Interchange Recharged

The excitement around green hydrogen has grown dramatically in recent years. Will it live up to the hype?This week, we turn to technologist, author and investor Ramez Naam. Ramez and Shayle examine the drivers behind cost improvement -- namely the costs of electricity and different electrolyzer technologies -- and why they are likely still a long way off the deep declines hydrogen needs to scale.They also cover the hurdles hydrogen may face along the way to scale, including fierce competition from grey hydrogen, fossil fuels, and electrification. There’s also the location question: Where are you going to make green hydrogen with renewables? The answer: Probably not where you need it, which is a problem given the cost and difficulty of transporting hydrogen.Ramez breaks down the policy strategies in Europe, North American, Japan and Australia.Shayle asks: Is blue hydrogen a bridge to green hydrogen, or a bridge to nowhere that will leave niche assets obsolete in a decade or two?They also assess Michael Liebreich’s grades for hydrogen end uses (Ramez gives ground transport an F).Finally, given this hydrogen landscape, where do you invest? They find clues in the early days of the solar market.The Interchange is brought to you by Enel X, a leader in energy storage, DER management software, and smart electric vehicle charging stations to increase project value. Learn what Enel X can do for your business. The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A decarbonized power sector will unlock massive opportunities across nearly every other sector, either via direct electrification or via indirect electrification via the production of low-carbon fuels, like green hydrogen.But here’s the rub. Many of the companies that are working on these solutions rely on pretty heroic assumptions around the cost, availability and cleanliness of electricity in order for the economics to work.To put it bluntly, many decarbonization business models hinge on a cell deep in their spreadsheets that has 1- to 3-cent per kilowatt-hour electricity. Is it a realistic assumption?To tackle that question, Shayle turns to his colleague at Energy Impact Partners, Andy Lubershane, the Senior Vice President of Research & Strategy.They survey the technologies that depend on this super cheap, super abundant power, such as EVs, space heating, carbon removal, green hydrogen and industrial heat.Then, they examine the talk of cheap renewables, covering the difference between cheap wholesale and more expensive delivered prices. They break down the variables that make up the difference between wholesale and delivered prices, namely transmission, distribution and capacity factors. So what are the solutions that could shrink that gap?The Interchange is brought to you by Enel X, a leader in energy storage, DER management software, and smart electric vehicle charging stations to increase project value. Learn what Enel X can do for your business. The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The pandemic has forced just about every part of society to reckon with resilience, but for cities the question is especially urgent. Will the global trend toward urbanization, which has been underway for more than 50 years, change its trajectory? Will increasing density remain the norm?The intersection of these two issues -- resilience and urbanism -- is relevant in a COVID context, but it's also increasingly important in a climate context. Shayle has talked about how the increasing prevalence and magnitude of natural disasters are going to slowly but surely foster a "culture of resilience" in society, where we're forced to deal with the likelihood that once in 100-year events are happening much more often.So what does building better resilience into cities actually mean, and how are we performing?To tackle these questions, Shayle turns to the co-hosts of Technopolis, a podcast about how technology is disrupting, remaking, and sometimes over-running our cities.Molly Turner is an urban planner and teaches urban tech at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Jim Kapsis runs The Ad Hoc Group, a firm that helps climate tech startups navigate and grow in heavily regulated markets.Shayle, Molly and Jim discuss the changing urban migration patterns and what it means for the future of cities.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office might be the most talked about -- and yet least understood -- part of the federal government’s efforts to support climate tech. It has already invested more than $35 billion in everything from Tesla's first big factory to the first two nuclear reactors to begin construction in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It was crucial in getting the first multi-hundred-megawatt solar projects ever developed off the ground.Today it has more than $40 billion of available loan capacity to throw at the next wave of climate technologies to scale.And now, as of a couple months ago, it has Jigar Shah as the director. Previously, Jigar was the co-founder and president of Generate Capital. He also founded SunEdison. And, of course, he is the former co-host of our sister podcast The Energy Gang. Jigar believes we have the technologies we need to put us on the right path toward decarbonization today. And further, that those technologies aren't as risky as the capital markets make them out to be.Therein lies the arbitrage opportunity Jigar has pursued his whole career. And now he's got $40 billion of federal dollars to test it in a whole new arena.In this episode, Shayle and Jigar break down the role of the Loan Programs Office and the specific financial products it offers. The backing of the federal government comes with the unique opportunities -- namely to move way faster on market opportunities than traditional debt markets can. But as Jigar explains, it comes with key limitations too.They also cover the technology sectors that Jigar sees opportunities in -- everything from green hydrogen to small modular nuclear to virtual power plants. And they highlight the stage of companies and types of projects the office might be uniquely suited to support.Plus, Jigar names the ideas he’s waiting to see (but that no one has pitched to him yet). The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There are few areas harder to decarbonize than heavy industry. But the stakes are high. Altogether, industry represents over 30% of global GHG emissions, when counting both direct process emissions and industrial energy use.It’s also a huge opportunity for innovation. This week, Shayle talks with Rebecca Dell, the Director of the Industry Program at The Climateworks Foundation, about the technologies that might transform cement, steel and petrochemicals. Shayle and Reecca go industry by industry, examining the pathways to decarbonization. They cover a range of technologies, including carbon capture and storage, alternative chemistries, recycling, hydrogen and biomass, among others. And finally, Rebecca breaks down how we might create demand for low-carbon industrial materials. The problem is that shifting to decarbonized alternatives might massively increase the cost of these commodities -- probably not what the owner of a steel forge, plastics plant or cement kiln is particularly excited to invest in. But as Rebecca argues, we may be looking through the wrong end of the telescope. For more on Rebecca’s research, check out her report Build Clean: Industrial Policy for Climate and Justice.