The Green Blueprint
The Green Blueprint is a podcast about scaling climate solutions. Host Lara Pierpoint interviews founders, investors, and leaders building the clean economy. Each episode explores the challenges and strategies behind deploying climate technologies at scale.
Episodes
Did someone just figure out how to project finance nuclear?
For decades, the promise of new nuclear power in the West has been stifled not by the technology itself, but by the “construction problem.” Massive, multi-billion dollar mega-projects plagued by schedule creep and labor shortages have made nuclear a financial non-starter for commercial project finance.
To build nuclear at scale, we need a paradigm shift.
Jake Jurewicz, CEO of Blue Energy,
The missing capital for climate startups: more debt
Climate tech companies are often forced to rely on expensive equity to bridge the gap between government grant awards and the cash needed to get projects off the ground. But for founders building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, dilutive capital isn't always the right tool. For many, it’s not even an option.
Dimitry Gershenson, CEO and co-founder of Enduring Planet, is
The ‘brutal reality’ of scaling low-carbon fertilizer
Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for global food security, yet its production is a hyper-centralized, fossil-fuel-intensive process that accounts for 5 to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As geopolitical instability threatens traditional supply chains, the vulnerability of this industry has never been clearer.
Nico Pinkowski, CEO and co-founder of Nitricity, initially set out to decentraliz
Form Energy's manufacturing breakthrough
Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage, but inexpensive, truly long-duration batteries may still have a significant role to play in backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid. Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron — essentially rusting and unrusting the earth's most abundant metal — Form is creating low-co
Why the climate tech ‘missing middle’ is a massive opportunity
If you’re building a consumer software startup, your investors may expect you to project hockey stick-style growth. But if you’re building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, you’re likely in a very different position.
Frank O’Sullivan, Managing Director at S2G Investments, argues that the climate finance ecosystem is suffering from a structural mismatch. While there is pl
The perovskite bet that could transform solar
Silicon solar panels have led the market for decades but will soon hit a ceiling around 25% efficiency. Perovskite, a frontier material once dismissed for degrading too fast, is now being called the holy grail of solar.
Saritha Peruri, VP of Commercialization at Tandem PV, is bringing it to market. The company stacks its proprietary perovskite on top of silicon, capturing a wider spectrum of ligh
How Supercool Earth's microbes could ease the water crisis
California recorded its second-lowest Sierra Nevada snowpack on record this spring. That's not just a bad ski season, it's a water supply crisis. Snowpack is where California's water comes from. And when it doesn't materialize, agriculture, hydropower, and fire suppression all feel the strain.
Dacia Leon, CEO and co-founder of Supercool Earth, is building a company around a deceptively simple ide
The $6 trillion threat to climate tech finance
The global financial system is undergoing a structural shift into a "volatile new world order," where unpredictability is the norm, and climate tech is uniquely exposed.
Venture investor Susan Su says the war in Iran is complicating the landscape. That's because about 40% of the world's capital comes from just four Gulf states, and those states are exploring whether the war allows them to invoke
The Green Blueprint is back for a second season!
We already have the blueprint for decarbonizing the global economy. We've invented many of the solutions, but much of that tech is still sitting on the sidelines waiting to get financed and built at scale.
But over the last year, we've seen a wave of change that complicates and – in some cases – helps that mission.
In the first season of the Green Blueprint, we heard stories from the entrepre
Sage Geosystems' bet on underground energy storage
About 90% of global energy storage is pumped storage hydropower – which requires a mountain, a lake, and a whole lot of permitting. While lithium batteries have gotten drastically cheaper over the last decade, they’re still expensive for longer durations.
But Cindy Taff and her team at Sage Geosystems are developing geothermal technology that could revolutionize energy storage. Instead of pumpi
Inside Microsoft’s plan to remove 50 years of carbon emissions
In 2020, Microsoft announced a major goal: by 2050 the company aims to remove from the atmosphere all the carbon emissions it has produced since its founding in 1975.
