Maria Robinson , outgoing Director of the Grid Deployment Office at the U.S. Department of Energy, joins us to share insights from her impactful tenure. Since stepping into the role in 2022, Maria has overseen $22 billion in federal funding to drive the development of new and upgraded electric infrastructure nationwide. Recorded in person at the recent Deploy conference in Washington, DC, hosted by the DOE, Maria and Cody discuss her background, the mission of the Grid Deployment Office, and the...
Dec 19, 2024•41 min
Arvin Ganesan is the CEO of Fourth Power , which is developing a flexible-duration thermal energy system designed to meet the needs of an electrical grid increasingly powered by renewables. Their system heats liquid tin to extremely high temperatures, circulates it through carbon blocks for heat storage, and converts that heat back to electricity on demand via thermal photovoltaics. The technology aims to address both short-duration energy storage (5–10 hours) and long-duration needs (100 hours ...
Dec 12, 2024•41 min
Hannah Bebbington is the Head of Deployment at Frontier , an advanced market commitment created in 2022, that aims to purchase $1 billion or more of permanent carbon removal by 2030. Founded by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey, Frontier has quickly become a leading force in the carbon removal space. Its portfolio includes a "who’s who" of innovators pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in carbon removal—many of whom have been guests on this show. Cody catches up with Hannah to ...
Dec 09, 2024•1 hr
Dr. Naomi Boness is the managing director of the Natural Gas Initiative and co-managing director of the Hydrogen Initiative at Stanford University. With a Ph.D. in Geophysics from Stanford and over 13 years in technical and management roles at Chevron, Dr. Boness combines deep scientific knowledge with real-world experience in energy operations. In this episode, we dive into the molecule side of energy, focusing on the evolving roles of natural gas and hydrogen in a decarbonizing world. Topics r...
Dec 05, 2024•56 min
Jason Marks is the Co-founder and CEO at TELO . TELO is developing EV pickup trucks in the footprint of a Mini Cooper with a bed the size of a Toyota Tacoma and the power of a mainstream truck. They're focused on urban use cases for pickup trucks, whether that be a weekend adventurer who lives in a city or an organization whose employees need trucks for work in urban environments but are fed up with navigating giant vehicles through traffic, parking, and underground lots. We were eager to hear J...
Nov 21, 2024•45 min
Mark Lundstrom is the founder and CEO of Radia . Radia is developing the WindRunner, the world’s largest aircraft, specifically designed to transport massive offshore wind turbine blades—some reaching the length of football fields—to onshore sites. This capability, termed "GigaWind," could redefine the scope and scale of onshore wind projects. Radia isn’t stopping at building these groundbreaking aircraft; they also plan to develop wind energy projects to catalyze the GigaWind transformation. Th...
Nov 14, 2024•43 min
Tom Montag , CEO of Rubicon Carbon , joins us to discuss the world of carbon credits. Tom has had an illustrious career, previously serving as Chief Operating Officer at Bank of America, President of Global Banking and Markets, and a member of the executive management team. He joined Merrill Lynch as Executive Vice President and Head of Global Sales and Trading in 2008, just before its merger with Bank of America. Before that, he was with Goldman Sachs, co-heading the Global Securities Business ...
Nov 11, 2024•46 min
Hannan Parvizian is Co-founder and CEO of Exowatt . Exowatt turned heads earlier this year when it announced a $20 million Seed round with backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Atomic, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. The company has developed a novel combined solution for energy generation and storage that concentrates heat from the sun, stores it as thermal energy, and converts it on demand to electricity. They've primarily focused their go-to-market around the data center boom driven by AI...
Nov 07, 2024•48 min
By now, you’ve likely noticed our refreshed look. We’re evolving the show to focus on the inevitable impacts of climate change and the groundbreaking solutions shaping our future. To kick off this next chapter our first guest on Inevitable is Tom Steyer , Co-executive Chair at Galvanized Climate Solutions , a multi-strategy investment firm focused exclusively on the climate transition. A little over a year ago, Galvanize announced the final close of its Innovation + Expansion Fund at over $1 bil...
Nov 04, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Climate change is inevitable. It's already here. But at the same time, the energy transition–the rewriting of industries to be cleaner, more profitable, and more resilient–is also inevitable. Join MCJ Managing Partner Cody Simms each week as sits down with experts across sectors to explore the groundbreaking innovations and extraordinary people shaping the transition of energy and industry. Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info...