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There’s money to be made in climate tech, broadly defined. But where exactly?As investment pours into climate tech, it’s true that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in markets -- especially fast-changing markets, like batteries, hydrogen, carbon capture, just to name a few -- those boats don't all get the same lift. Certain parts of the value chain, from upstream mining or manufacturing to downstream deployment models, are far better places to build a business than others. These profitable niches can be thought of as profit pools. And to make it more complicated, those profit pools shift over time. So it might be a great time to be in the manufacturing business. But just a few years later, it may be the worst place to be.This week, Shayle and Nat Bullard, Chief Content Officer at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, try to predict where those profit pools might show up.They examine historical examples, namely wind and solar, where profit pools have shifted from manufacturing to servicing. Along the way, they note some of the winners and losers of those shifts.Then they turn to the less-mature technologies, focusing on batteries, hydrogen, direct air capture, and carbon accounting. They discuss what lessons can (and cannot) be applied from the earlier generations of climate technologies.Within these spaces they cover entrepreneurs in this space may be wondering: When should I specialize vs. vertically integrate? Why do investors keep telling me to get out of the commodity business?Get your swim suits on. It’s time to dive into profit pools.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The grid of the future lies 850 miles off the coast of Portugal, on an island in the Azores called Graciosa.The island has always been dependent on fossil fuels. But in 2018, that changed. That’s when a group of developers kicked off a hybrid wind-solar-battery storage power plant to slash diesel consumption.The plant consists of 1 megawatt of solar, 4.5 megawatts of wind, and a 6 megawatt/3.2 megawatt-hour energy storage system.The power plant has changed Graciosa’s energy mix. In 2020, there were 128 days when the island was entirely powered by renewable energy. And Graciosa is now saving 190,000 liters of diesel fuel per month. One of the reasons: a piece of control software installed by Wärtsilä, called GEMS. It uses machine learning to balance the renewables and storage on Graciosa’s grid with inputs from meters, heating and cooling systems, and weather forecasts. And GEMS is helping grids across the world balance high amounts of variable renewables with energy storage.In this episode, produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä, we’ll talk with Duarte Silva, the engineer who oversees the island’s power system.We’ll also talk with Luke Witmer, a data scientist who manages R&D for Wärtsilä’s energy dispatch systems. Wärtsilä creates smart, flexible power technologies to enable a cleaner grid and put the world on a path to 100% renewable energy. They’re helping clients worldwide meet their clean energy goals in an efficient and cost-effective way. Learn more about how Wärtsilä helped the island of Graciosa transform the grid with the GEMS software.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the many ways they can decarbonize the economy.From optimizing buildings to modeling new industrial processes to better managing the grid, AI and machine learning are core to many technology strategies for addressing climate change.So how, exactly, will they be implemented? And what problems can they solve?With us is Priya Donti, a PHD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work is focused on machine learning, grid systems and climate change. She is also the co-chair of Climate Change AI, a group of academics and practitioners looking at machine learning as a decarbonization tool.This episode was originally broadcast in February 2020.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 2017, Google became the first major company to reach 100% renewable energy through corporate renewables procurement. But it was also the first major company to acknowledge that 100% renewable is not really 100% carbon-free. So Google set out to go further, and match procurement on an hourly basis, to reach the promised land of 24/7 zero carbon energy.It's going to be hard. But Michael Terrell, Google’s Director of Energy, thinks it’s doable. In this episode, Michael talks with Shayle about how it could even become a new norm for corporate and state commitments.But first: What will it take to get there?Shayle and Michael cover the datasets, the accounting mechanisms, and the massive scale of transactions needed to make it possible. They break down about Google’s efforts to shift computing load across its fleet of data centers. They talk about the power of corporate buyers to push policymakers to clean up grids.Where current clean technologies fall short, Google is looking at new technologies to fill in the gaps. They talk about that lineup of potential solutions, such as long-duration storage, carbon capture and storage, geothermal, advanced nuclear, and lithium-ion batteries. And finally they tackle cost and scalability: Will organizations without the capital and expertise that Google enjoys be able to follow its lead?The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In 2010, solar modules cost a little over $2 per watt. Many people questioned whether solar costs could come down another 50%.Well, here we are today with solar modules well below 50 cents per watt, far cheaper than most expectations. And it wasn’t some breakthrough revolutionary technology -- it’s been the crystalline-silicon solar panel the whole time.History has a tendency to repeat itself. Our guest, Jessika Trancik, an associate professor at MIT’s the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, published research earlier this month showing, quantitatively, that lithium-ion batteries have been repeating history and get cheaper, faster, than nearly anyone anticipated. This matters because it could happen again. The obvious next candidate is hydrogen electrolysis, where experts are saying we might be able to reach the promised land of $1 per kilogram by the end of this decade. Jessika and Shayle dug into her findings around batteries to see what broader lessons we could learn. We also talked about some other, related and fascinating research she’s done to examine what it will take to reach mass-market EV adoption.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The oil majors are slowly recognizing that in a decarbonized world their fundamental business is going to have to change. So what are they thinking? Where are they deploying resources -- and not deploying resources? Ed Crooks is the right person to ask. He’s our oil major whisperer. He Vice Chair for the Americas at Wood Mackenzie.Last time we had him on the show was in May of 2020 when the pandemic-driven collapse of oil demand sent key oil prices negative.Ed talks with our host Shayle Kann about the rebound since then and how oil and gas companies are using this new influx of cash.They discuss the longstanding differences between American and European oil majors: The Europeans are more aggressive on new energy investments; the Americans are more conservative. Does this distinction still hold, even under the rising pressure of shareholders, employees and governments on these companies to take climate action? And if they’re not going to invest directly in renewables and power, how will their business models change in a decarbonized world? Shayle and Ed talk about what it would mean to become a “carbon management company.”They also talk about the differences between 1.5- and 2.0-degrees-celsius worlds and what each would mean for oil and gas companies.Finally, they read the tea leaves on carbon pricing. Does the Biden administration’s aggressive stance on climate change the political chances of legislation in the U.S.?