Hydropower is the world’s largest source of renewable electricity today, according to the IEA. Like gas peaker plants, it’s highly dispatchable, meaning it can complement intermittent renewables like wind and solar. 

And we could get a lot more of it. The IEA estimates that we could double the amount of energy produced globally. One peer-reviewed study found that global economic potential for hydropower was 21,000 terawatt hours per year, more than five times the current generation today. 

So how could we deploy more hydropower?

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks to Gia Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Natel Energy, a hydropower technology company. One key argument Gia makes is that if we can build smaller projects with lower ecosystem impacts, we can tap into more zero-carbon power. 

Gia and Lara talk through: 

• How quickly we need to build more hydropower to meet 2050 net-zero targets
• The benefits of traditional hydro as a full-stack grid resource Different types of hydro technology like run of river, hydrokinetic, and traditional large-scale dams
• Why smaller, more distributed systems are key to unlocking hydropower potential
• Different technologies to manage fish and debris like bypass channels, screens and fish-safe turbines
• The co-benefits of improving riverine landscapes, including making ecosystems and hydroelectric infrastructure more resilient to climate change
• How hydrology and forecasting can help us better manage dams in a changing climate

Recommended Resources:

• Energy & Environmental Science: A comprehensive view of global potential for hydro-generated electricity
• Bloomberg: The World’s Biggest Source of Clean Energy Is Evaporating Fast

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 battery manufacturing announcements have been coming one after another—a VW cathode facility in Canada; a nuevo-leon-mexico-factory.html">Tesla factory in Mexico; a catl-electric-vehicle-battery.html">Ford battery plant in Michigan.

These companies hope to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s lucrative EV tax credits:

• Up to $3,750 for strategic minerals mined in the U.S. or its many free trade partner countries
• Up to $3,750 for battery components produced only in the U.S., Mexico, or Canada.

But there’s a catch. A whole bunch of intermediate battery products don’t fit neatly into either bucket. For example, lithium gets processed into precursor cathode active material before it becomes cathode active material, the powder that actually makes it onto the factory floor of a battery manufacturer. Battery electrolytes go through multiple processing steps, too.

Until last week, suppliers of these products were left wondering: Where should we manufacture to qualify? And for which credit?

Congress had left these details up to the Treasury Department, and on Friday regulators released guidance for these intermediate products, or “constituent materials.” The new rules pleased some and angered others.

So what do the changes mean for EV supply chains? 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, our resident EV-supply-chain whisperer. He’s the vice president of Battery Storage Solutions at E Source. He’s come on the show before to talk about the holy grail of batteries and the basics of the IRA’s EV tax credits. 

This time, Sam explains the new Treasury guidance.They cover topics like:

• Incentivizing domestic manufacturing while also giving auto companies the flexibility to qualify for credits
• Why Joe Manchin and European countries are upset about the new rules
• Japan’s last-minute free trade agreement before the rules came out
• How hard it will be for EV manufacturers to get qualifying constituent materials anytime soon, especially as they launch new mass market models
• What we still don’t know about how the Treasury will implement the IRA, including which countries or companies will qualify as “foreign entities of concern”

Recommended Resources:

• Paper.pdf">U.S. Treasury: Anticipated Direction of Forthcoming Proposed Guidance on Critical Mineral and Battery Component Value Calculations for the New Clean Vehicle Credit
• vehicles-treasury-tax-credits.html">The New York Times: New Rules Will Make Many Electric Cars Ineligible for Tax Credits
• Politico: Bitter friends: Inside the summit aiming to heal EU-US trade rift

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 run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) earlier this month was a hair-raising experience for anyone in climatetech. The bank catered to entrepreneurs in tech, especially climate. So when news of SVB’s troubled assets hit social media, startups scrambled to withdraw millions of dollars and draft emergency plans to make payroll. But after the Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation (FDIC) took over SVB and another troubled regional institution, Signature Bank, the dust started to settle. The FDIC announced that it would insure the full deposits at SVB, above the $250,000 guarantee. 

But how did this all happen? And what does it mean for climatetech today?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Saloni Multani, partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and former chief financial officer for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. She came on the show last May to explain what the economic downturn meant for climatetech. This time Saloni and Shayle cover topics like:

• What led to the problems at SVB, Signature, and others
• How trends in the broader banking system signal a new environment for climatetech companies 
• The durability of climatetech opportunities Whether others will fill the hole left by SVB, which was a critical partner to many climatetech projects, including 62% of U.S. community solar projects

Recommended Resources:

• The Carbon Copy: A bank collapse threatens climate startups
• Canary: Community solar industry says it can ride out Silicon Valley Bank failure
• The Guardian: ‘The first Twitter-fuelled bank run’: how social media compounded SVB’s collapse
• Catalyst: How will the downturn affect climatetech?

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Landfills, dairy farms and wastewater plants all emit methane, the potent greenhouse gas produced when organic material decomposes in the absence of oxygen. 

But instead of emitting that methane (often called biomethane or waste methane), it’s possible to capture and refine it, resulting in renewable natural gas, or RNG. Capturing methane that would have been emitted anyway (something that’s still up for debate) creates RNG that’s carbon neutral or carbon negative. And using that RNG to displace fossil-fuel derived natural gas can cut overall emissions.

Big players in energy are betting big on RNG. Last fall BP acquired RNG producer Archaea for $4.1 billion, Shell bought Nature Energy for $2 billion and NextEra purchased $1.1 billion in RNG assets from Energy Power Partners.

So what’s behind this recent flurry of activity? And to what extent could RNG actually offset carbon emissions? 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Brandon Moffatt, cofounder of Stormfisher, an RNG and hydrogen producer.

They cover topics like:

• RNG feedstocks like dairy farms, wastewater treatment plants, and landfills
• How much waste methane is available for RNG
• How different feedstocks determine RNG’s carbon intensity
• Government subsidies like the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) and Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs)

Recommended Resources: 

• Environmental Research Letters: At scale, renewable natural gas systems could be climate intensive: the influence of methane feedstock and leakage rates
• Bloomberg: The Gas Industry’s Survival Plan: Make Fuel From Cow Poop
• Vox: The false promise of “renewable natural gas”
• CBC: Renewable natural gas could help slow climate change, but by how much?

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Nitrous oxide or N2O is the third largest source of GHG emissions behind carbon dioxide and methane. Also known as laughing gas, it’s long-lived like carbon dioxide and incredibly potent like methane. And it accounts for about 6% of global warming. 

So where does it come from? And what do we do about it?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Eric Davidson, professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and principal scientist at Spark Climate Solutions. Eric studies the surprising source of nitrous oxide: bacteria in the soil. Eric and Shayle talk about topics like: 

• How the application of nitrogen fertilizer causes more emissions than the production of fertilizer itself
• The challenging economics of agriculture that cause farmers to over-apply fertilizer
• How precise and timely application of fertilizer could cut emissions
• New livestock feed additives that could replace the N2O-intensive crops in animal feed
• New crops that require less fertilizer

Recommended Resources:

• Nature Climate Change: Improving the social cost of nitrous oxide
• The Conversation: New research: nitrous oxide emissions 300 times more powerful than CO₂ are jeopardizing Earth’s future
• Nature: A comprehensive quantification of global nitrous oxide sources and sinks

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Mass. on April 6. We’ll record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Ma. on April 6. record a live episode of The Carbon Copy with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.

We’re bringing you a special crossover episode this week from Catalyst’s sister podcast, The Carbon Copy. I host the show and we did an episode recently about this urgent climate tech problem: America’s shortage of electricians. 

To decarbonize the economy, we need to electrify everything. That means installing millions of heat pumps, EV chargers, electric water heaters and rooftop solar panels. 

But there’s one big problem: finding enough electricians to make it happen. Electricians across the country are flooded with work — and just as demand is skyrocketing, many in the field are nearing retirement age. 

This week, in a special collaboration with Grist, reporter Emily Pontecorvo discusses where to find all the electricians we need to electrify everything and how we can train enough new entrants to the field to meet our climate goals. Read Emily’s feature article.

Transcript available here.

Recommended Resources:

• Canary: We need a lot more electricians if we’re going to electrify everything
• Canary: How to get contractors on board with heat pumps and electrification
• Canary: US climate law to spur thousands of new jobs in every state

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Last year’s surge in oil prices brought record windfall profits for oil majors, and a boon for investors. But historic trends don’t favor fossil fuels.

From 2010 to 2020, the oil & gas sector underperformed the broader S&P 500 index. The sector gained 6% over that period, while the benchmark S&P index grew 180%. Some called it a "lost decade" for fossil fuel investors.

“If anything, oil's been a drag,” says Zach Stein, the co-founder and CEO of Carbon Collective, a company building climate-focused portfolios for investors and employer 401(k) plans.

The recent surge for the oil and gas sector shows how fundamental fossil fuels are for today's economy. But looking forward, oil is facing the most significant competition it has ever seen, thanks to electrification and clean energy. 

That view of the long-term threat to fossil fuels drove Zach to co-found Carbon Collective – with a mission to build funds around industries that will deliver strong returns in a climate-constrained world.

In this episode, produced with Carbon Collective, Zach Stein talks with Stephen Lacey about trends in sustainable investing – how to define the category, identify good investments, and separate it from the confusing world of ESG.

If you want to invest sustainably – at work or individually – you can learn more at carboncollective.co. There, you can see how the portfolios are built and read more about the company's theory of change.

Come watch a live episode of The Carbon Copy! Canary Media and Post Script Media are hosting a live event at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts on April 6 with some very special guests. Get your tickets today.

We had so much to cover in Nat Bullard’s monster climate trends deck that we’re back for another episode. Haven’t heard the first part yet? Listen here. 

Nat was the chief content officer at BloombergNEF until last year. He is now a senior contributor at BNEF and Bloomberg Green as well as a venture partner at Voyager Ventures. 

Shayle and Nat dig into topics like:

• EVs. From 2017 to 2022, internal combustion engine car sales globally declined by nearly a third. Yet EV sales are on the rise. Will growth in EVs stave off the decline of passenger vehicle sales?
• Onshoring of supply chains. Companies have announced plans to bring manufacturing facilities to the U.S. or nearby countries. In the EV value chain alone, there were $70 billion worth of announcements in 2022. Will this onshoring trend have lasting power? 
• The three ages of decarbonization. First came renewable energy, then the energy transition, and starting in 2019, the net zero age. It builds on everything we did before, but now with a focus on molecules, calories, industry, and pressure on the boardroom.
• Plus: What we can do with old coal sites and the types of projects that tend to have cost overruns.

For a full transcript, click here

Recommended resources:

• Nathaniel Bullard: Decarbonization: The long view, trends and transience, net zero

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

It’s the first year of what we hope is an annual event: Nat Bullard has released his first climate trends report. He was the chief content officer at BloombergNEF until last year, and now is a senior contributor at BNEF and Bloomberg Green. He’s also a venture partner at Voyager Ventures. 

