Energy Gang

Zero-emission, low-cost electricity, delivered to the grid from natural-gas fuelled technology. A wright-brothers first flight kind of breakthrough in energy? The gang discuss the possibilities and scalability of NET Powers Technology, a Texas-based energy company who’ve made this exact claim. Ed is joined as usual by Melissa Lott from Columbia University, and Emily Chasan from Generate Capital. T...

The COP26 circus has left town. Across 2 weeks of talks in Glasgow, what were the successes, and what were the failures? With current commitments putting the world on track to 2.4°C of warming, the cost of inaction on climate and health will vastly outweigh the costs of acting now, so which countries are snapping into action? Host Ed Crooks is joined by regular Melissa Lott, Director of Research a...

COP26 is under way in Glasgow. It has been billed as the “last best hope for the world to get its act together” on climate change, but what is the real significance of the talks? Host Ed Crooks is joined by new regular co-host of the Energy Gang Melissa Lott, Director of Research at the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, to discuss the key issues and outcomes of the conference....

Some news for this podcast: Ed Crooks , VP of the Americas for Wood Mackenzie, will be taking over the show as our new host. Co-hosts Katherine Hamilton and Stephen Lacey will be moving on.  Wood Mackenzie will be producing the podcast from now on, bringing on a range of new voices to join the gang. We discuss the transition in the first half of the episode.  Later in the show, Katherine...

The U.S. Department of Energy is crucial for funding, researching, and testing emerging energy tech. Now, in the Biden era, the agency is orienting itself toward deployment. How difficult is that transition? Our former co-host Jigar Shah joins Stephen, Katherine, and Ed to discuss his experience running the Energy Department’s loan programs office. In March, Jigar left his position at Generate Cap...

EIA and IEA are out with projections for emissions and fossil fuel consumption. And they don’t look good.  On our current policy trajectory, there is no peak in sight, according to EIA  By 2050, we will likely see a 50% increase in energy consumption. And even though renewables will be the fastest-growing new source of energy, hydrocarbon liquid fuels will meet the majority of demand . T...

Suddenly everyone is talking about green hydrogen.  From South Africa to the United Arab Emirates. From China to Utah. Governments and developers are eyeing hydrogen as a decarbonization tool.  But the rush is also raising lots of questions: Where will hydrogen be most useful? How do you create a supply chain to support it? And how can we ensure it has climate integrity? For answers, we...

Ride sharing has swept transportation systems over the last decade -- bringing convenience, but also congestion, inequities, and political fights. Now a new category of transportation networking is emerging: TransitTech . It makes up a class of companies that are using tech to help maximize public transit systems. So what does TransitTech look like post-pandemic? Tiffany Chu joins Katherine and St...

All around us, hidden inside our buildings, are a series of choices and tradeoffs -- choices with direct impacts on our health, our money, and our energy use.  Our buildings are wasteful and are filled with a lot of  “embodied” carbon . As a result, buildings directly and indirectly account for 40 percent of global emissions.  How do we make those choices with better building scienc...

Carbon capture has long been criticized as too nascent, too expensive, and too distracting. Is that changing? This month, the Swiss company Climeworks officially launched a direct-air capture plant in Iceland, called Orca.  The company has already signed deals with SwissRe, Bill Gates, Stripe, and Shopify to sell them credits from the plant. But the tech is still pretty expensive and relative...

The electric grid is a central pillar of a zero-carbon economy. But in an era of unrelenting weather extremes, it’s also one of the most fragile. This week: what does power after carbon look like? Katherine and Stephen are joined by Dr. Peter Fox-Penner, author of a new book called, “ Power After Carbon .” Peter is the founder of the Boston University Institute of Sustainable Energy. And he’s a pa...

The world’s most scrutinized and peer-reviewed document is out: the IPCC report on climate change.  Thousands of scientists have spent decades pouring over every measurement and research report known. The findings are clearer than ever : It is “virtually certain” that the increases in extreme temperatures and droughts are caused by human activity.  The economic and human toll from climat...

This episode originally aired on The Interchange. Back in 2016,  Mateo Jaramillo  left Tesla, where he was leading the stationary energy storage business, and started looking for a new challenge to tackle. He took on long-duration energy storage -- not long duration like 8 hours or 12 hours, but days or weeks or more. In 2017 he came on the show  to talk about it .  He formed a...

We started the Covid pandemic at negative oil prices. Today, benchmark prices are above $70. And top oil companies are reporting billions of dollars in profits. And now there is more scrutiny than ever on how they’re going to spend that money. Activist shareholders are starting to get climate champions on oil major board seats -- most notably, climate tech investor and former wind executive Andy K...

We're at a new phase of the clean energy transition. Extreme heat, drought and floods are increasing in frequency. Public attention on clean energy is stronger than ever. The Biden Administration is putting zero-carbon energy at the core of its policies. And there's another powerful force: making sure the energy transition is as racially and economically just as possible. Anton Cohen is a partner...

After 30 years of R&D and commercial proof, hundreds of billions in institutional dollars are pouring into now-conventional tech like wind, solar and batteries.   But there’s a whole class of technologies that are ready to scale. And investors who are increasingly ready to back them. As we heard in our previous show, there was a record $17 billion in venture capital going into climat...

During the height of the pandemic in 2020, venture capital poured into climate technologies at record levels. It was a happy surprise amidst a collapsing economy and years of investment stagnation.  Venture investments in climate tech topped $17 billion in 2020 across more than 1,000 deals. Five years ago, it had fallen to $5.2 billion — a 30 percent decrease from a previous peak in 2011. Our...

In March of 2020, Covid shut down economies, closed off supply chains, and sent unemployment to historic levels. No one knew what would come next for energy. Oil prices went into negative territory. Industrial electricity use plummeted. Residential demand shot up. And there were big pipelines of renewable energy projects waiting to get built. “I think we were all a little bit nervous about how COV...

It’s been a very intense year for America’s power grid. Across the country, the electricity system just faced another stress-test as extreme heat taxed power plants and grid operators in the Pacific Northwest , Texas , and New York . Since 2000, outages across the U.S. have increased by 67% . Is the power system ready for tomorrow’s extreme weather -- today? Stephen and Katherine are joined by Dr....

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,&nb...

This week, we are offering the first episode of a new podcast: The Big Switch . It’s a five-part series about how to clean up the energy system -- told in a clear, understandable and fun way.  The show is hosted by Dr. Melissa Lott, research director at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. Stephen Lacey is the show's executive editor. Listen to the first episode of The Big Sw...

We can measure the energy transition in any number of ways. The hundreds of millions of solar panels and wind turbines installed. The gigatons of carbon reduced. Or the number of jobs created. But how do we measure the equity outcome? Our guest co-host, Dr. Destenie Nock , is focused on exactly this question. She is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon U...

America gets 20 percent of its electricity from coal. That’s a 50 percent drop since the peak in 2007. But if coal is becoming so economically uncompetitive, why does it still make up so much of our grid mix? This week: Coal is no longer king. But it still has a lot of power across the land. How do we banish it for good? Katherine and Stephen welcome Joe Daniel as a guest co-host this week. Joe is...

What if someone told you that we have everything we need to decarbonize most of the economy?  We would just need to start electrifying every new car, furnace, water heater, drier, and cookstove, and industrial process starting right now . And yeah, and put solar on every roof that can handle it. This week: a wartime plan for winning the climate fight with clean electricity. What’ll it take? H...

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then they transform? This week: a look at some positive trends guiding the utility sector. What are power providers that are leading the energy transition doing right? We’re joined by Julia Hamm , the president and CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance. We’re talking about SEPA’s 2021 utility transformation profile -- a survey...