Interchange Recharged

This week, we’re talking about a trend that’s picking up in electricity markets: aggregation of distributed resources. Utilities have been remotely switching off air conditioners to manage demand for a long time. But a range of emerging resources — solar paired with batteries, smart thermostats, intelligent water heaters, electric car chargers — are creating new kinds of virtual power plants. Peop...

Note: after this episode, we will be on hiatus for a few weeks while Stephen Lacey goes on paternity leave. This week, a conversation about what the Green New Deal reveals about public opinion on climate change. Why are national climate politics frozen? The conventional understanding is that Americans are deeply divided on the issue along party lines. Until recently, Democrats have been scared of...

This week, we present a special episode on behalf of Centrica Business Solutions. The Green New Deal is now a driving force in climate politics. But up until now, it’s been mostly theoretical. And then, in April, Mayor Bill De Blasio declared that New York City is creating its own version of the Green New Deal . As part of the law, large commercial buildings will need to cut emissions by 40 percen...

Every year, we see a wide range of models for the future global energy system. The scenarios come from a wide array of organizations: International Energy Agency and the Energy Information Administration; oil companies like BP, Shell and Equinor; and research outfits like Wood Mackenzie and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And the conclusions are all over the map.  So a group of experts at Resou...

On the docket this week: curtailment of renewable energy. Historically, we’ve thought about curtailment as a waste of valuable clean electricity — a financial penalty for renewable generators who need to monetize every last electron. It’s already an issue today. California has so much solar power, in certain months it is dialing back tens of thousands of megawatt-hours of PV generation. It’s happe...

This week, we’re challenging our long-held beliefs about whether individual actions matter. Even if we drastically altered our lifestyles, would it do anything to address climate change? We all want to believe that our individual life choices will have a meaningful impact on carbon emissions. But a focus on solar panels, LEDs and vegetarianism may just be a distraction. This week, Stephen is going...

Over the next two weeks, we are challenging our long-held assumptions about energy. We’re going to take the opposite stance of an argument that we agree with. Can we change our minds? In part 1, we’re revisiting the assumption that most people do not care about energy.  Most people care about convenience, lifestyle and price. But do they care enough about their energy use to make a change for...

We present a special episode produced in collaboration with Centrica Business Solutions. In 2006, Kate Sherwood left her job in strategy consulting to work in solar.  “I realized what I had been doing wasn't getting me out of bed anymore,” says Sherwood. “So, I took a very big pay cut to move into carrying a bag, into being a salesman.” Selling solar to corporate customers at that time wasn’t...

What would a truly bold presidential plan to decarbonize the economy look like? Democratic candidates are offering up their visions. Elizabeth Warren is focusing on banning fossil fuel extraction on public lands and using the military to counter climate threats; Beto O’Rourke is looking to executive action; Joe Biden is teasing a “middle ground” plan. Then there’s Washington State Governor Jay Ins...

Uber and Lyft are now public — and now under more investor pressure to expand quickly. What does that mean for energy use and carbon emissions as more cars hit the roads? Multiple new studies show that these transportation networking companies are causing more traffic and pulling people away from public transit. Meanwhile, cities and states are trying to clean up those fleets by promoting electrif...

Big energy giants around the world are investing heavily in renewables and cleantech. But there’s a whole class of companies making moves in the sector behind the scenes. In this episode, we’re looking at the unsung corporate heroes of the clean energy transition. Shayle and Stephen share their picks for companies that are making surprising moves into renewable energy, electrification and clean ma...

It’s taken decades for renewables to compete with fossil fuels. But we’re now entering the third phase of the clean energy transition, when new renewables are beating existing coal and gas plants on price alone.  "We’re on the verge of a new, radically different point in history,” argues futurist and technologist Ramez Naam. This phase of the energy transition will bring change that is faster...