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Heather Rock joined PG&E as director of climate resilience in 2018 -- just two weeks before a faulty PG&E line sparked the most destructive wildfire in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine a more complicated or politically-charged role.Back in November 2019, our host Shayle made a bet. In a Medium post called “The World around Us,” he wrote: “I think we’re on the cusp of a cultural transformation, one in which the idea of investing in resilience gains mainstream status for anyone who owns something worth protecting.”Heather is one of the people trying to bring a culture of climate resilience into the mainstream.We desperately need it. Hurricanes, wildfires, winter storms, sea level rise, floods and heat waves, among other threats, have exposed the incredible fragility of our infrastructure and underlined the dire need to bake climate resilience into every utility’s decision-making processes.So how exactly do we do it? In this episode, Heather and Shayle talk about the tools organizations need -- namely new models and data supported by our national labs and agencies like NOAA. But they also identify some of the cultural barriers to adopting these tools, plus how to overcome them. The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Imagine a battery that costs less than half of today's costs, can charge a vehicle in less than ten minutes, run for ten or more years with heavy usage, lasts over a million miles, and is produced with abundant raw materials found all over the world.None of those things are true of today's lithium-ion batteries. But our guest this week, Gene Berdichevsky, predicts that will change in the next decade.Gene was the seventh employee at Tesla and is now the co-founder and CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, one of the biggest players in the battery space.Our host Shayle Kann, a partner at the venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners, talks with Gene about new battery designs and chemistries that are hitting the market right now. By themselves, these advances are incremental. But taken together, they could usher in the kinds of batteries that would revolutionize the grid. Gene and Shayle cover the fundamental tradeoffs between key battery features, namely energy density, charging speed, cost and longevity. They also talk about more sustainable raw materials, battery recycling, the limits of new investment in this space, and why Gene believes that existing big players will continue to dominate, while the new entrants face an uphill battle. The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two years ago, we made an episode called “Cleantech Venture Capital Is Back.” After a decade in the wilderness, the world of climate tech has experienced a resurgence of investment and early-stage innovation. So much has happened since then -- an election, a stimulus, low interest rates, SPACs, corporate commitments, and an explosion of advocacy around climate.So where is the climate tech investment space now?We check in with Abe Yokell, our guest from that February 2019 episode. He’s a managing partner at Congruent Ventures. He talks with our host Shayle Kann, who is a partner at Energy Impact Partners. They talk about the persistent problem of access to capital for some early stage climate tech startups, SPACs, the Mr. Burns Test, and which technologies are underhyped or overhyped.The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Leading climate models point to a sobering reality: Even if the world’s economy reaches net zero emissions by midcentury, we will still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. And so if we have to not just emit less, but remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how do we do it?Today we dive into carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It’s an increasingly diverse and vibrant technology landscape, with some fundamental business model questions yet to be answered.To take stock of this space, we spoke to Sarah Sclarsic, a carbon removal researcher at MIT with business acumen to boot: She co-founded the mobility company Getaround. She’s now an investor and on the boards of two SPACs (one of which took XL Fleet public).We survey the existing technologies, ranging from the old school, like planting trees, to the novel, like direct air capture. And then we take a dive into some theoretical bioengineering approaches. Sarah argues that we already use powerful biotech tools for medicine and food. She shares her research on the potential to apply these biotech approaches to CDR, laying out what these technologies might look like, such as bioengineering microbes to assist with enhanced rock weathering or cultivating fields and fields of carbon-locking cassava.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Last summer a record-setting heat wave in California caused rolling blackouts throughout the state. This week, a record-setting freeze knocked out power for millions of people in Texas and the Midwest.It’s too early for a post-mortem on what happened, but we know that the cold affected all fuel sources, most of all natural gas. Wellheads and gas lines froze. Gas supplies were diverted to residential heating rather than power. This slice of the problem underscores how deeply we still rely on natural gas.It is arguably the most important current source of energy in the U.S. and many parts of the world. Most long-term net zero projections phase out natural gas, but it’s going to be with us for decades, particularly in heavy industry.So what do we do with it in the meantime? How do we tackle natural gas emissions and ultimately phase out natural gas in heavy industry?We spoke to an expert in this space: Cate Hight, a principle at RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute). Last year she wrote a report called “The Role of Gas in the Energy Transition.” Now she’s working on RMI’s Mission Possible Partnership, which aims to decarbonize heavy industries.Shayle and Cate talk about the rapidly changing emissions detection space, differentiated gas, and the many different colors of hydrogen. The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Climate change has gone macro -- as in macroeconomics. It’s not just an environmental, health and justice issue. It has become an economic imperative for financial analysts, finance ministers and the biggest asset managers in the world.For the second year in a row, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink singled out climate change as the biggest priority for the world’s largest asset manager: “I believe that this is the beginning of a long but rapidly accelerating transition – one that will unfold over many years and reshape asset prices of every type,” he wrote in his 2021 letter.Over many years, “alternative energy” just became “energy.” In the near future, will “climate finance’ just become “finance?” This week, we have the exact right person to run through this: Kate Gordon, the Director of the Office of Planning and Research for California Governor Gavin Newsom. She's also senior advisor to the governor on climate. Kate has been on the show before. She was one of the founders of the Risky Business Project, which was among the first ambitious projects to calculate climate risk and infuse it into financial systems. As you'll hear in her conversation with Shayle Kann, she's thinking about how this will all play out in the world of money every day.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Solar scaled first to become king in residential smart energy. But as other residential DER tech has advanced -- EVs, batteries, smart panels, and so forth -- has solar been dethroned as the anchor product in this space? We’ll walk with Arch Rao, the CEO of Span, about the biggest technological changes underway in home energy.How should we sell and manage distributed energy resources?Who buys them, and what do we actually do with them?What will scale to the mass market?How will consumers interact with their DERs?Span is a startup making a new kind of smart electrical panel. It just raised a $20m VC round and announced an integration with Alexa. Prior to Arch, helped lead the product team at Tesla that built and launched the Powerwall.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if we could see into the future? In 2020, we got our clearest view yet.Last March, lockdowns swept across Europe, forcing an eerie silence on some of the world’s most iconic and bustling cities. It caused a steep drop in electricity consumption -- putting pressure on thermal generators and giving renewables a greater share of the generation mix.