When Phil Goodman joined the company in 2022, he quickly found that the market for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) was just getting off the ground. That meant that in order to meet its climate pledge, Microsoft needed to help foster t
Captura's high-stakes gamble
Back in January, Captura CEO Steve Oldham was sitting in a conference room in Hawaii, entertaining reps from the company’s first potential customer. What the customer didn’t know was that Captura’s ocean-based carbon removal pilot –the whole reason for the visit – still wasn’t working.
The stakes were high. Steve’s team needed to prove they could pull off a major pilot under intense time crunch —
Boston Metal’s path to carbon-free steel
This year in the U.S., steel manufacturers will produce more than 71 million tons of steel – enough to build nearly 200 Empire State buildings. It's a stunning statistic, but not surprising. The steel industry has fueled economic growth and innovation in America since the early 1800s.
But for every ton of conventional steel produced, two tons of CO2 are emitted, making the coal industry responsi
The thermal battery transforming cold storage for India’s dairy farmers
In 2007 Sam White, co-founder of Promethean Power Systems, was traveling through India looking for a rural electrification problem to solve. He and his team had just won a $10,000 grant in an MIT competition, and they wanted to find an industry in India that needed their help. After looking at the sugar industry and the grape industry, they finally settled on dairy.
India is the largest produce
This VC wants climate tech to play hardball in Washington
Clean energy founders love to talk about technology, capital, and scale. But few are prepared for the fourth pillar of success: government.
Shomik Dutta, a co-founder and managing partner at Overture VC, learned that lesson firsthand after a career that spanned Obama’s White House, private equity, and venture capital. His takeaway: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Shomik thinks
Shortening the nuclear development cycle from decades to years
For decades, nuclear has struggled with cost overruns and delays — Georgia’s Vogtle plant being the latest example. Kairos Power co-founder and CEO Mike Laufer thinks the solution is to flip the script: focus first on non-nuclear demonstrations and then iterate quickly.
It’s a counterintuitive and potentially risky strategy . Rapid iteration isn’t the way engineers or funders like the DOE have t
The sunk cost dilemma
Deep into engineering studies for Project Cormorant, 8 Rivers' massive low-carbon ammonia facility, the team discovered new efficiencies that would create a safer, more advanced version of their hydrogen technology. But there was one problem: they'd already invested heavily in the current design.
CEO Damian Beauchamp faced a classic dilemma. Should 8 Rivers stick with their existing approach and
John Hickenlooper’s optimism in the face of opposition
Three years ago this month, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, marking the largest investment in climate policy in U.S. history. It included over $300 billion to address global warming and was expected to unlock nearly $3 trillion in private investment by 2032.
But then came Donald Trump.
Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle much of that progress, includ
The rogue idea that saved a hydrogen startup
In 2022, Zach Jones learned that his technical team at Graphitic Energy was secretly working nights and weekends on an unsanctioned approach to producing clean hydrogen from natural gas. It was an approach that abandoned the technology Zach and the company had spent years developing. And Zach wasn’t happy.
With investors to answer to and a pilot plant ready for construction, Zach couldn't switch
The tape that led to a fusion breakthrough
In 2021, Commonwealth Fusion Systems proved it had built the most powerful magnet in the world. The breakthrough was based on a specific material - a tape - that conducts massive amounts of current with very little loss.
Rick Needham, Chief Commercial Officer for CFS, says the breakthrough led to a $1.8 billion Series B fundraising round. Since then, the company has turned its attention to turni
Frontier Forum: Fixing distributed energy's finance gap
Clean energy attracts nearly $3 trillion in investment annually, but most of that capital flows to massive utility-scale projects through the world's biggest banks and large-scale asset managers. Meanwhile, smaller distributed projects — rooftop solar, batteries, microgrids — face a structural financing challenge that Amanda Li calls "death by a thousand cuts."
As co-founder and COO of Banyan Inf
FOAK tales
This week, we're bringing you a special episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann, a show about how to decarbonize the planet. In this episode: what it takes to secure investments for first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects.
