We already have many of the climate solutions we need. But scaling them is hard. The Green Blueprint is a show about the people who are architecting the clean economy. Every other week, host Lara Pierpoint profiles the founders, investors, and organizational leaders who are solving complex challenges in the quest to build climate technologies fast.
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BrightSource Energy, led by John Woolard, aimed to revolutionize power with concentrated solar (CSP) and its innovative power tower. Despite a successful pilot and overcoming major financial hurdles during the 2009 crisis, the company faced an existential threat from rapidly falling solar PV costs. The episode delves into the challenges of financing, permitting, and the difficult internal debate over pivoting away from their core technology, offering crucial lessons for climate tech innovators on market realities and competitive forces.
We’ve already invented many of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But a big chunk of emission reductions will come from technologies that are not yet commercial. We don’t have decades to get these commercialized – we have years. So what can we learn from the people who are bringing new technologies from the lab to the market, constructing first-of-a-kind projects, building companies, challenging and transforming incumbents, and finding the right kind of investment to support...
Since we stopped The Carbon Copy , some listeners had questions about what’s next. Here's a preview of our new podcast, the Transition-AI event in December, and a new newsletter called the AI-Energy Nexus . Stay tuned to the feed for our new show, dropping later this fall!
Dynamic pricing is everywhere – and impacts all of us. Whether it's the time of day, your location, or the amount of demand, so many of our decisions are driven by real-time pricing changes. But it's still a relatively new concept in electricity. This week, we're featuring a conversation with Scott Engstrom of GridX and Economist Ahmad Faruqui on the imperative for good rate design – and the consequences of getting it wrong. How do we create dynamic rates that are fair, transparent, and effectiv...
Some news: this will be our final installment of The Carbon Copy. But don’t go anywhere! Later this fall, the feed will be transformed into a new show that will profile the people architecting the clean energy economy. We promise it will be a valuable part of your media diet. For our last episode, we brought back some old friends: Jigar Shah, director of the DOE’s loan programs office, and Katherine Hamilton, chair of 38 North. Jigar, Katherine, and Stephen dissect some of the biggest storylines...
When millions of smart meters rolled out across the country at the turn of the last decade, many people hoped it would create the backbone of a digital grid. Today, you’ll find few who think meters lived up to expectations. One survey found only 3% of advanced meters supported by the 2009 stimulus bill brought customer savings. Mike Phillips, the CEO of Sense, is still bullish on the role of advanced meters for grid intelligence and bill savings. But as utilities start a new wave of rollouts to ...
Solar is the fastest growing electricity-generating technology in history. That rapid scaling was a result of squeezing cost reductions out of every step of production. But there's one critical piece that hasn't changed much: frames. Aluminum frames now make up one-quarter of the cost of a PV module. And that metal mostly comes from China, a country that controls nearly 60% of the world’s smelting. Since passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, companies have built or planned 155 gigawatts of pro...
A lot of climate tech investors are still trying to figure out how to invest in artificial intelligence. Will it become a unique investment category? Or just a natural enhancement of what many startups are already building? There’s an emerging class of startups with AI at the center of their business. Citrine Informatics is using generative AI to speed up discovery of new materials ; Koloma is using AI to identify potential sources of geologic hydrogen; and Zanskar is using AI to accelerate and ...
We need to invest many trillions of dollars every year to build a climate-positive economy. We know what those technologies are – but they're all at very different levels of readiness. So what would it take to scale critical climate technologies? That was the simple-but-complicated question recently posed by a group of energy, industry, and high-tech experts at McKinsey. The research offers a clear account of the state of a dozen types of climate technologies, which could collectively slash emis...
Data centers are an impressive energy success story. Over the last 25 years, internet traffic has climbed more than 500x while data center electricity use has remained flat. The servers and energy infrastructure have gotten wildly more efficient, and the biggest tech companies have focused on powering those warehouse-scale computers with renewables. But a lot of people are suddenly alarmed about data centers again, as energy demand for AI surges. Data centers are getting built so fast, many util...
The origin of Tesla was rooted in two goals: electrify transportation to drive down emissions that are warming the planet; and do it by driving down the cost of EVs to make them accessible to the masses. Is Musk now walking away from both? “He's decided I'm not a car company. I’m an AI and robotics company. It's astonishing what's happening with Tesla,” said Steve LeVine, editor of The Electric , a publication on batteries and EVs from The Information. Tesla has always been a tumultuous company....
This week, we have something a little different: a news quiz. We recently took the stage with four investors at the Prelude Climate Summit — armed with a bell, a buzzer, and four different categories of questions. We tested two teams of venture investors on their knowledge of the most recent industry news. Shayle Kann and Cassie Bowe, partners at venture firm Energy Impact Partners , are team "High Voltage." Shayle is also host of Latitude’s climate tech deep-dive podcast Catalyst . Dr. Carley A...
This week, we have a drop-in episode from our new podcast at Latitude Media: Political Climate. Since the Inflation Reduction Act became law in August 2022, we’ve asked ourselves a big question: could the government and the private sector actually get this sprawling set of climate programs up and running? So far, many would answer “yes.” The IRA has already created over 170,000 jobs and supported $110 billion in new clean energy manufacturing – with a majority of that investment headed to conser...
AI is suddenly in use everywhere – and it’s headed for the power sector. New research from Latitude Intelligence and Indigo Advisory Group shows a coming wave of AI integration, inside and outside of utilities. Distributed energy companies are increasingly integrating AI into their products, and many power companies are building teams to take advantage of automation for operational efficiency and grid monitoring. But adoption will be uneven – and an autonomous superbrain for the electric grid ma...