“And all of that has really provided us a bit of a glimpse of the future to a time where we will have much more flexible supply on the system and renewables will be consistently taking a much greater share of the market,” says Tom Heggarty, a principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie.The covid crisis proved that the European grid can handle large amounts of renewable energy -- at levels we didn’t expect to see for another five to ten years. So how do we take this knowledge and game out the future? For more answers, we turn to Jyrki Leino, a senior manager for business development at Wärtsilä. “We kind of stepped to the future right away. We saw the systems in a situation where in normal conditions would be in five or 10 years time,” he says.Jyrki and his team at Wärtsilä wanted to help answer some simple questions: what happens to European power markets if the trends we saw during covid persist? And what happens if renewables are meeting nearly all load? So they built an open-data test environment, called the Wärtsilä Energy Transition Lab or WET Lab. It’s like a fact-based choose-your-own-adventure for energy geeks. Or a crystal ball.In this episode, brought to you by Wartsila, we look into that crystal ball. Check out Wärtsilä's Energy Transition Lab to see the impact of Covid-19 on energy markets, and for clues about Europe’s clean energy transition. It’s an open-source data set that anyone can use.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What technology will become the dominant means of decarbonizing each part of the economy?The pattern we see now — and that we expect to continue over the coming couple decades — is a series of battles between consistent contenders: electricity, hydrogen and carbon capture. Electricity is hitting its stride. The power sector is getting cleaner, and electrification is spreading to light duty vehicles and even residential boilers. But electricity actually has only a 20% market share of all energy end uses. So what do we do with the remaining 80%?These are tough-to-decarbonize arenas that rely on hard-to-replace fossil fuels: heavy duty vehicles, aviation, maritime shipping, chemical manufacturing, iron and steel.  Shayle called up Andy Lubershane, Senior Vice President of Research & Strategy at Energy Impact Partners to game it out. Andy has been writing about the potential phases of the energy transition and the roles these three technologies could play in different sectors. Andy and Shayle got the inspiration for Deep Decarbonization Infinity War from Andy’s love of games. He not only uses games as a tool to think about the energy transition, but is actually in the process of creating his own board game. It’s Deep Decarbonization: Infinity War. Let’s go.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We are going to build a lot more wind and solar over the coming decades. It will inevitably lead to oversupply of these resources on the grid. But is that a good thing?That’s the focus of this week’s show, featuring a conversation between Shayle Kann and Columbia University's Melissa Lott.The stars have aligned for a rare win-win-win situation: Solar and wind are popular with politicians; they’re popular with customers; and they’re often the lowest-cost resource, making them an attractive bet for investors.As we build more solar and wind, many regions will start to look like California does on a sunny spring day, or like West Texas does on a windy night: power prices drop to zero or below, producers curtail excess electricity, creating the dreaded "overproduction” of renewables.So what do we do with all this carbon-free power?We asked Melissa Lott and it turns out quite a lot! She argues that renewable oversupply can actually be a feature of the grid, not a bug (even if it causes some minor pests along the way). There are all kinds of new resources we can harness with excess wind and solar. Melissa is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and she and her colleague, Julio Friedman, wrote a paper laying out the case for intentionally overbuilding capacity — and thus intentionally creating oversupply. They lay out a framework for figuring out what to do with intermittent excess energy and zoom in on a case study in New Zealand.What happens when an aluminum smelter — one that uses a whopping 12% of the county’s annual demand and is powered largely by hydroelectric power — closes down? It was one decarbonization modeler’s dream. The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Net-zero commitments went mainstream in 2020. There are now 22 regions, 452 cities, and over 1,100 companies with revenues over $11 trillion that have pledged to bring emissions to net zero by middle of the century. In 2021 we’re going to spend a lot of time working backward from that. We’ll be trying to understand the pathways to get to net zero and what it means for today — for the technology and business of decarbonization.That brings us to this week’s guest: Jesse Jenkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton. He’s a well-known expert energy-systems modeler.Last month Jesse and a team of colleagues at Princeton came out with a massive study called Net-Zero America that examines five pathways for the U.S. to decarbonize the entire economy.Even without reading the report, you can probably guess some of the headlines: More renewables. More transmission. Electrify transportation. Carbon capture and carbon removal. But there are some other conclusions that are less obvious.As more and more renewables come online, how will biomass, fossil fuels and hydrogen will fit into the multiple pathways to transition? We also examine the chicken-and-the-egg problem of CO2 transportation and CO2 conversion. And we ask: How much are these massive transition scenarios  going to cost, and who’s paying?The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.We're also brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll feature part 3 of our series on the future of solar technologies with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran Dan Shugar.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s been a great year for "climate" oriented public companies. Virtually every clean energy or climate company has dramatically outperformed market indices and most now have record-high equity value. So what's going on here? And what might it mean for the next generation of climate technology companies?In this final episode of the year, Host Shayle Kann talks with Sameer Reddy, a partner at Energy Impact Partners.Sameer sits on the board of companies like Arcadia Power, Opus One, and Enchanted Rock. And he, like us, has been marveling over this public market madness and thinking about what it might mean. Shayle and Sameer discuss the state of the market, the factors driving stock prices upward, historical challenges in the sector, and what could go wrong.We're brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll tell you about some really important tech trends in solar with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran Dan Shugar.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives such as microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode: we try to figure out where hydrogen is headed.In the universe of clean energy, the world seems to rally around one big technology push each decade. This is when governments introduce subsidies, incumbents announce big projects, and a nascent technology gets a chance to scale from tiny to small, in the hopes of achieving liftoff. In the 1990s, it was wind. In the 2000s, solar. In the 2010s, lithium-ion batteries. And in the 2020s, it seems increasingly clear it's going to be hydrogen.But hydrogen is a different beast. For one thing, you can't just harness it like you can solar or wind -- you have to make it. For another, there is a dizzying array of potential end markets for it, ranging from power to transportation to industry. And finally, there's the pesky problem of the midstream. Assuming we start producing lots of clean hydrogen, and we find a market for it, how will we store it? How will we transport it? This week, Shayle is joined by Gniewomir Flis, who spends most of his days thinking about these questions. He's an energy & climate advisor at Agora Energiewende and has spent the last few years laser focused on the thornier issues of building a hydrogen economy.We're brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage, and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll tell you about some really important tech trends in solar with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran, Dan Shugar.