Nov 01, 2024•2 min
Today on My Climate Journey, we’re bringing back a familiar voice: Jason Jacobs, Founder and Venture Partner at MCJ. In this special episode, Cody and Jason reflect on the evolution of MCJ and its mission to drive climate innovation. While this is the last episode under the My Climate Journey name, don’t worry—the show isn’t going away. The format will stay the same, but a new name is coming soon. Cody and Jason share lessons learned, the ongoing need for collaboration, and gratitude for the com...
Oct 31, 2024•25 min
Joselyn Lai is the Co-founder and CEO at Bedrock Energy . Bedrock uses geothermal energy to transform the heating and cooling of buildings. We've covered geothermal on the show a few times, but Bedrock brings a unique approach. On one end of the spectrum, we've explored large utility-scale geothermal projects, which aim to drill deep to tap into underground steam vents for turbine-powered electricity generation. On the other end, we've featured companies that drill relatively shallow wells to cr...
Oct 24, 2024•49 min
Erica Nemser is CEO at Ardent , a Series A stage startup that's aiming to help drive industrial decarbonization by developing and selling membranes to perform point source carbon capture. Point source capture differs from direct air capture in that it's focused on concentrated greenhouse gas emissions coming right out of the flue of an industrial system, as opposed to direct air capture (DAC), which attempts to capture emissions from ambient air. Ardent, formerly Compact Membrane Systems, has be...
Oct 17, 2024•48 min
Molly Yang is CEO and co-founder of Hgen , a company that develops clean hydrogen to decarbonize heavy industry. Specifically, they are working on alkaline electrolyzer technology to make it have higher efficiency and higher power density, which they claim will allow them to produce hydrogen with a smaller footprint and lower cost, using a modular, mass-manufacturable design. Based in Los Angeles, Hgen has raised capital from Founders Fund, Fontinalis Partners, and Seven Seven Six among others. ...
Oct 10, 2024•36 min
Russell Kenneth DeGraff spent 18 years as a staffer on Capitol Hill, including 12 years as the Chief Climate and Technology Advisor to Nancy Pelosi, notably during her second term as Speaker of the House. He was, as they say in the room where it happened when negotiating the landmark climate legislation of the last few years, including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. This is a special conversation going deep into the backsto...
Oct 07, 2024•1 hr 26 min
This My Climate Journey podcast episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Ion during Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week . Zach Dell is the Co-founder and CEO of Base Power Company . Base aspires to build a reliable and affordable home energy service powered by distributed batteries. Their technology supports the grid during times of peak need and protects customers during outages. They claim to do this at a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Base is serving live customer...
Oct 03, 2024•42 min
*This My Climate Journey podcast episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Ion during Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week . Our guest is, Vicki Hollub , CEO of Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) , a century-old oil and gas company employing over 12,000 people globally with a market cap near $50 billion. Recently the company has made significant investments into what they refer to as “carbon management” technologies including the acquisition of Carbon Engineering, a Direct Air Capture (...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 7 min
The election cycle can feel overwhelming for the average person who is climate-concerned, but not deeply political enough to understand where and how to plug in. If you have money to give, where should it go? If you have time to contribute, what should you do? We could think of no better group than the experts we have here to help walk us through it. Tiernan Sittenfeld is the Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at LCV or the League of Conservation Voters , among many other things. LCV as...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Doug Bernauer is the CEO and Co-founder of Radiant . Radiant is developing a portable nuclear micro-reactor to replace diesel generators. They raised a $40 million Series B in 2023 led by a16z, after previously raising capital from investors including USV, Founders Fund, and DCVC. They're targeting the development of a portable, mostly self-contained, one-megawatt nuclear reactor that is roughly the size of a shipping container. We've been focusing more on nuclear energy lately, exploring whethe...
Sep 12, 2024•38 min
Jeff Chapin is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Haven Energy. Haven aims to make it easier for homeowners to install home battery systems, including choosing the right battery, permitting and installation, tax credits, and virtual power plant setup. Haven recently began offering bundled installation of solar and batteries. Jeff has seen scale before as he and his co-founder, Philip Krim, previously co-founded and grew the one-time darling, direct-to-consumer mattress company, Casper. ...