There’s so much in this 141-slide deck that we’ve split the conversation into two episodes. In this first part, Shayle and Nat dig into topics like:

• Land use. For example: we grow 40% of the U.S. corn to offset 10% of U.S. motor gas demand. Also, despite a growing world population, land used for agriculture globally has been shrinking. What do these trends mean for alternative proteins and sustainable aviation fuels?
• ESG. In 2022, there were more anti-ESG than pro-ESG regulatory developments. And while ESG fund flows were positive last year, they’re still only a fraction of their peak in 2021. Where is ESG investment heading and should we even be putting environmental, social and governance criteria in the same bucket? 
• Batteries. Battery costs rose in 2022, but battery system costs rose faster. And yet there’s still rising demand for utility-scale batteries. Meanwhile, the top ten battery manufacturers of 2022 were in Asia. What do these trends mean for the battery market and manufacturing supply chains?

For a full transcript, click here

Recommended resources:

• Nathaniel Bullard: Decarbonization: The long view, trends and transience, net zero
• Catalyst: Climatetech’s surprising bottleneck: Land access

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Recent announcements in the world of nuclear power might make you think that new nuclear technologies are close to deployment in North America. But look closely and you’ll find that progress is actually painfully slow, weighed down by regulatory challenges.

Today’s guest argues that all those rules and regulations need to be overhauled.In this episode, Shayle talks to Bret Kugelmass, CEO and founder of nuclear reactor developer Last Energy. He’s also the host of the podcast Titans of Nuclear. They cover topics like:

• Small modular vs micro vs traditional reactors
• The state of SMR and nuclear development in North America
• Why utilities are disincentivized to build nuclear
• Places that are currently seeing a lot of construction, like China and Poland
• Building with existing components vs developing new designs
• The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s certification and licensing process
• Overhauling the bureaucracy and the institutional design of the Commission itself

Click here for a full transcript.

Recommended Resources:

• Catalyst: Will advanced reactors solve nuclear’s problems?
• Canary: Small modular nuclear reactors: The race is on to actually build them
• Canary: A small modular nuclear reactor just got U.S. approval — a big milestone

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

Recent research has raised questions about the global-warming impact of uncombusted hydrogen. When it leaks from storage, pipes and other infrastructure into the atmosphere, new studies suggest hydrogen absorbs more heat than previously understood. And, perhaps more importantly, it extends the atmospheric life of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Proponents argue that hydrogen is a critical climate solution. “Green” hydrogen, for example, is made with zero-carbon electricity, effectively turning things like solar and wind energy into a storable fuel that can replace natural gas in many end uses. But could hydrogen’s warming impacts outweigh its advantages?

That depends on your assumptions about how and where we use it.

In this episode, Shayle talks to Thomas Koch Blank, senior principal at RMI, where he leads the organization’s Breakthrough Technology Program. Shayle and Thomas examine the new research and discuss topics like: 

• Where we will use hydrogen and varying risks of leakage in those applications
• Poor applications for hydrogen, like turning is-green-hydrogen-vs-blue-hydrogen-and-why-it-matters.html">“blue” hydrogen derived from steam methane reforming into synfuel
• Estimated leakage rates and the incentives for hydrogen producers to build low-leakage systems
• Hydrogen’s total warming impact, factoring in how much natural gas it could replace
• How natural gas and hydrogen compare kilogram for kilogram or megajoule for megajoule
• The time horizon we should use to evaluate the global warming potential of hydrogen
• Hydrogen leakage measurement, verification, and safety

Recommended Resources:

• Environmental Defense Fund: Emissions of Hydrogen Could Undermine Its Climate Benefits; Warming Effects Are Two to Six Times Higher Than Previously Thought
• RMI: Hydrogen Reality Check #1: Hydrogen Is Not a Significant Warming Risk
• Columbia University’s SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy: Hydrogen Leakage: A Potential Risk for the Hydrogen Economy

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.

Catalyst is supported by EnergyHub. The company’s platform lets consumers turn their smart thermostats, EVs, batteries, water heaters, and other products into virtual power plants that keep the grid stable and enable higher penetration of solar and wind power. And they are hiring! Learn more and see open roles at energyhub.com/catalyst

Catalyst is brought to you by Sealed: The experts in home weatherization and electrification upgrades. Sealed is leading the way, with over a decade of experience being accountable to homeowners because they only get paid based on actual energy reductions. Visit Sealed.com/measuredsavings to learn more.

It’s that time of year when we reach into our listener mailbag and answer your questions. And you had some good ones. In this episode, Shayle once again hands the mic to guest host Sarah Golden, VP of energy at GreenBiz Sarah Golden. Together they cover things like:

• The role of biology in creating fossil-fuel-free materials
• Whether the marginal cost of electricity is heading toward zero
• Solving the dilemma of financing first-of-a-kind projects
• The impact of tech layoffs on climatetech
• The biggest roadblocks to decarbonization
• What role battery recycling will play in addressing the shortage of lithium and other critical minerals

Click here for a full transcript of this episode.

What else should we cover on the show? Leave us a voicemail at 919-808-5832. Or email us at catalyst@postscriptaudio.com. You can also tag us on Twitter.

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.

Here’s the dream: millions of controllable devices—from EV chargers to thermostats, fridges, and batteries—working together to inject power back into the grid. They reduce load when there’s not enough electricity supply to meet demand. They ease transmission congestion and maintain grid frequency. And these devices, collectively called distributed energy resources or DERs, are all controlled remotely by grid operators. 

So how far are we from this dream? 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Mathew Sachs, senior vice president for strategic planning and business development at CPower, a company that aggregates DERs and sells DER services to the grid. They talk about where we are on the long and winding path to large-scale deployment of DERs and what it takes to monetize them. They dig in on: 

• EV chargers, the fastest growing category of DERs, as well as V1G and V2G
• How much easier it is to share your financial data with a credit check than to share your energy data with a DER aggregator
• How current rules create obstacles to monetizing DERs
• Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 2222 and the status of new DER rules in NYISO and CAISO
• Positive developments like the declining costs of DERs and rising watts per customer acquired

Full transcript here

Recommended Resources:

• Canary: FERC Order 2222: Experts offer cheers and jeers for first round of filings
• Canary: Is ​‘vehicle-to-everything’ charging ready for prime time?
• Catalyst: Tapping the gold mine of consumer energy data

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.

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
• tagged.pdf">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.

In this bonus episode, we present With Great Power, a podcast from GridX about the people building the future grid, today.

The grid is no longer the biggest source of carbon emissions in America. It's transportation.

Electric vehicles are a key part of decarbonizing the transportation sector – making utilities an important force in growing EV adoption.

Electric cars will create a new opportunity for power providers to scale their business. But first, they need to get people to buy them. And that's where people like Karl Popham come in.

“The mindset is how can we get EVs to your customers as quickly as possible and as profitable for the salesperson as possible,” explains Karl, who is manager of electric vehicles and emerging technologies at Austin Energy.

This week, Brad speaks with Karl about Austin Energy’s work in making electric cars as accessible as possible by taking a dealership-centric approach.

You can find many more episodes like this over at the With Great Power feed. Subscribe to it on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to shows.

The natural gas market has been through a wild ride, especially in Europe. The pandemic first pushed the prices way down. Then a resurgent economy and an unusually long European winter sent them back up to record heights. And by September of last year, Russia had dramatically cut natural gas flows to Europe, further squeezing supply.

The high prices were especially painful for the continent, which relies heavily on the fuel for home heating, industry and power plants. But high prices also catalyzed efforts to shift to lower carbon technologies like renewables, hydrogen and heat pumps.

Then fast forward to this past December, and now gas prices have plummeted again. What’s going on? What’s causing these rapid swings and what might happen next?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Anne-Sophie Corbeau, research scholar at Columbia University’s SIPA Center on Global Energy Policy where she studies natural gas and hydrogen. Her article, “Putin’s energy gambit fizzles as warm winter saves Europe” recently ran in Bloomberg.

They discuss how we got here, covering topics like:

• The range of factors at play, such as LNG cargos, a European drought, and unusual weather patterns
• Whether Europe might resume large-scale natural gas imports from Russia
• Why China’s zero covid policy and an unusually warm winter amounted to a lucky break for Europe

What topics should we cover on the show? Send us an email or voice memo to catalyst@postscripaudio.com.

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.

The Haber-Bosch process, which turns nitrogen and hydrogen into ammonia, produces an essential ingredient in fertilizers and explosives. But it’s responsible for 2% of global emissions. 

Ammonia could become an important low-carbon fuel, because when combusted it emits no carbon. We could use it in ships, heavy industry and even mixed in with coal or gas in power plants. 

So what’s keeping us from using it as a new low-carbon fuel? And why would you use it instead of hydrogen, which you already need to make ammonia?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. Julio and a team of colleagues just co-authored a report on low-carbon ammonia for the Innovation for Cool Earth Forum.

They cover topics like:

• Why some countries like Japan, Singapore and Korea are especially interested in developing ammonia infrastructure.
• How ammonia compares to other low-carbon fuels like methanol and hydrogen.
• How we would need to retrofit coal and gas power plants to co-fire with ammonia
• Addressing ammonia’s corrosion and toxicity issues.
• The areas that need more research, such as ammonia’s impact on air quality and radiative forcing.
• Key constraints like human capital and infrastructure.

Recommended Resources:

• Innovation for Cool Earth Forum: Low-Carbon Ammonia Roadmap
• Canary: Watch this TED talk to get up to speed on green ammonia and shipping
• Canary: The race is on to build the world’s first ammonia-powered ship
• run-ammonia.html">Chemical & Engineering News: Will Japan run on ammonia?

Full transcript here.

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.

Today we’re talking about two climate blind spots: methane and short-term warming. Most of us think of global warming as a long game. How do we reach net zero by 2050? And how should we curb carbon dioxide emissions to get there?

But the warming happening now and in the next few years is just as important.

Short-term warming exacerbates wildfires, hurricanes and other climate impacts now. And the short-term trajectory of warming can make things better or worse in the long run. At some point before we reach net zero emissions, it’s increasingly likely that we will overshoot our 1.5 degree target. Hopefully we will come back down, but the more we overshoot, the worse the effects of climate change will be. Which is why we should bend the curve of that trajectory by tackling the causes of short-term warming.

High up on that list is methane. It lives in the atmosphere for only 12 years, but in the 20 years after it reaches the atmosphere it causes about 84 times more warming than carbon dioxide. That means it’s also a powerful solution. Methane in the atmosphere right now causes about 30% of global warming to date, but cutting emissions now would actually have a cooling effect. Why? Because, unlike carbon dioxide which lasts for several hundred years, methane breaks down relatively quickly. 

So how do we tackle the methane problem?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Erika Reinhardt, co-founder of Spark Climate Solutions, a non-profit focused on under-addressed climate solutions. Right now Spark is focusing on methane emissions from livestock, also known as enteric methane.