John O’Donnell co-founded and ran two solar thermal companies. He watched as the technology shifted from being the most promising utility-scale solar technology, to getting out-competed by photovoltaics everywhere. But he stayed passionate about heat. Today, he’s CEO of Rondo Energy, which makes a “heat battery” for industrial applications using bricks, heating coils, and cheap, intermittent renewables. And that cheap PV that made solar thermal so difficult is now a critical input for decarboniz...
Mark Gurman has been covering Apple since 2009. His reporting career is full of scoops about new products or strategic decisions from inside the company. His latest scoop in February : Apple is finally shutting down its efforts to build an autonomous electric car. Apple first started exploring an electric car in 2014. At that point, cars had already become computers on wheels, Tesla was scaling mass-market production, and vehicle autonomy was the hottest thing in the tech industry. “It made sens...
The US green hydrogen industry is at a critical juncture. After months of input and debate, the government put out draft rules for tax credits at the end of last year – setting strict requirements for matching new, local renewables to hydrogen production. It was hailed by many as a really important step for ensuring that green hydrogen actually lives up to its name. But across the industry, the reaction has been mixed – even among those who want to make the industry as clean as possible. Maeve A...
There are many forces that could hold back AI in the power system: computing infrastructure, power availability, regulation, and corporate inertia. The biggest one? Good data. Utilities and grid operators are awash in data. But getting access to it – or making sense of it – is very difficult. For a better understanding of how to change that, we turn to someone who spends a lot of his time in the so-called data cloud: Tititaan Palazzi, the head of power and utilities at Snowflake . “Data naturall...
Early in her career, Amanda Li worked on many deals in solar and storage as part of a billion-dollar sustainable infrastructure fund. And she discovered a problem that often hinders deployment: the underwriting process is cumbersome and slow. “All of it was in spreadsheets, word documents, emails. When you look at a solar deal, there's a lot of documentation, a lot of counterparties to deal with, and that information needs to be processed somehow. It felt like we were spending a lot of time just...
When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts. Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of ChatGPT 3.5, which ran on Microsoft’s data centers. “That was the moment that I realized we were going to need a bigger boat. This is a massive leap ...
In the early 2000s, Steve Cotton ran a company serving the fast-growing data center industry with backup battery systems. And when those systems reached the end of their lives, the company monetized kilotons of lead-acid batteries by sending them to recycling facilities – industrial plants that break down and burn the components. “It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You've got a bunch of people wearing hot suits, literally chucking batteries into high temperature furnac...
Can a couple trillion dollars feel small? Global investments in the energy transition – from the buildout of factories and power projects to project finance and government debt – hit nearly $1.8 trillion last year. That’s almost as big as the GDP of South Korea. It’s nearly 20% more than the year before, and nearly eight times more than a decade ago. But even with those record levels of spending, we are astonishingly behind what’s needed to stay on a net-zero trajectory this decade. This week, w...
If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants. That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other distributed assets into dispatchable power plants. The US already has tens of gigawatts of VPP capacity, ...
The storage market is full of surprises. Last year, global storage installations were a third higher than expected, driven mostly by Chinese policy to attach batteries to renewables. Meanwhile, a ramp-up in manufacturing is causing oversupply – and a potential shakeout for smaller battery makers. By 2030, the world could see 1.8 terawatt-hours of storage capacity installed, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance . Rapid manufacturing expansion, a shift in chemistries and designs, and increase...
As President Biden’s green industrial policies reignite the US manufacturing base, AI computing workloads soar , and machines across the economy turn electric, the power grid is facing an historic increase in demand. After almost two decades of flat electricity consumption, suddenly America’s grid planners are doubling their forecasts for demand – raising the urgency for new infrastructure. This week, we’ll ask: what’s needed, and what happens if we can’t build it? Then, some major changes in th...
Artificial intelligence is quickly accelerating drug discovery, healthcare services, product design, and manufacturing efficiency. Now it's here for materials development – and it could be one of the most influential uses of AI in energy. A decade ago, Greg Mulholland started playing around with machine learning as a way to accelerate product development of materials inside LEDs. After seeing its potential – and witnessing the rapid evolution of AI – he co-founded Citrine Informatics . Citrine b...
Turbulent. Equilibrating. Those are the words that investors Gabriel Kra and Carly Anderson use to describe the last year for venture capital in climate tech. We now have a full picture of the year for climate tech venture investing in 2023. Fresh data from Sightline Climate shows a decline in deal counts, round sizes, and a dropoff in repeat investors. It was a year of rising interest rates, declining valuations, a bank collapse, and falling exits. But it was also when many companies started bu...
When the numbers for 2023 are finalized, there could be another 320 to 413 gigawatts of solar installed around the world – bringing global capacity to nearly 1.5 terawatts. Solar is now on track to surpass coal and fossil gas capacity in the next few years, bringing generation to 10% of global electricity supply. There's universal recognition that we're firmly in the solar era. But outlooks on how fast the technology will grow are mixed. And that's because a mix of constraints – market design, t...
The competing trends in the energy transition from 2023 were stark: a looming peak in demand for oil, gas, and coal; a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; and an increasingly realistic pathway to triple renewables development. But we also experienced the hottest global temperatures in 125,000 years, record US oil & gas production, inflation headwinds that challenged large renewables projects, and a very tough year for clean energy stocks. Every new investment in energy inf...
In less than a decade, America has become the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas. In the mid-2000s, the US was building terminals to import more fossil gas. But that all changed after the fracking boom unlocked vast reserves of hydrocarbons. The US became a net exporter in 2017. Then, Russia’s war on Ukraine forced a scramble for new supplies of gas in Europe – and American companies stepped in. The consequence: a historic push for new terminals, a vast new source of heat-trapping...
