Podcasts about energy impact partners

The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new reactors, Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, reached completion over a decade later. So is this latest wave of nuclear hype any different? In this episode, Shayle talks to Chris Colbert, CEO of Elementl Power, which on Wednesday announced a deal with Google to develop three nuclear projects of at least 600-megawatts each. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, is an investor in Elementl.) Chris, a former executive at NuScale Power, thinks last year may have marked the start of a nuclear revival: the recommissioning of Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and Michigan's Holtec Palisades; Big Tech deals to support small modular reactor development; and the start of construction on TerraPower's Wyoming reactor, the Western Hemisphere's first advanced nuclear facility. But until new reactors move beyond one-off projects to serial deployment, nuclear won't achieve the cost reductions needed for widespread adoption. Chris and Shayle discuss what it will take to turn this groundswell of activity into widespread deployment, covering topics like: Current tailwinds, like load growth and interest from corporate buyers Why corporate buyers may be better positioned than utilities to take on development risks Elementl's technology-agnostic approach Different nuclear technologies — light water, non-light water, and advanced designs — and Chris's predictions for when they'll reach commercialization Why iteration is essential to driving down costs (and why the Google deal involves three separate projects) How regulatory timelines are speeding up The steps of project development with a corporate buyer Chris's criteria for site selection — and why attracting skilled labor ranks surprisingly high Resources: Latitude Media: Was 2024 really the year of nuclear resurgence? Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback? Catalyst: The cost of nuclear Latitude Media: Trump's DOE is reupping Biden-era funding for small modular nuclear reactors Latitude Media: Utah bets on a new developer to revive its small modular reactor ambitions Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, and increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data plus tools that they've never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

There are a handful of people in the clean energy and infrastructure world whose knowledge and voices serve as guiding lights. Shayle Kann is one of those people. Known for his deep expertise, unique perspective, and distinct voice, Shayle has covered and shaped the energy transition for years.While regular listeners will know, we typically feature startup founders. But Shayle's long-standing influence—from GTM and The Interchange to EIP and Catalyst—made it a true pleasure to turn the mic around.This episode, recorded in front of a live, sold-out audience at SF Climate Week, marked Shayle's first time as our guest, though he's no stranger to the show. For the first few years of Watt It Takes, starting in 2017, when every episode was recorded in front of a live audience, Shayle would kick off each conversation by setting the industry context and introducing our guest.In this episode, we trace Shayle's journey, starting with his roots in Madison, Wisconsin, and share how his entrepreneurial spirit and compelling storytelling abilities have been instrumental in his rise as a leader.On a personal note, I've known Shayle for nearly a decade. He has been a colleague and a friend, and I'm excited for him to tell his story.SponsorsThis live recording, and this next season of Watt It Takes, is brought to you by our lead sponsor, HSBC Innovation Banking who is proud to bank some of the most exciting companies pioneering the technologies of tomorrow.With specialist financing support, deep understanding of the challenges, and a global network across more than 50 markets, they help clients scale breakthrough innovations, and take them to the world.So, if you're looking for early-stage funding, or well on your way to FOAK, click the link in the show notes to learn how HSBC Innovation Banking can help on the next stage of your journey.About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Innovation is a leading consulting firm connecting top-tier corporations and investors, including corporate innovation teams, CVCs, and pensions with cutting-edge technologies and startups that meet their specific criteria for engagement. Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization. To hear more stories of founders building our climate positive future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

China's new export controls on rare earth elements (REEs) are a problem for EVs, renewables, and other industries that rely on the minerals, especially the permanent magnets they're used in. The vast majority of the global supply chain is in China. Plus, Chinese companies control supply chain operations around the world.  So is it possible to stand up a rare earth supply chain outside of China's control? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ahmad Ghahreman, co-founder and CEO of REE recycler Cyclic Materials. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Cyclic.) They cover topics like: REE 101: the basket of 17 minerals, how they're mined and processed, and the most important five Why an REE supply chain hasn't been built outside of China, even though the raw materials exist outside the country The timeline of Chinese export controls leading up to the April escalation and what could come next The specifics of what's limited, including oxides, alloys, and magnets Why Ahmad is optimistic about building an ex-China supply chain Other potential pathways, like recycling and designing more REEs-efficient products Recommended resources: The New York Times: The Mine Is American. The Minerals Are China's. The New York Times: How China Took Over the World's Rare Earths Industry Axios: China trade war risks stifling America's electric car movement Heatmap:  China's Minerals Pause All Pain, No Gain for U.S Latitude Media: Building a supply chain for rare earth elements Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a platform enabling solar and storage developers and buyers to save time, reduce risk, & increase profits in their equipment selection process. Anza gives clients access to pricing, technical, and risk data and tools that they've never had access to before. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

In our latest podcast, Patrick Kondarjian, Global Head of Sustainability, Markets & Securities Services, HSBC, discusses energy transition with Hans Kobler, Founder & Managing Partner of global investment firm, Energy Impact Partners. Listen to their discussion on the move away from an ideological transition to a more pragmatic energy ‘addition'. This includes the climate technologies crucial in tackling volatility in demand and supply, increasing resilience, and powering the growth of electron-hungry data centres. Hans also shares perspectives on Energy Impact Partners' investment priorities and why energy transition was central to Davos's biggest themes.Subscribe to HSBC Business Edition- MENAT on Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube or Anghami for the latest business news and insights.Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ae/podcast/hsbc-business-editions-menat/id1530716865Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/3d9NPmyU64oqNGWvT0VvARAnghami - https://play.anghami.com/artist/7640230YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOGWG1Zpoxznztf0ucbZ5HZpP1cAqQQE Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robots are becoming cheaper to make and more powerful because of AI. In the climate tech space, they're already laying transmission lines, inspecting wind turbines, and installing solar panels.. And with labor productivity stagnating, immigration restrictions tightening, and the cost of labor rising, they're looking even more appealing.  So where might robotics have the biggest impact on climate tech? In this episode, Shayle talks to Andy Lubershane, a partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners (where he's a colleague of Shayle). Andy also recently wrote a blog post on the effects of autonomy across climate tech. They cover topics like:    How more affordable parts and better foundation models are making robotics cheaper The high CapEx and low OpEx that make automation expensive to start, but valuable with high utilization Robotics-as-a-service companies that help to overcome these initial CapEx challenges The most promising applications, like manufacturing, construction, and maintenance The hopes for more humanoid general-purpose robots — and the challenges in making them Recommended resources Steel for Fuel: Autonomy is real now SemiAnalysis: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1 Steel for Fuel: From SaaS to Robots F-Prime Capital: State of Robotics Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Batteries were electrochemistry's breakout hit. For years it was a field that kept a low profile, outshined by flashier cousins like biotech and computer science. That is until lithium-ion batteries became big business, showing that studying the relationship between chemicals and energy could unlock technical pathways that other disciplines could not. Now the field is making breakthroughs in critical areas like cement, metallurgy, and new battery chemistries. So what else can electrochemistry do? Which problems is it especially good at solving? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT. He's also the co-founder of at least six electrochemistry companies, including Form Energy and Sublime Systems, which are both portfolio companies of Energy Impact Partners where Shayle is an investor. They cover topics like: Promising applications like mining, SAFs, and other industrial processes that require a high concentration of energy The strengths of electrochemistry and where it fits best in larger system The weak spots of electrochemistry, like solid-solid transformations and the limitation to 2-dimensional surfaces How electrochemical processes work with intermittent power and the role of embedded chemical storage AI's potential to shape the field — and its limits Recommended resources Catalyst: What do you do with a 100-hour battery? Catalyst: Fixing cement's carbon problem Catalyst: Seeking the holy grail of batteries Catalyst: The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

The distributed generation market is shifting rapidly as capital tightens, power prices rise, and smaller developers bump up against capital and market constraints. Independent power producers (IPPs) like Aspen Power are stepping in to bridge the gap—partnering with developers, securing financing, and scaling solar assets in key markets. But what does it take to succeed in today's distributed energy sector? And what does distributed energy mean in today's evolving market?Jorge Vargas, co-founder and CEO of Aspen Power, has spent over two decades in structured finance and solar project development, with past roles at Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Lennar Homes. Aspen Power emerged from his work at Energy Impact Partners, where he identified the need for a full-scale IPPs focused on distributed generation. Backed by private equity firm Carlyle, Aspen Power has grown rapidly, now managing over 250MW of assets. Jorge breaks down how they are reshaping distributed generation through innovative financing, project buybacks, repowering existing assets, and long-term investment in clean energy infrastructure. Expect to learn:Why smaller developers are struggling to access capital—and how Aspen is helpingThe four market segments driving distributed generation todayHow Aspen's buyback strategy is unlocking new value in older solar assetsThe role of Safe Harbor in securing ITC benefits amid policy uncertaintyThe biggest regulatory and financial challenges facing developers in 2025If you want to connect with today's guest, you'll find links to his contact info in the show notes on the blog at https://mysuncast.com/suncast-episodes/.Our Platinum Presenting Sponsor for SunCast is CPS America!SunCast is proudly supported by Trina Solar.You can learn more about all the sponsors who help make this show free for you at www.mysuncast.com/sponsors.Remember, you can always find resources, learn more about today's guest and explore recommendations, book links, and more than 730 other founder stories and startup advice at www.mysuncast.com.Subscribe to Valence, our weekly LinkedIn Newsletter, and learn the elements of compelling storytelling: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/valence-content-that-connects-7145928995363049472/You can connect with me, Nico Johnson, on:Twitter - https://www.twitter.com/nicomeoLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickalus

In our latest podcast, Patrick Kondarjian, Global Head of Sustainability, Markets & Securities Services, HSBC, discusses energy transition with Hans Kobler, Founder & Managing Partner of global investment firm, Energy Impact Partners. Listen to their discussion on the move away from an ideological transition to a more pragmatic energy ‘addition'. This includes the climate technologies crucial in tackling volatility in demand and supply, increasing resilience, and powering the growth of electron-hungry data centres. Hans also shares perspectives on Energy Impact Partners' investment priorities and why energy transition was central to Davos's biggest themes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Lambert is the Co-founder and CEO of Quilt,  a company designing smart ductless heat pumps for residential heating and cooling with intelligent room-by-room controls. Quilt was founded in 2022 and launched in the San Francisco Bay Area in spring 2024. Since then, they have achieved hundreds of deployments and are preparing to expand to their next market in Southern California. Earlier this year, they announced a $33 million Series A financing round co-led by Energy Impact Partners and Galvanize Climate Solutions, following a $9 million seed round in 2023 co-led by Lowercarbon Capital and Gradient Ventures. MCJ is proud to have invested in both rounds through our venture funds.Before founding Quilt, Paul led sustainability efforts at Area 120, Google's in-house incubator for product ideas developed during employees' 20% time. He previously held product roles at Google and Twitter and began his career by founding, running, and exiting a startup called LearnDot.In this conversation, we wanted to understand Paul's product mindset—how Quilt works, the assumptions he's validated along the way, and how he's approached the challenges of building the business.In this episode, we cover: [2:01] The origin of the name Quilt [3:32] An overview of Quilt's product stack [5:37] Quilt's installation process [8:24] An overview of mini splits[10:56] How Paul and his co-founder decided on ductless mini splits [17:09] Paul's path from design spec to prototype [18:47] The company's progress to date[21:38] Consumer sentiment about heat pumps[23:51] Seasonal changes that drive consumers to purchase Quilt[27:16] Paul's biggest learnings in building the company [32:16] Design considerations in Quilt's product[34:59] Workforce development and other inertia challenges [40:51] What's next for Quilt [45:52] Where Quilt is hiring, plus its newly launched merch storeEpisode recorded on Dec 17, 2024 (Published on Jan 23, 2025) Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.Connect with MCJ:Cody Simms on LinkedInVisit mcj.vcSubscribe to the MCJ Newsletter*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant

To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, is planning to expand its fleet of natural gas plants. And Microsoft signed a deal last September to re-open Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant But could we meet a portion of that load growth with distributed energy resources? Pier LaFarge thinks so.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Pier, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Sparkfund). DERs can come online much faster than large, centralized generation, Pier argues. He makes the case that utilities are especially well-positioned to lead what he calls “distributed capacity procurement” (DCP) of customer-sited solar, storage, and other assets. Shayle and Pier cover topics like: How host agreements work, using utility-owned assets sited at customer locations How the effective load carrying capability (ELCC) of DERs compares to large, centralized power plants The relationship between DCP and VPPs The key tradeoff of DCP: DERs are faster to build, but cost more and have lower ELCC than large, centralized plants Who should pay for those higher costs? Why vertically-integrated utilities are best-positioned to take advantage of the value DCP creates for capacity, distribution, and transmission The limitations of DCP at a systems level Recommended resources Latitude Media: Can distributed energy answer AI's power problem? Latitude Media: Jigar Shah: It's time for VPPs to get simpler Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Just Climate is a 1.5bnUSD vehicle established by Generation Investment with the mission to invest in the highest impact solutions that can radically reduce or remove emissions. They occupy the “missing middle” between VC and PE-Infra allowing growth, FOAK and deployment. Their positioning comes on the heels of VCs such as Prelude Ventures, Energy Impact Partners or Breakthrough Energy Ventures.Laurent and Gerard invite its CEO, Shaun Kingsbury, the “inventor” of North Sea Offshore Wind when he was at the head of UK Green Investment Bank.We talk about the investment thesis and its portfolio. Steel? Cement? Electro-mobility? Gerard discusses the general environment when it comes to Climate Tech (not great) and wonders if the third wave of Green Investment is not hitting a wall after years of exuberance.Shaun concludes that there is no future for climate innovations if they don't deliver attractive risk-adjusted financial returns. There will be short term bumps, but the long term is bright.