Shayle and Erika cover topics like:

• Why we should consider different time-scale standards for measuring global warming impact, such as GWP100 and GWP20
• How short-lived aerosols mask the full warming impact of greenhouse gasses
• Methane removal, including the process of oxidation and methane sinks
• Different sources of methane, such as wetlands, livestock and fossil fuel production
• Ready-to-deploy solutions to fossil fuel methane emissions, such as flaring, detection, capture and storage
• How flaring may be less effective than previously thought
• Solutions under development for livestock methane, such as manure management, biogas digesters and feed additives like seaweed-derived bromoform 

Recommended Resources:

• Canary: Cutting methane emissions could make a big dent in climate change, major UN report says
• Bloomberg: As Gas Prices Soar, Nobody Knows How Much Methane Is Leaking
• Inside Climate News: Feeding Cows Seaweed Reduces Their Methane Emissions, but California Farms Are a Long Way From Scaling Up the Practice

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.

A coalition of companies organized by the U.S. government is promising to purchase low-carbon versions of commodities from “hard to abate” heavy industries. This sort of policy is called an advanced market commitment, which the U.S. has used in the past to accelerate the development of new technologies. With guaranteed revenue from the government, manufacturers are able to take risks to create products that they might not have otherwise.

In the leadup to COP26 last year, John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, announced the First Movers Coalition (FMC) in collaboration with the World Economic Forum. It now involves 65 companies—including Delta, Maersk, and Rio Tinto—that will buy or supply a percentage of low-carbon products by 2030. India, Norway and eight other countries have signed on, too. The coalition has also committed to purchase carbon removal, adding to the wave of similar pledges like the $1 billion Frontier Fund.

So how will the FMC work?

In this episode, Shayle talks to FMC’s brainchild, Varun Sivaram. Varun is managing director and senior advisor for clean energy and innovation in Kerry's office.

They cover topics like:

• Why advanced market commitments are not silver bullets
• The FMC’s ability to make companies keep their commitments 
• How the FMC is developing standards for low-carbon products
• How much progress coalition members have made toward their targets 
• How the Inflation Reduction Act and the FMC support each other
• The FMC’s ability to endure changes of administration
• When we can stop calling these sectors “hard to abate”

 Recommended Resources:

• Bloomberg: Companies Commit to Buying Super-Green Cement in Corporate Climate Club
• Columbia University: To Bring Emissions-Slashing Technologies to Market, the United States Needs Targeted Demand-Pull Innovation Policies
• Harvard University: Using Advance Market Commitments for Public Purpose Technology Development
• Catalyst: Growing the carbon dioxide removal market

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 are headed into an uncertain future for the climate – but the range of possible scenarios is getting clearer. We’ve likely avoided the worst-case scenarios, thanks to the progress made in clean energy.

And that has experts feeling conflicted.

“People who are deep in the industry of trying to address climate change flip flop from skepticism to the amazing opportunity we have,” says DNV Senior Vice President Nick Brod. “Every few weeks, we see new technologies that show us that there is endless potential to make things more and more efficient.”

“We definitely have a lot of the technologies in wind and solar and storage – and there continues to be breakthroughs,” says DNV Senior Vice President Marion Hill.

We have most of the tools available to slow climate change. So where are the opportunities? And what are the bottlenecks to growth?

In this special episode, produced in partnership with DNV, we feature a conversation between Stephen Lacey, Nick Brod, and Marion Hill about the trends reshaping supply and demand on the grid.

DNV provides advice and assurance to customers across the spectrum of the energy transition, from generation to end use – in solar, storage, wind, grid planning, hydrogen, carbon capture, and more. To learn more about how experts like Nick and Marion can help you accelerate the energy transition, go to dnv.com/catalyst

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.

In a funny twist of fate, solar’s success has made it old news. It’s the fastest-growing source of electricity in the world and one of the cheapest. But it’s far from the hot topic it was a decade ago when utility-scale photovoltaics were still an emerging technology. Now that it’s a more mature tool in the climate fight, we take it for granted.

And yet there’s so much more we need to do. To reach net zero by 2050, we likely need to quadruple global solar capacity by 2030, according to projections by BloombergNEF (BNEF). But labor shortages, high material costs and interconnection bottlenecks stand in the way. 

So how do we get there?

In this episode Shayle talks to Jenny Chase, who managed BloombergNEF’s solar insights team for 17 years before leaving the role this month. Every year she tweets a thread of 50 not-always-popular opinions on solar, covering the state of the industry and the challenges it needs to solve. For this episode, Shayle picked the opinions he found most interesting and unpacked them with Jenny. 

They cover Jenny’s opinions on:

• The biggest bottlenecks holding back solar deployment, like labor shortages, high polysilicon prices and grid interconnection backlogs
• Why we don’t need new technology breakthroughs in solar
•  Perovskite and building-integrated photovoltaics 
•  How residential solar and battery salespeople are making up their savings projections
• How the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act could spur an unsustainable boom in solar and hydrogen equipment manufacturing
• Why leading forecasts could be underestimating solar deployment

Recommended Resources:

• Twitter: Jenny Chase’s 2022 opinions-on-solar thread 
• Canary Media: What’s behind solar’s polysilicon shortage — and why it’s not getting better anytime soon
• Canary Media: Perovskites can make solar panels more efficient than silicon alone
• Bloomberg: Solar Outshines Wind to Lead China’s Clean-Energy Transition
• Bloomberg: Solar Growth Estimates for 2050 Are Aggressive, But Not Unrealistic

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 systems.com/">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:

• change-infrastructure.html">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.

Want to build a power plant in the U.S.? Here are three things to know. 

First, connecting a wind farm, utility-scale battery, or other big source of power to the grid means getting in line. A typical project’s wait time has increased from around two years in 2005 to four years in 2020, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

Second, the interconnection queue is a crowded place. In 2020 there were 1.44 terawatts of projects in the queue. That’s more than the U.S.’s current fleet of generation.

Third, dropouts are the norm. Only 25% of projects make it to completion. Projects withdraw from the queue for lots of reasons, but wait times are a big factor. During long waits, negotiations can fall apart and rights can expire, reports Emma Penrod of Utility Dive.

Why the bottleneck and long queues? Lack of transmission is the single biggest factor. We need way more of it to bring power from rural areas with rich wind and solar potential to power-hungry population centers. But NIMBYism and a complex permitting process have slowed the construction of new transmission to a glacial pace. So while congress debates permitting reform, what technologies could help us get more energy on the wires?

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks to Liza Reed, electricity transmission Research manager for climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank in Washington D.C. She’s also a grid fellow at Prime Movers Lab.

Lara and Liza explore ways to expand transmission capacity:

• Replacing steel-reinforced lines with composite-core lines to carry more energy, known in the industry as “reconductoring”
• High-voltage direct current lines capable of sending lots of power long distances (a common solution in China but rare in the U.S.) 
• Running transmission lines underground, known as “undergrounding”
• Building lines along existing rights of way, such as highways
• High temperature superconductors, which involve cooling wires down to carry more power
• Line monitoring technology that analyzes local weather, wind and other factors to detect which lines are cooler than expected, allowing grid operators to send extra power through them
• Improving grid studies that determine what kinds of upgrades are needed for interconnection 
• Federal permitting reform, which might allow more new transmission to be built

Resources:

• Utility Dive: Why the energy transition broke the U.S. interconnection system
• Volts Podcast: Transmission month: everything in one place
• Canary Media: Manchin’s permitting-reform bill splits Dems, pro-renewables groups
• Canary Media: New software can find more room for clean energy on transmission grids
• Canary Media: FERC has a new plan to connect clean energy to the grid more quickly

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Utilities in developing countries are juggling a complex set of problems: How to extend electricity to those who don’t have it; how to deploy large-scale power generation to power economic growth; and how to pursue these goals while decarbonizing. 

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks to Kate Steel, CEO of Nithio, a finance company focused on off-grid clean energy in Africa. Kate and Lara discuss the options for separating economic growth from fossil fuels. And she argues that we have the technology to develop low-carbon electrified economies in developing economies; we just need to deploy it.

Lara and Kate weigh in on: 

• The tension between expanding access to low-cost power and attracting investment in large-scale baseload generation
• Why off-grid solar is often more economically viable than diesel generators for rural electrification
• How canceled power purchase agreements have stymied the development of renewables and how to solve these financing challenges 
• “Reverse” tech transfer from developing countries to developed ones, such as hyper-efficient appliances 
• Options for off-grid power, such as lanterns, microgrids, microhydro, biogas and liquefied petroleum gas canisters.
• How transportation may leapfrog fossil fuels in developing countries with electric motorbikes, buses and cars

Recommended Resources:

• Canary Media: COP26 players pledge funding to shut down coal plants
• Bloomberg: A New Era of Climate Disasters Revives Calls for Climate Reparations
• Canary Media: Expanding solar access in Africa through artificial intelligence
• Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment: Roadmap to Zero-Carbon Electrification of Africa



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.

In this episode, produced in partnership with CohnReznick, we explore the market implications of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The Inflation Reduction Act is an incredibly important win for climate. It puts the U.S. back on the global stage as a serious climate negotiator. It puts the country within reach of a net-zero grid. And it will put hundreds of billions of dollars toward renewables, storage, carbon-capture, and hydrogen.

In reality, it’s a very practical – and very complicated – tax bill. We support clean energy in America through the tax code, and this legislation builds on that framework in a big way.

This episode was produced in partnership with CohnReznick and CohnReznick Capital. 

CohnReznick’s Renewable Energy Industry Practice can help your business move forward by proactively addressing even your most complicated challenges and needs. 

And CohnReznick Capital’s industry-leading investment banking team can help your company break through the dynamic and evolving sustainability sector by simplifying project finance, M&A, capital raising, and restructuring.

Europe’s hydrogen economy is so close to becoming a reality. Billions in public and private dollars are lining up to invest in a wave of newly hydrogen-project-aims-to-decarbonize-europes-industrial-north.html">planned hydrogen facilities. EU policymakers are finalizing new regulations and subsidies. And the region’s energy crisis–sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine–has accelerated the need for alternative energy sources like hydrogen.

But an unexpected twist: The U.S. passed the Inflation Reduction Act, with subsidies for hydrogen production and far looser rules than those under consideration in Europe. Could Europe lose its hydrogen competitiveness?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Gniewomir Flis, an independent hydrogen consultant. Previously he researched hydrogen at Agora Energiewende, a decarbonization think tank, and Energy Revolution Venture, a decarbonization venture capital firm.

Gniewomir explains that some in Europe worry the U.S. might become a more attractive place to invest in hydrogen if the EU’s rules are too strict. This concern throws more complexity into an already difficult policy-making process. It’s causing EU policymakers to fight over proposed rules and investors to delay final decisions to greenlight European projects.

Gniewomir and Shayle discuss questions like:

• What’s the evidence for the concerns about Europe’s competitiveness?
• What counts as renewable hydrogen in the proposed EU rules? They discuss the three key criteria that could be required for subsidies: additionality, temporal correlation and geographic correlation
• Which electrolyzer technology—proton exchange membrane (PEM), alkaline, or solid oxide—is best for which power generation technology, such as solar, gas, and wind?
• How will the proposed rules impact developing countries’ plans to export hydrogen to Europe?
• How do we transport hydrogen? They discuss options, such as metal hydride, ammonia, methanol and liquid (also known as cryogenic) hydrogen.
• Will China ultimately take over electrolyzer manufacturing, like it did for solar photovoltaic manufacturing?

