Interchange Recharged

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...

This week, we present a special episode brought to you by the Energy News Network . We profile State Senator Bob Steinburg, a local North Carolina politician who spent a lot of time in his republican primary campaign talking about the benefits of renewable energy.  We also talk with Elizabeth Outzs, a journalist at the Energy News Network, who covered Steinburg’s campaign. “What we’re seeing...

Forget everything you think you know about solar. A growing body of research and real-world experience shows that solar can be a flexible, dispatchable resource. And it can potentially rival gas plants in providing grid regulation services — without the use of batteries. We’ve had the technology to allow solar and wind to provide grid services for years. So how do we open up markets to unleash the...

This week, we’ve got our year-end recap — with an Interchange twist.  We’re going to cover the following topics: The story that didn’t warrant the attention it got.  The story that should have gotten more attention than it did. The energy tech/sector/personality that had the biggest breakthrough of the year The energy tech/sector/personality that had the biggest setback of the year A not...

This week, we've got a live episode recorded at GTM's storage summit. We'll talk about the hottest energy storage stories of 2018, Oscars style. Julian Spector and Stephen Lacey debate nominees and award recipients in the following categories: Best original policy and regulatory development Best application for storage in a hybrid or supporting role Best foreign storage market Best new artist Best...

This week, we’re road tripping across Europe.  In Poland’s coal country, diplomats are breathing in smog-filled air, preparing to strengthen a global climate deal. In France, angry protestors are rioting in the streets over a gas tax as part of the president’s climate policy. And in the U.K., Britons may leave the European Union without a deal in place, threatening the health of energy m...

We’re back with another edition of “consensus” this week. GTM Co-Founder Scott Clavenna joins us to explain the arcane and hyped up world of blockchain to our listeners in the energy business. We promised not to discuss blockchain on The Interchange until we saw some newsworthy developments — now we have too much to sift through. So we’re going to survey the most important stories of the last year...

There are tradeoffs to everything in energy. So why not put those tradeoffs to a test? We recently crowdsourced some "would you rather" scenarios from our listeners. On this week's  Interchange  podcast, we'll choose our favorites and debate the scenarios. Here are the scenarios: Would you rather have $10 billion in renewable deployment funding, startup funding, or R&D...

When you grow plants with electrons rather than the sun, what happens to the grid? This week, we’re talking about the energy profile of indoor plant factories. Indoor farming is having a moment. Venture capitalists are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into vertical farming startups growing in urban, industrial facilities. Cities are easing restrictions to encourage more plant factories. A...

This week, we’re taking bets on the future of energy. Shayle wrote a piece celebrating his colleague’s expected daughter, nicknamed Bug.  Bug will be born at the beginning of 2019. She’ll enter high school in 2033 and turn 30 in 2049. What will her future look like? In this episode, we outline 8 different scenarios that Bug may face in her lifetime — and decide whether or not to take Shayle’s...