Oh, the heat pump — a climate tech darling that still hasn't hit the big time yet. One challenge for heat pumps is that the customer experience can be difficult, involving a complex installation process, poor installation jobs, and even technicians that don't want to sell you one. What's it going to take to get heat pumps right?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Paul Lambert, founder and CEO of the heat-pump company Quilt. They talk through the nuts and bolts of the customer experience and how to improve it. (Shayle and Energy Impact Partners invest in Quilt). They cover topics like: Why many technicians are ambivalent or resistant to selling heat pumps The cost stack for heat pumps, including the surprising cost of materials The complex labor involved that ratchets up the total price of installation Lessons from other industries, such as solar and auto Whether users actually save money on heat pump installations The challenges of vertical integration of the value chain Recommended resources Latitude Media: We have more data on the energy benefits of heat pumps — and they're big Catalyst: Ramping up the pace of home electrification Catalyst: Unleashing the magic of heat pumps Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.= On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year's conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide does. The good news: We're in the middle of a global effort to replace them with lower impact alternatives.  Will we replace them fast enough to hit climate targets? And in the meantime, can we prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ian McGavisk, senior advisor at RMI for carbon-free buildings. An industry veteran, he recently co-authored a report on recovering residential AC refrigerants in the U.S., which have the carbon equivalent of 1.7 million cars. (Ian also works in business development at Transaera. Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle works, invests in Transaera.). Shayle and Ian cover topics like: The sources of emissions in the refrigerant lifecycle  The economics of recovering and reclaiming refrigerants Alternatives with low global warming potential and their tradeoffs, such as efficiency, flammability and concerns about forever chemicals Recommended resources RMI: Refrigerant Reclamation Project Drawdown: Refrigerant Management Project Drawdown: Alternative Refrigerants EPA: Transitioning to Low-GWP Alternatives in Commercial Refrigeration UN Environmental Programme: Montreal Protocol On Substances That Deplete The Ozone Layer, Report Of The Technology And Economic Assessment Panel, May 2024  Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year's conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

Adam James is a Partner at Energy Impact Partners, where he leads the firm's Customer Experience team and the Impact and Sustainability team. Adam joined EIP from Tesla where he worked on global business operations. Prior to Tesla, he was the Deputy Director at SolarCity, supporting global market expansion including business development, M&A, and utility partnerships. Adam previously held roles with GTM Research and at the Center for American Progress. Adam is also a Board Member at the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI), a nonprofit dedicated to developing the next generation of energy leadership, which he co-founded in 2013. Energy Impact Partners, or EIP, is a purpose-built investment platform. It is a collaborative strategic investment firm that invests in energy companies. They bring together brilliant entrepreneurs and some of the world's most influential corporations to help transform the global economy towards a sustainable future. EIP is committed to setting standards on ESG reporting, transparency, and measurement, as a member of the Initiative Climate International, a subgroup of UNPRI specifically formed to work on reducing carbon emissions of private equity-backed companies and securing sustainable investment performance by recognizing and incorporating the materiality of climate risk. Show Notes: [2:29] - Adam shares what initially sparked his motivation in this field and how it has evolved over time. [7:56] - Adam describes some of his experiences in the early days of his career. [10:16] - Climate change is a really unique problem because it requires a multi-disciplinary approach. [12:53] - In building an organization, there are several first steps to take. Adam explains some of the critical steps that he took at the start. [16:17] - It is apparent in the climate field how generous and collaborative people are. [19:15] - Scaling things up in an organization has been an exciting part of the work for Adam. [21:50] - What can be learned after years of experience and data? How can there be improvement? [23:24] - It is a complex political environment. In general, no matter what is going on, corporations have a business objective. [26:14] - Compared to years past, there is more progress and good news regarding climate change coming everyday. [28:03] - Adam describes some of the things he is most excited about when it comes to emerging technologies. [31:32] - Adam shares advice to those who are entering the field. Links and Resources: Energy Impact Partners Website

Deploy or innovate? Scale up an existing technology or develop a breakthrough? Build, build, build, or invent a better mousetrap? The question isn't which strategy to follow; it's which strategy to use in which sector. Virtually no one thinks that solar needs brand new tech breakthroughs to scale. Crystalline silicone took the lion's share of the market years ago from cadmium telluride, amorphous silicon, CIGS and other early solar technologies. But in carbon removal, batteries, nuclear, and other industries — should we develop new technologies, or scale up a promising few? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane about the better mousetrap fallacy in climate tech. Andy is the head of research and a partner at Energy Impact Partners. He argues that, in certain industries, investing in building a better mousetrap is a bad use of capital, and that too many options causes analysis paralysis for would-be customers.  Shayle and Andy cover topics like: How scaling up technologies – as Chinese manufacturers have scaled up solar and batteries – drives down cost Why new technologies that aren't five or 10 times better than an incumbent may fail to beat the cost curve Whether batteries need breakthroughs, and how Andy thinks about lithium-iron-phosphate, sodium-ion, thermal, and iron-air Why Andy thinks that the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions should license more new projects than new technologies The challenge of having more direct air capture technologies than buyers Recommended resources Catalyst: The cost of nuclear Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback? Catalyst: Seeking the holy grail of batteries Catalyst: Growing the carbon dioxide removal market Catalyst is brought to you by Kraken, the advanced operating system for energy. Kraken is helping utilities offer excellent customer service and develop innovative products and tariffs through the connection and optimization of smart home energy assets. Already licensed by major players across the globe, including Origin Energy, E.ON, and EDF, Kraken can help you create a smarter, greener grid. Visit kraken.tech. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a revolutionary platform enabling solar and energy storage equipment buyers and developers to save time, increase profits, and reduce risk. Instantly see pricing, product, and counterparty data and comparison tools. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the global leader in integrated marketing, public relations, creative, and public affairs for energy and climate brands. If you're a startup, investor, or enterprise that's trying to make a name for yourself, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help tell your story and accelerate your growth engine. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

This episode is part of our EEI 2024 highlights series. In this episode, you will hear conversations about topics including clean energy technologies, opportunities for collaboration created by AI, building system resilience, distribution transformation, and more. The speakers are: Hans Kobler, Founder and Managing Partner, Energy Impact Partners, Creighton Oyler, Oracle Senior Vice President and General Manager  Paul Enoda, Founder and Chief Policy and Global Affairs Officer, ENODA, and Martin Stansbury, Deloitte US Power, Utilities & Renewables Risk & Financial Advisory Leader  You can also visit EEI's website to read EEI 2024 recap newsletters and see photos from our annual thought leadership forum.

Batteries are making their way into more passenger cars and commercial vehicles than ever before, but the limits of electrification mean that we'll likely need alternative fuels to decarbonize heavy transport like ships, planes, and trucks.  So what are those fuels and what modes of transport do they suit best? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners. They talk through the limits of electrification and the alternatives for decarbonizing trucks, ships, and planes, drawing on Andy's recent blog post, “How will we move the big, heavy things?”. They cover topics like: The main limitations of batteries: density and infrastructure Volumetric and gravimetric density, and why they matter for different types of vehicles How fossil fuels would beat out even a theoretical “uber-battery” multiple times denser than current batteries Why upgrading “always-on” grid infrastructure can be lengthy, expensive, and disruptive  The alternatives to electrification: biofuels, hydrogen, and e-fuels The advantages and limitations of each for different modes of transport Recommended Resources: Port of Long Beach: Our Zero Emissions Future Enterprise Mobility: Electrifying Airport Ecosystems by 2050 Could Require Nearly Five Times the Electric Power Currently Used Catalyst: Understanding SAF buyers Utility rates could make or break the energy transition – so how do we do it right? On June 13th, Latitude Media and GridX are hosting a Frontier Forum to examine the imperative of good rate design, and the consequences of getting it wrong. Register here. And make sure to listen to our new podcast, Political Climate – an insider's view on the most pressing policy questions in energy and climate. Tune in every other Friday for the latest takes from hosts Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.  Dr. Carley Anderson, principal at venture firm Prelude Ventures, and Matt Eggers, Prelude's manager director, are team Shayle Gassed. (Prelude led fundraising for Latitude Media.) Stephen Lacey, executive editor of this show and host of The Carbon Copy, quizzes the teams on the latest in climate tech news. Which team will come out on top? Catalyst is supported by Origami Solar. Join Latitude Media's Stephen Lacey and Origami's CEO Gregg Patterson for a live Frontier Forum on May 30th at 1 pm Eastern to discuss Origami's new research on how recycled steel can help reinvigorate the U.S. solar industry. Register for free on Latitude's events page.

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 Anderson, principal at venture firm Prelude Ventures, and Matt Eggers, Prelude's manager director, are team "Shayle Gassed." Which team will come out on top? Utility rates could make or break the energy transition – so how do we do it right? On June 13th, Latitude Media and GridX are hosting a Frontier Forum to examine the imperative of good rate design, and the consequences of getting it wrong. Register here. And make sure to listen to our new podcast, Political Climate – an insider's view on the most pressing policy questions in energy and climate. Tune in every other Friday for the latest takes from hosts Julia Pyper, Emily Domenech, and Brandon Hurlbut. Available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential ingredients in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and many electronics. As with most critical minerals, China controls the vast majority of the REE supply chain. And so when it banned the export of REE processing technology last December, it raised concerns about supply. So what will it take to secure the supply of REEs?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Ahmad Ghahreman, CEO and cofounder of Cyclic Metals, a rare earth elements recycling company. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Cyclic). They cover topics like: The five high-value REEs used in the permanent magnets inside EVs, wind turbines, and other electronics The many steps in the supply chain, from extraction to end-of-life Building magnets without REEs Increasing production outside of China The role of recycling Why Ahmad is optimistic about developing a supply chain in North America Recommended Resources: MIT Technology Review: The race to produce rare earth elements IEEE Spectrum: Who Will Free EV Motors from the Rare Earth Monopoly?

Section 702 gets another two years.  MITRE suffers a breach through an Ivanti VPN. CrushFTP urges customers to patch an actively exploited flaw. SafeBreach researchers disclose vulnerabilities in Windows Defender that allow remote file deletion. Ukrainian soldiers see increased attention from data-stealing apps. GitHub's comments are being exploited to distribute malware. VW confirms legacy Chinese espionage and data breaches. CISA crowns winners of the President's Cup Cybersecurity Competition. Cecilia Marinier, Director, Innovation and Programs at RSA Conference, and Niloo Razi Howe, Senior Operating Partner at Energy Impact Partners & judge, review the top Innovation Sandbox contest finalists in anticipation of RSAC 2024. Targeting kids online puts perpetrators in the malware crosshairs.  Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest We have two guests today. Cecilia Marinier, Director, Innovation and Programs at RSA Conference, and Niloo Razi Howe, Senior Operating Partner at Energy Impact Partners & judge, review the top Innovation Sandbox contest finalists and what to look for on the innovation front at RSAC 2024. For 18 years, cybersecurity's boldest new innovators have competed in the RSAC Innovation Sandbox contest to put the spotlight on their potentially game-changing ideas. This year, 10 finalists will once again have three minutes to make their pitch to a panel of judges. Since the start of the contest, the Top 10 Finalists have collectively seen over 80 acquisitions and $13.5 billion in investments. Innovation Sandbox will take place on Monday, May 6th at 10:50am PT. Selected Reading Warrantless spying powers extended to 2026 with Biden's signature (The Record) MITRE breached by nation-state threat actor via Ivanti zero-days (Help Net Security) CrushFTP File Transfer Vulnerability Lets Attackers Download System Files (Infosecurity Magazine) Researchers Claim that Windows Defender Can Be Bypassed (GB Hackers) Ukrainian soldiers' apps increasingly targeted for spying, cyber agency warns  (The Record) GitHub comments abused to push malware via Microsoft repo URLs (Bleeping Computer) Presumably Chinese industrial spies stole VW data on e-drive technology (Bleeping Computer) CISA declares winners of President's Cup cybersecurity competition, with Artificially Intelligent team leading (Industrial Cyber) Malware dev lures child exploiters into honeytrap to extort them (Bleeping Computer) Share your feedback. We want to ensure that you are getting the most out of the podcast. Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey as we continually work to improve the show.  Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here's our media kit. Contact us at cyberwire@n2k.com to request more info. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © 2023 N2K Networks, Inc.

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 urgency in the need for new clean energy technologies, including advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal, low-carbon hydrogen, and long duration storage.Unlike wind and solar, these emerging technologies have not yet been deployed at scale, and they are generally have much higher costs. There is a chicken-and-egg problem: costs will only come down as these technologies scale up, but companies are reluctant to deploy them because they are too expensive.Now Google, Microsoft and Nucor have come up with an idea that could be at least part of the solution. They are collaborating on new commercial structures to help new clean energy technologies scale up and reduce the risk for investors.To discuss that plan, host Ed Crooks is joined by regular guest Dr Melissa Lott, professor at the climate school at Columbia University, and Michael Webber of the University of Texas at Austin. Michael is also chief technology officer at Energy Impact Partners, which is a $3 billion venture fund that invests in some of these emerging technologies. Together they debate the consequences of that surging demand for electricity, and the role of new technologies in avoiding disastrous outcomes for our international climate goals.They also talk about another promising source of clean energy: natural hydrogen, which is found in geologic reservoirs rather than being made from water or from methane. The US Geological Survey estimates there could be 5 trillion tons of natural hydrogen in rocks around the world; a vast, untapped energy reserve that could significantly contribute to meeting global low carbon hydrogen needs.Given that a world with net zero emissions could use about 500 million tons of low-carbon hydrogen a year, that is a very exciting resource base. But is it really plausible that natural hydrogen could be viable as a significant contribution to clean energy supplies? The energy gang has some answers.There's an urgent need for innovative solutions to tackle rising energy demand. Join the discussion on X – we're @theenergygangSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The electricity gauntlet we covered last year has been having a moment in the national spotlight, with coverage of rising load growth in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.  On one side of the gauntlet, demand for electricity is rising, driven by new loads like EVs, data centers, and electrification. On the other side, electricity supply is slow to grow, bogged down by years-long interconnection queues, the immense challenges of building transmission, and other bottlenecks. And utilities are stuck in the middle, struggling to deliver enough power to meet that rising demand. These challenges have been brewing for years, but the AI race is supercharging demand as big tech companies seek out power for their growing data center fleet.  So what does all this mean for emissions and prices? And what tools do we have to make it through this electricity gauntlet? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners. Shayle and Andy cover topics like: Why utilities are building new natural gas plants and keeping coal plants open to meet load growth How technologies like nuclear, grid-enhancing technologies, geothermal, and multi-day storage could meet load growth with fewer emissions What utilities can do to prepare new gas plants for carbon-capture and storage What the gauntlet might do to electricity prices and which customers might be willing to pay higher premiums (data centers, cough cough) Whether the hype around rising power demand is overblown Plus, what medieval Swedish spearmen have to do with electricity  Recommended Resources: Andy Lubershane: The electricity gauntlet S&P Global: NERC raises North American power system reliability flags as demand could outstrip supply Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is brought to you by Atmos Financial. Atmos is revolutionizing finance by leveraging your deposits to exclusively fund decarbonization solutions, like solar and electrification. Join in under 2 minutes at joinatmos.com/catalyst.