Recommended Resources:

• energiewende.de/en/publications/12-insights-on-hydrogen-publication/">Agora Energiewende: 12 Insights on Hydrogen
• Guidehouse: Facilitating hydrogen imports from non-EU countries
• Florence School of Regulation: Green hydrogen: how grey can it be?
• natural-gas.html">The New York Times: Can This Man Solve Europe’s Energy Conundrum?

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.

So you want to build an offshore wind farm. Are you prepared to manage the marine ecosystem impacts of construction? What about monitoring and protecting underwater electrical cables?

Or maybe you want to decarbonize shipping. Do you know how to trace low-carbon fuel through ports or maintain storage tanks in marine environments? How about managing worker safety on the ocean?

These are the kinds of questions that crop up at the intersection of climatetech and something called bluetech, the range of technologies that touch the oceans. And this marine-based expertise may prove invaluable to climate solutions. 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Alissa Peterson, co-founder and chief executive officer of ahead.com/">SeaAhead, an organization that supports and incubates bluetech companies. They survey a range of technologies, covering topics like:

• Alternative low-carbon fuels for shipping, such as ammonia, methanol and hydrogen
• Alternative proteins, fisheries and kelp
• Oceanic carbon removal, such as ocean alkalinity enhancement and sinking kelp to the bottom of the seabed 
• In the U.S., will big coastal infrastructure, like offshore wind, suffer the same fate as long-distance transmission lines, stalling in an overly strict regulatory environment?

Recommended Resources:

• Canary Media: Zero-emissions cargo shipping catches on in cities and port communities
• Canary Media: Offshore wind installations surged threefold last year
• SeaAhead : Innovation in Offshore Wind Reverse Pitch
• MIT Technology Review: Companies hoping to grow carbon-sucking kelp may be rushing ahead of the science

Catalyst is a 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.

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. 

There’s a buzz right now about paying farmers to trap and store emissions. Soil is a carbon sink, and certain farming practices accelerate carbon capture while others hurt it. 

Enter soil carbon credits to incentivize sequestration through methods like cover cropping, no-till farming and agroforestry. These are practices often included under the umbrella of regenerative agriculture. So what does science say about how well these methods actually lock away carbon?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Eric Slessarev, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he studies soil carbon. 

Eric says there’s a lot we don’t know about how well these practices actually work. There are even more fundamental questions like how much carbon is in the soil. Turns out dirt is pretty complicated.

They cover things like:

• How exactly carbon gets into the soil and why it sticks around.
• The challenges with measuring soil carbon.
• The difference between soil carbon and enhanced weathering.
• How microbes, minerals and the depth of root systems affect storage.
• Specific practices like no-till farming, agroforestry and cover cropping.
• Why our soil carbon models may need a big update.

Resources:

• Canary Media: Carbon storage gets dirty: The movement to sequester CO2 in soils
• International Soil Carbon Network Seminar Series: Towards a Durable Understanding of Soil Carbon as a Tool for Climate Adaptation and Mitigation

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, your comprehensive source for navigating the complex and evolving financial, tax and regulatory landscape of the renewable sector. Visit cohnreznick.com to learn more.

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. 

Depending on which headlines you read, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will either reduction-act-ev-tax-credits-could-hurt-sales.html">hurt U.S. electric vehicle sales by replacing existing tax credits with vehicle-tax-credits.html">complicated new ones or build out a North American battery supply chain and rev up EV sales. So which is it?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, vice president of battery solutions at E-Source, about the key provisions of the IRA’s EV and battery tax credits. Sam explains how the IRA will spur a North American EV battery supply chain in the long run but will also create winners and losers along the way. 

There’s a $30 billion pot of money for various tax credits and limited time to make use of them. Who will get to it first? There are already some early movers.

Sam explains the key provisions:

• The EV components tax credit reduces the cost of EVs whose batteries contain materials assembled in the U.S. or its free-trade partner countries. This includes electrodes, electrolyte components and cells. 
• The strategic minerals tax credit reduces the cost of EVs whose batteries contain minerals mined and processed in the U.S. or its free-trade partner countries. These minerals include lithium, cobalt, and rare earth metals, among others.
• The 45X advanced manufacturing production credit reduces the cost of making batteries in the U.S.
• Certain credits ratchet up the percentage of materials required to qualify over several years. So once an EV model qualifies, it will have to maintain eligibility by getting a larger and larger share of its components and minerals from approved countries.

They also cover which part of the battery industry will benefit more– the EV battery side or the stationary storage side. And Sam explains why he’s paying attention to the Treasury Department’s forthcoming guidance on the tax credits.

Resources:

• bill-electric-vehicles.html">The New York Times: For Electric Vehicle Makers, Winners and Losers in Climate Bill
• Canary Media: Private-sector reactions to the Inflation Reduction Act
• Canary Media: 6 clean energy companies that are ramping up US manufacturing

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. 

Winter is coming. The energy crisis that is afflicting Europe and other parts of the world is worsening as Russia weaponizes natural gas.

This energy crisis has effects across climate tech, and so today we’re bringing you an episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, a podcast from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. On Catalyst, we don’t usually dig so deep into geopolitics and policy, but this crisis has big implications for markets, investment and technology. 

After Russian President Vladimir Putin turned off supply of Russian gas through the Nord Stream pipeline earlier this month, prices across Europe soared – causing severe pain for manufacturers and consumers, and pushing the region closer to recession. European countries are weighing emergency measures, like price caps and rationing.

In addition to the immediate energy crisis, key questions remain about what all of this means for the clean energy transition. The supply of critical materials for clean energy technologies – such as copper, lithium, and cobalt – will also present challenges. A recent report by S&P Global predicted that demand for copper will double by 2035 as a consequence of the energy transition, and it is unclear if the existing supply chains can sustain such an increase. 

How can governments and companies address the energy crisis without sacrificing progress on climate? And how might current and future supply shortages change the geopolitical landscape?

This week, Columbia Energy Exchange host Jason Bordoff talks with Dr. Dan Yergin, an internationally known authority on energy, geopolitics, and economics. He sits on the boards of numerous institutions – including Columbia’s Center of Global Energy Policy.

Dr. Yergin is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.” And his most recent book, “The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations,” illustrates the greatest issues of geopolitics and energy today. 

He is the Vice Chairman of S&P Global, and was the project Chairman for the report, “The Future of Copper: Will the looming supply gap short-circuit the energy transition?”

Jason spoke with Dr. Yergin about the ongoing energy crisis, the supply of critical materials, and the future of energy superpowers.

Resources:

• Simon & Schuster: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
• Penguin Random House: The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> plus.com/">Register here.

Don’t miss our live episode of Climavores in New York City on October 20! Sign up here for a night of live audio and networking with top voices in climate journalism. 

We designed our power plants, refineries, and other energy infrastructure to depend on water. But not just any kind of water—water that’s available at the right quantity, quality, place and time. When water falls outside of this Goldilocks zone, energy systems can unravel, sometimes in unexpected ways. Low water levels drought-economy-climate.html">strain hydroelectric and thermal power production and restrict coal shipments by river. Extreme cold freezes water in risk-texas-natural-gas-supply-system-power-16020457.php">natural gas infrastructure, causing blackouts. Examples abound.

The irony is that the energy system fuels climate change, which in turn fuels water problems for the energy system. 

So how do we address these vulnerabilities as we decarbonize? And how can we build a resilient water-energy system in an increasingly chaotic climate?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Michael Webber, author of Thirst for Power: Energy, Water and Human Survival. Michael is a professor of energy resources at the University of Texas-Austin and chief technology officer at Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner. 

They cover topics like:

• The surprising places we use water in energy, like extracting minerals and natural gas, growing crops for biofuels and sequestering carbon
• The ways energy improves the quantity and quality of water, allowing us to move water longer distances, reach deeper wells and desalinate water
• How to avoid exacerbating water problems as we decarbonize
• Whether cheap, abundant electricity from nuclear fusion will power wide-spread desalination
• Why the data on water systems is so scarce compared to energy systems
• How prescient the new Mad Max water-war movies are

Resources:

• Yale University Press: Thirst for Power: Energy, Water and Human Survival
• heat-energy.html">The New York Times: Europe’s Scorching Summer Puts Unexpected Strain on Energy Supply
• drought-economy-climate.html">The New York Times: China’s Record Drought Is Drying Rivers and Feeding Its Coal Habit

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Drill down far enough anywhere in the world and you reach temperatures hot enough to generate firm, reliable zero-emission electricity. That’s the hope for new geothermal technologies that could scale the industry beyond well-known geothermal hot spots like Iceland.

But first the industry needs to overcome major challenges in financing and technology. It has also to deal with the public opinion around the oil and gas industry, which may be an essential partner in scaling geothermal because of its overlapping expertise in drilling and underground exploration.

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks with Jamie Beard, executive director of Project Innerspace, a non-profit focused on expanding the use of geothermal energy globally. 

Current geothermal technology relies on naturally occurring underground hot spots, common in places like Iceland and the western U.S.. But an approach called enhanced geothermal systems or “hot, dry rock,” would make geothermal available around the world, potentially adding hundreds of gigawatts to current geothermal capacity.

Lara and Jamie discuss major questions facing the geothermal industry, like:

• How and where to drill for consistent hot temperatures? 
• How long before a well is depleted of heat-carrying capacity? 
• What sort of surveying and information do funders need to deal with exploration risks? 
• How can the industry take advantage of the co-benefits of geothermal drilling, such as lithium extraction, carbon sequestration and waste heat?
• What working fluids, like water or critical CO2, are appropriate for a given project?
• How viable are geothermal-source heat pumps and how do they compare to air-source heat pumps?
• What are the potential environmental impacts of geothermal?
• What role should the oil and gas industry play in scaling this zero-emission technology?

Resources:

• Canary Media: Advanced geothermal heats up with $138M round for startup Fervo Energy
• Department of Energy: DOE Launches New Energy Earthshot to Slash the Cost of Geothermal Power

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Soil is a massive carbon sink that’s stored away emissions for centuries. But years of destructive farming practices have released much of this carbon. Could incentivizing farmers help restore—and expand—soil’s carbon-carrying capacity? 

In theory, yes. But the market for soil carbon credits—literally paying farmers to improve their practices—needs serious reform.  

In this episode, Shayle talks with Freya Chay, program manager for carbon removal at CarbonPlan. The fundamental problem is that the existing carbon credits don’t do what they say they will do: permanently lock away additional carbon. Freya and Shayle survey the big challenges of the market and explore potential fixes, covering questions like:

• How do we measure—using models, samplings and satellites—the amount of carbon in a plot of soil?
• What tools do we have to make sure the carbon will stay in the ground, such as buffer pools and ton-year accounting?
• The additionality question: Without the credit, would the carbon have been captured anyway? Or would it have remained locked away anyway?
• What role could third-party grading systems play in differentiating high-quality credits from low-quality ones?