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives such as microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, Shayle Kann talks with Kiran Bhatraju, the CEO of Arcadia, about who's buying clean energy.Every pathway toward economy-wide decarbonization drives straight through a dramatic transformation in the electricity sector. But so much of the discussion in that sector focuses on the supply side: how fast will wind and solar displace fossil fuels? what will happen with natural gas?But there's another important player in this game: the energy consumer. Consumers tend to be confusing when it comes to energy. It's hard to discern how much we actually care about it in the first place, what our preferences are, what decisions we'll make, what we'll pay for. Most sectors that have undergone dramatic transformation have been driven by changing customer behavior, and energy may be no different. So we need to understand the consumer, and to find ways to deliver them products and services that will accelerate the energy transition.Shayle and Kiran discuss the different groups of clean-energy customers, how they respond to options, and how a changing regulatory landscape could influence behavior.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives such as microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

For all the hype around autonomous vehicles, we're still in the very early stages of a rollout. While most of the attention is being paid to the Waymos and Zooxs of the world, trying to build fully autonomous passenger vehicles on public roads, there's an entirely separate category being created: off-road.These are similarly autonomous vehicles that are mostly all-electric. But they don't ride on public roads. Instead, they're in shipping yards, distribution warehouses, mining operations, on campuses, and in farming. It's underappreciated how big that shift could be.In this episode, Shayle Kann talks with Alisyn Malek, the executive director for the Commission on the Future of Mobility. She is also the founder and CEO of Middle Third, a boutique consultancy focused on mobility strategy.We’ll hear from Alisyn about the state of the technology, different applications, regulatory hurdles, and the near-term promise for deployment.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives like microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient, and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a sponsored episode produced by GTM Creative Strategies in collaboration with Wärtsilä. In August, California’s grid operators shut off power for millions of residents during an historic heat wave.The blackouts caused confusion and outrage in the state. People were looking for someone to blame: an agency, a utility, or a technology like renewables.We now know what happened. The cause was detailed in a lengthy, multi-agency investigation. It was a unique combination of factors, including a lack of preparation for extreme events. So will this hurt California’s decarbonization efforts?“I do not think it changes the decarbonization goals. I think, if anything, it calls for the acceleration of moving toward a system that is more resilient, that is decarbonized,” says Amisha Rai, managing director at Advanced Energy Economy.So if California’s blackouts accelerate clean-energy efforts further, how can we apply lessons from this summer? That’s what we’re covering in this episode, produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä. “Now, it is very important to figure out a practical and realistic plan. I think California is working very hard on it. Without the plan, you will end up in ad hoc situations easily,” says Jussi Heikkinen, director of growth and development for the Americas at Wärtsilä.In this episode, Jussi will outline all the optimal scenarios for decarbonizing California’s grid -- even while managing the threat of extreme events.Wärtsilä creates smart, flexible power technologies to enable a cleaner grid and put the world on a path to 100% renewable energy. Read the “Path to 100% for California” report discussed in this episode. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Need a distraction from the election? Shayle Kann and Adam James have you covered, with an energy-themed version of the game show "Would I Lie to You?"Rules:Each person selects three energy related facts or stories. Any number of the three can be lies, and at least one has to be a lie.They have to be clear lies, not slight adjustments of the truth.The other person can ask three questions. And they must get an answer.At the end of the round, the truths and lies are revealed. If the score is a tie, it moves to a penalty shootout where each person offers a fact/story and the other person has to say truth/lie. If someone misses, and the other person gets their next one right, they win.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives like microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient, and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Net-zero carbon pledges are heating up. Japan just committed to reaching net zero, just four weeks after China did the same. In total, seven of the 10 largest economies in the world (not including America, India and Brazil) have made such commitments. And that's on top of all the subnational players, the corporates, and others.It has become increasingly clear that we're unlikely to reach net-zero at any significant scale without some pretty heavy carbon management. That means carbon capture, carbon removal, and carbon utilization.As a result, the carbon management sector has seen a frenzy of activity over the past couple years, ranging from research to investment to innovation. Just this year we've seen venture capital flow into companies protecting forests, sequestering carbon in the soil, capturing co2 directly in the air, and converting captured CO2 into a range of products from cement to jet fuel.So in this episode, we make sense of both the economics and the technology. Shayle Kann talks with Dr. Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy. Julio is an expert on all things related to carbon management.The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When we talk about climate change on this show, and what causes it, we are usually talking about gases that come from vehicles or from the electricity sector. But what about the built environment? This week: we’re talking about the embedded emissions in our buildings.There’s the natural gas that gets burned in them, and there’s all the electricity that it takes to power them. And then there’s another category – all the upfront energy that went into making the buildings in the first place. That’s called “embodied carbon” or “embedded carbon” or sometimes “upfront carbon.” In the next few crucial years when we can bend the arc of climate change, most of the emissions that come from buildings are going to come from the embodied carbon. So how we choose to build buildings really matters. Our senior editor Ingrid Lobet has a special interest in buildings and wrote recently about embodied carbon for Greentech Media. Read that article here.Just before everything shut down with the pandemic several months ago, Ingrid was at a conference on this subject organized in part by Ed Mazria. Mazria has been at the forefront of a growing faction of builders, engineers and designers intent on remaking buildings into a climate solution. She spoke with him about the biggest opportunities in decarbonizing buildings.The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: consolidation and cooperation in the distributed energy market.Just as federal regulators in the U.S. are making batteries, solar systems, electric cars, generators and other similar resources more valuable in wholesale markets, we’re seeing a new wave of business activity.Wood Mackenzie predicts that U.S. distributed energy resource capacity will reach nearly 390 gigawatts by 2025. And a lot of companies are getting in on the action.Amazon is jumping deeper into the smart-home game. Generac, one of the top generator companies in the U.S., just made another acquisition to help it manage batteries and pumps and motors and possibly other clean energy resources.And Calibrant is a new company being formed by industrial multinational Siemens and MacQuarie Capital, part of the Australian financial services giant. Calibrant will offer businesses and industry and schools and hospitals no-money-down, on-site energy systems known as Energy-as-a-Service.   What do all these business moves mean for the future of this market?Additional resources:Amazon Blog: Alexa’s New Energy Dashboard (Coming Soon) Greentech Media: Generac Acquires Enbala, Boosting Plan to Harness Behind-the-Meter Energy ResourcesGreentech Media: Siemens and Macquarie Form Calibrant Energy to Tackle Distributed Energy MarketThe Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