Over the last several years, climate tech has emerged into the spotlight as more than $120B in venture capital funding has poured into the sector and interest for decarbonization solutions have surged. Through it all, CTVC has tracked, analyzed, dissected, and reported on the biggest news and deals in the climate tech ecosystem.   CTVC (now Sightline Climate) founder and CEO Kim Zou joined us on the show to talk about the quickly changing climate tech sector and about her journey building CTVC from a popular newsletter into a market intelligence platform used by some of the top investors and companies in the industry.   In the episode, we talk about the state of climate tech VC, where it's changing the most quickly, where the opportunities are, and where the industry is heading. We also discuss Kim's hopes for Sightline to mitigate some of the mistakes made in Cleantech 1.0 and to direct investment to the most critical areas. Keynotes: -How Kim's work building Energy Impact Partners' Frontier Fund influenced the transition of CTVC into Sightline Climate -Which sectors within climate tech are changing the most quickly -How we can avoid the challenges faced in Cleantech 1.0 -Where the biggest opportunities in climate tech are And follow us on: Newsletter: https://www.energy-terminal.com/newsletter-signup LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/energy-terminal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/energyterminal/  

Barbara Burger is the former president of Chevron Technology Ventures and describes herself as a "corporate graduate." She now spends her time advising and helping startups and venture funds working on the energy transition, including Greentown Labs, Energy Impact Partners, Emerald Technology Ventures, Syzygy Plasmonics, Heliogen, and many more.In this episode, we discuss her multifaceted career journey and her current role in guiding startups and venture funds in the energy sector. The conversation covers the technological advancements driving the energy transition, the dynamics between large energy companies and startups, and the specific roles of natural gas and hydrogen. Barbara also sheds light on generational shifts in the energy industry, global energy geopolitics, and offers valuable advice for women in the sector. In this episode, we cover: [03:45]: Barbara's book recommendation, "The West Texas Power Plant That Saved the World"[06:47]: Barbara's career journey, starting at Chevron after graduate school[07:41]: Learning and growing in the energy sector, from industrial chemistry to energy economics[09:26]: Shift to Chevron Technology Ventures, focusing on biofuels, renewable fuels, and digitalization[11:14]: Evolution of Chevron Technology Ventures' investment focus[14:46]: The potential of renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel[17:07]: Barbara's insights on the emerging hydrogen value chain[20:21]: Innovations in shale exploration and their impact on the energy industry[22:23]: The integration of oil and gas companies in the clean tech venture space[27:21]: Post-Chevron activities: advising startups and venture funds in the energy transition[31:54]: Advice for large companies working with startups and vice versa[35:00]: The critical role of speed in energy transition[40:11]: Geopolitical aspects of energy in different regions: China, India, Africa[42:11]: Future of natural gas, role of CCUS, and economic factors[47:10]: Generational shifts impacting the energy industry[50:35]: Barbara's career advice for women in energy and tech[53:04]: The necessity of affordable, reliable, and low-impact energy solutionsEpisode recorded on Dec 18, 2023 (Published on Jan 15, 2024) Get connected with MCJ: Jason Jacobs X / LinkedInCody Simms X / LinkedInYin Lu X / LinkedInMCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube*If you liked this episode, please consider giving us a review! You can also reach us via email at content@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Venture and early-stage investment in climate tech in 2023 was down 30% from 2022, according to market intelligence firm Sightline Climate. But is that a bad thing? In this episode, Shayle unpacks the findings of Sightline's 2023 Climate Tech Investment Trends report with Kim Zou, co-founder and CEO of the firm, which also produces the popular CTVC newsletter. (Shayle is an adviser to Sightline, and Kim was also previously a partner at Energy Impact Partners where Shayle works.) Kim argues that numbers suggest that the early-stage climate tech space is actually maturing, citing smaller deal sizes, steady deal count, and more repeat investors.  The data focus on venture and early-stage capital, rather than non-equity financing, which actually expanded in 2023, another sign that climate tech finance is becoming more sophisticated. Shayle and Kim also cover topics like: Why food and land use fell out of the top three verticals (and why heavy industry took its place). Major funding rounds, acquisitions, and bankruptcies in 2023. The role of generalist investors moving into climate tech. Zou's predictions for investment trends in 2024. Recommended Resources: Latitude: Exclusive: Non-equity funding for climate tech is taking off Latitude: Clean energy capital is getting pricier Catalyst: Financing first-of-a-kind climate assets Sign up for Latitude Media's Frontier Forum on January 31, featuring Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, who will break down the budding market for clean energy tax credits. We'll dissect current transactions and pricing, compare buyer and seller expectations, and look at where the market is headed in 2024. Sign up for Latitude Media's newsletter to get updates on the tech and business frontiers of the climate tech industry. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is brought to you by Atmos Financial. Atmos is revolutionizing finance by leveraging your deposits to exclusively fund decarbonization solutions, like residential solar and electrification. FDIC-insured with market-leading savings rates, cash-back checking, and zero fees. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

It's time to get specific. In the power industry “long-duration energy storage” could mean anything from 4 to 10 to 100 hours of energy. But Form Energy's Mateo Jaramillo argues that batteries in the ballpark of 100 hours hit a sweet spot, and that sweet spot deserves its own term: multi-day storage. In the 15 minute to 12 hour range, lithium-ion batteries shine, effectively displacing natural gas peaker plants that run less than 5% of the year. But they don't displace higher-capacity generation. Nor do they meet the needs of the grid during significant weather events, like heat domes, Nor'easters and freak Texas winter storms that can last upwards of 75 hours. And for that, Mateo says we need multi-day storage.  Form Energy's iron-air batteries made headlines back in 2021 for promising to deliver tens of hours of storage at a low cost per kilowatt hour. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Form Energy.) So what role could multi-day storage play on the grid? In this episode, Shayle talks to Mateo about real-world examples from Form's experience with utilities like Xcel and Georgia Power. They also cover topics like: The strengths and limitations of lithium-ion batteries on the grid today, and why Mateo thinks lithium-ion is here to stay. The competitive landscape for mulit-day storage, including iron-air, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, and transmission. What role multi-day storage plays for utilities beyond balancing renewables, such as meeting load growth and resilience goals. Plus: Shayle's idea for bitcoin mining on a barge. Recommended Resources: Canary Media: Form Energy closes its biggest deal yet for long-duration energy storage Carbon Copy: A groundbreaking long-duration battery nears industrial scale Wall Street Journal: Old West Virginia Steel Mill Becomes a Green-Energy Powerhouse If you want more news and analysis like this in your inbox, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter and Canary Media's newsletter. Catalyst is a co-production of Latitude Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is brought to you by BayWa r.e., a leading global renewable energy developer, service supplier, and distributor. With over 22GW in their project pipeline, BayWa r.e. is rethinking energy every day and at every level. Committed to being a solid partner for the long run, BayWa r.e. wants to work with you to help shape the future of energy. Learn more at bay.wa-re.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Sungrow. Now in more than 150 countries, Sungrow's solutions include inverters for utility-scale, commercial, and industrial solar, plus energy storage systems. Learn more at us.sungrowpower.com.

Alex Meek is Co-Founder and President and Chief Revenue Officer at Moxion Power. Key topics in this conversation include: The need for cleaner mobile power Electrification of industries such as construction, transportation, utilities, live events, and film production Overcoming the challenges of manufacturing a complex product Moxion's business model Links: Show notes: http://brandonbartneck.com/futureofmobility/alexmeek https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandermeek/ https://www.moxionpower.com/ Bio Alex Meek oversee Moxion's revenue generation, including expansion of its energy logistics locations, commercial partnerships, sales and marketing teams. An entrepreneur, operational leader, and investment professional, Meek has direct and relevant operational leadership experience as a former company Co-Founder and President at Newday Financial Technologies, a financial technology platform for impact investing. At Newday, Meek built a technology platform that allowed its clients to invest in major global issues, including climate change, ocean health, sustainable agriculture, and clean water. Meek successfully raised venture capital, led the design and execution on a multi-million-dollar technology engineering budget, built asset management frameworks for impact investing, and scaled the organization to several hundred million in assets. Prior to that, Meek was a Managing Director at Silver Creek Capital, a trading and asset management firm. He holds his MBA from Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and a BS in Economics from St. Lawrence University. About Moxion Power Moxion Power designs, engineers, and manufactures mobile BESS storage products and technologies, which enable and accelerate the electrification of industries such as construction, transportation, utilities, live events, film production, telecommunications and defense. Moxion's investors include the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, Sunbelt Rentals, Enterprise Holdings, Marubeni Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, and Tamarack Global. Future of Mobility: The Future of Mobility podcast is focused on the development and implementation of safe, sustainable, effective, and accessible mobility solutions, with a spotlight on the people and technology advancing these fields. linkedin.com/in/brandonbartneck/ brandonbartneck.com/futureofmobility/ Edison Manufacturing and Engineering: Edison manufacturing is your low volume contract manufacturing partner, focused on assembly of complex mobility and energy products that don't neatly fit within traditional high-volume production methods.

For those of us in the U.S., Europe's strong electric vehicle market might offer a glimpse into the future of EV charging. In 2022 the electrification haven of Norway had a whopping 166 plugin-in electric vehicles per 1,000 residents. Germany had 20 per 1,000 residents and Europe's largest fleet, based on reporting by Euronews. That's far ahead of the U.S., which averaged 8.6 in 2022, according to Argonne National Laboratory. So, it stands to reason that these countries must have insights into how to get all these vehicles charged. And Europe does indeed have a lot to teach the U.S. — but it turns out the lessons might actually go both ways.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Nick Woolley, CEO and co-founder of charging management company ev.energy, which operates in both the U.S. and Europe. (Shayle's firm Energy Impact Partners is also an investor in ev.energy.) They discuss topics like: EV adoption rates and charging patterns by region The fragmented European charging networks and Europe's unique roaming programs that facilitate interoperability The difference between customers who have off-street parking and their own charging infrastructure, and those who instead have to scavenge for charging The pros and cons of Europe's unbundled electricity markets, as compared with vertically integrated markets in the U.S.  Carrots, sticks, and compliance for managed charging, also known as V1G The challenges of implementing vehicle-to-grid charging, or V2G Recommended Resources: Catalyst: Can the V2X dream become reality? Catalyst: The journey to monetizing distributed energy resources If you want more news and analysis like this in your inbox, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter and Canary Media's newsletter. Catalyst is a co-production of Latitude Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is brought to you by BayWa r.e., a leading global renewable energy developer, service supplier, and distributor. With over 22GW in their project pipeline, BayWa r.e. is rethinking energy every day and at every level. Committed to being a solid partner for the long run, BayWa r.e. wants to work with you to help shape the future of energy. Learn more at bay.wa-re.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Sungrow. Now in more than 150 countries, Sungrow's solutions include inverters for utility-scale, commercial, and industrial solar, plus energy storage systems. Learn more at us.sungrowpower.com.

If you listen to Volts, you probably also listen to — or at the very least, should also be listening to — Catalyst, the Canary Media podcast hosted by veteran cleantech investor Shayle Kann. Like Volts, it features fairly nerdy deep-dive interviews, though they are mercifully shorter, and they're more focused on cleantech, less likely to drift into politics and activism. (Shayle is a partner at Energy Impact Partners, where he assesses and funds cleantech companies for a living, so unlike me he brings some expertise to the table!)Anyway, our pods have been mutual admirers for a while now and we thought it would be fun to do something together. So the following episode features Shayle and I discussing a few technologies and trends we think are overhyped, and a few we think are underhyped. We get into electric stoves, interest rates, thermal batteries, and much more. It was just as fun and enlightening as I expected — especially where we disagreed — so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe

We kicked off New York Climate Week with a live podcast recording with Kim Zou and Sophie Purdom, co-founders of CTVC. CTVC's data-driven insights have been featured in channels including NYTimes, Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, and TechCrunch.Kim serves as the CEO of CTVC. She was previously a climate tech investor at Energy Impact Partners. Prior to joining EIP, Kim was part of JPMorgan's Tech M&A investment banking team and graduated from Johns Hopkins University.In addition to her work with CTVC, Sophie Purdom invests in and supports early-stage climate tech founders and their companies via her venture capital fund Planeteer Capital. Prior, Sophie launched an ESG fund at a major endowment, learned to make pretty slides at Bain & Co., published a book on sustainable investing, and helped found an agricultural technology company that makes carbon-negative ammonia fertilizer.Special shout-out to everyone who came out to the live recording, and to our hosts at P&T Knitwear for lending their beautiful space in the Lower East Side. Enjoy the show! In this episode, we cover: [2:33] How Kim and Sophie met and the early days of CTVC[6:37] Kim's background [10:14] The pair's early venture experience[13:22] Sophie's background[17:05] The origins of Planeteer Capital [20:18] CTVC's evolution into a market intelligence company [25:42] CTVC's Climate Tech Capital Stack: https://www.ctvc.co/the-sophisticating-climate-capital-stack/[28:51] Early stage dry powder[31:36] Project finance and infrastructure financing [36:56] Public funding and philanthropy [40:06] Trends in philanthropic catalytic capital [43:45] Corporate strategics[46:34] The role of banks[50:08] Insurance [51:18] Sophie and Kim's predictions for the market in the near termGet connected: Kim Zou X / LinkedIn Sophie Purdom X / LinkedInCody Simms X / LinkedInMCJ Podcast / Collective / Instagram*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Episode recorded on September 18, 2023 (Published on September 25, 2023)

Steven Skancke, Chief Economic Advisor at Keel Point and Bloomberg Economics Chief US Economist Anna Wong look ahead to Wednesday's FOMC rate decision and the Fed's summary of economic projections. Hans Kobler, Founder and Managing Partner of Energy Impact Partners, discusses transforming the global economy towards a sustainable future. Johannes Jütting, Executive Head of the Partnership in Statistics for Development at PARIS21, talks about data related to climate, gender equality, evidence-based policy-making. And we Drive to the Close with Charles Tan, Co-CIO of Global Fixed Income at American Century Investments. Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last time we talked to Dr. Michael Webber, we dug into the nexus between water and energy. This episode we're diving into food. The connections are myriad. Food itself is just a means of energy storage, and a particularly good one at that. While photosynthesis is remarkably inefficient—averaging only 0.3% globally, compared to 90% or more in an electric motor—it stores energy for weeks to years. In the U.S. we use around 12% of our energy to produce food, in the form of inputs like diesel, fertilizer, and electricity. Meanwhile, the food system itself provides fuel to the rest of the energy system, through ethanol and other forms of bioenergy. So how do all these things fit together?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Webber, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas–Austin, and chief technology officer at Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner. They cover topics like: The Green revolution, which added more energy to food production, improving yields while reducing the amount of people required The categories of energy consumption, such as fertilizers, on-site fuel, transportation, the cold chain and cooking Food waste, which in the U.S. reaches about 30 - 50% of edible food Why buying local is not necessarily good for the environment Why we should not use food for fuel, unless it's waste by-products from food production How climate change affects the food system, for example by reducing the efficiency of photosynthesis and requiring more refrigeration to reduce spoilage The viability of indoor agriculture Recommended Resources: Climavores: Bursting the ‘eat local' bubble Catalyst: The 3 pathways to alternative proteins Catalyst: From biowaste to ​‘biogold' Catalyst: How well does soil actually store carbon? Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Are you looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape the business of energy? Come network with utilities, top energy firms, startups, and AI experts at Transition-AI: New York on October 19. Our listeners get a 10% discount with the code pspods10. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by RE+. RE+ is more than just the largest clean energy event, it's a catalyst for industry innovation designed to supercharge business growth in the clean energy economy. Learn more: re-plus.com.

