Catalyst with Shayle Kann

The idea of colocating data centers with behind-the-meter generation is picking up steam, including large projects in Memphis, Texas, and Utah developing significant on-site capacity, mostly from combined-cycle gas plants. The main argument is speed to power. Building your own generation allows data centers to sidestep the challenges involved in grid upgrades, transmission, and permitting.  But wh...

You sent in great questions, and today we’re answering them. In this episode, Shayle hands it over to Lara Pierpoint, the managing director of Trellis Climate at the Prime Coalition and host of The Green Blueprint. Together they cover topics like: Whether solar radiation management will remain the “black sheep” of climate technologies What technologies will excel in a world of rising power prices...

Adding flexibility to data center loads could ease strain on the grid and reduce the need for costly new generation. And, according to one study, shaving off just a few megawatts during peak hours could also unlock unused capacity —as many as 98 gigawatts in the U.S —  if those facilities reduced load by just 0.5% each year.   The problem: data centers promise near-perfect reliability, often “five...

Editor's note: With the Trump administration's efforts to roll back California's electric trucking rules, there's new attention on heavy duty transport right now. So we're bringing you a deep dive into the industry, an episode of The Green Blueprint on Terawatt Infrastructure's $1 billion strategy to build charging depots. In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terrawatt Infrastructure with a bold missio...

Our first episode covering sodium-ion batteries featured a cautious take on the chemistry: Back in February Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER program, explained the challenges of reaching competitive energy density and costs, especially given the falling price of LFP. Still, sodium-ion chemistries are picking up steam, thanks largely to growing deployments in stationary storage and small-sca...

Editor’s note: The uncertainties of data center construction — like when, where, and how much to build — are as pressing as ever. So we’re revisiting a conversation with Brian Janous, co-founder and chief commercial officer at data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. In this episode, he explains his theory of the ‘Watt-Bit Spread’, which offers insightful heuristics for understanding how d...

The PJM capacity auction this month broke records with sky-high wholesale power prices — and that was by design. Under PJM’s auction rules, tight supply raises prices, incentivizing the development of new generation and encouraging existing generation to stay online. The big driver of that tight supply? Data-center driven load growth. The independent system operator covers Virginia, one of the den...

The job of an EV battery is unforgiving. If its performance slips too far — say, lost acceleration or range — it's probably off to the recycling heap. That’s even though it may have plenty of usable life, if only for something less demanding than powering a vehicle. Grid storage is theoretically a gentler job, involving slower discharging and more careful management. Still, repurposing isn’t easy....

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) complicates things. Together with a related executive order, it dismantled key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, while also injecting uncertainty into tax credit eligibility. The uncertainty in particular throws a wrench into project planning and leaves big questions about the impact across climate tech.  So what do we know about the complexities of the new po...

Residential solar has had a rough couple of years. In 2024, the market contracted 31% and major companies like Sunpower and Titan went bankrupt. Now, only halfway through 2025, Sunnova and Mosaic have filed for bankruptcy, too. The market has suffered from low demand, high interest rates, and major policy changes like California’s cuts to net metering.  So now that the One Big Beautiful Bill phase...

You’ve probably heard about Nat Bullard’s massive decarbonization slide decks, filled with charts and insights into decarbonization drawn from climate and energy data.  This time he's waded through piles of utility regulatory filings — countless PDFs that hint at the inner workings of utilities and large customers — to find clues about everything from gas plant costs to new large-load tariffs.  In...

Lithium-manganese-rich (LMR) batteries could offer a rare combination in energy storage: high energy density at lower costs. They swap much of the expensive nickel for abundant, affordable manganese. But technical hurdles — like poor cycle life, voltage decay, and long formation time — kept them on the sidelines. Now GM says it’s solved these challenges. In May, it announced plans to mass produce...

Addison Stark thinks waste heat is a waste of time. The real opportunity, he argues, is decarbonizing industrial steam, which accounts for roughly 30% of industrial heat in the U.S. But doing that means deploying alternatives to the fossil fuel boilers industry currently relies on. So how do you clean up steam? And why does Addison think waste heat is overhyped? In this episode, Shayle talks with...

The future of the grid increasingly hinges on where and how data centers get built. To forecast the kind of power infrastructure we need to meet AI’s growing appetite, we first need to understand a laundry list of variables: data center size, workload type, latency, reliability — even the variety of a data center’s coolant system.  So what’s the state of play in data center development today — and...

Demand for turbines is growing fast, but so are lead times — causing serious headaches for developers. In Texas, one of six projects that pulled proposals from consideration for a valuable financing program cited “equipment procurement constraints” as the reasons for its withdrawal. Lead times are stretching to four years and sometimes more. Costs are climbing. So what’s behind the bottleneck? In...

Geothermal seems to be nearing an inflection point. With rising load growth, clean, firm power is more valuable than ever. Next-gen geothermal players like Fervo Energy and Sage Geosystems are signing PPAs with major tech firms. Even U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright — a known critic of renewables — has praised the potential of geothermal.  The size of the U.S. geothermal resource accessible t...

In April, the Trump administration issued an executive order to accelerate the development of deep-sea minerals — part of its broader push for “energy dominance.” The world’s oceans hold vast, untapped deposits of critical minerals like nickel, copper, manganese, and rare earth elements — all essential to batteries and clean energy technologies. Despite decades of interest, no commercial deep-sea...

From his days as an IndyCar race engineer to his current role as chief product officer for a leading storage integrator, Tristan Doherty has always worked at the intersection of high performance and risk management.  Today, he's applying that expertise at LG Energy Solution Vertech to build more resilient, domestically manufactured energy storage systems for America's evolving grid. LG Energy Solu...

This week, we're bringing you a special episode of The Green Blueprint, a show about the stories behind first-of-a-kind climate projects. In this episode: Terawatt Power's first commercial electric truck charging depot, which opened in April near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It was a significant milestone for the industry. So how’d Terawatt pull it off? Host Lara Pierpoint talks to Ter...

The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new react...

In the mid-2000s, Ben Brown started his career designing demand response programs that relied on pagers and telephones. Today, as Renew Home's CEO, he's leveraging AI and tens of millions of connected smart devices to help households save energy and create an entirely new approach to grid management. Renew Home is building a new kind of virtual power plant that moves beyond occasional emergency ev...

It’s a Catalyst first-of-a-kind: our very first live event! We hosted it last Wednesday at San Francisco Climate week. In this episode, Shayle talks to Mike Schroepfer, co-founder and partner at Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, and Nick Chaset, CEO of Octopus Energy US. Together they cover: Lessons on building products that consumers love  Over and under hyped trends, including data cente...

China’s new export controls on rare earth elements (REEs) are a problem for EVs, renewables, and other industries that rely on the minerals, especially the permanent magnets they’re used in. The vast majority of the global supply chain is in China. Plus, Chinese companies control supply chain operations around the world.  So is it possible to stand up a rare earth supply chain outside of China’s c...

The U.S. storage market is experiencing hockey-stick growth, with multiple gigawatts being installed quarterly. But new policy uncertainties around tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act are threatening this momentum. But Jeff Waters, the CEO of Powin, remains optimistic. "This industry will figure out a way to work with it," says Waters, who brings decades of experience from the semiconductor an...

Big tech’s data center construction boom is fueling a flurry of natural gas development, despite the fuel’s challenges, and it’s complicating big tech’s climate goals. But carbon capture and storage (CCS) could mitigate emissions from those new plants, and hyperscalers could secure low-carbon power while meeting their needs for speed and reliability.  So how could natural gas with CCS serve data c...