First-of-a-kind projects need infrastructure investment, the kind of money that costs less than venture capital and usually comes in the form of deals worth tens or hundreds of m
Building Fervo's geothermal giant
In 2023, Sarah Jewett was on her honeymoon in France when she received a life-changing text: steam was flowing from Fervo Energy's first commercial geothermal project in Nevada. That moment confirmed their revolutionary approach—applying horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing from the oil and gas industry to tap heat resources previously considered inaccessible.
Unlike traditional geotherm
Terawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy
In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terawatt Infrastructure with a bold mission: create the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution.
Within its first year, Terawatt secured a billion-dollar investment. But as the company developed plans for a nationwide charging network, it confronted the daunting challenge of building infrastructure for an electric truck market that barely existed.
Hig
The scrappy beginning of Tesla’s energy business
In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages.
Customers across multiple markets were already excited about the new product, but Drew’s team struggled to keep up with demand. With Powerwall 2 already
LineVision's quest to win over utilities
In 2018, LineVision was a young company with revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines. Its dynamic line rating sensors and software could increase the capacity of existing power lines by up to 40% without building new infrastructure — a critical solution for integrating renewables and meeting growing electricity demand.
But to prove its tech, it needed to win over notoriously caut
Nextracker's blueprint for 100 gigawatts of solar trackers
Dan Shugar has been trying to move solar panels around since the 1980s. What started with a few experiments as a young engineer has turned into one of the biggest solar tracker companies in the world.
In 2012 he founded Nextracker with a single product. Since then, Nextracker has revolutionized tracking technology through an array of innovative products.
This week, host Lara Pierpoint talks with
Electric Hydrogen’s bet on supersized electrolyzers
When Raffi Garabedian co-founded Electric Hydrogen in 2020, he saw existing electrolyzers as too small and expensive to make green hydrogen economically viable. Instead of building standard sub-megawatt units, his team aimed for 100-megawatt systems at half the industry cost.
Initial market enthusiasm brought millions in capacity reservations, fueling construction of a Massachusetts manufacturing
How supply chain chaos sank Sunfolding
Leila Madrone founded Sunfolding in 2012 with an innovative idea – build a solar tracker using pneumatic "airbags" instead of motors and torque tubes. By 2015, the company was deploying the technology in a field test in Davis, California.
Over the next six years, Sunfolding iterated on the technology’s design, built out the supply chain, and tried to prove bankability. Then, in 2021, the company
Open Circuit: Jigar, Katherine, and Stephen are back
This week, we’re featuring an episode of Open Circuit, a new show from Latitude Media that reunites Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and Stephen Lacey.
Many listeners may remember them from The Energy Gang, a show they co-hosted for eight years.
They are back together, co-hosting a weekly roundtable that will cover the latest news – to explain what's really accelerating the energy transition, from
The first commercial construction project for low-carbon cement
In May 2024, Yanni Tsipis was watching as his team prepared to pour a low-carbon version of concrete — one that had never been used in a commercial project. As senior vice president of WS Development, he was in charge of the team building Boston’s largest net-zero office building for operating emissions (not embodied emissions), and he had spearheaded an effort to use a new type of low-carbon ceme
Pioneering one of the first IRA tax credit transfers
When Chris Taylor and his team at GridStor were building Santa Barbara county's largest battery storage project in Goleta, CA they saw an opportunity: become one of the first companies to transfer tax credits under the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act. But there was no playbook to follow.
Instead of working with smaller, specialized investors, GridStor took an unconventional approach. They wen
Building the world’s biggest DAC facility
On Christmas Eve 2023, Doug Chan wasn't celebrating with family. Instead, he was in Hellisheiði, Iceland with his team, preparing to commission Mammoth — what would become the world's largest operational direct air capture facility.
Getting there wasn't easy. After building two successful smaller plants, Climeworks faced its biggest challenge yet in attempting a 10x scale-up of its Orca plant. Whe
A complex path for building heat batteries
In 2022, John O’Donnell and Peter von Behrens figured out how to design a heat battery that would deliver heat at very high, constant temperatures. The breakthrough came on the heels of two years of research and development, some of which took place in Peter’s garage.