This episode is part of our EEI 2023 highlights series. In this episode, you will hear conversations about topics including Inflation Reduction Act customer tax incentives and rebates, the future of natural gas, new approaches to financing transmission, and keeping the clean energy transition equitable and affordable. The speakers are: Dan Hahn, Partner at Guidehouse, Dr. Michael Webber, Chief Technology Officer at Energy Impact Partners and Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources, Author, and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas, Duke Austin, president and CEO of Quanta, and Mary Sprayregen, Global Head, Regulatory Affairs and Market Development at Oracle/Opower. You can also visit EEI's website to read EEI 2023 recap newsletters, see photos from our annual thought leadership forum, and watch videos of the keynotes.

Electrification should be a field day for utilities. As we electrify the economy, adding gigafactories, charging stations, and green hydrogen hubs to the grid, the demand for power is growing for the first time in decades. For savvy utilities, there's a lot of money to be made. But only if they can keep up.  Utilities face massive challenges to deliver the power needed for electrification – years-long interconnection queues, a shortage of transformers, an uncertain regulatory environment—the list goes on. It's the electrification gauntlet.  Can utilities make it through?  In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners.  They cover topics like: Why power demand flatlined over the past twenty years—and what's changing now Big industrial loads like data centers that face delays because utilities aren't able to deliver enough power  The differences between big industrial load growth, like green hydrogen hubs, and distributed load growth, like heat pumps. The current EPA's proposed power plant regulations, which might require carbon capture and storage The shortage of electrical transformers  Why microgrids might become even more valuable as utilities struggle to deliver power Recommended Resources: Reuters: Global power demand growth to rebound in 2024 after slowdown, IEA says Utility Dive: Full industrial electrification could more than double US power demand. Here's how renewables can meet it. Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Are you looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape the business of energy? Come network with utilities, top energy firms, startups, and AI experts at Transition-AI: New York on October 19. Our listeners get a 10% discount with the code pspods10. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by RE+. RE+ is more than just the largest clean energy event, it's a catalyst for industry innovation designed to supercharge business growth in the clean energy economy. Learn more: re-plus.com.

This week on Cleaning Up, Michael welcomes Kim Zou, CEO and co-founder of CTVC (Climate Tech VC). Launched in 2020, CTVC is a leading climate innovation resource and newsletter with 50,000 weekly readers, providing data-driven insights and analysis into the latest deals and developments in climate tech. CTVC launched their H1 2023 climate funding update at the end of June, reporting a 40% drop in venture funding. Michael wanted to hear from Zoe whether this was a moment of crisis or correction, and to compare notes on building a market intelligence platform, having jumped through so many of the same hoops building New Energy Finance. Make sure you like, subscribe, and share Cleaning Up. We're growing fast on LinkedIn, and we'd love for you tell your professional network about us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cleaning-up-with-michael-liebreich/ You can find everything you need to keep up with Cleaning Up here: https://linktr.ee/mlcleaningup  Links and Related EpisodesAll of the episodes mentioned by Michael at the end of the show can be found in our “Women Leaders of the Net-Zero Transition” playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe8ZTD7dMaaBJwVk9CfU-CZLeX42M7flC You can subscribe to CTVC here: https://www.ctvc.co/ Read CTVC's H1 2023 climate tech funding update: https://www.ctvc.co/climate-tech-h1-2023-venture-funding/#:~:text=Highlights,35%25%20from%20H2'22. CTVC's Climate Capital Stack is here: https://www.ctvc.co/the-climate-capital-stack/ In May CTCV announced their new climate intelligence platform: https://www.ctvc.co/ctvc-platform-fundraise/ Kim and co-founder Sophie Purdom spoke to Techonomy in September 2022: https://techonomy.com/video/the-state-of-climate-tech-venture-capital/  Guest Bio Kim has spent the last three years building Climate Tech VC, a leading source on climate and innovation with 50,000 weekly readers among climate investors, operators and market leaders. CTVC generates data-driven insights on the climate tech market which have been featured in channels including Bloomberg, Reuters, Financial Times, and TechCrunch. From 2020-2022, Kim was an Investor at Energy Impact Partners, a $2.5B AUM venture capital firm, and from 2018 – 2020, an Investment Banking Analyst at JP Morgan. From 2017 – 2019, Kim was Managing Partner at A-Level Capital. Kim holds a bachelor's degree from John Hopkins University in Economics, Environmental Science and Applied Mathematics.

In this week's Espresso, we cover investment updates from VIOO, SCAPE, Fivvy, Ceibo, Asaas, and Motrix. Plus, we talk about the new funds launched by QED Investors and Bicycle Capital.OUTLINE OF THIS EPISODE:[00:28] – Bicycle Capital announced the launch of a $500M fund.[00:42] – VIOO raised a $1M Seed round.[00:58] – SCAPE raised $1.3M in an over-subscribed round.[01:12] – Fivvy raised a $4M round from Global Ventures.[01:23] – QED Investors raised nearly $1B for two new funds.[01:37] – Ceibo announced a $30M Series B funding.[01:51] – Asaas secured an additional $20.9M in funding.[02:08] – Motrix received a contribution of $2.9M.[02:22] – Crossing Borders: Luis Rubén Chávez: Helping Mexicans build their financial healthRESOURCES & PEOPLE MENTIONED:Startups: VIOO, SCAPE, Fivvy, Ceibo, Asaas, and MotrixVCs and Investors: Claure Group, Mubadala Investment Company, Bicycle Capital, Wollef, Kima Ventures, 500 LATAM, Colectivo Jaguara, Global Ventures, QED Investors, Energy Impact Partners, and Grupo ÁgathosPeople: Luis Rubén Chávez

From investing in startups and appearing on TV shows to writing books and teaching the next generation of entrepreneurs, Michael Webber, the CTO of Energy Impact Partners and the Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources at the University of Texas at Austin, brings an array of experiences and insights to the energy transition. On today's episode, he joins BNEF Chief Editor Ben Vickers to discuss the art of entrepreneurship, what Energy Impact Partners look for when investing in startups, and how his time working with ENGIE helped him change his mind about ‘green' hydrogen. Complimentary BNEF research on the trends driving the transition to a lower-carbon economy can be found at BNEF on the Bloomberg Terminal, on bnef.com or on the BNEF mobile app. To find out about BNEF's Summits and to listen to more interviews, go to about.bnef.com/summit/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stuart Lombard has built and sold several companies, as well as having been a VC on the other side of the table. His latest venture, ecoBee, has acquired funding from top-tier investors like Energy Impact Partners, Thomvest, Relay Ventures and Amazon's Alexa Fund.

Are you a utility or climatetech startup looking to understand how artificial intelligence will shape your company? Come to our one-day event, Transition-AI: Boston, on June 15. Our listeners get a 20% discount with the code PSPODS20. On the Catalyst with Shayle Kann podcast this week: The good news: the U.S. has about 47 days' worth of energy stored up for later use. The bad news? Virtually all of it is in the form of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. By comparison, if you add up all the energy stored in batteries, pumped hydropower and other zero-carbon storage, it adds up to just a few seconds' worth. This small scale of low-carbon energy storage is a big problem. We're building out intermittent renewables fast, and we need enough energy storage to back up wind when turbines slow down and solar when the sun isn't shining.  But there are technologies that could get us there. In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, who is a partner and head of research at Energy Impact Partners. Andy recently wrote a piece called Four ways to store sunlight, which compares lithium-ion batteries, heat storage, ion-air batteries, and hydrogen. Andy and Shayle cover topics like: The storage trifecta: short duration, diurnal, and multi-day seasonal Andy's guess at how low the price of lithium-ion batteries could go Why we would use heat storage and hydrogen, despite their low round-trip efficiencies Why molten-salt heat storage didn't take off High hopes for iron-air batteries' low costs Blending hydrogen into gas turbines How all these technologies are competing against carbon capture and storage (CCS) Recommended Resources: Andy Lubershane: Four ways to store sunlight Form Energy: Enabling a True 24/7 Carbon-Free Resource Portfolio for Great River Energy with Multi-Day Storage Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Support for Catalyst comes from Climate Positive, a podcast by HASI, that features candid conversations with the leaders, innovators, and changemakers who are at the forefront of the transition to a sustainable economy. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrids, the distributed energy company dedicated to transforming the way modern energy infrastructure is designed, constructed, and financed. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes it easy. Learn more: scalemicrogrids.com.

The excitement around ChatGPT and other large language models has put AI firmly in the spotlight in recent months. Public perception is that we're entering a new age of AI; it is a brand-new technology that promises to change our lives. In the world of energy, though, AI is not a new concept. GE was developing its AI capabilities more than a decade ago. BP invested in an AI company in 2017 to support oil exploration and production. And so far, although you can see the impact of AI in many parts of the world of energy, it has not exactly transformed the fundamentals of the industry. So when people get excited about AI in energy today, and expecting revolutionary change, are they just buying into some well-orchestrated hype?Amy Myers-Jaffe is Director of the Energy, Climate Justice and Sustainability Lab at New York University. She joins Ed and explains the real-world benefits of automation and AI for electricity networks. Automating home energy use and business operations in conjunction with power supplies could have huge implications for energy. The gang is also joined this week by Michael Webber. Michael is the Josey Centennial Professor in Energy Resources, in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas. He's also CTO of Energy Impact Partners, a cleantech venture fund.Together, the team examine whether AI will transform energy and our lives in the same way the internet did. And they assess the question: is AI the tool that will ultimately open the door to a net zero energy system? Subscribe to the show so you don't miss an episode and follow us on Twitter, we're @theenergygang Wood Mackenzie's Solar & Energy Storage Summit is back, taking place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on June 21 and 22. Join expert solar and storage analysts for discussions with leading grid-scale utilities, solar and energy storage developers and federal policy makers.  How is the IRA catapulting the development of solar andstorage in North America? How can we continue to build a productive environmentfor solar and energy storage as we move forward with the energy transition?What is required to nurture the development of a thriving localized storagecomponent supply chain?  Expect two days of panel discussions, presentations andworkshops, as we explore the opportunities for solar and storage in the comingdecades.  If you are interested in sponsoring or attending find outmore on woodmac.com/events/solar-energy-storage-summit See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Startup Series is Jack Morrison, Co-founder and CEO at Scythe. Scythe recently announced a $42M Series B round of financing led by Energy Impact Partners to grow and scale their product line of autonomous electric commercial lawnmowers. When discussing the need to electrify everything, we tend to focus on electric vehicles and home efficiency. But over the next 5-10 years most of us will be surprised by just how many things in our daily lives will move from loud, smelly, gasoline-powered engines to quiet, odorless electric motors. This podcast has featured electric solutions for pleasure craft boating, motorcycles, passenger buses, semi trucks, and even cargo shipping. And in most cases, the business models of the electric versions of these things are innovative in some way or another too.The Scythe team is pioneering a new usage-based model for their mowers and the company believes it offers a more sustainable way for landscaping companies to manage their cashflows and help their employees get the job done. In this episode, we cover: [2:00] Jack's background in programming and robots [4:00] His transition from 3D scanning to landscaping [6:48] Climate impact of the landscaping business and Scythe's role in helping curb the emissions footprint[11:03] Scythe's M.52 mower product [13:17] Why Scythe chose an electric and autonomous solution [18:16] The safety side of the company's tech[22:36] Impacts on landscapers' day to day [27:45] Technology barriers for incumbent mowing companies [30:18] Scythe's early traction, progress to date, and market shareGet connected: Cody Simms Twitter / LinkedInJack Morrison / ScytheMCJ Podcast / Collective*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Episode recorded on March 7, 2023.