Resources:

• CarbonPlan: A buyer’s guide to soil carbon offsets
• CarbonPlan: Unpacking ton-year accounting
• Canary Media: Carbon storage gets dirty: The movement to sequester CO2 in soils
• Sylvera: Carbon Credit Ratings: Frameworks & Processes White Paper

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

In aviation, there’s a crowd of low-carbon technologies vying for a slice of the market. On one hand, the long-haul portion of the market will likely rely on sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) which still emit greenhouse gasses but could be offset to net-zero. On the other hand, there’s a big share of air traffic that could go completely zero-emissions with the help of batteries and hydrogen. 

So how soon could you book a ticket on a zero-emissions flight? And what routes are possible?

In this episode, Shayle talks with Jayant Mukhopadhaya, a researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). Jayant recently authored two reports on electric aircraft and hydrogen aircraft. Shayle and Jayant dig in on some tough questions: 

• Can electric aircraft take incremental steps into the market given the limitations of current battery energy densities? Or do they need a technology breakthrough?
• How do hydrogen fuel cell, compressed hydrogen combustion, and liquid hydrogen combustion compare?
• How do airports need to prepare for hydrogen fueling? Hint: Terminal-sized upgrades.

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Resources:

• Canary Media: Can battery-powered airplanes decarbonize air travel? 
• Canary Media: How do we clean up air travel? Fuel from fast-food grease is just the start
• Bloomberg (video): Hydrogen May Be the Jet Fuel of the Future
• Catalyst: A bumpy ride toward decarbonizing aviation

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Electric vehicles (EVs) are moving quickly toward mass adoption. So how do we make sure that charging infrastructure keeps up?

The people who own, operate and install chargers have some big questions to answer: 

• Can public chargers run a profit, and how do business models need to change to accelerate deployment?
• Why is it so hard to repair broken stations?
• Does it matter where we install new ones?
• When will chargers be as ubiquitous and easy to use as gas stations?

In this episode, Shayle digs into these questions with colleague Cassie Bowe, partner at the venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners, where she focuses on mobility. Cassie outlines the trajectory of charger deployment over the years, comparing charger accessibility in the U.S, China and Europe. 

Shayle and Cassie cover smart charging (also known as V1G) and V2G, as well as the commodification of charging hardware. Plus, how soon we might see wireless charging and why Shayle doesn’t have an EV yet. 

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> plus.com/">Register here.

The change-deal-manchin.html">$369 billion climate and tax bill from Sen. Joe Manchin III and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer caught everyone by surprise. Democrats had abandoned their climate legislation last month after Manchin, a must-have vote for Democrats, signaled his opposition to it.

But late last week Manchin and Schumer announced they had revived the deal under a new name – The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. If passed, it would be the most ambitious climate action in U.S. history.

And inflation-reduction-act.html">now with support from another key swing vote, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the bill is an important step closer to passage.

So what would the bill do?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins. Jesse leads the REPEAT Project, which analyzed the effects of the bill in a 08-04.pdf">report released today. Overall, the bill would make clean energy cheaper and build up the capacity of climatetech industries in the U.S. and its allies across multiple sectors of the economy, including power, transportation, heavy industry and buildings. 

Shayle and Jesse walk through the key provisions in the proposed legislation and their predicted impacts, including:

• Hundreds of new gigawatts of solar and wind capacity, plus new technology-neutral tax credits to support other technologies such as advanced nuclear
• Building up a North American supply chain for electric vehicles (EVs)
• Reducing the costs of EVs, sustainable aviation fuels, energy storage, hydrogen and more
• Increased energy security for medium- and low-income households, such as installing heat pumps and insulation

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

We're bringing you something different today. It's an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, called Watt It Takes hosted by Emily Kirsch of Powerhouse Ventures. 

We talk a lot on Catalyst about how to finance and build climatetech. What we don’t always get into are the personal stories of people who are trying to do that work.

That’s exactly what Watt It Takes does. The show tells the stories of founders who are building a zero-carbon world — their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs.

This episode is about Neha Palmer, CEO of TeraWatt Infrastructure, which builds large-scale electric vehicle charging hubs for medium and heavy transport.

Tens of millions of delivery vans and semi trucks move around the clock to keep supply chains humming. These medium- and heavy-duty vehicles make up more than 25 percent of transportation emissions in the US — even though they only make up 10 percent of all vehicles on the road.

We need to electrify medium and heavy-duty vehicles to meet our climate goals. But, how do we build and operate the charging infrastructure to power them?

That charging network is exactly what TeraWatt Infrastructure is building.

TeraWatt develops, owns, and manages charging infrastructure for these large vehicles. The company integrates hardware, software, and grid services along with on-site chargers. TerraWatt has a growing portfolio of land in strategic locations across the country that enables it to build and operate that charging infrastructure.

TeraWatt brings together a team of experts from data centers, transportation logistics, and electric cars. The more complex the high-powered charging needs, the better suited TeraWatt is for the task.

Watt It Takes host Emily Kirsch sat down with Neha to learn what it takes to electrify a sector with such massive energy demand. They talked about founding TeraWatt after Neha left Google, where she was a key figure in that company's ambitious renewable energy strategy. And they discuss the unique demands of heavy-duty transportation.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

If you like the show, subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

If there were a holy grail of electric vehicle batteries, it would be low-weight, long-range, and fast-charging. It would last a million miles and cost less than anything produced today.

So in the booming EV battery market, what kind of battery will check all those boxes? Who will invent it? And do we really need all those features in one battery in the first place?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, vice president of battery solutions at E-Source. They trace the history of the two major competing lithium-ion chemistries: Lithium Iron (or ferrous) Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC).

Sam and Shayle also discuss the factors that shaped this competition, like China, Tesla, and access to capital. They discuss new partnerships between battery manufacturers and automakers, including LG and GM, Samsung SDI and Stellantis, ACC and Mercedes

And they cover questions like:

• Who decides which chemistries to develop — automakers or battery part manufacturers? 
• Will a small number of chemistries dominate or will there be a rapid diversification of battery chemistries to meet different needs?
• Is fast charging a nice-to-have or need-to-have?
• Will the rising costs of battery materials, especially lithium, slow the adoption of EVs? 

Plus, Sam explains why he is no longer bearish on vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging.

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

In climatetech, the ‘valley of death’ describes the lack of capital for newer solutions, especially those that mainstream investors view as unproven. The climate tech world is full of technologies that would be fantastic tools for fighting the climate crisis, if only they could cross this valley of death and scale.

Scott Jacobs co-founded Generate Capital in 2014 to help address this problem. In this episode Shayle talks to Scott about how to successfully finance first-of-a-kind climatetech. They cover technologies like electric bus leasing, anaerobic digesters, microgrids and EV fleet charging infrastructure.

And they dig in on:

• Winning over investors who don't have the time to understand complex technologies or business models
• The kinds of support, beyond capital, that first-of-a-kind technologies need from investors 
• Navigating the rising cost of capital and supply chain problems
• When exactly technologies have proven themselves in the eyes of investors

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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

On the Carbon Copy podcast this week:

It’s been over three months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent shockwaves into global oil markets, causing supply constraints and skyrocketing prices. The conflict has complicated the flow of energy at a time when supply chains were already jumbled up because of Covid.

But it’s not just oil. The war is leaving its mark on all kinds of commodities, including the global supplies of minerals and metals. Geopolitical shifts are causing big spikes in the prices of lithium and nickel, two key components of the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars.

However, this supply mess could actually be boosting a positive trend in the battery space: recycling. 

Batteries are a pillar of the zero-carbon economy, but are they truly sustainable? And will technical advancements and evolving geopolitical alliances alter the battery-based economy for the better?

Our guest is Julian Spector, a senior reporter with Canary Media. Check out his latest report on five exciting startups tackling battery recycling from different angles. And check out all of Canary’s Recycling Renewables special coverage.

The Carbon Copy 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.

Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

It’s shark week! Or ‘spark’ week? Today we’re bringing you an episode of How to Save a Planet, in which Shayle steps into the shoes of a Shark Tank-style judge.

This episode is all about (drum-roll please): Storage!

...Exciting, right? Ok, we’ll prove it to you. Each day, more and more of our electricity comes from intermittent renewables like wind and solar. To balance out our electric grid in the future, we’ll need new ways of storing extra energy, so we can still turn on our lights when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. This week, with help from Dr. Leah Stokes and Shayle Kann, we explore the wild world of energy storage, from a hidden underground lair to a piping hot thermos full of poison. And did we mention it’s a gameshow?

Guests

• Dr. Leah Stokes, Professor of Climate and Energy Policy at University of California, Santa Barbara
• Shayle Kann, Climate Tech Investor at Energy Impact Partners
• Len Greene, Director of Government Affairs and Communications, FirstLight Power
• Curtis VanWalleghem, CEO of Hydrostor
• Dr. Cristina Prieto, Professor of Engineering at the University of Seville

Calls to Action

• Learn more about energy storage
• Pumped Hydro
• Compressed Air
• Molten Salts
• And for a really wild one: check out Energy Vault
• Learn more about our electric grid, with our episodes How We Got our Grid and How We Get a Better One and Party Like It’s 2035
• We still want to see your climate Venn diagrams! For inspiration, check out ClimateVenn.info. Post your diagram to Instagram and tag us at @how2saveaplanet. We’ll be reposting examples listeners share with us.

Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

This episode of How to Save a Planet was produced by Daniel Ackerman. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Kendra Pierre-Louis, Rachel Waldholz and Anna Ladd. Our supervising producer is Matthew Shilts. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our intern is Janae Morris. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard with original music from Emma Munger. Our fact checker for this episode was James Gaines.

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.



Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15.plus.com/"> Register here.

Within the climate tech world, technology hype is all over the map. In this episode, Lara Pierpoint, director of climate at Actuate, and Stephen Lacey, host of The Carbon Copy and executive producer of Catalyst, join Shayle for a game of “buy sell hold.” They take bets on which technologies are either overhyped, underhyped or just right.

They cover a range of topics, including:

• Advanced nuclear, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s rejection of Oklo’s reactor designs and shifting opinions around nuclear
• Whether the concern around hydrogen leakage and its greenhouse effect is overblown
• Heat pumps, including the Biden administration’s efforts to boost production with the National Defense Production Act and a new report on how a proposed federal program to incentivize heat pumps could save Americans over $27 billion
• Non-lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage, which may see an opening in the market as lithium-ion batteries become expensive due to rising commodity prices and backedup supply chains.
• The state of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies and fleet electrification
• Battery recycling, which is picking up speed due to concerns about the environmental impact of production and a shortage of materials
• Whether web3- and crypto-climate startups are solving the right problem

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arca​dia​.com/​c​a​t​alyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

In some climate circles, solar geoengineering is akin to a swear word. Also known as solar radiation modification (SRM), it means deliberately modifying the earth’s atmosphere to reflect solar radiation. It provokes forceful pushback, because it’s unclear how it would affect the earth’s agriculture, ozone layer and ecosystems.

But it’s been change-geoengineering.html?referringSource=articleShare">attracting interest because it’s clear it would do one thing well: cool the planet.

If we’re not moving fast enough on emissions reductions and carbon removal to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, could solar geoengineering, despite its risks, be less dangerous than a hotter world?