Now, John and Peter were ready to prove their technology at commercial scale. So they approached a long-time innovation partner, C
The ‘third inning’ of the energy transition [partner content]
In the aftermath of the presidential election, the clean energy industry is scrambling to figure out what a second Trump administration would mean for their companies and projects.
But Tom Burton isn't just looking at the next four years. After 25 years serving the industry with the law firm Mintz, he's thinking about the growth of the industry over another couple of decades.
“Back in 2000, many p
The risk of scaling 100x
In 2022, Via Separations was getting ready to build its commercial-scale filtration system, a technology that could help cut emissions and costs for a wide range of industries like paper, chemicals, and food processing.
And when the company faced two paths — scale up 10x or 100x — CEO and co-founder Shreya Dave decided to scale faster by building a commercial project at a paper mill in Alberta, C
Why concentrated solar couldn’t compete
In 2009, John Woolard’s team flipped the switch on a first-of-a-kind concentrated solar power project. The pilot paved the way for BrightSource Energy, where John was CEO, to build its first commercial CSP plant, a 440-megawatt project in the Mojave Desert called Ivanpah.
John and his team believed they were far ahead of the competition, including photovoltaics. And they were on the verge of buil
Introducing: The Green Blueprint
We’ve already invented many of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But a big chunk of emission reductions will come from technologies that are not yet commercial.
We don’t have decades to get these commercialized – we have years.
So what can we learn from the people who are bringing new technologies from the lab to the market, constructing first-of-a-kind projects, building com
An update on what's ahead for this show, and more
Since we stopped The Carbon Copy, some listeners had questions about what’s next.
Here's a preview of our new podcast, the Transition-AI event in December, and a new newsletter called the AI-Energy Nexus.
Stay tuned to the feed for our new show, dropping later this fall!
Frontier Forum: How rates will make or break the energy transition
Dynamic pricing is everywhere – and impacts all of us.
Whether it's the time of day, your location, or the amount of demand, so many of our decisions are driven by real-time pricing changes.
But it's still a relatively new concept in electricity.
This week, we're featuring a conversation with Scott Engstrom of GridX and Economist Ahmad Faruqui on the imperative for good rate design – and the conse
Our final episode: The top stories of 2024 so far
Some news: this will be our final installment of The Carbon Copy. But don’t go anywhere!
Later this fall, the feed will be transformed into a new show that will profile the people architecting the clean energy economy. We promise it will be a valuable part of your media diet.
For our last episode, we brought back some old friends: Jigar Shah, director of the DOE’s loan programs office, and Katheri
Avoiding mistakes from the first smart meters
When millions of smart meters rolled out across the country at the turn of the last decade, many people hoped it would create the backbone of a digital grid.
Today, you’ll find few who think meters lived up to expectations. One survey found only 3% of advanced meters supported by the 2009 stimulus bill brought customer savings.
Mike Phillips, the CEO of Sense, is still bullish on the role of advan
Why ditching aluminum is key to securing the US solar supply chain
Solar is the fastest growing electricity-generating technology in history. That rapid scaling was a result of squeezing cost reductions out of every step of production. But there's one critical piece that hasn't changed much: frames.
Aluminum frames now make up one-quarter of the cost of a PV module. And that metal mostly comes from China, a country that controls nearly 60% of the world’s smelting
AI-fueled geothermal and ‘the edge of the possible’
A lot of climate tech investors are still trying to figure out how to invest in artificial intelligence. Will it become a unique investment category? Or just a natural enhancement of what many startups are already building?
There’s an emerging class of startups with AI at the center of their business. Citrine Informatics is using generative AI to speed up discovery of new materials; Koloma is usin
A macro view on the state of climate tech
We need to invest many trillions of dollars every year to build a climate-positive economy. We know what those technologies are – but they're all at very different levels of readiness.
So what would it take to scale critical climate technologies? That was the simple-but-complicated question recently posed by a group of energy, industry, and high-tech experts at McKinsey.
The research offers a clea
Energy is now the ‘primary bottleneck’ for AI
Data centers are an impressive energy success story. Over the last 25 years, internet traffic has climbed more than 500x while data center electricity use has remained flat.