A full quarter of global energy use goes toward heat that powers industrial processes. To provide clean industrial heat but avoid the variability often associated with renewable energy, a company called Rondo makes a thermal battery, storing renewable-energy heat in bricks. In this episode, Rondo CEO John O'Donnell talks about this breakthrough technology and the opportunities that thermal storage promises to open.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsElectricity gets the bulk of the attention in clean-energy discourse (this newsletter is, after all, called Volts) but half of global final energy consumption comes in the form not of electricity, but of heat. When it comes to reaching net zero emissions, heat is half the problem.Roughly half of heat is used for space and water heating, which I have covered on other pods. The other half — a quarter of all energy humans use — is found in high-temperature industrial processes, everything from manufacturing dog food to making steel or cement. The vast bulk of industrial heat today is provided by fossil fuels, usually natural gas or specialized forms of coal. Conventional wisdom has had it that these sectors are “difficult to decarbonize” because alternatives are either more expensive or nowhere to be found. Indeed, when I covered an exhaustive report on industrial heat back in 2019, the conclusion was that the cheapest decarbonization option was probably CCS, capturing carbon post-combustion and burying it.A lot has changed in the last few years. Most notably, renewable energy has gotten extremely cheap, which makes it an attractive source of heat. However, it is variable, while industrial processes cannot afford to start and stop. Enter the thermal battery, a way to store clean electricity as heat until it is needed.A new class of battery — “rocks in a box” — stores renewable energy as heat in a variety of different materials from sand to graphite, delivering a steady supply to various end uses. One of the more promising companies in this area is Rondo, which makes a battery that stores heat in bricks.I talked with Rondo CEO John O'Donnell about the importance of heat in the clean-energy discussion, the technological changes that have made thermal storage viable, and the enormous future opportunities for clean heat and a renewables-based grid to grow together.All right, John O'Donnell of Rondo. Welcome to Volts. Thank you for coming.John O'DonnellThank you. It's a great pleasure.David RobertsI am so excited to talk to you. I've been geeking out about thermal storage for over a year now, just wanting to do something on it, and there's so much there. And I find that unlike a lot of electricity topics which I cover, there's just not a lot of baseline familiarity out there among, let's say, normal people. So there's a ton to cover from the ground up. So I want to start at the highest possible level, which is to say, let's just talk about heat. Like in the clean energy world, electrical power gets a lot of attention, a lot of discussion, a lot of technological development.Everybody's got their favorites, everybody knows what's going on. But then there's also heat, which is the sort of weirdly ignored not so much anymore, but up till pretty recently ignored. So maybe just start with an explanation of why heat is important if you care about clean energy, why you should care about heat?John O'DonnellThank you. Sure. That's a great question. And that context you just provided is, of course, dead on. There's a really simple answer. Heat. Industrial heat is 26% of total world final energy consumption. Whether you are making baby food, or fuel, or cement, or steel, the manufacturing processes vastly predominantly use energy in the form of heat, not electricity. Globally, it's three quarters of all the energy used by industry is in the form of heat. Again, whether you're pasteurizing milk or melting steel. And the DOE has just created a new office focused on this topic. We're thrilled about it.Their assessment is that industrial heat is 11%, I think, of all total US CO2 I'm in California. Here in California, we burn more natural gas for industrial process heat than we do for electric power generation. And to a first approximation, as you just mentioned, no one knows that.David RobertsRight. So heat is a huge portion of final energy consumption. It's a huge portion of global CO2 emissions. So maybe give a sense of like, what percentage of total heat final consumption is industry, like how's the total heat-pie divided up.John O'DonnellSo when I said 26% of world — that's industrial heat, right. So that's not buildings, that's not other heating sources.David RobertsRight. Heat is a bigger category than that.John O'DonnellI mean, if you take actually heat for buildings and heat for industry, together they're like 60% of all the natural gas used in Europe. But within industrial heat, people sort it out by a couple of different things. One of them is the temperature. There's a lot of heat in cooking processes. That's around 150°C in the form of steam all the way up to the highest temperature heat in making cement, that's around 1800°C. About 95% of total heat is used in processes that need it below 1500°C, about maybe half to two thirds of industrial heat is below about 400°C.There's a fairly steep curve. About half of all industrial heat, something like that, is delivered as steam.David RobertsRight. Steam is the lower end of the temperature spectrum. I recall looking at these charts of sort of what industries use, what levels of heat. Up at the super high heat, you have pretty singular industries, like steel's up there and concrete's up there. But down in the lower heat registers, where you're using just steam, there's a bunch of little industries clustered up there. Most of the industries are using that.John O'DonnellThat's right. All of these have been things that people say are hard to decarbonize because across many of these industries, they're making commodities, whether it's steel or tomato paste that are relatively low margin and for which the cost of heat is a very significant portion of the total cost of production. So this is a sector where all these processes use heat in somewhat different ways. The cost of that energy is really critical to the competitiveness of that industry and what commodities cost consumers. And there have not been great solutions until recently that could provide decarbonized heat at the same or lower cost.David RobertsSo the situation is there's a huge chunk of our energy that goes toward heat, a huge chunk of that goes toward industrial heat. And there's been comparatively little work on finding zero carbon versions of that heat. That's the problem we discussed the last time we talked, probably three or four, five years ago. Everything pre-pandemic is a haze. But I think it was around five years ago I covered this big comprehensive report on industrial heat options, like, what can we do about industrial heat? And it went through the options, and basically the conclusion was that continuing to do it with fossil fuels and just capturing the emissions post combustion was the cheapest option for a lot of these heat uses.And I dutifully reported that. But I didn't like it. I didn't like the idea that that's the best we can do is create these Rube Goldberg machines where we're digging up carbon, burning it, capturing the carbon, burying the carbon again, et cetera. I was like, surely that's not the best we could do. But things have changed a lot, since then. So maybe just run through what are the low carbon heat alternatives and which ones have emerged recently, and what has changed that has helped them emerge?John O'DonnellYeah. Thank you. You said for a long time there hasn't been much work on this. I would say partly there hasn't been so much success on it. I've been working on for 15 years.David RobertsNo offense, John.John O'DonnellAnd in two previous solar companies we wound — who are a lot of the team here at Rondo worked with me there — we wound up delivering more than half of all the solar industrial heat that's running worldwide right now. But to say that's a drop in the bucket is oversizing a drop you asked exactly the right question. What are the options? Because the world has really changed.There has always been the option of burning biomass, which is more or less sustainable, but very high cost, high air pollution, and very, very limited availability. Other kinds of biofuels, like renewable natural gas, if we take it to a giant scale, it might power as much as 1% of our industrial heat. And it's easy to laugh about, but it's true. The thing that has profoundly changed is what the wind and solar PV industries have accomplished over the last 15 years. The 95% reduction in cost means that intermittent electricity is becoming — has become — the cheapest form of energy that humans have ever known.And it's now cheaper than burning stuff as a source of heat, but it's intermittent. So how do we take that intermittent electricity and use it to deliver the continuous heat? I mean, you turn on a smelter or a factory or even a tomato paste plant, you run it for months or a year on end, it has to have continuous heat or it will be damaged.David RobertsIt's worth just pausing to emphasize this. The vast majority of industrial processes are continuous. They cannot run intermittently. They cannot stop and start with the sun and the wind. It just would be wildly uneconomic.John O'DonnellThat's a beautiful and concise way of saying it. Like there are processes where if they get a half second interruption in their energy supply, it takes a week to restart the process. Reliability is a very big deal. So what are the tools we have for that? Intermittent electricity, which is becoming plentiful. And in places right now, you can have essentially unlimited amounts briefly every day at prices far below fuel prices. We have hydrogen, electrolytic hydrogen, make hydrogen, compress it, store it, and then combust it. That works. Although electrolyzers are today expensive, they're coming down in cost.But the laws of physics bite you in that you get about one unit of heat for every two units of electricity because of the chemical steps involved.David RobertsRight. All the conversions.John O'DonnellYes.David RobertsBut can you just dump hydrogen into existing boilers and kilns? Like, is existing equipment hydrogen ready, as they say?John O'DonnellNot exactly. It's hydrogen ready for a few percentage of hydrogen. But when you look at a boiler, 95% of its lifetime cost is the fuel, not the boiler. So upgrading boilers to run that other fuel, that's something that you would do if the economics of that fuel were sensible.David RobertsGot it.John O'DonnellRight? Now at taxpayer expense. We're creating a period where hydrogen, electrolytic hydrogen is going to get down to the same cost as fossil fuel in the US with tax credits. But again, intermittent electricity by itself today is cheaper than fossil fuel. Doesn't need tax credits to get it to that point. And now there is this emerging class of electric thermal energy storage systems that don't do chemistry. They just convert electricity to heat directly and then store the heat. Because heat storage, another thing you could do I skipped over is you could, of course, store electricity in a battery.Right.Which would be the most expensive thing.But if you have a coffee thermos on your desk, it's storing energy as it happens. The energy stored in your coffee thermos is more energy than the energy stored in your laptop battery, and it's a bit cheaper than your laptop battery. Storing heat is cheap right now in the thermos. What do you have? You have hot water, which stores a lot of energy per degree, and an insulation thing around it, depending on how good the insulation is, that'll tell you how long that thing will store energy. All those things have been around for a long time, and suddenly, okay, how are we going to heat these things electrically?How are we going to use simple technology? Because most people who are working on electric thermal storage are doing simple things. There are some exotic things using conductive materials, liquid metal things, but there are simple things that people are doing also.David RobertsYou're hitting directly on something. That is why I love this area so much, why it sort of kind of caught my imagination so much. Like, you really have a situation here where electricity was just more expensive than fossil fuels for these purposes up until like five minutes ago.John O'DonnellExactly.David RobertsIn terms of looking for opportunities for just storing. Now that electricity is cheap, we're looking for ways to store it and use it as heat in a lot of ways for the first time. And what that means is there's like, very simple low hanging fruit all over the place. The way I think about it is, like, my generation maybe like younger people than me, when we think of technology or advanced technology, we generally think digital, and that generally means opaque. Like, we don't know what's going on in there. Even cars these days. Like, so little of it is mechanical anymore and so much of it is digital and computerized.It just seems opaque to us. And these technologies of storing electricity as heat are so delightfully simple. Like, you're literally just heating up a rock and that's, like, you might say that heating up a rock is literally the oldest energy transfer mechanism that humans have available to them. It's probably the very first way we moved energy ever, literally. So it's just fun to me in that it's almost like a childlike sense of discovery to it. Anyway, that's just my that's completely off topic, but ...John O'DonnellOne of the electric thermal energy storage technologies actually uses rock. And on the outside of the pilot it says, welcome to the new Stone Age. And there's a mastodon as the mascot. So, yes, it's a well understood thing.David RobertsSo just to sort of summarize where we've been so far, you need all this heat. Up until very recently, it was overwhelmingly cheaper to do it by combusting fossil fuels. A lot of the alternatives to fossil fuels are more expensive than fossil fuels. But now recently, along comes renewable wind and solar electricity, which are cheaper than anything. So now the challenge is, well, how do you get the heat from the wind and solar electricity? As you say, the applications are running around the clock. Wind and solar come and go. So in between the wind and solar and the applications, you need something that's going to store that wind and solar that can release it in a steady flow.John O'DonnellExactly.David RobertsSo that's the new thermal storage technologies that are emerging now are sitting right in that space, including Rondo. So if you're talking about something sitting in that space, what do you need out of it? What are the sort of metrics by which you judge the performance of that thing that's sitting in between the renewables and the application?John O'DonnellGreat question. So obviously you need safety, efficiency, cost, temperature at which the heat can be delivered.Right.Some other things as well. One of them is the faster that you can charge the system and deliver energy continuously. If you can charge it, if it takes you typical batteries, they charge and discharge at the same rate. But here we'd like to charge perhaps during the solar day in six or 8 hours and deliver for 24 hours continuous. If you could charge in about 4 hours, we find that's even more valuable. The periods of curtailment and the periods of zero and negative electricity prices in electricity grids are short.So the ideal thermal storage can charge very rapidly. You can control its charging like other batteries, it could participate in providing grid services and it can run continuously, shut it down once a year for inspection and when the factory that it's connected to is shut down and just sit there and require low O and M, operating and maintenance, costs.David RobertsYeah, and I presume low losses too.John O'DonnellYeah, that's right.David RobertsBut I want to pause and just emphasize the first point you made just so people get it. We have these wind and solar all come online at the same time because they're all using the same wind and sun. So what you have are these periods of oversupply. I think people are familiar with this. You get oversupply more than the grid can use and today that just goes to waste. It's curtailed. That energy is not used. And so what you're doing is proposing to come along and use it. But if that's your economic sweet spot, those couple of hours of curtailed energy, you need your battery to charge as much as possible during those couple of hours.In other words, charge really quickly because the amount of energy available in those curtailed hours, especially in coming years, is going to be potentially huge. Right. So you need to stuff a lot of energy in your heat battery really quickly.John O'DonnellThat's right. Now the early deployments of heat batteries will use what is curtailed today. One of the things that we see that's uniquely pretty cool about this class of electric thermal storage is the total amount of energy that industrial heat needs is really large for scale. I think we had a 52 gigawatt system peak in California not long ago. We've got about 20 gigawatts of PV in the state. Just repowering the boilers and furnaces that we have right now in California needs 100 gigawatts of new generation to replace those fuel BTUs, about 40 of those gigawatts can actually be built without any connection to an electricity grid.One of the things that's great about ETES powering industry is we're headed for a world where industrial electrification is not creating more problems for the grid, but we'll get there. But this matter of fast charging rate means that new generation projects that are serving the grid, the best ones, the cheapest ones, will be built selling part of their power to thermal storage. Like during the peak and curtailed hours and then delivering those broader shoulder renewable power to the electricity grid. And we're seeing again and again that that's a formula for low energy prices for the industrial and for lower prices to the grid.There's an interesting synergy.David RobertsYeah, we're going to get into that synergy in just a second, but I want to focus on how we're evaluating the heat battery. So we want it to absorb a bunch of energy quickly.John O'DonnellFast, charge. Yeah.David RobertsAnd then we want it to hold that energy with very little losses. And this is the other fact about thermal storage that blew my mind that I do not think is widely appreciated, which is the incredibly low losses here. People are accustomed to, I think if you want to store energy in hydrogen, you're losing about 50% of your energy through all the convergence. Like a 50% efficiency ish yes, batteries, lithium-ion, depending, you're getting up to don't know what the standard average is, but just heating up a rock, you get 90% to 95% of that heat back out of that rock.That is wild to me.John O'DonnellThat's right. Yeah. The least efficient of the thermal energy storage systems are around 90%. We happen to be 98%.David RobertsThat's just crazy. So the heat just sits there in the rock and doesn't go anywhere?John O'DonnellWell, fill up your thermos with hot coffee, take the thermos and wrap it in a couple of blankets, open it up, three days later the coffee is still hot. It's not like a chemical system where there's self discharge or something. The only place energy can go is either lost to the environment through insulation or delivered to the target. So it's a lot easier than it sounds. A lot of people think, "Oh, this efficiency couldn't be possibly the case." It really is almost embarrassingly simple.David RobertsAnd now my question though is when we say 95-98%, what are the time horizons of that? Like if I fully charge your thermal battery and we're going to get into the guts of your thermal battery here in a second, but if I fully charge a Rondo battery and then just don't do anything to it, how long would it take for all that heat to be lost? Like what is the time horizons we're discussing here?John O'DonnellAgain, the use case that we're considering that we're targeting, is it's discharging continuously?David RobertsRight. It doesn't need to hold it that long. Theoretically, I'm wondering.John O'DonnellTheoretically that's right, because the one place where you are holding energy, we've got a food factory that runs shift work. They operate one shift five days a week. So yeah, you're storing some energy and you got more energy on Monday than you did on Friday afternoon. The short answer is we lose about 2%, 2.5% per day. So if you were holding energy multiple days, there would be self discharge. But that's because we were designing for a particular use case. Again, you could decide the rate at which your thermos loses heat by if you wrap it in a blanket ... you could make it store energy for months on end.Then the question is, is that valuable? If you really want to store energy for months on end? If you want to move energy from July to January, chemical storage is a great thing because it doesn't have self discharge.David RobertsRight.John O'DonnellIf you are in a place where you can have a salt cavern and you can make hydrogen in July and pull out in January, okay, that's great.David RobertsRight? Because the hydrogen you pull out in January contains the exact same amount of energy ...John O'DonnellExactly.David Roberts... as you put in the hydrogen.John O'DonnellAs long as it didn't leak out. But yes.David RobertsSo in the hours today's, maybe multiple days, rarely a week time horizon that you're working in, you're getting 98% efficiency. 98% of the energy that goes in comes back out to the application.John O'DonnellYes. In that use case. That's right.David RobertsI think now that we're focused in here on the heat battery, let's just discuss what the Rondo heat battery is, and maybe while you're telling us, tell us what some of the other options in this space are. I know people are heating up. You're heating up bricks. Some people are heating up giant chunks of graphite. I think sand is on the table. I don't even know what all the options are. But what are people trying in that space?John O'DonnellThe one technology that's been at scale for quite a while, that's been used by the solar industry since the 1980s is using nitrate salts, which melt at around 250 degrees. Salts? That's right. They're stable up to about 600°C. And so you can have a big tank of cold salt, which is something like 600 degrees Fahrenheit. It looks like a transparent liquid, but stay away from it. And a tank of hot salt, and you heat by pumping from one to the other and pull the heat out going the other way. I built my first molten salt test facility back in 2008 at a national lab.David RobertsI remember there was a hype cycle around molten salts that has kind of faded. Why has it faded? Like, why are rocks preferable?John O'DonnellThe more you know about it, the less you like it. It's one thing to use it in a solar power station where there's nothing in there for a mile away except for the turbine. It's quite another thing for an energy storage facility to be put inside a factory where people are working. When I mentioned safety first, you don't want a system that can catch fire or spill a superheated liquid that would burn everybody or release toxic gases. I'm not aware of any molten salt projects that haven't sent at least one person to the hospital. So there's the molten salt systems.And again, they work. They're proven but they have proven challenges.David RobertsThey just require a lot of engineering to contain.John O'DonnellWell, and that's another matter that you've talked about previously, which technologies get cheap, right? Molten salt systems are a lot like they have the nuclear reactor characteristic that everyone is bespoke, those tanks at that site with that engineering and there has not been much learning capable to drive cost out. The modular approach, the factory manufactured approach, eludes that technology. Now there are a lot of people exploring how do we do modular factory manage. And one of the things that you first do if you want to store heat is, okay, what's it cheap to store heat in?As you mentioned stone, crushed rock, various kinds of rocks in a box or sand in a cylinder where you build an industrial strength hairdryer. You blow superheated air through the rock or the sand bed. And then when you want heat, you push cool air the other way through the sand or the rock bed. That works. There are people taking it to scale. It has temperature and cost challenges. What you find in every one of these cases, the rock is cheap, but the box costs a lot.David RobertsAnd the fans, I assume like the fans and that kind of engineering adds to the ...John O'DonnellThat's right. And remember now that your fan has to blow at your peak charging rate. And there's an example of a technology that leads you to it's more expensive to charge fast. But the big problem with those unstructured materials is when they heat up, they expand and you have to have a container strong enough and then when they cool, they shrink and settle and then the next day they expand again and they slowly turn into dust over at a rate. So the material looks really cheap, but the system turns out to be not so cheap.Right then you mentioned there are a lot of interesting science experiments with new materials that have never been used this way before. When we started Rondo, we did a really careful look at everything that's out there. There are people using liquid silicon. It melts at 14° Celsius stores a lot of heat. Just like ice melting in a glass absorbs a lot of heat melting and releasing silicon. Freezing silicon is a really good thing for high temperature heat. But what do you make the glass that's holding that silicon-ice? How do you keep it like there are a lot of challenges that companies have been working on for years and it's probably going to take another decade before that technology is at the point that an ordinary project finance guy will say, yes, that's as low risk as PV. I'll invest in that at the same finance rate. And that time to bank ability is one of the biggest issues. If you want a technology to go big fast, everybody's got to agree it's boring and low risk and that's a challenge with new materials. Graphite is another material that's interesting. It has higher heat capacity than rock or brick, especially when it gets hot, but it catches fire at 560°C. So you want to store energy at 1500° or 2000°.You've got to keep it in some atmosphere so that it can't catch fire for 30 years and it's conductive electrically, which could be great. But anyway, there are interesting engineering challenges and there are at least four companies working on that. One of them is also looking at using that graphite not for electricity to heat, but electricity to heat to electricity. Using PV cells to capture the light from the graphite.David RobertsIs that Indora?John O'DonnellAntora.David RobertsAntora. Yeah, I talked to them, too. And in terms of like science-fiction geeky fun, that one is just a great one. They heat the graphite up, it gets so hot that the energy comes back out as light.John O'DonnellLight.David RobertsSo they have it covered in shutters that they can open incrementally. And the light can either shine on tubes full of fluid if you want heat, or these special PV modules that they built especially for it. If you want electricity, like the whole conceptually, that's very satisfying.John O'DonnellIt's super cool. My first job was infusion power, where you have a reactor that wants 100 million degree plasma right next to a superconducting magnet that has to be five degrees. The Antora PV challenge when they solve that that technology is cool for electricity to electricity because it could turn out to be long duration, no moving parts storage. It's hard for us to see that. That's an example of we're going to do something deeply innovative. How long will it take to prove that it's bankable and what we're doing is much more boring? The back to electricity is their superpower is back to electricity.David RobertsYeah, I want to discuss that. Like the ability to go back to electricity and what, you'll come to that. We'll get to that. But you guys have settled on rather than any of these materials science fun time experiments. Bricks.John O'DonnellYeah. Okay. Somebody told me this the other day. How many gigawatts of batteries are there in the world right now, do you know?David RobertsI don't.John O'DonnellSomebody told me there are about three gigawatts of batteries in the world right now.David RobertsLithium-ion batteries, you mean?John O'DonnellYeah. So how much heat storage is running in the world right now? As we speak, there's about 30 gigawatts of heat storage running right now. In 1828 was the first patent for a thing called a cowper stove, which is a tower with a thousand tons of brick in it that has air passages that on a 1 hour cycle. The still combusting exhaust of the blast furnace is blown down through that tower and heats all the brick to about 1500°C. And then for about 20 minutes, fresh air is drawn up through the tower and it's providing the inlet air to the furnace and it's delivering 115 megawatts heat for about 20 minutes.David RobertsCrazy.John O'DonnellAnd then it's heated again. These. Things are heated and cooled 24 times a day. They last 30 years. There's a million tons of that brick in service right now at the blast furnaces around the world.David RobertsAnd these are just ordinary brick-bricks that people are familiar with. Like, what are bricks made of?John O'DonnellWhat, are they the term they use? Yeah, there are a bunch of different materials, but two of the most abundant elements in Earth's crust are silicon and aluminum. Silica, silicon dioxide, alumina, aluminum oxide are two of the most important minerals. Different bricks are made of different mixtures of silica and alumina. And there are other kinds of bricks as well that are even higher temperature, but they call it aluminosilicate brick. It's higher temperature brick than in your fireplace. Looks a lot like it. And it's what is in every if you have a ceramics kiln, that's what's in your ceramics kiln liner.It's in a cement kiln, and it's again, used in all kinds of areas. People have been making brick like this for thousands of years. Brick is made from dirt. I mean, certain kinds of dirt. You mix it up, you put a little binder, you throw it in a kiln, and you've got your brick.David RobertsSo if I'm looking inside a Rondo box, am I literally just looking at a stack of bricks?John O'DonnellPretty much. The one thing that's different ... our breakthrough. So the brick, as you know about brick, it's brittle. If you drop a brick, it'll break.David RobertsRight.John O'DonnellYou also know that brick is not a good heat conductor. That's why we make fireplaces out of it. So if we want to heat it fast, we have to heat it uniformly. If you stuck a brick and you had, like, one side in a bucket of water and the other side in a fire, the brick might fracture. But if you put the brick in the middle of the fire, it'll heat up rapidly to the temperature of the fire. It's one of those ideas that once you see it, it's obvious. But it only took 80 design revisions.If you look inside a Rondo unit, what you'll see is a brick stack that's full of these open chambers. It's a checkerboard of open boxes surrounded by brick, and brick surrounded by these open boxes. And electrical heaters are embedded directly in the stack, and they provide radiant heat within those open boxes. And because thermal radiation of every object in the universe goes as the fourth power of its temperature in degrees Kelvin, as I know you remember.David RobertsOf course.John O'DonnellThings that can see each other get to become the same temperature by exchanging heat. So the result of this was we found a way to directly, rapidly heat the brick.David RobertsAnd this is an alternative to blowing hot air over the bricks.John O'DonnellThat's right.David RobertsWhich, a. would require more engineering and more money, but b. also might not heat them uniformly, like might heat one side before the other side or something like that.John O'DonnellHot air. You can heat them uniformly, like the blast furnaces do that. But in that case, you have the same