In this episode, Shayle talks to visioni.github.io/">Dan Visioni, a climate modeler who studies solar geoengineering at Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

They discuss what solar geoengineering might look like in the real world. 

Stratospheric sulfate injections would mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo in 1991, which cooled the planet by 0.5 degrees Celsius in the following year. 

Marine cloud brightening would use salt aerosols to brighten a type of cloud that reflects solar radiation, a phenomenon already created by ocean-going ships.

They also cover cirrus cloud thinning and—straight out of a sci-fi movie—space mirrors.

They explore key questions, such as:

• What do we know about the potential effects on ozone, precipitation and ecosystems? What do we need to research and what could we learn by testing?
• Which could scale faster—Carbon dioxide removal or solar geoengineering? 
• Solar geoengineering could cost a tiny fraction of the amount required to scale up CDR. Does that mean it could buy us time to draw down emissions more cheaply? Or does the relative affordability enable a rogue actor to deploy it without international collaboration?
• And who gets to decide whether the world deploys solar geoengineering? Whose hand is on the thermostat, so to speak?

Links:

• Nobel prize winner Paul Crutzen’s influential 2006 paper on stratospheric sulfur injection
• A provocative change-geoengineering.html">New York Times Op-Ed promoting geoengineering from David Keith, professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard who studies geoengineering

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arca​dia​.com/​c​a​t​alyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

We're presenting a trailer for a new show from Post Script Media, called Climavores.

Climavores is a show for eaters who don’t want to cook the planet. Each week, journalists Tamar Haspel and Mike Grunwald explore the complicated, confusing, and surprising relationship between food and the environment. 

Episodes drop on June 21. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more. And you can engineer it to capture extra carbon dioxide and sequester it underground or at the bottom of the ocean. 

The catch: The world has a finite capacity for biomass production, so every end use competes with another. If done improperly, these end uses could also compete with food production for arable land already in tight supply.

So which decarbonization solutions will get a slice of the biomass pie? Which ones should?

In this episode, Shayle talks to direct.com/team/julio-friedmann/">Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at direct.com/">Carbon Direct. They cover the sources of biomass, everything from municipal solid waste to kelp.

They also survey the potential end-uses, such as incineration to generate power, gasification to make hydrogen, and pyrolyzation to make biochar, as well as fuel production in a Fischer-Tropsch process. 

In a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Julio and his co-authors propose a new term called biomass carbon removal and storage, or ‘BiCRS’, as a way to describe capturing carbon in biomass and then sequestering it. Startups Charm Industrial and Running Tide are pursuing this approach. Julio and his co-authors think of BiCRS as an alternative pathway to bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS). 

They then zoom in on a promising source of biomass: waste. Example projects include a ski hill built on an incinerator in Copenhagen and a planned waste-to-hydrogen plant in Lancaster, California. 

Shayle and Julio also dig into questions like:

• How to procure and transport biomass, especially biowaste, at scale? 
• How to avoid eco-colonialism, i.e. when wealthy countries exploit the resources of poorer countries to grow biomass without meaningful consent?
• If everyone wants it, when is biowaste no longer waste? And when there’s a shortage of waste—like corn stover, for example—what’s the risk of turning to raw feedstocks, like corn?
• How to pickle trees? (yes, you read that right)

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arca​dia​.com/​c​a​t​alyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

There’s a bottleneck in climate tech that we don’t talk about enough: land availability. It’s a physical resource you need to support biomass, renewables, mineral mining, and other essential tools of decarbonization. So how much is enough, and where do we need it?

In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane, managing director of research at Energy Impact Partners. Andy argues that land—geography, landscape and the rights to land—will be a common constraint among climatetech solutions as we reach gigaton-scale reductions of emissions.

Andy and Shayle survey the industries where the availability of land could play a critical role, exploring questions like:

• How much land will we need for solar and wind power in deep decarbonization scenarios like the Net Zero America Study, and where? How does that amount of land change depending on siting, permitting and regulatory challenges of building transmission?
• What about the “pores” of underground space needed for carbon sequestration and hydrogen storage? For technologies that require both land for renewables and underground storage for carbon sequestration, like Direct Air Capture, where do those locations overlap?
• Could we see a run on waste biomass, given the tight supply of arable land suitable for producing new biomass? 
• Where will access to land constrain supply of metals needed for batteries and infrastructure?

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arca​dia​.com/​c​a​t​alyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

Consumer energy data is vital to the energy transition, especially distributed energy resources (DERs). For example, a rooftop solar company needs consumer energy data to analyze bill savings from a potential solar installation. An electric vehicle (EV) charging company needs it to offer a customer special rates on EV charging.

But that data has long been incredibly difficult to access – available only in PDFs and hard-to-access utility databases – often coming in very different formats and standards.

And yet companies are trying to overcome these challenges by bringing that data into easy-to-use interfaces. Arcadia is one such company. Earlier this month it raised $200 million, an investment that valued the company at $1.5 billion. Yesterday, Arcadia purchased commercial energy-data provider Urjanet. 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Arcadia CEO Kiran Bhatraju about how to build a business around consumer energy data and how that data could become a goldmine for DER providers. 

A few important disclosures: Shayle’s firm Energy Impact Partners (EIP) is an investor in Arcadia. EIP led the company's Series A and has invested in every round since. Arcadia is a sponsor of this podcast. Kiran is also a friend of Shayle’s, and Shayle is an Arcadia customer.

Shayle and Kiran discuss key questions about consumer data, such as:

• What are the most valuable data points? Kiran and Shayle talk about grid carbon intensity, on-time bill payments and more.
• What level of fidelity do we need from the data? Do we need precise real-time data to prove savings to customers and support higher DER sales, or will high-level estimates suffice?
• Do we need an ever-expanding pool of smart devices, or can we unlock most of the value with a few key devices, such as a hot water heater, heat pump and EV charger?
• How do you develop a moat that protects you from competitors in the consumer data space?
• What could the future of the DER market look like? Kiran argues that DER providers will shift from selling widgets to selling platforms and packages as whole-home managers.

Plus, Shayle reveals the smartest business idea that he ever turned into reality.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee​.net/join.

Stock markets are in decline. Inflation is on the rise. Interest rates are up. Private tech companies are laying off workers. 

Is this the long-awaited market correction that never quite materialized during the bull market of the last 13 years?

And what does it mean for climate tech? 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Saloni Multani, a partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and former chief financial officer for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. 

Shayle and Saloni place the current moment in historical context. They cover the recent wave of low-cost capital that poured into climate tech and the low interest rates that gave renewables an advantage over fossil-fuel investments. 

And they dive into some pressing questions like:

• Are the broader market impacts on climate tech delayed? Or is climate tech somehow more insulated than general tech companies?
• The green premium question: Will a downturn in the market jeopardize investments in more expensive but lower-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels, such as airlines’ recent purchases of Sustainable Aviation Fuels, or SAFs?
• How should climate tech investors rethink their strategies? What should entrepreneurs expect in the coming years?

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

We’re reversing roles today by taking listener questions for our host, Shayle Kann. He’s usually the one interviewing our guests, but he also has expertise (and maybe a few hot takes) to share. He leads a $350 million fund that invests in early-stage climate startups, so he spends most of his time trying to figure out which technologies and businesses will help us decarbonize as quickly as possible.

GreenBiz senior energy analyst Sarah Golden joins the show to ask Shayle your questions and dissect the answers with him. 

They cover:

• The causes of rising solar costs and other troubles in the solar industry 
• The biggest bottlenecks in climate tech
• The the startups that are trying to reduce the carbon intensity of fertilizing crops amid a global fertilizer crisis
• The overhyped hate for crypto mining 
• The race between synthetic fuels (aka synfuels) and biofuels
• What happens to the pace of deployment for Direct Air Capture if power grids are slower to decarbonize than expected?

Plus: Shayle’s owl tattoo and the drinking game Shayle’s wife made up for whenever he begins listing things. 

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is having a moment. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the world cannot meet the targets of the Paris Agreement without removing hundreds of gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere.

Big companies like Alphabet, Stripe and others have formed the Frontier Fund, a nearly $1 billion joint-effort to jump-start the market to purchase CDR offsets. Elon Musk is even sponsoring a $100 million X-Prize focused on it.

We’re not talking about point-source carbon capture and storage, often called CCS. And we’re not just talking about Direct Air Capture or planting trees, the most well-known forms of CDR. Carbon Dioxide Removal also includes technologies involving kelp, bamboo, cement, mangroves, biochar, and others. 

In this episode, Shayle explores CDR with Ryan Orbuch, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital who leads the firm’s carbon-removal work. Ryan helped to start Stripe’s carbon removal procurement program and has been involved in Stripe's nearly $1 billion Frontier Fund. 

Shayle and Ryan cover key questions around CDR, like:

• What are the important characteristics of a carbon-removal technology? What roles do permanence and additionality play?
• Will investments in removal come at the expense of reducing emissions?
• Will CDR become a commodity market?

Shayle also shares his experience with the first wave of carbon offsets, and the challenges that undermined those efforts. Ryan talks about separating out the cost of measurement and verification from the costs of removal, as well as why we should be thinking about radiative forcing more holistically, and not just carbon removal alone.

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

A massive green hydrogen project in Utah has won a $504.4 million conditional loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. The project, called delta.com/">Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES), will generate hydrogen from renewables and store it deep underground in what’s called a salt dome. ACES will use that stored hydrogen to generate electricity in a hybrid power plant, running on both natural gas and hydrogen.

ACES is one of the many planned hydrogen hubs in the U.S., and once completed it would be one of the largest in the country. The loan will finance an initial 220 megawatts of hydrogen production and 300 gigawatt hours of storage.

What did it take to put this deal together, and what does it say about the future of hydrogen hubs more broadly?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) about the project. The LPO is the government agency behind the conditional loan guarantee.

Shayle and Jigar talk about what made this particular project attractive to the LPO. They talk about why the salt dome storage was essential to making the project work, and the other uses for hydrogen beyond power, such as a feedstock for ammonia production and other heavy industries. They also break down the difficulties in transporting hydrogen and the need to site hydrogen production near consumption.

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

The metals used to make batteries are in hot demand. In 2021, the price of one form of lithium skyrocketed by over 400%. Automakers are racing to lock up supply deals for key minerals as they roll out new electric-vehicle models. And the market value of companies with mining assets, or new technologies to unlock them, has skyrocketed.

What’s behind this scramble for metals and what does it mean for the energy transition? 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Kurt House, chief executive officer and co-founder of KoBold Metals. Kobold uses artificial intelligence to discover and characterize new sources of key battery metals. 

Kurt and Shayle survey five key materials of the energy transition — lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt and rare earth metals. They compare the roles of each one in different types of batteries and discuss how the changing battery cell chemistries are shaping metal markets. Kurt explains the different factors shaping supply, including recycling, new mineral discoveries and shifting geopolitics.

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Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

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Conventional livestock agriculture, especially beef production, is a huge climate problem. It makes up 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

But there’s good news: alternative proteins are hot. Brands like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat rely on alternative proteins to replicate the taste and texture of conventional meat and dairy – but with drastically less carbon pollution.