The servers and energy infrastructure have gotten wildly more efficient, and the biggest tech companies have focused on powering those warehouse-scale computers with renewables.
But a lot of people are suddenly alarmed about
Tesla’s extremely hardcore pivot
The origin of Tesla was rooted in two goals: electrify transportation to drive down emissions that are warming the planet; and do it by driving down the cost of EVs to make them accessible to the masses.
Is Musk now walking away from both?
“He's decided I'm not a car company. I’m an AI and robotics company. It's astonishing what's happening with Tesla,” said Steve LeVine, editor of The Electric, a
The news quiz episode!
This week, we have something a little different: a news quiz.
We recently took the stage with four investors at the Prelude Climate Summit — armed with a bell, a buzzer, and four different categories of questions. We tested two teams of venture investors on their knowledge of the most recent industry news.
Shayle Kann and Cassie Bowe, partners at venture firm Energy Impact Partners, are team "High
Political Climate: Is the IRA under political threat?
This week, we have a drop-in episode from our new podcast at Latitude Media: Political Climate.
Since the Inflation Reduction Act became law in August 2022, we’ve asked ourselves a big question: could the government and the private sector actually get this sprawling set of climate programs up and running?
So far, many would answer “yes.” The IRA has already created over 170,000 jobs and supported
An influx of EVs. Surging peaks. Can AI help?
AI is suddenly in use everywhere – and it’s headed for the power sector.
New research from Latitude Intelligence and Indigo Advisory Group shows a coming wave of AI integration, inside and outside of utilities.
Distributed energy companies are increasingly integrating AI into their products, and many power companies are building teams to take advantage of automation for operational efficiency an
The rise of heat batteries
John O’Donnell co-founded and ran two solar thermal companies. He watched as the technology shifted from being the most promising utility-scale solar technology, to getting out-competed by photovoltaics everywhere.
But he stayed passionate about heat. Today, he’s CEO of Rondo Energy, which makes a “heat battery” for industrial applications using bricks, heating coils, and cheap, intermittent renew
Inside Apple’s failed car program
Mark Gurman has been covering Apple since 2009. His reporting career is full of scoops about new products or strategic decisions from inside the company.
His latest scoop in February: Apple is finally shutting down its efforts to build an autonomous electric car.
Apple first started exploring an electric car in 2014. At that point, cars had already become computers on wheels, Tesla was scaling ma
The Latitude: Could government rules hinder green hydrogen?
The US green hydrogen industry is at a critical juncture.
After months of input and debate, the government put out draft rules for tax credits at the end of last year – setting strict requirements for matching new, local renewables to hydrogen production.
It was hailed by many as a really important step for ensuring that green hydrogen actually lives up to its name. But across the industry, the r
The achilles heel of AI in the power system: data
There are many forces that could hold back AI in the power system: computing infrastructure, power availability, regulation, and corporate inertia.
The biggest one? Good data.
Utilities and grid operators are awash in data. But getting access to it – or making sense of it – is very difficult.
For a better understanding of how to change that, we turn to someone who spends a lot of his time in the
The urgent need to simplify clean energy finance [partner content]
Early in her career, Amanda Li worked on many deals in solar and storage as part of a billion-dollar sustainable infrastructure fund. And she discovered a problem that often hinders deployment: the underwriting process is cumbersome and slow.
“All of it was in spreadsheets, word documents, emails. When you look at a solar deal, there's a lot of documentation, a lot of counterparties to deal with,
New demand is straining the grid. Here’s how to tackle it.
When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts.
Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of ChatGPT 3.5, which ran on Microsoft’s data center
The right way to recycle batteries [partner content]
In the early 2000s, Steve Cotton ran a company serving the fast-growing data center industry with backup battery systems.
And when those systems reached the end of their lives, the company monetized kilotons of lead-acid batteries by sending them to recycling facilities – industrial plants that break down and burn the components.
“It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You'v
A view of the $1.8 trillion clean energy economy
Can a couple trillion dollars feel small?