electrical heater that's in something like a hairdryer. And inside a hairdryer, the heaters are mostly radiating to the metal plates, which in turn are heating the air, which in turn would in this case, heat the brick. There'd be a couple of hundred degrees difference between the final temperature of the brick and the temperature of the wire. In our case, that's about five degrees.David RobertsSo instead of using the wire to heat the air, to heat the brick, you're just sticking the wire in the brick, and the wire is heating the brick directly.John O'DonnellThat's right. So we just last week, we announced the world's highest temperature thermal energy storage system running. That's not because we use different heating materials than others. It's because of that physics insight that led to that structure. That's right.David RobertsGot it. Okay, just quickly, what are some of the engineering challenges here? Do the bricks expand and contract when they are heated, or do they degrade over time? What sort of things are you dealing with here with bricks that you had to overcome?John O'DonnellYeah, there were lots of things because what we're talking about is kind of at some level obvious, and people have done really good work on this previously. But the challenge is you have to think about, yes, the bricks expand and contract, so build your structure. But the nice thing is they're freestanding. They don't need a container to hold them in. So if you build your structure properly, it can freely expand and contract.David RobertsSo there are like spaces between the bricks in which they can ...Where they're touching when they're hot and spaces open up when it's cold. Exactly. Other big challenges consider if you have a storage system and one area has some airflow blockage so that during discharge, it's not getting as cool as another area the next day when you put heat in, it's going to wind up hotter than another area. And the day after that, even hotter thermal runaway that would cause failure because one part was too hot. If you have that possibility, you have to run the whole thing cooler. So it turns out one of the hard problems, one of the hard engineering problems is making sure that the temperature inside the material is uniform.John O'DonnellAnd it's uniform not just when the unit is new, but when it's 30 years old.David RobertsYour promise here is that this Rondo battery has the same capacity and the same performance characteristics in 30 years that it does today. Is that the idea?John O'DonnellThat's exactly right, yeah.David RobertsAnd no other battery? There's no other battery that can say that.John O'DonnellI think that's true. But here, there's a million tons of this material running in the world, and those guys have much higher mechanical force on it. They build 30 meters tall things. We build eight meter tall things. They heat and cool it 24 times a day. We heat and cool it once a day. Lasts 30 years for them. Pretty clear it's going to last longer than that for us. Yeah.David RobertsAnd let me ask about getting the heat out to where it needs to go, because as I have been reading about, I did a thing on a company a while back that was using concentrating solar to superheat a fluid. And they could get to these levels of heat that are germane to concrete and whatever the higher end, the higher temperature applications, but only at a particular spot. Right. It's got to be right where the sun is and where everything's coming together in that one spot. And then, of course, you face the challenge of how do I get that heat to where it needs to be without losing a bunch of the heat?And this is sort of, obviously the other half of the thermal energy challenge. And there's sort of two challenges. One is making it into steam right. For all these lower temperature applications, and then, I don't know, making it into what, for the steel or the super high energy. I don't even know how you transfer that high version of heat. So what are you using on the back end?John O'DonnellYeah. So every combined cycle power station in the world has a jet engine that's generating electric power. Its exhaust is around 605 C. That exhaust is passed through a boiler, a heat recovery steam generator that drives a steam turbine that makes extra electric power. So the world knows how to build those boilers that run on about 600 C air.David RobertsGot it.John O'DonnellThe Rondo storage is much hotter temperature than that we mix down. And for the systems that are delivering steam, we work with leaders who build conventional boilers and we've engineered the heat battery to include that boiler. So the basic heat battery models are exact drop in replacements for particular models of industrial boilers. They're just about the same size. Stick us next to your existing one, hook us up to the pipe.David RobertsYou're replacing a fossil fuel run boiler with a heat battery and a boiler in the same space.John O'DonnellYeah. We think of the heat battery as from the substation to the steam flange in that case. So it is a like for like drop in replacement. The less work the customer has to do, the better off we are.David RobertsYeah, I was going to ask it. We might as well discuss this now, because this is obviously one of the this is something you run into with battery chemistries all the time. Right. Which is just like there's so much existing infrastructure that even if you have something clever and fancy and new that's super cheap, if it requires all the facilities to update themselves, you're just starting way, way behind the eight ball.John O'DonnellThat's right.David RobertsSo to what extent is the sort of Rondo heat battery plug and play like in a low temperature steam application and like a steel plant, can you wander into any of these and just switch out with no pause.John O'DonnellAll of the energy. So the top four categories in the United States, the Doe just gave a talk recently and the top four categories in descending order of industrial heat use are chemicals, food and beverage, paper products (That includes everything from toilet paper to cardboard,) then cement, and then steel. So for chemicals, about a third to 50% of all the heat is steam. For food and bev and paper products, it's all steam. And for cement and steel, none of it is steam. So we are simultaneously, we're delivering drop in boilers today and simultaneously with our investors and partners building and developing the calciners, the ethylene crackers, the kilns, to drive particular industrial processes.Because you made this point about the solar tower. Yeah, you have a spot that's 100 meters up in the air where you can have your heat. But what we want, the heat is in some process unit. And look, we have 200 years of designing industrial process units that are powered by fuel. Which of those can we retrofit? Where will we need to design new things? We were given a grant by the Danish government. We have a project underway to design and pilot a true-zero cement process, intermittent electricity to zero-emission cement. Most of the work in that project is the design of a calciner that instead of internal combustion, runs on superheated air or superheated CO2.So it doesn't all happen all at once, but it does all happen, but some of it will. The high temperature things will take more work to integrate because industrial plants today were designed with magnificent engineering and heat balance and efficiency burning fuel. And so, as it happens, everything that runs on steam, easy drop in all the high temperature processes. We have work underway now and hope to have results over the next couple of years that use the same thermal storage platform.David RobertsBut this first commercial battery that you've deployed now, which by the way was just last week, I think, what application is that or what temperature level is that?John O'DonnellYeah, that's targeting steam, steam, steam, steam and steam. The particular installation is at a fuel producer and it's at a biofuel producer. Whether you're making renewable diesel from soybeans or animal fat or ethanol from corn, about half the total carbon intensity of that fuel is fossil fuel that was burned to produce that biofuel. And we can set that to zero. So we can produce biofuels that are about half the carbon intensity of what they are today. Interesting, our customer is really a visionary that's going to zero because the other thing that's been talked about a lot with biofuels is combining carbon capture of the biogenic CO2 in those facilities.As it happens, using Rondo for the heat eliminates about half the total carbon intensity using carbon capture, eliminates about the other half and together you get about essentially a zero-CI, zero-carbon-intensity fuel. That little unit we just started up is the pilot for deployment of a series of larger ones to do exactly that, to produce zero carbon biofuel.David RobertsVery interesting. So let's pull the lens back a little bit, maybe talk about business model. Is the idea long term that if I'm say I'm a manufacturing facility and I'm making I don't know what baby food, is the idea that I buy a Rondo unit and install it in my factory? Or is the idea that Rondo comes in, sets things up and sells me heat as a service? In other words, am I buying the equipment or am I buying the heat? Or some of both.John O'DonnellYeah. Over time, there are as many answers to that question as there are to how conventional gas turbines and steam turbines are sold. Right. Sometimes people own their own cogeneration plant. Sometimes they contract with someone else to provide them electricity or heat as a service. The renewable heat as a service business will develop the same way. In the United States today, there's a huge community of developers who know how to shave a few pennies off solar and wind electrons, but have never really looked at these industrial facilities. In Europe, actually, there are already renewable developers who are out there originating renewable industrial heat projects.So, first of all, Rondo is offering, on four continents, commissioned, guaranteed installed heat batteries. That's the foundation. We are also originating and financing heat as a service, principally in North America.Interesting.Because, again, whether you make baby food, as you said, or steel, you don't drill gas wells to get the fuel to run your process. You buy energy as a service, your capital dollars, most folks want to spend it on their own processes. And this class, this thermal energy storage class, is arguably creating one of the great business opportunities of our time for the development community, because we all know wind and solar deployment is slowing down, not because of reduced demand, but because of congestion.And I think the interconnection queue time in England is now 13 years.David RobertsYes, there's like a terawatt now, I think, waiting in the queues.John O'DonnellRight. Rondo heat batteries. Our basic unit, the RHB 300, needs 70 megawatts of generation. Typical installations may have two to ten at a single site. These are utility scale energy demand and they can be built with no grid connection.David RobertsRight. So the idea is you go build a solar farm or a wind farm that is just attached to these batteries.John O'DonnellThat's right.David RobertsAnd then you're selling the heat from the batteries. So at no point do you need the electricity grid. You're not waiting for the interconnection or anything else, that these are a coupled unit. Wind and solar being so cheap, the implications are endless and often counterintuitive. Like when I hear I could either buy heat from a conventional boiler or I could buy heat from someone who had to go out and build an entire utility scale renewable energy installation and a couple of heat batteries. Intuitively, that just sounds more expensive. But are wind and solar so cheap now that that's competitive?John O'DonnellYes, absolutely. And it depends, right, because one of the things that's exactly the right matter that you just raised someone is making an investment that's going to provide 40 years of energy to your facility. They're going to sell it to you on a contract, they're going to care about your credit worthiness and your willingness to sign that contract. That's one of the things that's unique here. It's different than selling electricity to a utility. On the other hand, from your standpoint, someone is saying you can get off the fossil fuel price roller coaster. Not surprisingly, there are a lot of people in Europe who ... and we've seen that in US.Prices have been fourteen, they've been two, they're ten. And they are also in places that have carbon prices. You can have a permanent. This lack of volatility and exposure to regulatory matters also is a strategic advantage. A friend of mine said, why were all the factories in England built on the coast? Because where it was cheap to bring the coal, low cost, reliable energy supplies are the foundation for industrial investment.David RobertsSo you're free from fluctuations in fossil fuel prices and you're free from any worry about escalating carbon prices or other carbon related regulations. Basically, like two huge worries because as you say, for a lot of these facilities, the cost of energy is the bulk of the costs. And to have the bulk of your costs fluctuating 500x back and forth over the course of a couple of years is just an insane way to try to run an industrial facility.John O'DonnellThat's right. This matter of what kind of risks do we take? People say, oh, it's risky to work with this new technology, but look at the risks that we just were used to taking. And we're entering this new world where we're not talking about a green premium, we're talking about the same or lower energy cost with these reduced risks. And then, of course, depending on what the commodity is, low carbon aluminum trades at a price premium on the London Metals Exchange. Low carbon fuels trade at much higher prices in California and Germany. And for consumer facing brands, there are buyers, coops of producers who are seeking low cost effective renewable heat sources so they can offer to the market low carbon commodities.David RobertsYeah, I mean, it seems like there ought to be a bunch of market actors that are just ready to embrace this. Like, for one thing, as you say, just on a quantity basis. If you take all that energy that we're using for heat and transfer that to electricity, you need a lot of new electricity and a lot of new clean electricity. So it seems to me like renewable energy developers ought to be over the moon about this, like beating down your door. Are they lining up to be proponents for renewable heat in the industry generally or have they not caught on yet?John O'DonnellIn some places the answer is yes. As I mentioned, Europe is very aggressively moving in this direction and a number of folks over the last few years have said "this Rondo thing sounds too good to be true. Come back to me when you're operating something commercial." We're now operating something commercial. So the short answer to your question is yes, because again, these projects offer this mix of speed and certainty that we're not tied up in a grid queue. Scale, utility scale, there's a lot of commercial industrial C&I Solar, where people are building 2 MW here, 2 MW there.It takes the same amount of brain power and lawyer time to do the two megawatt project versus the 400 megawatt project that the same facility would use for heat, and returns now that we're in an era where that's the coolest thing is that the numbers work for the heat user, they work for the financier, they work for the builders of the solar fields and they work for us. And that's a new world and economic tailwinds driving it. It will keep going faster and faster. The size you mentioned, I think at the end of 2021, there was about 1000 gigawatts of wind and 1000 gigawatts of solar each in the world.The IEA did an assessment of industrial heat and their number is it's about 9000 gigawatts of new generation that's going to be required to replace the oil, coal and natural gas now being burned.David RobertsGood grief.John O'DonnellThat's worldwide, right? And so it's only, what is it, 20% of that in the US. Yeah, that's right. It's only a few thousand gigawatts in the US.David RobertsAn enormous opportunity to build more renewable energy.John O'DonnellYeah.David RobertsA similar question is, and I have always had this question about electric vehicles too, which is electric utilities are sort of notoriously stressed, worried about this death spiral, they're worried about grid defection. And you represent potentially just a wild new load, a new responsibility for them. Something that natural gas utilities were doing, were handling, is now all going to transfer and be their responsibility, which is just a way for them to grow and invest and just a wild new opportunity for them. Why aren't they at the front of the line beating down the door, trying to make this happen faster?John O'DonnellThat's a great question, and they are. One of our investors is Energy Impact Partners, whose backers are the North American electric power industry. And for sure the lowest cost way that we're going to decarbonize all of civilization is electrification. And for sure the electric industry is at the heart of that. One of the things that's really profound about what we're doing for them is that electrification, you install an electric furnace. That furnace is now running on wind power 30% of the hours of the year. And the other 70%, it's a new load on gas fired or coal fired power stations until the grid has fully decarbonized.David RobertsRight.John O'DonnellThese thermal storage systems, these things can be dispatched by the utility the same way they dispatch generation. The deal is not that I want a megawatt continuously, the deal is I want 24 megawatt hours today. You deliver them when it's convenient. These things become an asset in the electricity grid and a solution to these problems of variability and over generation and balancing.David RobertsRight. In the same way that sort of any controllable load helps grid stability. These are controllable.John O'DonnellYeah, but people talk about controllable load, demand response, for example, is a load that you expect to run all the time, but you can turn it off during emergencies. That's not this, this is something that no, no, you're going to dispatch it so that it never takes a single megawatt hour of spinning reserve or gas fired power generation. You're going to dispatch it so that it never raises the peak demand on your transmission or distribution system. You can manage it with telemetry from the grid operator. It's different than anything that's come before. It's like lithium-ion batteries in that sense, but at a tiny fraction of the cost.And we're not trying to solve from moving electric power from noon to 07:00 p.m.David RobertsRight.John O'DonnellWe are taking that electric power and replacing gas combustion principally in North America, and oil and coal combustion. We're opening an entirely new segment to renewable deployment. So, yeah, the electric utilities are getting engaged now. They face all kinds of issues with the regulatory frame that we have for electricity. Of course, they're already facing those matters as renewables deploy. And there are some new challenges, but there are people actively working that issue and we're thrilled to be working with them.David RobertsSo if I'm, I've got this manufacturing facility, I've got a big Rondo battery and I'm trying to decide between two options. One is I could build my own off-grid behind the meter generation, solar and wind. I could put my own solar and wind up, or I could just get on the grid and time my charging so that I'm chasing the clean energy on the grid so that I'm only charging when there's clean energy on the grid. Do we have any sense of which of those will be more economic or why you'd want to go one way rather than the other?I'm just wondering how many of these sort of self contained, off-grid, purpose built renewable energy installations there are going to be, it seems to me intuitively like that ought to be more expensive and what you ought to prefer is just for the grid itself to clean up so you have more, so it's easier. But what are the choices there?John O'DonnellThese questions are right at the heart of the matter. You're dead on. And I'll give you the long answer. The short answer is it depends. And it depends primarily on where you are. Pre-war economics, one project in Europe, large operation, that wanted to replace a 250 megawatt gas boiler. They could install a 250 megawatt electric boiler and eliminate their scope one. Their actual scope one, plus scope two would go up because they're in an area that's about 40% wind. And now, if 60% of the energy is coming from a coal plant, you were worse off.But from an economic standpoint, they were paying $35 a megawatt hour for gas fired heat. The electricity price annually would have been about €68 sorry. Per megawatt hour. But upon a study, given the presence of offshore wind in that area, their expected energy price on a long term buying in the cheapest 4 hours a day was under €10 a megawatt hour. So that's an example where the grid connected thing is exactly right, and it will only take four years to get the grid upgrade done, of which about three months is construction. So in a lot of places, the grid connection for grid projects is a matter.Oklahoma last year had 2000 hours of negative wholesale prices. If you put a project in Kansas or Oklahoma, you have energy prices that are slightly negative on an annual basis. If you can charge very rapidly, if you are allowed to participate in the wholesale market, there are regulatory obstacles.David RobertsBut in theory, in Oklahoma, during a time of negative wholesale prices, your facility that's running off a Rondo heat battery could be paid to charge itself.John O'DonnellThat's right.David RobertsIs that how that works? Is that what negative prices means?John O'DonnellThat's what negative prices means.David RobertsThat's so mind-blowing.John O'DonnellWell, again, and we have lots more of that coming. I know you've spoken to folks about the IRA. The production tax credit coming to solar is going to broaden the areas of the country where we see intermittent negative prices. Because, of course, if I'm getting $20 megawatt hour for tax credit, I'm perfectly happy to generate when prices are negative $19, right?David RobertsYeah. That's just crazy.John O'DonnellTechnologies like this that can absorb those periods are going to lift the price floor. They're going to benefit all the generators, especially the generators that can't turn off. And we're pretty excited. But again, it's can we connect to the grid? Can we capture those prices?David RobertsBecause if you can, there's enough heat to absorb all the curtailed power in the US, times a gazillion. Theoretically, if you could hook up all heat to electricity, you'd never curtail again, or at least not for decades. Probably.John O'DonnellOf course, subject to where is the heat-load versus where is the curtailment? Some curtailment is regional associated with total generation. You know, some of it is transmission constrained. But to a first approximation of the answer yet, that was correct, yes?David RobertsYeah, that again, seems just a crazy business opportunity for everyone involved.John O'DonnellYeah, we agree.David RobertsBut you do expect to see these off grid, custom built renewable energy installations, purely powering heat batteries in areas, say, where the grid is congested, or the grid is dirty or the interconnection queue is unusually long. You do expect to see those pop up?John O'DonnellWell, as I mentioned earlier, and just for scale, California has on the order of 20 gigawatts today. We need 100 gigawatts of new PV just to replace the BTUs of fuel now being burned for industrial heat. About 40 of those gigawatts, because of where the things are cited, could be built with no grid connection at all. And most of them will need some kind of grid connection. We see again and again that the new renewable project development model is going to be building a project that part of its electricity goes to industrial heat, into a heat battery, and part of it goes to the grid.And that, that's the sweet spot that delivers lower cost electricity to the grid. And we're absorbing what would have been curtailed power from that new purpose built thing to get all the power we need for the factory or the cement kiln or whatever.David RobertsRight. Yeah, if I'm a renewable developer and I catch wind, that there's this whole category of renewable projects that don't require this unholy paperwork nightmare that they all go through. Now again, I just can't imagine that they're not going to be stampeding in this direction. I mean, I hear them complain about this constantly.John O'DonnellWhat are the required conditions? Obviously the financial community we have to get our minds around. Okay, how are we structuring these projects where most of the energy is going to a single factory rather than to the utility? Let me think about the credit worthiness of that. And then for the moment, how long will it take to retire the Rondo technology risk? How do we backstop that? And we're busy building systems and projects that this first one of course, is the first step at commercial scale to build the track record. But again, there's a reason why we chose these century proven materials specifically, so that once you turn one of these things on and operate for six months, there's nothing left to prove.We know it works and we already know everything is durable.David RobertsThe brick heats up, the brick cools down. It's not again, it's so simple.And exact ... but that exact material, there's a million tons of doing that around the world. Doing that right now in much more severe service. But yes, it's simple. That's right.And I would imagine also that this space is going to see a lot more entrance competition. Of course, once it's kind of uncorked and it becomes clear what the opportunity is.John O'DonnellLook, trillion dollar markets don't happen without lots of people trying to enter them and nothing could be better, right? That's what we urgently need.David RobertsRight. One other question about industry, about location matters. You mentioned industry clustering along a coast where the coal is available. As more and more of our industrial activity in general and civilization gets hooked up to cheap renewable energy. Do you see something like over the course of I mean, I guess this will take years and decades, but do you imagine areas of intense renewable capacity like with lots of sun and lots of wind becoming new attractors to industry? Do you see global industry starting to migrate to renewable energy? Is it that much of a chunk of the cost of an industrial facility that it might be worth someday literally moving to it?John O'DonnellThe short answer to your question is yes. Just look at what happened with the shale gas revolution in the US. Vast investments in petrochemical and other manufacturing immediately shifted to where huge employment growth shifted to where that low cost energy was. And there's a question of how fast these transitions happen. Vasila Smill likes to talk about, "oh, it takes a really long time," but there are lots of examples where that is not true. Just, again, when the rules changed and combined cycle gas fired power generation was allowed in the US. We saw giant capital flows and giant rates of transformation.Now, that took awareness. It took enough experience that investors could say, oh yeah, I'll build that giga project because I know it's going to work. It took awareness of the kind that you are building that these opportunities exist, but the long term. Yes, absolutely. That's right.David RobertsThat'll be such an interesting geopolitical like of all the forces in the last 50 years or whatever that have moved industry around the globe, this will be just a completely new version of that. It's going to scramble all the previous alliances.John O'DonnellYeah, but there is one example that's even faster, which is not just the long term, but the right now. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at the Munich Security Conference in a session with a number of industry CEOs and Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president and president. Wevine said, look, there are three wars underway. There's the ground war, there's the energy war. He thought he would bring us to our knees. And there's a clean energy war, mostly with China. And a huge challenge before us today is how do we get off gas? But we need to get off gas without deindustrializing.There have already been giant plant shutdowns and layoffs because of the unavailability of gas right now and the forecast unavailability of gas longer term. Europe's bullets in the energy war are clean electrons, domestically produced, stable, low cost sources of energy. And again, we and all the other electric thermal storage technologies because we save twice as much gas per kilowatt hour as hydrogen. We're an important part of speeding up that transition there and preserving an existing industrial base. I think the same thing is true in the US as well as carbon prices come into the world. As gas prices rise, the competitiveness of US manufacturing on the world stage is going to be affected by how fast can we make this transition to renewables.And it doesn't happen all at once. But there are beyond the climate drivers, beyond the huge business response that we've just seen in the last five years, to the climate drivers, the pledges, and not just pledges, but action that we're seeing across all kinds of industrial producers. We are really at an amazing moment. I kind of wish we had gotten started with what we're doing here at Rondo five years ago. But five years ago what we were doing was stupid, right?I mean, go back ten. What we're doing somebody could have figured out earlier.David RobertsI said it at the outset, I'll say it again, I say it over and over again. Wind and solar being as much cheaper now as they were five to ten years ago is just like it's not an incremental change, it's a phase change. It's a flip to a different system. All we're doing now is just like sort of one at a time here and there in different industries, in different places, kind of opening our eyes to like, oh, this is a completely different landscape, like completely new opportunities. It's a different world now. It's going to take a while just to absorb the implications of super cheap renewables.John O'DonnellYes. And the thing we know for sure is that every year somehow those cost reductions will continue, right? We have some short term supply chain things, but somehow, I mean, I worked in the electronics industry for decades and everybody every year said, oh, Moore's Law is over, it can't keep getting better.David RobertsThey say it every year for wind and solar too, right?John O'DonnellYeah, exactly. And you look back over every five year period, every year's forecast was wrong, it fell faster than that. It's reasonable to assume we're going to continue to be in that, so that this era that we're entering, it keeps getting better and better. Our storage technology and the other storage technologies will cost reduce as they come down. But the storage technology is only 20% of the cost of the total project. The fact that the wind and solar are coming down so steeply, this cost advantage is going to continue to open for the people who have made this transition onto renewables.David RobertsIt's really interesting watching people in industry try to sort of skate to where the puck is going to be, as they say, sort of like start off on something that might not be economic when you first start developing it, but you're going to meet that cost curve, right, in five years, and then your business model will become viable. It's a real tricky timing there. There's a lot of people trying to sort of coordinate that dance just right.John O'DonnellYes, but my point is we're already at that point where we're at break even or better, we're not waiting five years. That's one of the big difference of this class versus there are a lot of things that are just as you said, we're investing now because we're hope it's going to be cheaper in the future.David RobertsWe're already at that point, right, so a final question. I wan