This week: we dig into the causes of PG&E’s latest bankruptcy: wildfires. PG&E’s restructuring is one of the biggest in U.S. history — and it could be considered the first climate bankruptcy.  The utility faces tens of billions of dollars in liabilities after investigators pinned over a dozen wildfires on PG&E equipment. What does it tell us about the health of utility infrastruct...

Global energy giants have been on a distributed energy acquisition spree over the last few years. With the formation of its New Energies unit in 2016, Shell is leading the oil & gas majors in investment and vision. Shell New Energies plans to invest $2 billion dollars in renewables, microgrids, batteries, electric vehicle charging, and other emerging tech every year. That number is just a tiny...

Within the next decade, automakers will invest up to $300 billion in electric models, according to a recent tally from Reuters. These automakers are also spending billions more on autonomy to compliment those investments. It could result in 21 million new electric cars, trucks and SUVs on the roads. A lot of that activity is happening in China. But we’re also starting to see new investments in EV...

We asked on a recent Interchange episode : how are we going to manage all this distributed energy on the grid? This week, we’re asking: how to we manage all this centralized renewable energy hitting the grid? The answer is both simpler and more complex. We need to build a lot more transmission, yes. But getting that transmission in place is one of the hardest and most controversial pieces of decar...

We're on spring break this week. So we're offering a replay of an earlier episode -- it's all about pivots. Did you know that Nokia started out as a paper mill in Finland? Or that Nintendo once made instant rice? Many of the world's leading companies start out in radically different markets. Cleantech is the same. Sales cycles are often slow, technologies don't work as planned, and customer needs...

This week, the history and future of Tesla Energy. Back in 2006, Elon Musk posted a manifesto outlining his vision for a high-end sports car that would push unit volume and lower costs. It also included hints about an integrated company that will sell solar and batteries alongside cars. More than a dozen years later, that vision is being put to the test. After launching a distributed and grid-scal...

Distributed energy resources (DERs) are going to double on the U.S. grid by 2023, according to our researchers at Wood Mackenzie.  By then, we’ll likely have somewhere around 100 gigawatts of flexible capacity — made up of distributed solar, combined heat and power, electric vehicles, smart thermostats, and battery storage. Those technologies alone could amount to the current bulk power syste...

This week, Shayle and Stephen stumble into career counseling. There are now 3.4 million people in America working in clean energy, spanning across transportation, renewable energy, energy efficiency, environmental services and many other related areas. It’s a big number. But it also means there are tens of millions of others with the right skills or the desire who haven’t yet joined the advanced e...

This week, we present an original podcast episode, brought to you by  Wunder Capital . This is the third part of our three-part series produced with Wunder. In this episode, we’ll hear the story of Dave Riess, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Wunder. Well before co-founding Wunder, Dave found himself in a tricky spot. Even after building a successful career in software developme...

After a long downturn, cleantech venture capital investments are back on the upswing. According to  year-end numbers  from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, venture and private equity investments into the sector grew 127 percent in 2018 over the previous year, amounting to $9.2 billion. That is the highest total since 2010. Years after venture capital plummeted in 2012 — when investors ran f...

Desperation has taken hold in climate policy. People are so anxious to do something meaningful, allies are fighting against each other over the solutions.  Is the right approach a Green New Deal to re-engineer the energy and labor markets with renewable energy? Or is it better to just price carbon in order to allow all kinds of technologies and carbon mitigation efforts to flourish? We need b...

As the trend toward electrification speeds up, what type of company will dominate the market? We're hosting a cage match to find out. On this week's episode of  The Interchange , we pit utilities, oil & gas majors, mobility providers and consumer tech companies against one another. We're throwing them inside a voice-activated, electrified cage to see who will emerge as the energy company...

After a period of moderation, heat trapping gases are going up in the U.S. and around the world. In 2018, global emissions rose by 2.7 percent. And U.S. emissions rose by 3.4 percent, according to an early tally from the Rhodium Group. This week, we're going to put some meaning to those emissions numbers. We are joined by Brad Plumer , an energy and environment reporter at the  New York Times...