Global investments in the energy transition – from the buildout of factories and power projects to project finance and government debt – hit nearly $1.8 trillion last year.
That’s almost as big as the GDP of South Korea. It’s nearly 20% more than the year before, and nearly eight times more than a decade ago. But even with those record levels of spending,
Virtual power plants: the ‘sandwich’ for the grid
If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants.
That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other dist
Pricing and tech trends shaping the global battery storage market
The storage market is full of surprises. Last year, global storage installations were a third higher than expected, driven mostly by Chinese policy to attach batteries to renewables.
Meanwhile, a ramp-up in manufacturing is causing oversupply – and a potential shakeout for smaller battery makers.
By 2030, the world could see 1.8 terawatt-hours of storage capacity installed, according to Bloomberg
US power demand is set to boom. How will we meet it?
As President Biden’s green industrial policies reignite the US manufacturing base, AI computing workloads soar, and machines across the economy turn electric, the power grid is facing an historic increase in demand.
After almost two decades of flat electricity consumption, suddenly America’s grid planners are doubling their forecasts for demand – raising the urgency for new infrastructure.
This we
How AI is rapidly advancing new materials for clean energy
Artificial intelligence is quickly accelerating drug discovery, healthcare services, product design, and manufacturing efficiency. Now it's here for materials development – and it could be one of the most influential uses of AI in energy.
A decade ago, Greg Mulholland started playing around with machine learning as a way to accelerate product development of materials inside LEDs. After seeing its
Venture investors riff on headwinds, hype, and wildcards of 2023
Turbulent. Equilibrating. Those are the words that investors Gabriel Kra and Carly Anderson use to describe the last year for venture capital in climate tech.
We now have a full picture of the year for climate tech venture investing in 2023. Fresh data from Sightline Climate shows a decline in deal counts, round sizes, and a dropoff in repeat investors.
It was a year of rising interest rates, de
The terawatt era of PV: ‘Solar will be the gas of today’
When the numbers for 2023 are finalized, there could be another 320 to 413 gigawatts of solar installed around the world – bringing global capacity to nearly 1.5 terawatts.
Solar is now on track to surpass coal and fossil gas capacity in the next few years, bringing generation to 10% of global electricity supply.
There's universal recognition that we're firmly in the solar era. But outlooks on ho
The storylines of the energy transition in 2023
The competing trends in the energy transition from 2023 were stark: a looming peak in demand for oil, gas, and coal; a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; and an increasingly realistic pathway to triple renewables development.
But we also experienced the hottest global temperatures in 125,000 years, record US oil & gas production, inflation headwinds that challenged large renewa
LNG exports: America’s hidden ‘climate bomb’
In less than a decade, America has become the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas.
In the mid-2000s, the US was building terminals to import more fossil gas. But that all changed after the fracking boom unlocked vast reserves of hydrocarbons.
The US became a net exporter in 2017. Then, Russia’s war on Ukraine forced a scramble for new supplies of gas in Europe – and American compan
Making sense of advanced nuclear’s stumbles
The nuclear industry is grappling with several issues: high interest rates, rising commodity prices, limited supply chains, fuel availability, and a regulatory environment that has been slow to adapt to new technologies.
In the west, nuclear knowhow has faded over the decades. Even with a surge in policy support and public interest, development is stagnant and capacity has fallen. Momentum has mo
How to triple renewables by 2030
It took 12 years to triple global renewables – and now we need to do it in eight years.
As the latest UN climate summit begins, there’s a proposal on the table to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Countries may agree to it in theory, but can the market meet it in practice?
This week, we’ll look at why this tripling is necessary, how it could be done, and what technologies will dominate.
T
AI in the real world: Solar forecasting, EVs, and virtual power plants
Weather forecasts for the grid depend on supercomputers to calculate the flow of heat, water, and radiation in the atmosphere, and then spit out predictions about what could happen next.
These supercomputers are powerful. But they are also expensive and slow, relative to how quickly the weather changes. A new class of AI-based weather forecasts could change the game for grid operators and renewabl
The future of the ‘broken’ grid [partner content]
This is a partner podcast episode, brought to you by Intersect Power.