Alternative proteins are starting to show up in fast food, fine dining and grocery stores. They’re garnering big-time investment, and they have the potential to shake up the conventional livestock industry. 

But the term alternative proteins includes a smorgasbord of technologies. What are they and how do they work? And where do we need research and development?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Liz Specht, vice president of science and technology at the Good Food Institute. Liz explains the three main pillars of alternative protein technology – plant-based proteins, microbial fermentation and cultivated (or lab-grown) meat. Shayle and Liz discuss the technical bottlenecks to production, like addressing the global shortage of bioreactors, developing new crops and deriving new cell lines. And they talk about designing alternative proteins that are tastier and healthier than their conventional counterparts. Plus, Liz recommends her favorite alternative meat to try this weekend. 

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

We want to hear from you! Take our quick survey for a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. This will help us bring you more relevant content.

Support strong climate journalism! Donate to Canary Media to celebrate its one-year anniversary.

After a string of relatively high profile failures and cost overruns, point source carbon capture and storage (CCS) – that is, capturing carbon dioxide directly from flue stacks at industrial and power generation facilities – fell into disrepute.

Many projects were shelved. And yet, in just the first nine months of 2021 the global capacity of planned CCS projects grew 50% to 111 million tons, which would triple the current operating capacity in the world.

So why the recovery? And what might happen this time?

In this episode Shayle talks to Chris Bataille, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, a professor at Simon Fraser University and a lead author on the industry chapter of the IPCC report that just came out this week. 

Chris and Shayle talk about the state of CCS technology, the reasons for past failures, and the applications where it could work, namely chemicals, cement and certain power plants.

They examine the bottlenecks in deep saline aquifers and the capacity of these aquifers to absorb carbon dioxide. They also discuss the role of carbon capture and utilization (CCU), which could both improve the economics of CCS and displace more carbon-intensive fossil fuel extraction. 

And: Will CCS lead to unnecessary emissions? They discuss upstream methane leakage and whether CCS enables polluters. 

Catalyst is supported by Advanced Energy Economy. AEE is on the front lines of transforming policy that accelerates the move to 100 percent clean energy and electrified transportation in America. To learn how your business can play a key role in transforming policy and expanding markets, visit aee.net/join.

Catalyst is brought to you by Arcadia. Arcadia allows innovators, businesses and communities to break the fossil fuel monopoly through its technology platform, Arc. Join Arcadia’s mission and find out how you or your business can help turn a fully decarbonized grid into a reality at arcadia.com/catalyst.

We want to hear from you! Take our quick survey for a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. This will help us bring you more relevant content.

Europe imports about 45% of its natural gas from Russia. As the conflict in Ukraine escalates, pressure is mounting for Europe to wean itself off Russian energy as quickly as possible. European sanctions against Russia have excluded the energy trade, meaning that European purchases of oil and gas – which fund about 40% of Russia’s federal budget – are in effect funding the Russian war effort in Ukraine.

So how could Europe eliminate the import of Russian fossil fuels?

In this episode Shayle talks to Princeton energy professor Jesse Jenkins about how to do it. The pledges-to-cut-russian-gas-imports-by-two-thirds-before-next-winter.html">EU’s current plan is to cut its import of Russian gas by two thirds by the end of the year. Jesse’s energy modeling team is working on a plan to cut 100% of Russian energy imports by October 1.

Shayle and Jesse explore the immediate impact of the war in Ukraine on energy markets and the ripple effects on other markets like fertilizer, food and carbon markets. 

Then they discuss the tools Europe and its allies have at their disposal in the short term, such as switching from gas to coal, ramping up heat pump installations and extending the operation of nuclear plants. They also examine a possible path for the US – decreasing domestic use of fossil fuels while increasing exports of coal and liquid natural gas to Europe. 

Finally: How could this rapid shift in Europe accelerate the energy transition in the long term?

We want to hear from you! Take our quick survey for a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. This will help us bring you more relevant content.

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 anten​na​group​.com to learn more.

Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

Carbon markets of all types – avoidance, removal, voluntary, compliance – are hot. Startups are sprouting up, looking to develop, broker and verify new kinds of credits. More than a decade ago there was a similar flurry of excitement around offsets, followed by a big crash in carbon markets. Experts blamed the Great Recession, but also a lack of trust and transparency in the offsets themselves.

Will this time be different? 

In this episode, Shayle talks about what’s changed with Nat Bullard, chief content officer at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. They review the persistent oversupply and trust issues in voluntary markets, and then examine the tech stack that could address them, such as web3, blockchain and regenerative finance, or ReFi. They also take a look at the new focus on removal, which is easier to verify and track than avoidance. 

Also in the episode: What could carbon market prices look like in 2050? Will large financial institutions climate-disclosure-rule.html">or new regulations spur companies to adopt transparent carbon accounting practices? 

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 anten​na​group​.com to learn more.

Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

In the 90s batteries powered your camcorder and boombox. Then your phone. Now they’re running your electric vehicle (EV), and in some cases, even your house. 

At what scale will batteries meaningfully reduce greenhouse gas emissions? We may be nearing an inflection point with electric vehicle batteries, but we’re nowhere near as close with grid storage technologies. What’s it going to take to get there?  

Guest host Lara Pierpoint explores this question with battery expert – David Schroeder, chief technology officer of Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm focused on storage.

They talk about David’s two least favorite phrases in the battery world: “range anxiety” and “long duration.” They also survey different applications for storage and whether there’s a holy grail technology that can satisfy that variety of demands. . 

Then, they zoom in on lithium-ion technology, the workhorse of EVs and storage. They cover safety, recalls, supply chains, and why lithium ion is so expensive for grid applications. But David explains why he’s optimistic that declining lithium-ion costs will fall even further.

They also discuss recycling, flow batteries, thermal storage, and mechanical storage by lifting and lowering heavy blocks of concrete. Oh, and nuclear watches.

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 anten​na​group​.com to learn more.

Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

For nearly two decades, the terms "smart grid" and "grid edge" have been used to define the digital layer of the electricity system that can help integrate more rooftop solar panels, EVs, smart meters, and home batteries to avoid outages and save customers money.

But even with massive increases in computing power, utilities are still lagging in technology to communicate with DERs (also known as grid-edge assets) and the computing power to crunch all that data.

In this episode, what can the grid learn from the internet?

Guest host Lara Pierpoints talks to a person deep in both worlds. Astrid Atkinson is a former senior Google engineer who specialized in distributed networks. She’s now founder and CEO at the grid software company Camus.

Lara and Astrid examine where the grid still needs a digital upgrade. They also discuss concerns about giving utilities access to the technology to communicate with DERs and control over consumers’ devices.

Plus, Astrid and Lara also cover FERC Order 2222, the incentives that allow DERs to play in electricity markets, and the under-appreciated role of electricity co-ops in testing out new grid-edge technologies. 

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 antenna​group​.com to learn more.

Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

It may not get the same attention as higher-profile sectors, but cooling accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gasses emissions. That's more than even aviation or shipping.

Demand for cooling is expected to triple by 2050. In places where global warming is triggering intense heat waves, cooling has become a matter of life and death. 

And yet, cleaner, more-efficient air conditioning technology exists. Why aren’t we using it? And how do we make it affordable and widely available?

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint talks with Jessy Rivest, vice president and general manager of the Cleantech program at Xerox PARC, where she develops and commercializes new cooling technologies.

Lara and Jessy examine the two key technologies inside an air conditioner. The first is the cooling itself, a sophisticated process involving refrigerants. The second is humidity control, an energy-intensive process that Jessy thinks is ripe for an upgrade.

Jessy also talks about the challenges of higher upfront costs associated with more efficient cooling options, and how incentives like the Global Cooling Prize are addressing them. She points out market opportunities like cooling-as-a-service and rebates from utilities to help avoid grid blackouts. And they dig into refrigerants, new types of dessicants, heat pumps and even ice. 

Lara and Jessy also discuss ventilation and air quality technologies that intersect with health, a key consideration during the pandemic and wildfire season.

And Lara talks about turtles and sartorial approaches to manage that enduring office debate: How cold should it be in the building?

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 anten​na​group​.com to learn more.

Catalyst is supported by Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world — with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nex​track​er​.com/​s​u​s​t​a​i​n​a​b​ility to learn more.

Traditional nuclear power is bogged down by cost overruns and concerns about safety and waste. But does it have to be that way? Could we deploy scaleable reactors that are cheaper, safer, and that produce less waste? Advanced nuclear startups in the U.S. certainly think so. 

In this episode, guest host Lara Pierpoint speaks with Jake DeWitte, co-founder and CEO of Oklo, one of many advanced nuclear companies that have emerged in recent years.

Lara and Jake survey the polarized landscape of nuclear development, with many countries shutting down plants and others planning to open new ones. They discuss the main problems with traditional nuclear, and examine some new ways companies are attempting to solve them. 

They focus on the technologies that Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and microreactors could use, including liquid metal, liquid salt, and gas-cooled options, as well as fast reactors. They also talk about nuclear waste recycling, safer self-cooling designs, and nuclear direct heating.

Lara asks: Can advanced nuclear reactors scale in time to make a dent in global emissions? Jake says, in the medium term, yes. To get there, he says we need to build reactors like we build cars, planes, and wind turbines: by simplifying designs, pre-fabricating modules and taking advantage of existing supply chains. This modular approach could open up new business models, like nuclear as a service, and new financing options, like the power purchase agreements common in renewable energy. 

But how will regulators respond? Just recently the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo’s application to build and operate the company’s Aurora compact fast reactor in Idaho. Lara and Jake break down the decision and what it means for the future of advanced nuclear in the US. 

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

We buy insurance for everything – our cars, our houses, our health. But climate tech insurance? That’s a new one.  

When Jeff McAulay was working in solar, he discovered one major roadblock to scaling up climate tech. Solar developers didn’t have the right kind of insurance to cover their risks. So Jeff co-founded Energetic Insurance.  

Turns out, insurance solves problems beyond solar. Jeff says there are unaddressed risks associated with many new climate technologies that can prevent developers from accessing affordable capital. In essence, Jeff sees insurance as part of the larger capital stack, alongside better-understood tools like venture capital and debt.

In this episode, guest co-host Lara Pierpoint speaks with Jeff about applications in heat pumps, energy-risk-announces-collaboration-with-markel-to-support-dramatic-growth-of-bloom-energy-fuel-cell-installations-301464097.html">fuel cells, geothermal, advanced nuclear and more. They also discuss the limits of private insurance, and the role governments can play in addressing uncertainty, technological complexity and regulatory hurdles. 

They also cover moral hazard and how insurance companies could change the market. Will insurance companies continue to offer catastrophic insurance in wildfire-prone areas, or coastal areas prone to hurricanes? Will they continue to insure coal mines and coal-fired power plants?

And Lara asks: Will insurance companies be able to adapt their models to the changing risks of climate change?

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

This week, we're featuring an episode of The Carbon Copy.

Batteries are everywhere. In our electronics, our power tools, our electric grid, and in our cars. And almost all those batteries use a lithium-ion chemistry.