Aug 29, 2024•48 min
Matt Soule is the CEO and Co-founder of Parallel Systems . Parallel Systems is re-imagining how goods can be transported via rail by building automated battery-electric freight rail vehicles. These vehicles resemble box cars that can drive independently and form on-the-fly connections with each other to create mini trains. According to Matt, the goal is not to upend existing rail freight use cases but to rethink what’s possible on current rail infrastructure to address use cases traditionally ma...
Aug 22, 2024•47 min
Katie Siegel is CEO and Co-founder at Flipturn . Flipturn is an EV charging management platform for fleets and we're diving into the electrification of trucking. At the beginning of 2024, the Advanced Clean Fleets law came into effect in California creating a number of mandates for zero emissions vehicle adoption in the trucking space. And the law impacts any fleet doing business in California, so there are nationwide implications. Cody and Katie dig into this as well as the impacts on various t...
Aug 15, 2024•36 min
Julia Strong is the Executive Director of Symbiosis Coalition . Announced in early 2024, Symbiosis Coalition is an advanced market commitment from Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce to purchase up to 20 million tons of nature-based carbon removals. The forestry credit space has faced challenges over the last couple of years, prompting interest in how Julia and these large tech companies collaborated to stimulate activity in the sector. Conversations about forestry should be relatively strai...
Aug 12, 2024•52 min
Joe Daniel is a Principal on the Carbon-Free Electricity Team at RMI . Our topic today is coal, specifically the "non-economic dispatch" of coal. This phenomenon occurs when coal-fired power plants deliver power to electricity grids even when their electricity is not the most cost-effective option, thereby disrupting the "merit order" of electricity dispatch. This complex topic is explored with Joe's help, as he provides insights into this intricate issue. The US electric grid is notoriously dif...
Aug 05, 2024•51 min
Siva Yellamraju is the Co-founder and CEO at Fourier . Fourier's mission is to make hydrogen universally accessible with on-site and on-demand production. Fourier is not Siva's first startup, it's his fourth. He sold his last company to Apple the one before that to Google and the one before that to Polycom, so he knows a thing or two about entrepreneurship. Fourier is barely two years old and they raised a seed round in mid-April led by General Catalyst. They've largely operated in stealth. In f...
Jul 31, 2024•47 min
Japan is important to consider on the global energy stage. The country’s emissions footprint is considerably smaller than China and the U.S. While Japan's energy footprint isn't growing as rapidly as India's, it’s still the fifth-largest emitter of any country globally, with emissions representing roughly three to 4% of the global total. Japan's energy system is heavily fossil fuel-based, especially after it cut nuclear power generation from roughly one-third to zero in the aftermath of the 2011...
Jul 22, 2024•45 min
Max Jamilly , CEO and Co-founder at Hoxton Farms . And today, we're talking about fat. Hoxton Farms, a London-based startup, grows and sells animal fats without animals. They aspire to be an ingredients provider; cultivating fats via bioreactors and selling cruelty-free and sustainable fats to other food brands, starting with meat alternatives. It's been a challenging time for the alt-meat space, and we were eager to hear how Max feels the industry will develop and the role Hoxton Farms can play...
Jul 18, 2024•50 min
Julia Reichelstein is the CEO and Co-founder at Vaulted Deep , a carbon removal company that injects carbon-rich waste slurries deep underground into permanent geologic storage. They've come onto the scene quite fast recently securing just north of a $58 million order from Frontier to sequester over 152,000 tons of carbon between now and 2027, which is Frontier's largest commitment yet. They're one of 20 finalist teams still in the mix for the $100 million Carbon Removal Xprize , and one of 24 s...
Jul 11, 2024•56 min
Mish Thadani is the CEO and Co-founder of Rhizome . Rhizome helps utilities plan for resilience. It's an AI-powered software platform that helps electric utilities identify vulnerabilities from climate threats to quantify risk and to measure the economic and social benefits of grid enhancing investments. In our discussion, we delve into how utilities address vulnerabilities arising from extreme weather and other climate change impacts. We also explore how they balance preventive investments to a...
Jun 27, 2024•44 min
Today's conversation is all about how the US is trying to onshore manufacturing of key clean energy supply chains, things like EV, battery metals, and the like. Giulia Siccardo is the Director of the US Department of Energy's Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains or MESC. We start out with a bit of a history lesson on why manufacturing somewhat intentionally moved offshore from the 1980s through the 20-teens and the implications of this move on the American workforce. We then talk abo...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr
