Energy Gang

This sponsored episode was produced in collaboration with GTM Creative Strategies and the Opower team at Oracle Utilities. The last two years have brought a surge of plans for zero-carbon energy from some of the biggest power providers in the world. Dozens of U.S. utilities have committed to decarbonizing by 80% or more by 2050. "Two thirds of U.S. consumers are now served by utilities with c...

This week: the future of the planet depends on the mail.  The mail-in votes are still being counted, but it’s increasingly likely that Joe Biden will become America’s next president. As of this recording on Thursday morning, Biden’s path to the presidency looks much better than Trump’s. It could be Thursday night or Friday when we get calls for Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina...

We’re just a few days out from the election -- and how could we talk about anything else? Climate is finally beginning to play the kind of role that we have waited so long for.  In this pre-election episode, we’ll recap where things stand: and how energy and climate are playing into late-stage messaging of Biden and Trump.  Plus, what are some of the crucial down-ballot races we’re watch...

This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Solstice CEO Steph Speirs . Solistice is a community solar company trying to make PV accessible to everyone. Steph Speirs grew up one of three kids, first generation, in Hawaii. Her mom had immigrated from Korea. She knows what eviction feels like, and what it’s like to skirt homelessness. And she knows how a poor credit score...

In a year when clean energy and clean vehicle jobs were supposed to increase by some 175,000, we are down by half a million jobs.  We will tell you why, and explain the numbers. What will reverse the decline? Then: Did New Jersey just pass the most sweeping environmental justice law in the country? The new law will mean big changes for industrial sites -- and the neighborhoods that often feel...

Manish Hebbar architects billions of dollars worth of equity and debt deals in clean energy. He’s able to stay methodical and calm in the middle of deals that are very stressful, involving multiple buyers and counter-parties.  “M&A transactions are those types of deals, where it's a fast-paced environment, every minute and every hour matters. It's really about who can stay the course and...

What does it mean when the world’s largest generator of wind and solar outpaces the most iconic oil company in market value? We’re talking about NextEra Energy and ExxonMobil. What does the flip tell us about the energy transition? Plus, reporters at Bloomberg got their hands on documents that show ExxonMobil plans to pretty significantly ramp up emissions in the coming years. Is this the planet’s...

China, the country currently pouring the most carbon into the atmosphere, is making a promise to get to zero emissions – 40 years from now. Is it a breakthrough? Or is it a plan to keep burning coal? Is it both? We’ll hash it out.  Then, the Governor of California wants to stop selling any new cars that run on gasoline – in 15 years. It’s ambitious, can it be done? Is it legal? What will that...

Does the loss of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg mean the future of federal climate policy is in jeopardy? What will a changed Supreme Court mean for climate change, and for the all-important endangerment finding? The Gang weighs in.  Then, the great plastic cover-up. How important are plastics to the profits of fossil fuel companies? We dive into an important investigation from NPR and Frontline...

This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Michael Liebreich. You may know Liebreich as the brain behind New Energy Finance, which was sold to Bloomberg in 2009. But before that company, Leibreich started a ski-based travel startup and invested in a portfolio of companies that lost 90 percent of their value in the dot-com bust. After that, he was "unemployable." But he...

In the first half of 2020, renewables beat out fossil fuels on the grid in Europe for the first time. They didn’t only beat out coal -- they beat out all fossil fuels put together. We’ll look at what the milestone means. Then, 30 major companies have come together in a new joint lobbying organization to flex united power for clean energy. Will it make renewables a bigger political force? And what...

This week on Watt It Takes : Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with green jobs pioneer Van Jones. Jones may be best known for “The Van Jones Show” and “The Redemption Project,” which both air on CNN. He is also the author of three best-selling books, including “The Green Collar Economy.” But long before the high-profile Green New Deal, Jones was also a powerful voice for bringing clean energy...

We are just over two months away from America’s presidential election. And that means we are days away from one of the most consequential political moments ever for the planet.  Joe Biden put climate and cleantech jobs at the top of his priorities in last week’s nomination speech. His VP pick, Kamala Harris, says she’ll use her background as a prosecutor to hold industries accountable for cli...