California plans to ban new internal-combustion vehicles by 2035. But are electric vehicles ready to take their place?We know that there are dozens and dozens more models of electric cars on the market. Ranges are increasing. Consumers like the driving experience. And total costs are creeping downward.But America’s electric vehicle market is anemic. Dealers aren’t pushing them. Consumers aren’t demanding them. And there are still very real infrastructure challenges.So in this episode, we’re unpacking those trends in the context of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s executive order mandating a halt to new gas-powered cars in 15 years.This is a conversation between co-host Shayle Kann and his colleague at Energy Impact Partners, Andy Lubershane. It’s a detailed look at the underlying trends that could complicate California’s plans.In this conversation, they touch on the state of the EV transition, the state of the technology and consumer habits, and the impact of lots of EVs on the grid.The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In recent weeks, five million acres have burned across California, Oregon and Washington State -- killing dozens, displacing tens of thousands of people, and causing untold damage.In California, over three million acres have burned since the start of the year. At the height of the current wildfire outbreak, western cities had the worst air pollution in the world for days.It makes the solutions we talk about on this show -- renewables, grid resilience, microgrids, decarbonization -- that much more urgent. This week, we’re replaying a conversation that we taped last fall, just after a different round of record fires. It’s Shayle talking with Kate Gordon, the director of the office of planning and research in California. She's also a senior advisor to Governor Newsom on climate.Kate details the diverse range of climate risks that California faces -- and how it's impacting every decision the state makes.The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The market for initial public offerings dropped way down this year. Or did it? There is a surge in activity in a different kind of IPO: a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It’s also known as a reverse merger.These are shell companies listed on exchanges with a mission to buy private companies and convert them into public ones.According to a tally from Barron’s, there have been 70 IPOs through this method in 2020, with proceeds totaling $27.7 billion.It’s creating a path for little-known, pre-revenue cleantech companies to get access to public markets. Does all this frothiness make sense? And why now?The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals.We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There are still questions about what exactly caused California’s blackouts during last month’s heat wave. We know that imports were down, natural gas plants tripped off line, and wind generation fell. But what about all those air conditioners, batteries and industrial loads that are supposed to support the grid? What role did they play -- or didn’t they play -- in helping California’s stressed grid?We’re going to look at how distributed resources are being used today in different grids around the U.S.With us this week is Dr. Elta Kolo, a content lead on the grid edge team at Wood Mackenzie. She’s an expert on utility business models, grid integration, and demand response.She’s going to help us understand the technology and market-design landscape for demand response. With California going through another round of grid stresses due to a heat wave and wildfires, this conversation is particularly relevant.The Interchange is supported by Schneider Electric, the leader of digital transformation in energy management and automation. Schneider Electric has designed and deployed more than 300 microgrids in North America, helping customers gain energy independence and control, while increasing resilience and reaching their clean energy goals. We’re also sponsored by NEXTracker. NEXTracker has more than 30 gigawatts of resilient and intelligent solar tracking systems across six continents. Optimize your solar power plant.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: how an innocuous grid-modeling project became a threat to Trump’s efforts to save coal -- and then languished inside the Department of Energy.It’s one of many pieces of research that have been suppressed by the current administration.What is the study? What does it tell us about the systematic dismantling of government under Trump? What are the implications for a cleaner grid?Journalist Peter Fairley joins us to talk about his investigation, which was a collaboration between InvestigateWest and The Atlantic. The Interchange is brought to you by Stem, a global leader in artificial intelligence-driven energy storage services. By combining advanced energy storage solutions with Athena, a world-class AI-powered analytics platform, Stem enables customers and partners to optimize energy use by automatically switching between battery power, onsite generation and grid power. Find out more. The Interchange is also brought to you by GTM Creative Strategies. You’ve got a story to tell, and we’re here to help you tell it, including custom podcasts. GTM Creative Strategies leverages unmatched editorial credibility, top creative minds and seasoned analysts to drive unparalleled brand awareness that puts you ahead of your competitors. Find out more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before the pandemic, one of the biggest news stories of the year was BlackRock’s decision to make climate risk a central part of its investment strategy. This isn’t your average family office; this is BlackRock, a company with $7 trillion under management.It brought more mainstream attention to ESG, or environmental, social, governance. ESG is a set of standards for valuing ethical business practices, including decarbonization. Suddenly all kinds of ESG funds focused on sustainability are popping up, worth $1 trillion.The concept is not new. But activity has ramped way up in the last few years. BlackRock’s splashy climate declaration only ramped it further.It’s also a world that is not well defined, not well regulated, and still very messy. Will that messiness derail progress in the world of sustainable investing? The Interchange is brought to you by Stem, a global leader in artificial intelligence-driven energy storage services. By combining advanced energy storage solutions with Athena, a world-class AI-powered analytics platform, Stem enables customers and partners to optimize energy use by automatically switching between battery power, onsite generation and grid power. Find out more. The Interchange is also brought to you by GTM Creative Strategies. You’ve got a story to tell, and we’re here to help you tell it, including custom podcasts. GTM Creative Strategies leverages unmatched editorial credibility, top creative minds and seasoned analysts to drive unparalleled brand awareness that puts you ahead of your competitors. Find out more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We’re constantly going through waves of hype in different energy sectors: flexible solar panels, vertical-axis wind, electric planes, vehicle-to-grid, the smart home, blockchain. Some are real, some are not. Some just need to mature.So what phase are we in now? In this episode, Shayle and Stephen are digging into different sectors and trends at various stages of the climate tech hype cycle. They’ll decide whether to buy, sell or hold based on the current