Today's guest is Harry Tannenbaum, Co-founder and President at Mill. Mill developed a household bin that not only collects uneaten food but also shrinks and deodorizes it. The company's solution aims to keep food in the system and prevent it from ending up in landfills or waste systems, which would otherwise generate significant emissions. Mill recently exited stealth and we're proud to be multi-time backers of the company through our MCJ Collective venture funds alongside other leading climate tech funds such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lower Carbon Capital, Prelude Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, and John Doerr. In this episode, Cody and Harry delve into the issue of food waste and what inspired him to tackle it. They discuss the qualities of a successful consumer product and how Harry and his co-founder, Matt Rogers, applied the lessons they learned at Nest to their work at Mill. Additionally, they examine Mill's product and logistics framework, and the intersection between consumer behavior change and systems change. They also explore the network effect that Mill hopes to create between the two. Finally, the conversation covers the pros and cons of building a company in stealth, as Mill did during the product development process.In this episode, we cover: [2:42] An overview of the food waste problem[6:04] The life cycle of food waste and the role of city municipalities[11:15] Harry's journey and experience with Nest[14:13] How he met his co-founder and decided to focus on waste[20:00] The genesis for Mill's hardware solution and how it evolved[25:28] Critical team members and how the company's final produce came to be[29:47] Mill as a systems change company[30:35] An overview of the Mill bin and membership experience[37:07] Where chickens fit in[45:19] The theoretical debate of systems change vs. personal responsibility[54:00] The company's partnership with the city of Tacoma, Washington[57:27] Where the company is looking to hire talent[59:06] Pros and cons of building in stealthGet connected: Cody Simms Twitter / LinkedInHarry Tannenbaum / MillMCJ Podcast / Collective*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Episode recorded on February 10, 2023.