The U.S. grid is in trouble. It's old; it's really hard to build new transmission lines; and that is limiting the amount of wind and solar we can add to the system.
Sheldon Kimber, Founder and CEO of the clean energy developer Intersect Power, says the grid is “broken.” But he has a plan to get around those constraints.
In this
For Microsoft, AI is an ‘unlock’ for decarbonization
Microsoft was an early mover in integrating OpenAI’s LLM into its Azure cloud services. And now every part of Microsoft’s technology stack — from cloud infrastructure to data analytics to consumer apps — will be “reimagined” for the AI era, said Nadella. As a result, every industry will inevitably be impacted by AI.
Utilities will also find themselves at the center of this shift, even if most aren
Inflation plagues clean energy. How bad is it?
Wind, solar and batteries have seen steady, fairly predictable cost drops over the last two decades. But a combination of pressures – supply chain turmoil, grid constraints, interest rates, labor costs – has raised costs for products and projects. And they’re challenging the commercial viability of emerging sectors like offshore wind and hydrogen.
So how will the market work through this inflation
Tackling the tough stuff: steel, cement, and chemicals
The industrial sector is set to overtake power generation and transportation as the biggest source of planet warming emissions in the US by 2035, according to The Rhodium Group.
The sector’s impact is even greater on the global scale. Industry around the world accounts for more carbon dioxide emissions than all forms of transportation combined – largely driven by steel, cement, and chemicals.
Ther
Investors riff on the new era for climate investing
There are a lot of quarterly ups and downs in venture dollars deployed across climatetech. But the trend is generally up. Since 2021, more than 200 new climate investment funds have been created with $121 billion under management, according to CTVC.
Earlier this month, Canary Media Editorial Director Eric Wesoff explored the evolved state of climate investing at Canary Media's live event in Berkel
Can California pull off its clean energy ambitions?
California is at a crossroads. The state has already installed nearly 1.8 million rooftop solar systems, 5 gigawatts of batteries, and 1.6 million electric cars. But it is also facing some serious challenges.
The list is long: controversial policy changes, extreme weather threats, and backlogs – lots and lots of backlogs.
It is facing serious backlogs in interconnecting utility-scale solar and sto
Why electric cars are driving the auto strikes
Just as the auto industry resolves supply chain problems from the Covid pandemic, a new disruptive force has emerged: labor disputes.
Nearly 20,000 American auto workers are on strike as they ask for higher pay. At the heart of their concerns: will the shift to electric cars make them worse off?
We’ll look at a strike that is raising big questions about how to support the companies making electri
New frontiers of clean energy emerge
Renewables and electric vehicles are on a tear, and they’ll soon likely attract $2 trillion in yearly investment. But global emissions have not peaked.
So what are the new frontiers of technology that will make renewables and storage more valuable – and draw down emissions at the speed needed?
This week, we’re going to reflect on that question coming out of RE+, a major American conference where
Inflation headwinds for offshore wind
In the last few months, three major projects in Europe and America have been delayed or canceled, thanks to rapidly rising costs.
Those projects make up more than 10% of current offshore wind capacity in the EU and US, according to Bloomberg. Another 9.7 gigawatts are at risk in America, as developers look to renegotiate contracts.
The complexity of offshore wind magnifies the technical and finan
As debate over carbon removal swirls, America steps up funding
As the carbon dioxide removal industry grows, engineered solutions like direct-air capture are getting more attention.
According to the IPCC, novel methods for carbon dioxide removal are necessary to meet the Paris climate targets.
But another UN body, the UNFCCC, recently sparked controversy by concluding in draft language that “engineering-based removal activities…pose unknown environmental and
America’s next-generation mining future [partner content]
This is a partner podcast episode, brought to you by South32.
Pat Risner spent 25 years as an engineer, general manager, and executive at one of the largest mining companies in the world, BHP. Today, he's the president of the Hermosa Project, a mining development in Arizona run by the global mining firm, South32.
That mine is the only advanced project in America that could produce manganese and z
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