level of fanfare. In other words, do we think it's overhyped, underhyped or just right? We’re going to do this for six sectors, some of which came from listeners. Green hydrogenMicromobilityResidential battery storageDirect air capture (tons of people on twitter suggested this one)BlockchainVirtual power plantsAnd here’s Shayle’s climate tech hype cycle chart that we discuss on the show.The Interchange is brought to you by Stem, a global leader in artificial intelligence-driven energy storage services. By combining advanced energy storage solutions with Athena, a world-class AI-powered analytics platform, Stem enables customers and partners to optimize energy use by automatically switching between battery power, onsite generation and grid power. Find out more. The Interchange is also brought to you by GTM Creative Strategies. You’ve got a story to tell, and we’re here to help you tell it, including custom podcasts. GTM Creative Strategies leverages unmatched editorial credibility, top creative minds and seasoned analysts to drive unparalleled brand awareness that puts you ahead of your competitors. Find out more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We may be facing one of the worst economic downturns in American history, but it hasn’t stopped the surge in battery storage development.We’re constantly hearing the phrase “world’s largest” or “record breaking” as new gigawatt-scale projects are unveiled weekly. Small-scale batteries are being attached to more than one-third of residential solar systems for leading installers, making distributed batteries a staple of home energy offerings.New markets like Texas are heating up. And utilities are putting batteries front-and-center in their 100% clean energy plans.As a result: we will likely see a 14-fold increase in batteries deployed on the grid in the US over the next five years, according to our analysts at Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables.With us is the reporter at the front edge of all these developments: Julian Spector, a staff writer at Greentech Media.Read Julian’s coverage here. And check out his newsletter.The Interchange is brought to you by Stem, a global leader in artificial intelligence-driven energy storage services. By combining advanced energy storage solutions with Athena, a world-class AI-powered analytics platform, Stem enables customers and partners to optimize energy use by automatically switching between battery power, onsite generation and grid power. Find out more. The Interchange is also brought to you by GTM Creative Strategies. You’ve got a story to tell, and we’re here to help you tell it, including custom podcasts. GTM Creative Strategies leverages unmatched editorial credibility, top creative minds and seasoned analysts to drive unparalleled brand awareness that puts you ahead of your competitors. Find out more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The world looked bleak for startups in the spring. According to figures from Crunchbase, venture capital deals were down 44 percent from March to June compared with last year. Seed-stage deals took the biggest hit, down nearly 60 percent. But series B deals also took a hit. It was difficult at any stage of funding.Deals are finally coming back. Obviously, travel startups won’t be a hot category for a long time. But what about climate and cleantech? Are they insulated? And what does the reorientation tell us about who’s still all-in on the category?We’re joined by Abe Yokell, managing partner and co-founder of Congruent Ventures. He and Shayle dig into a wide range of venture capital trends:COVID impacts on the “climate tech” venture revolution. We’ll check back in on what we talked about last time, given the new state of the world.The rise of the tech company mega-climate-fundPublic market madness. What, if anything, does this say about exit prospects for climate tech startups?Hot sectors: where is the smart tech talent going?The Interchange is brought to you by Fluence, a global leader in battery-based energy storage technology and services. From commercializing the first grid-connected battery systems in 2008 to the multi-gigawatt fleet being deployed for customers globally today, the Fluence team is ensuring that storage is the cornerstone of the electric future. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coronavirus is reshaping the way we move around. Will we emerge from this pandemic with smarter planning? Or will it dismantle already-weakened public transportation systems?When economies across the world shut down all at once in March, the impact on transportation systems was immediate. According to the International Energy Agency, activity on roads globally was down 50% compared to the 2019 average. Commercial flights were down 75% compared to 2019. Many cities saw a more than 90% drop in public transport ridership. And leading ride sharing companies saw between an 80-90% drop in usage.Activity has since picked up, but people are still moving around a lot less. The pandemic will likely shape behavior long-term, which will influence how we design our roads, bike lanes and public transit systems.Our guest is on the front lines of these changes: Tiffany Chu, the CEO and co-founder of Remix. Remix works with hundreds of cities around the world to help them better plan multi-modal transportation in an environmentally sound and equitable way.The Interchange is brought to you by Fluence, a global leader in battery-based energy storage technology and services. From commercializing the first grid-connected battery systems in 2008 to the multi-gigawatt fleet being deployed for customers globally today, the Fluence team is ensuring that storage is the cornerstone of the electric future. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Earlier this month, Sunrun, the largest residential solar company in the U.S., declared its intent to acquire Vivint Solar, the second largest installer. It’s an all-stock transaction that would value the combined entity at over $9 billion.It's a big deal -- literally. The enterprise value attached to Vivint is $3.2 billion, which makes it the largest single transaction in the history of the distributed energy market. It’s also a big deal because of what it says about the state and future of distributed solar, plus adjacent markets like energy storage and maybe even electric vehicles.So that's what we're going to talk about today. Shayle sits down with Austin Perea, a senior solar analyst for Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables, to talk about the strategy behind this deal and what it tells us about the next phase of the market.Assuming the acquisition goes through, how big will this new entity be?The Interchange is brought to you by Fluence, a global leader in battery-based energy storage technology and services. From commercializing the first grid-connected battery systems in 2008 to the multi-gigawatt fleet being deployed for customers globally today, the Fluence team is ensuring that storage is the cornerstone of the electric future. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: is carbon transparency finally coming?Electronics maker Logitech became the most recent company to offer carbon labels on its products. Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell called carbon “the new calorie.”It’s one of many attempts by food and consumer goods producers to make the lifecycle emissions of their products clearer to consumers. In this episode, we’ll examine the new generation of climate labels. We’ve seen attempts at carbon labeling before. What makes these newer ones different? And will they stick?Plus, we’ll try to answer listener questions about renewable natural gas, vehicle-to-grid, ESG standards, and COVID predictions.This episode was recorded live in front of hundreds of listeners (remotely). Thanks to everyone who joined us!The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is a widely-held perception that data centers -- the giant facilities that hold networks of society’s supercomputers -- are an out-of-control energy suck.We’ve all seen headlines like this: “Your Netflix binge may be frying the planet”“Cut back on email if you want to save the environment”“Every Google search you do contributes to climate change”“Bitcoin could be the final nail in the coffin for climate change”It’s actually not true, says our guest. These myths are rooted in bad projections and false statements from coal advocates, dating all the way back to the 1990s.Yes, data centers collectively use a lot of energy. But they’re becoming hyperefficient. They’re a magnet for renewables development. And they’re helping us unlock the powerful software, algorithms and heavy computational tasks that run the clean energy economy.Our guest has been researching data centers for decades. It is Jonathan Koomey, an expert on sustainable IT. Jon was previously a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and a lecturer at Stanford. Today, he runs his own research and consulting outfit on the environmental impacts of information technology. We’ll talk with him about the different ways that data centers are at the cutting edge of energy and sustainability.The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A boisterous CEO who brags of “out-Eloning” Elon Musk; a reverse merger that makes a little-known fuel cell trucking company as valuable as Ford; and no actual cars or trucks in production.This week, we try to make sense of Nikola Motor. Nikola Motor went public last week through a reverse merger, achieving a ~$13 billion valuation. As the markets closed on Wednesday, the company’s market cap was at $23 billion. But with a non-traditional IPO, an enigmatic CEO, and zero revenue or actual vehicles, it’s become one of the more befuddling stories in cleantech in recent memory. We’ll dig into the company’s claims and business model. Is this just another overhyped penny stock, or is there any substance to Nikola’s plan?LA Times: Electric Truck Maker Nikola Looks Like Tesla 2.0 — Except Even RiskierCNBC: Meet Nikola, the Speculative Electric Vehicle StockBarron’s: Truck-Building Tesla Competitor Nikola Draws the Attention of a Short SellerThe Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We use the term “energy transition” to define markets, technology, business models. But what about people?The transition away from fossil fuels isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. The hardest part isn’t building the clean resources. It’s shutting down the dirty stuff at a pace the science demands.And that means disrupting entire classes of employment and communities that depend on fossil fuel extraction -- in other words, helping people find work somewhere else.The often-used phrase is the “just transition.”We have a guest who’s been researching and writing about this subject for years: Sandeep Pai. Sandeep the author of “Total Transition: the Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution.” He’s a former journalist and a current PhD student and public scholar at the Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia. We’ll talk with Sandeep about his analysis of the strategies for transitioning fossil fuel workers in economies around the world. The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Greed is good. At least, it’s good for decarbonization.This week on The Interchange podcast, we have a new edition of the fantasy decarbonization draft -- this one focused on acquiring and restructuring public companies. We’re joining the ranks of corporate raiders like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens and Gordon Gekko by taking over public companies and bending their strategies to our will. (For benevolent reasons, of course.)Shayle and Stephen will pick their portfolio of companies. And then listeners choose who has the best investment strategy. (Vote over at @InterchangeShow on Twitter.)Here’s how it works:We each have $25 billion to spend We can acquire a maximum of eight companies each. There’s no minimum.The cost of any given company is its market cap at the time of choosing.Our acquisition targets must be publicly tradedOnce we’ve acquired a company, we can control its strategy. The goal is to accelerate decarbonization in our chosen sectorOur geographic focus is North AmericaMake sure to listen to our first and second decarbonization drafts.The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. Get your system today.We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy, an open-access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, we’re talking about the new wave of carbon offsets. Will startups and corporates be able to solve accountability problems?Right up until the global economy stopped working in March, the carbon offset market was surging. In 2019, offset sellers saw a 5-fold increase in purchases, after years of low demand in the wake of the financial crisis.Flight-shamed consumers were demanding them. The world’s top companies were buying them in record numbers.But then came the coronavirus shock. The steep drop in fuel and electricity consumption has slowed consumer demand for carbon offsets in the short-term, but there are still underlying trends that may herald the return of carbon offsets.Is this time different? Can new players improve the quality and traceability of carbon reductions?The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. We’re also brought to you by Wärtsilä Energy. Wärtsilä is leading the energy transition with “The Atlas of 100% Renewable Energy,” an open access tool based on the modeling of 145 countries and regions worldwide to illustrate the cost-optimal 100% renewable energy systems. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week: where does the COVID detour take us as we map the energy transition?We’re once again thinking through the practical and theoretical consequences of the pandemic, in the near-term and well into the future. Shayle and Stephen talk with Ramez Naam, a futurist, science-fiction author and energy expert. Ramez joined us last August to talk about some future scenarios for energy. The world is a dramatically different place today, so we’re bringing him back to recalibrate our sights.We’ll talk about a wide range of subjects, including: oil consumption, behavior changes, demand for electric cars, and whether we’re delaying the energy transition.The Interchange is brought to you by Prisma Energy Solutions. Prisma Energy Solutions provides a unique financing model for battery energy storage systems that can help you reduce energy demand, participate in both energy and ancillary service markets, improve renewables integration, increase system reliability, and reduce your carbon footprint. We’re also brought to you by the Wood Mackenzie power team. WoodMac is delivering actionable real-time data on how our new reality is shaping power markets. Learn more about how we can help you understand the future of energy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Electricity grids can handle a lot of wind, solar and water resources. But what will help us get from 80% renewable energy to 100% renewable energy?The missing piece may be renewable synthetic fuels.“When we really want to decarbonize the whole electricity system, absolutely synthetic fuels will play a key role,” says Matti Rautkivi, the director of Business Development and Strategy at Wärtsilä.In this episode, produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä, we’re looking specifically at how to use green hydrogen to create renewable fuels -- and burn those fuels to create the fully-renewable electricity system.There’s some uncertainty about how exactly this market will evolve. But experts like Rautkivi are confident that renewable fuels are going to become a vital solution. “When we have excess electricity available, instead of curtailing it, we are going to put it through the synthetic fuels process and convert the electricity to fuels that we can store and use it later,” says Rautkivi. “So it provides flexibility to the electricity system.”This is the third in a three-part series produced with Wärtsilä. You can listen to part one and part two. Wärtsilä creates smart, flexible power technologies to enable a cleaner grid and put the world on a path to 100% renewable energy. They’re helping clients worldwide meet their clean energy goals in an efficient and cost-effective way. Find out more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.