Last week, short-term blackouts rolled across an overheated California after the grid operator said there was not enough power to meet demand.  This wasn’t supposed to happen again. Not after the Enron scandal. Not after 19 years of reforms. We have a very different grid now.  Renewables skeptics, including President Trump, are seizing on the incident. What really happened? Where do we p...

“Electrify everything” isn’t just a good slogan. It’s the fastest way to decarbonize and create tens of millions of jobs -- and it can be done using off-the-shelf technology.  A respected squad of researchers did the math on a swap-out of every aging boiler, truck and power plant -- and replacing it with equipment that won’t burn fossil fuels ever again. We’ll dig into a new analysis from Rew...

On this week’s episode of The Energy Gang: big energy companies are putting together bids for multi- renewable power -- and it’s merchant.  Global investment in offshore wind more than quadrupled in the first half of this year. More new wind farms were approved at the height of the pandemic than during all last year.  Some of offshore projects include storage, and even hydrogen. Some of...

Dan Yates and his co-founder Alex Laskey built Opower, an efficiency company that saves more energy every year than the hoover dam can generate. It was based on cutting-edge behavioral science -- but it wasn’t always clear how the science would play out. “It wasn’t okay with us to just know that there was going to be a result. It had to be a certain level, otherwise it wasn’t economic. And in the...

Joe Biden just released a plan to address climate change on a trillion-dollar scale. Along with focusing on rapid deployment of renewables, it also devotes resources to environmental justice, sustainable housing, clean transportation, and networking. What would it mean? And who's informing the ideas? We’ll dig in. Then Facebook's disinformation problem. We look at why Facebook is rejecting the con...

A group of House lawmakers recently released a 547-page report on climate change. Reporters at E&E News call it “arguably the most comprehensive climate policy plan in American politics.” The report spells out in great detail how to use Congressional policy to decarbonize the economy. It was the result of nearly a year of input from hundreds of experts, 17 hearings, and thousands of meetings....

A rivalry is emerging between two companies trying to clean up the trucking industry: Nikola Motor versus Tesla Motors. Tesla thinks battery-electric semi models are superior. Nikola thinks hydrogen is the best choice. Neither company actually has a semi model on the road. But Elon Musk and Trevor Milton are talking up their visions for the future of heavy-duty trucks, with the hope of getting veh...

This is an original, branded podcast from GTM Creative Strategies, produced in collaboration with CohnReznick. In 2004, Ted Gunther started a new job at a big accounting firm. He led the team overseeing transactions in newly-deregulated electricity markets. On his first day, he met the "Green Book," a thick, complicated book that sets standards for derivatives, hedging strategies and contracts str...

Most decarbonization proposals play out over 30 years, aiming toward 2050. But a new roadmap from researchers at UC Berkeley and the policy firm Energy Innovation shows the grid can get 90% clean in just 15 years.  No new fossil fuel plants. Lower rates for consumers. 85,000 lives saved. 500,000 additional jobs. Region by region, they lay out exactly how. Prices have fallen so quickly that ou...

We’re back with another live show from quarantine.  Europe is crafting a €750 billion recovery package in response to the economic impact of coronavirus. It will devote more than €200 billion directly to low-carbon infrastructure projects. That could enable hundreds of billions more for renewables, efficiency, clean public transport, and hydrogen. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., our recent stimu...

This week: as anger over police brutality explodes into the once-empty streets, we tackle an equally oppressive force for black Americans: environmental racism. Coronavirus has exposed an unsettling reality for black and brown people, who are dying at higher rates in the country’s most polluted communities. We’re suddenly talking again about structural racism in policing and criminal justice. But...

Gia Schneider and her brother Abe started Natel Energy based on a hydropower turbine their father designed. And after more than a decade of R&D, pilots, software development and a project for Apple, Natel is preparing for the next level of scale. “Our objectives have actually not wavered. But they haven’t wavered because of rigid adherence to dogma, they have not wavered because we check in co...