1. Sameer's background, growing up in Gainesville, Florida, and how childhood trips to India shaped his outlook on energy and environment 2. The varying paths of breaking into venture and how sitting in on utility board conversations developed Sameer's energy understanding 3. The importance of harnessing the corporate ecosystem to help companies scale 4. Energy Impact Partners' exciting launch of the “Elevate Fund”

On today's episode of Everything About Hydrogen, we speak with Raffi Garabedian, CEO and Co-Founder of Electric Hydrogen (EH2), a deep decarbonization company pioneering new technology for low cost, high efficiency, fossil free hydrogen systems. By using electrolyzers many times larger than the industry standard, EH2 aims to help eliminate more than 30% of global GHG emissions from difficult to electrify sectors like steel, ammonia, and freight.Raffi was previously the CTO of First Solar, the pioneering thin-film solar company, and before joining First Solar in 2008, he was founder and CEO of Touchdown Technologies. He has a long history of innovation and entrepreneurship in "hard-tech" ranging from automotive components to telecommunications subsystems. He holds over 20 issued patents and has learned a lot over the years about strategy, business development, product, manufacturing operations, leadership, and most importantly, building great teams.The EH2 leadership has revolutionized other clean energy sectors at Tesla and First Solar and they are backed by world-class climate tech investors like Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Capricorn Investment Group, Energy Impact Partners, Fifth Wall Climate Tech, and S2G Ventures. The company also has partnerships with strategic investors that are leaders in their target sectors, including the Amazon Decarbonization Fund, Cosan, Equinor Ventures, Honeywell, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and Rio Tinto.We are excited to learn more from Raffi about the EH2 technology, lessons learned by scaling First Solar, and what we might expect to see next. ----LinksCompany Website: www.eh2.com EH2 Fundraising Press Release: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220622005258/en/Electric-Hydrogen-Secures-198M-in-Financing-to-Decarbonize-Global-Industries-With-Fossil-Free-HydrogenElectric Hydrogen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/electric-h2/Reach Raffi on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/raffigarabedian

In the U.S. alone, food waste is responsible for the equivalent emissions from 42 coal power plants. Globally it accounts for 10% of greenhouse gases, more than heavy industries like cement and steel.  Why? Wasted food means wasted energy. Throwing a piece of food in the trash is like tossing out the fertilizer and fuel used to make it, too. And we waste a lot of it. Nearly one third of all food grown gets trashed. On top of that, when food decomposes in landfills through anaerobic digestion, it releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas.  So how do we clean up food waste?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Matt Rogers, founder and CEO of Mill. Matt founded Nest, the smart thermostat company, and has now turned his attention to food.  Disclosure: Shayle's venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners is an investor in Mill.  Matt and Shayle cover topics like: Where food waste occurs along the value chain (hint: The biggest source of waste is us, when we toss food we've already purchased.) The causes of emissions, from energy inputs to anaerobic digestion in landfills The current solutions to food waste, such as composting, green bin programs, supply chain management software and shelf-life extension. The challenges with landfills, including trucking waste and landfill capacity. Mill's new consumer-focused food waste technology, which includes shipping dehydrated food scraps in the mail. How much consumers care about food waste and carbon emissions. Recommended Resources: ReFED: Drawdown Update Affirms Reducing Food Waste as a Leading Solution to Climate Change ReFED: Roadmap to 2030: Reducing US Food Waste by 50% Canary: Eating the Earth | Decarbonizing our food systems Climavores: Today's food crisis is a postcard from our warming future EPA: From Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of U.S. Food Waste Click here for a full transcript Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.

To make products like cement, cereal and even baby food, you need heat—and lots of it. Industrial heat consumes about one-fifth of all energy used in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency.  Factories often burn coal or natural gas to generate consistent temperatures up to 2200 degrees Celsius. And most run nearly 24/7 to maintain profitability in competitive commodity markets.   Other sectors like power and ground transportation have clear pathways to decarbonization, relying mainly on electrification and cheap intermittent renewables. But these solutions don't deliver consistent temperatures and the 24/7 energy needed to make things like steel and petrochemicals. So industrial heat has been a far more stubborn problem to solve. But there's a crowded field of technologies lining up to try, including hydrogen, biogas, heat pumps, electric arc furnaces, and even heat batteries. In this episode, Shayle talks to John O'Donnell, co-founder and CEO of Rondo Energy, a thermal storage startup. Shayle's venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners has made investments in Rondo Energy. They break down the challenges of industrial heat and discuss the range of technologies that could help to generate it with low emissions. John and Shayle cover topics like: Which fuels do we currently rely on for specific industrial uses, and where could we use alternatives? How thermal batteries can help to solve the intermittency challenges of wind and solar Industrial grid defection, where large industrial facilities build behind-the-meter renewables to avoid the rising costs of delivered electricity The potential for industrial growth in places with access to cheap renewables, like the American midwest Recommended Resources: McKinsey: Net-zero heat: Long-duration energy storage to accelerate energy system decarbonization Canary: This startup's energy storage tech is ​‘essentially a giant toaster' Canary: This startup wants to use cheap surplus clean energy to make high-temperature industrial heat Catalyst: The many pathways to decarbonizing chemicals   Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrid Solutions, your comprehensive source for all distributed energy financing. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes financing it easy. Visit scalecapitalsolutions.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by CohnReznick Capital, a trusted source for renewable energy investment banking servicing the US sustainability sector. Visit cohnreznickcapital.com to learn more.

We want your feedback! Fill out our listener survey for a chance to win a $100 Patagonia gift card. Join us on November 30 for a live, virtual episode of Climavores. Come ask a question about food, nutrition, and eating for the climate. Concrete is an incredible material. It's essentially pourable rock, and we use it in almost every part of the built world. We also consume more of it than any other man-made material in the world—about three tons per person annually. And the secret ingredient in all this concrete? Cement. Think of it as the glue that binds the crushed rocks in concrete together.  But here's the problem. Making cement emits lots of carbon. The cement industry alone produces 8% of global emissions.  Why? First, the process happens at 1500 degrees Celsius, a temperature so hot that companies often burn coal to reach it. Second, the chemical reaction involved in creating cement releases carbon dioxide.   So what are the solutions?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Leah Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Sublime Systems, a startup that has developed a novel way to produce cement at room temperature without releasing carbon dioxide. Shayle's venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners is an investor in Sublime. Shayle and Leah discuss: The important properties of cement and why we use so much of it The chemistry of cement and why it releases carbon dioxide Alternative chemistries to Portland cement, the most common and useful formulation Things you can add to the mix, called supplementary cementitious materials, to offset some of the Portland cement required (like fly ash from coal-fired power plants) Adopting performance-based standards that allow more flexibility in the materials used in cement Replacing coal with electrification and alternative fuels in cement kilns  Post-combustion carbon capture for cement kilns CarbonCure's technique for injecting carbon dioxide into concrete to increase strength and reduce the amount of cement required Sublime System's electrochemical technique for manufacturing cement without carbon emissions Recommended Resources: The New York Times: Making the Concrete and Steel We Need Doesn't Have to Bake the Planet Canary Media: Major construction firms team up to get the carbon out of concrete Bloomberg: Breakthroughs Are Helping Even Cement and Steel Go Electric E&E News: Congress wagered on ‘low-carbon' concrete. Will it pay off? Canary Media: Cement is terrible for the climate. California just passed a law to fix that Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrid Solutions, your comprehensive source for all distributed energy financing. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes financing it easy. Visit scalecapitalsolutions.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by CohnReznick Capital, a trusted source for renewable energy investment banking servicing the US sustainability sector. Visit cohnreznickcapital.com to learn more.

What's not to love about heat pumps? Well… a few things, actually.  Don't take this the wrong way: Heat pumps are magic. They heat. They cool. They're way more efficient than gas boilers. Switching to one can save a household hundreds of dollars in energy bills and lots of carbon emissions. It's why governments are incentivizing and requiring them. But heat pump adoption has slowed nationally. It's even declined in colder regions. What‘s holding it back? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, managing director for research and innovation at Energy Impact Partners, a climatetech venture capital firm.  Andy and Shayle talk about the state of heat pump technology and what we need to fix to speed up adoption. They cover topics like: The relatively high upfront costs and messy customer journey to installation What mass adoption would do to peak demand on the grid in cold climates  How heat pumps dramatically ramp up electrical load in a typical home and on the grid Heat pumps powered by natural gas or hydrogen Plus, why Andy would be a great early adopter for any company that wants to pitch Shayle on solving these problems. Recommended Resources: US Department of Energy: Residential Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge Canary Media: Heat pumps now required for new homes in Washington state Canary Media: One weird trick to make heat pumps boom Canary Media: Will tough standards for heat pump tax credits hurt adoption? Canary Media: Window heat pumps will help electrify New York City's apartments Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media. Catalyst is supported by Scale Microgrid Solutions, your comprehensive source for all distributed energy financing. Distributed generation can be complex. Scale makes financing it easy. Visit scalecapitalsolutions.com to learn more. Catalyst is supported by CohnReznick, a trusted partner for navigating the complex and evolving financial, tax and regulatory landscape of the renewable sector. Visit cohnreznick.com to learn more.