The Imperial Valley in southern California is home to the Salton Sea, a land-locked body of water that contains vast reserves of lithium. California Governor Gavin Newsom called the region the "Saudi Arabia of Lithium." If mined, it could completely reshape the global supply chain.

This week on The Carbon Copy: California has ambitious plans to fuel the global EV boom with the Salton Sea’s lithium. But will the people who need it most get left behind?

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

There’s momentum building for electrification. But when will electrification take off as a mainstream movement? And what companies can provide electrification solutions to consumers at scale?

One strong candidate is Sunrun. It’s the leading residential solar company in the U.S., after SolarCity years ago, and acquiring its next-biggest competitor Vivint solar more recently.

Sunrun has also become a major player in residential batteries. And it started to push its way into the residential EV charging game via a partnership with Ford around the electric F-150.

Mary Powell recently became CEO of Sunrun, after taking over from co-founder and previous CEO Lynn Jurich last year.

Shayle talked to Mary about what Sunrun is today – and what it might be in the future. They talk about what it will take to lower consumer acquisition costs, overcome the inertia of policy and utilities, and compare the emotional and economic drivers behind residential solar installations. 

Plus: the opportunities for vehicle-to-home charging and how NREL’s solarapp-streamlines-solar-permitting-text.html">SolarAPP could speed up residential solar permitting and installation process.

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

Chemicals might be the most daunting industrial sector to decarbonize. Unlike concrete and steel, where the end products are largely uniform, refineries spit out thousands of different chemicals through a dizzyingly complex set of processes. These end products are, in turn, used in everything from plastics to fertilizers to pharmaceuticals to clothing. 

The International Energy Agency predicts that chemicals will be the largest source of demand growth for oil through 2050. 

A wide range of approaches could transform the sector. To talk through them, Shayle turned to industrial emissions guru Rebecca Dell, the Program Director for Industry at Climateworks Foundation. 

She breaks down this mysterious sector. Where chemicals are we talking about? Where are they made? And where do the associated emissions come from? 

Shayle and Rebecca also talk about the feedstock problem: Decarbonizing heat and electricity in the industry is a hard but straightforward challenge. But how do we replace the versatile fossil fuels used as feedstocks?

Plus, Rebecca has a bone to pick with anyone who thinks we should store captured carbon in plastics. 

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

Biotech has enormous potential across a wide array of climate solutions. It can be used to create alternative proteins, remove carbon from the atmosphere, clean up fertilizer, or to create renewable fuels. But it also comes with some scaling challenges. 

This week, Shayle talks about the intersection of biotech and climatetech with Arye Lipman. Arye is a biologist and a general partner at MarsBio, a bio-focused early-stage fund. He also writes a Substack newsletter on biotech called The Last Great Mystery.

Arye and Shayle talk about the dream of synthetic biology: to use biology like a software platform and program cells to make whatever you want. Arye is cautious on this front, and points out the areas where biotech is limited.

They also cover lab-grown meat, building materials, microbes to fix nitrogen in the soil, genetically engineering plants to sequester more carbon, and Shayle’s fungal biomass chaise lounge.

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 Nextracker. Nextracker’s technology platform has delivered more than 50 gigawatts of zero-emission solar power plants across the globe. Nextracker is developing a data-driven framework to become the most sustainable solar tracker company in the world – with a focus on a truly transparent supply chain. Visit nextracker.com/sustainability to learn more.

First-of-a-kind projects are, by definition, unproven. Despite the abundance of capital in climate tech these days, the valley of death for new technologies still exists.

But there are solutions. And this week on Catalyst, we have a case study of one of them. 

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has $40 billion of capacity to help solve this exact kind of problem. It just announced its first conditional commitment for a $1 billion loan guarantee to help corp.com/">Monolith scale up its first megaplant in Nebraska. 

Monolith uses methane pyrolysis – heating methane up to high temperatures – to split the gas into hydrogen and carbon black, which is an essential component of tires, plastics, rubber and other materials.

It’s a key indication of where the department is putting its priorities. 

We brought both sides of the negotiating table on the podcast: Rob Hanson, the CEO and co-founder of Monolith; and Jigar Shah, the Director of the Loan Programs Office. 

Jigar shares what he’s heard from lenders about why loan guarantees are important, and why commercial banks are reluctant to place bets on these first-of-a-kind plants. He also addresses misconceptions about the office’s role in the climate tech ecosystem.

Rob dives into Monolith's decade-long process to reach this milestone, and points out key differences between venture capital and infrastructure capital. He also talks about what Monolith’s second- or third-of-a-kind climate tech plant could look like.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

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.

The common trope about fusion is that it has always been – and will always be – a decade away. So is something different happening now?

Recently, we’ve seen technical achievements in fusion, like near ignition at the National Ignition Facility in August, yielding “a record 1.3 MJ in fusion energy, releasing, for the first time, more energy than the fuel capsule absorbed.”

Fusion startups have also enjoyed a recent barrage of mega-funding. First, General Fusion raised $130 million. Then Helion Energy raised $500 million with another $1.8 billion committed based on whether it hits milestones. And then Commonwealth Fusion Systems closed a $1.8 billion venture round. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, has also invested in Zap Energy).

So what's happening here? To find out, Shayle talks to Dr. Scott Hsu, ARPA-E’s program director for fusion R&D. 

Shayle asks: what role will fusion actually play in the future of our energy supply? 

Scott and Shayle cover technical advancements that have enabled rapid improvements in the size and cost of fusion systems. They also discuss key milestones, scaling to cost-competitiveness, and technical pathways. They also examine the economics and physics that will determine how rampable a fusion system might be and targets for the cost of a megawatt hour. 

They also discuss the tritium-breeding blanket Shayle is getting for Christmas.

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

What exactly counts as “climate tech”? Basically all human activity is responsible for emissions, directly or indirectly. So nearly every new technology trend or capability has at least some role to play in curbing those emissions.

Robotics? Sure. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, of course. Synthetic biology? Definitely. 

But here's a really interesting one: quantum computing. 

Mark Cupta is convinced it may actually be one of the most important technologies we'll invent to mitigate climate change. Mark is a partner at Prelude Ventures, a climate-focused venture capital firm, and he’s made multiple investments in quantum-computing companies. 

Shayle and Mark talk about how it might unlock climate-tech breakthroughs that would otherwise take decades of brute-force PhD power. They talk about applications for new materials, battery and fuel chemistries, and synthetic biology. It could also help to solve optimization problems to improve the efficiency of logistics and operations. 

Although quantum computing may not itself reduce carbon emissions in a huge way, it could essentially enable other critical technologies that we need to fight climate change. 

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

There are many pathways to decarbonize natural gas. Do we replace it, full stop? If so, with what? Or do we blend natural gas with alternatives, or rip up the old infrastructure and replace it with something new? 

There's a lot to unpack here. But also a lot of opportunities for innovators in the climatetech world. To dig into it, Shayle turns to Andy Lubershane, the senior vice president for research & strategy at Energy Impact Partners.

Andy and Shayle talk about natural gas’ existential threat: upstream methane emissions. 

And remember the utility death spiral? Andy argues that, if solar and DERs continue on their current rise, natural gas infrastructure might actually face a death spiral itself.

They talk about capturing methane emissions, replacing gas with hydrogen, recovering solid carbon, and renewable natural gas.

And where might natural gas stay strong? Andy says to keep an eye on distribution-level building heat. 

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

Aviation represents 2-3% of global GHG emissions. If the aviation sector were a country, its emissions would rank around 6th in the world, somewhere between Japan and Germany. If you add the additional warming impacts of aircraft contrails and estimates are that aviation contributes something like 3.5% of total anthropogenic warming.

It's also another one of those notoriously tough-to-abate sectors. Jet fuel (a.k.a. kerosene) is pretty magical. It has enabled the movement of people and the globalization of high-value goods. 

Sustainable aviation fuels, hydrogen, electrification, and electrofuels are all possible solutions -- but they all carry their own challenges.

Dan Rutherford knows those challenges well. He's the Director of the aviation and maritime programs at the International Council on Clean Transportation. 

In this episode, Shayle talks to Dan about the pros and cons of these various tech pathways. They look at how these technologies could play out in the tight economics of airlines and who will bear those costs. They also examine the pressures on the industry to decarbonize, including consumer interest enabled by emerging low-carbon-travel search features. Finally, they peer into the future at the next generation of planes.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

Stripe, a fintech startup worth $100 billion, is trying to kick-start a $1 trillion market for carbon removal. The company is being extremely transparent about its processes, which means we get a window into the exciting, messy, often very experimental world of removing gigatons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere.

Traditionally, carbon removal has involved planting lots of trees. There have also been a select few companies toiling away at expensive-but-promising direct-air capture.

But it turns out there are many ways to remove CO2. The earth already has a massive carbon cycle — plants, rocks, oceans and soil are already part of it. So there are many candidates for tapping electrochemistry and synthetic biology to accelerate natural processes.

It’s still a small market — and one that needs to grow massively over the coming decades. So how do we build it?

Shayle addresses that question with Nan Ransohoff, Stripe’s head of climate. Shayle and Nan break down lessons from Stripe’s first two carbon-removal portfolios.

They discuss whether carbon removal will become a commodity market. They also cover learning curves, the sources of demand and the parallels between carbon removal and vaccine development.

And Shayle asks: What does a winner look like? Will a single technology dominate?

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

Can investors win by betting on early-stage innovations in hard-to-decarbonize sectors such as energy, transportation, agriculture and heavy industry? 

The answer doesn’t matter only to venture capitalists. If you believe that we need fundamental science and engineering innovation to climb our way out of the climate crisis, it's an important question.

Plenty of reasonable observers say the answer is no. Case in point: The 2016 MIT report Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean Energy Innovation by Ben Gaddy and Varun Sivaram.

But things have changed since “Cleantech 1.0,” the first wave of investment in the sector that resulted in a lot of bankruptcies -- but also some big hits like Tesla, Sunrun, and Nest.

climate-tech-start-ups-have-raised-32-billion-this-year.html">Capital is flowing back into the sector at stunning rates, as venture investors all turn their attention to climatetech. So do the arguments against deeptech climate venture capital hold up today?

To explore this question, Shayle turns to Ramez Naam, another veteran of Cleantech 1.0. Ramez and Shayle go point by point, covering questions such as: Does climatetech take too much capital to scale? Is the time to commercialization too long? Is the exit landscape still relatively unattractive? Will this new climatetech boom lead to another bust?

Catalyst is a co-production of Post Script Media and Canary Media.

Catalyst is supported by Atmos Financial. Atmos offers FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts that only invest in climate-positive assets like renewables, green construction, and regenerative agriculture. Modern banking for climate-conscious people. Get an account in minutes at joinatmos.com.

Shayle Kann has been thinking about the technology and market fixes for climate change for almost two decades. On Catalyst, he brings on the smartest people in climate tech to think through those hard problems.

This show is about how we overcome the climate challenge. Not just at a theoretical level, but using actual technologies, tackling actual market structures, and accounting for the biggest variable of them all -- money. Subscribe everywhere.

The show is a co-production of Canary Media and Post Script Media.