Energy Gang

This week: our pre-thanksgiving intellectual feast. It’s a four-course meal as usual. For the hors d’oeuvres, we’re serving up something new: a roundup of the new entrants into the presidential race, and how they stack up on environmental issues. For the side dishes, we’ll reheat some leftovers. We’ll look at the climategate debacle 10 years later. And for the main course. What people or companies...

As we reckon with the dark side of Silicon Valley’s tech giants, there’s more scrutiny into how these companies are assisting climate denial and obfuscation. We’ll look at a few different stories: Climate and clean energy are getting disadvantaged by Facebook and Twitter’s different policies on political ads: how do we define issue ads and political speech? Google, Facebook and others are getting...

This week on Watt It Takes : how a would-be priest made it his mission to spread the gospel of battery storage. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Mateo Jaramillo, the CEO and co-founder of Form Energy. Form is working on a new kind of long-duration battery. And Mateo has one of the longer-duration careers in the storage industry.  In the early 2000s, he deployed the...

We recorded this episode on Halloween morning. We woke up and felt like celebrating the theme of the holiday. If you’re listening after Halloween, don’t fret. There’s still plenty of newsworthy stuff in here. First up, we’re choosing the story from 2019 that is most worthy of its own horror movie. As a bonus, we are also choosing the genre of horror. Then, we pick the zombie story or trend of the...

Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content:  bit.ly/gtmpodcast This week: it’s the oil industry versus the world.  We’re examining two legal battles for oil majors playing out in states. One involves electric cars and one involves responsibility for climate change. We’ll start first with a story from POLITICO’s Gavin Bade . Advocacy groups...

Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content:  bit.ly/gtmpodcast The world’s fifth-largest economy looked more like a developing country last week, as PG&E purposefully cut power to millions of people in Northern California for days. We knew this was coming. The growing safety and financial risk of wildfires in the state mean mass power outage...

This is a branded podcast made in collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and GTM Creative Strategies.  As grids get saturated with wind and solar electricity, there’s pressure to find new ways to store that energy across daily, monthly or seasonal variations. Could the answer be a billion-year-old microbe? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and SoCalGas are curre...

Could you do us a favor? Take our listener survey so we can give you more relevant content: bit.ly/gtmpodcast This week on Watt It Takes: how a computer nerd who loved assembling electronics became obsessed with designing a solar-storage system to light up Africa. In this episode, Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Xavier Helgesen, the co-founder and chief technology officer at ZOLA Electr...

This is a branded podcast made in collaboration between CohnReznick Capital and GTM Creative Strategies.  Britta Von Oesen knows risk.  As an intern in Lehman Brothers’ global energy unit in 2008, she watched the collapse of the investment bank in real time.  Later, she watched European markets grind to a halt after feed-in-tariffs were reversed. And in the U.S., she’s monitored the...

The Bonneville Power Administration, the government-owned “power marketing agency” that serves the Pacific Northwest, is facing a strong current of problems.  As cheap renewables make hydro less competitive in the region, BPA is now bleeding money. There’s now concern that its utility customers will stop buying hydro after contracts expire. Meanwhile, the cost of rehabilitating salmon populat...

This week: We’ve gone from drought to flood. People who care about climate change have spent the last three presidential election cycles cajoling, prodding and begging television news outlets to cover the issue. But the more pressure mounted, the more coverage lagged.  Across all three debates between Clinton and Trump in 2016, environmental issues got just under 5 and a half minutes of air t...

America is a place where if you can dream something — no matter how big or ambitious — you can do it.  Unless you’re trying to string 700 miles of high-voltage transmission lines to bring wind power from Oklahoma to Tennessee.  Our guest this week is Russell Gold, author of a new book about the saga that unfolded when wind energy pioneer Michael Skelly tried just that.  The book, “...

This week on Watt It Takes : How an energy researcher obsessed with electric vehicles stumbled upon a vast trove of transportation data and built a company that is reshaping infrastructure planning for mobility. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Laura Schewel, the founder and CEO of Streetlight Data .  Laura spent her career studying storage, electric vehicles, and transportation sys...

With flight shame growing in popularity, extreme weather intensifying, and the Amazon burning, there’s more demand than ever for carbon offsets to assuage our guilt and make us feel like we’re doing something. But those credits many not be doing what you think they are — or anything at all. This week, we’re discussing the complicated and frustrating world of carbon offsets. There’s a reason why ev...

In nearly every corner of the country, energy storage projects are finding their way onto the grid — they’re getting bigger, cheaper, more diverse, and even a little bit weirder.  Most of all, they’re just becoming normal. This week, we’re talking about the new normal for power operations. It includes a lot of batteries. And maybe some air tanks, water pumps and cranes too. GTM Staff Writer J...

Solar and wind sent European utilities into financial disarray, and U.S. utilities are facing a similar fate. Are global oil companies next? A new report from one of the world’s biggest banks, BNP Paribas, says that solar and wind paired with electric cars provide up to 7 times more useful energy for mobility than gasoline dollar for dollar. And that economic reality could hit oil companies sooner...

This week on Watt It Takes : How a former Apple engineer applied design principles from the iPod and the iPad to smart thermostats — jolting an industry badly in need of change. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Matt Rogers, the co-founder and former chief product officer of Nest. Nest is best known for its elegant learning thermostat, the first major breakout hit in the smart home space....

Note: after this episode, we will be on hiatus for a few weeks while Stephen Lacey goes on paternity leave. We’ll be back soon! On July 8, Donald Trump stood in the East Room of the White House and delivered a speech on his “environmental leadership.” What could he possibly talk about? Onlookers called the speech “Orwellian.” The Trump Administration has tried to pull America out of a global clima...

This week, we present a special episode produced on behalf of CohnReznick. There’s a bonanza sweeping across North America: cannabis. As more states legalize marijuana, the industry is attracting high-profile investors and bringing in $6.5 billion in yearly sales.  But it also faces two major challenges: limited access to banking and high energy costs. Because cannabis is still illegal a...

This week: we examine the Trump alternative to the Clean Power Plan, look at the gap between red and blue states on climate change, and review the presidential debates. Up first: how Trump's EPA is replacing Obama's major climate rule. Then, the red-blue climate divide. States are putting ambitious new climate plans in place. But they’re almost all in states dominated by democrats -- and the new E...

This week on Watt It Takes : How a Ukrainian immigrant quietly toiled away on a new battery chemistry and created a billion-dollar unicorn. Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Gene Berdichevsky, the CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies. Sila is developing a new lithium-ion battery chemistry that uses silicon in place of graphite — leading to an improvement in battery density by 20 percent. This spr...

It’s been a decade since the fracking boom reshaped U.S. energy markets — so when will we ever use our drilling prowess to create a similar geothermal boom? That’s the hope. The Department of Energy just released a massive new report revisiting America’s geothermal potential in conventional hydrothermal, enhanced geothermal, direct use and heat pumps.  And the potential is enormous — but it’s...

It may be a couple election cycles late, but we’re finally getting a wave of climate plans from presidential candidates. The issue is now front and center in the Democratic primaries. We’ve spent the last week collecting the plans from leading candidates, surveying the stances of the rest of the field, and monitoring the reactions. We’ll sort through them in this week’s Energy Gang episode. ...

A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the world spent $5.2 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2017. That’s half a trillion dollars more than in 2015. But it also shows that fossil fuel subsidy spending is down by half since 2012. What gives? How much are we actually spending to make fossil fuels cheaper? We’ll clarify the different ways economists are measuring that spendi...

It took four decades for America to install a million solar systems. And it took just three years to install the second million. From here on out, the U.S. market will likely see a million systems every couple of years, according to the latest data from Wood Mackenzie. To mark this new era of scale, we’re going to look back at the most important trends that got us to the first couple of million sy...