr...
Jun 11, 2024•52 min
Regulators are trying to clear the path to the grid that clean energy needs. To go from an electricity system based on coal and gas to one based on solar and wind, the US needs a very different power grid. On some estimates, annual installations of new transmission capacity need to double. To help build the grid that a new clean electricity system will need, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has been working on regulatory reforms, intended to smooth the path for new investments in tran...
May 28, 2024•1 hr 2 min
AI is driving up demand for electricity. How can we meet that demand with clean energy? It has been a big theme on the Energy Gang this year: the massive additional demand for energy that could be created by data centers for artificial intelligence. It’s an emerging issue that threatens to cause new challenges for the world’s attempts to achieve net zero goals. So it is a great opportunity for us to have on the show a representative from Google, a company that relies heavily on data centers and ...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 4 min
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has a grandstand view of the energy transition. Where is it going next? Jigar Shah, one of the originators of the Energy Gang, now runs the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, playing a key role in advancing clean energy projects. By helping to bridge the gap between R&D and large-scale deployment, it encourages private sector investment and supports the administration’s work to achieve its net zero goals. Jigar was appointed Director ...
May 09, 2024•51 min
Fossil fuels still dominate the world’s energy supplies. Do we need different terminology to talk about what’s happening? We talk about “the energy transition” all the time. But is that language misleading? 20 years ago fossil fuels were 85% of the world’s energy, today they’re just a few percentage points less. If there is a transition to low-carbon energy, it is happening only slowly, and it needs to move much faster to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. The world has made huge ...
Apr 30, 2024•57 min
Conversations from the Gulf Coast Power Association conference. This bonus episode of the Energy Gang was recorded live during the spring meeting of the Gulf Coast Power Association in Houston, Texas. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Beth Garza, President of the Gulf Coast Power Association, Frank O'Sullivan, Managing Director for Clean Energy at S2G Ventures, and Ken Medlock, Senior Director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. The GCPA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promot...
Apr 22, 2024•1 hr 3 min
As half the world heads to the polls, how important will the results be for efforts to cut emissions? Over half the world lives in a country that will be holding an election this year. The votes come at a time when resistance to the energy transition is building in many parts of the world, as concerns around energy security grow and some of the challenges of decarbonization come into focus. In the US, a finely-balanced election offers voters two sharply differing visions of the energy future. Bu...
Apr 16, 2024•55 min
Big power users are getting together to accelerate the development of advanced clean energy technologies. The hottest topic in energy right now is the expected surge in demand for electricity. Data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles are driving power consumption higher in the US, after about 15 years of stagnation. Solar and wind power can meet some of that increased demand, but many users, including data centers, want clean electricity round the clock. So there is a new urgenc...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 4 min
AI isn’t just threatening to take our jobs, it’s also draining our electricity. Data centres centers used to have power demand measured in the tens of megawatts. Now they are in the hundreds of megawatts, and the new ones that are being proposed have demand in the thousands of megawatts: gigawatts. At the Distributech conference in Feburary, Harry Sideris of Duke Energy said it used to be a big deal when they had a customer wanting to add 10MW or 20MW of load. Now they have several planned data ...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min
This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our third from the Distributech conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use that technology to serve their customers. In this episode, Ed is joined b...
Mar 08, 2024•1 hr 5 min
On this episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang: w hat the history of innovation in solar power and batteries can teach us about the right ways to support clean energy breakthroughs. As the world moves towards a more sustainable energy future, government support is essential for research to develop new technologies, and for investment to deploy them at scale. But policymakers often seem to be blundering in the dark, grasping for policies that they hope will have the outcomes they want. So ho...
Mar 05, 2024•1 hr 2 min
When most people drive electric cars, what does that mean for the grid? This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our second from the Distributech conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use ...
Mar 01, 2024•20 min
What AI means for the energy transition in the electricity industry Welcome to a special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Distributech 2024 conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event in North America for the electricity transmission and distribution industry. It provides a fantastic opportunity to talk to the companies that provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and to the utilities and other companies that use that technology. The impac...
Feb 28, 2024•57 min
There are no two ways around it: 2023 was a difficult year for low-carbon energy investment, and 2024 has so far carried on in very much the same vein. Rising interest rates, fears around future energy policy, cost inflation in some sectors, and perhaps a correction to some earlier over-exuberance, have meant that shares in clean energy companies have generally under-performed the market. To take a couple of high-profile examples, Tesla shares have fallen about 55% from their peak in 2021, while...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 1 min
The US is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), super-cooled to about -160 °C (or -260 °F) so it can be shipped in tankers. An investment boom means export capacity will soar over the next few years. But last month the Biden administration signaled it was putting the brakes on future growth, announcing a “pause” in new approvals for LNG plants to export to nations that don’t have a free trade agreement with the US. This decision is expected to stall future US LNG projects ...
Feb 06, 2024•54 min
The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week, bringing together leaders from business, finance, politics, academia and culture. Regular Energy Gang guest Dr Melissa Lott was there, talking about one of the meeting’s central themes: long-term strategies for the climate, nature and energy. On this week’s show, she shares with host Ed Crooks and guest Julio Friedmann – who’s chief scientist at the carbon management company Carbon Direct – what she learned there....
Jan 23, 2024•54 min
Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe and Dr Melissa Lott to look ahead to 2024. They explore the people, places, and technologies that could have a big influence on energy this year. Amy kicks things off with a look ahead to the US elections in November. The results of that vote will have big impact on policy in the US, and there are several other elections coming up around the world that could also have significant consequences for energy. COP28 in Dubai may be only just behind us, but the wo...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 9 min
