Interchange Recharged

Have you ever played around with the idea of installing a solar system for your home? Where would you start? What worries you most about the process? The price? Quality of work? What about the durability of the equipment? These concerns are often a barrier to residential solar. This week in the Interchange recharged we meet Otovo – an interesting business with European roots who are trying to remo...

75% of American households do not have access to solar power. Residents that do not own their own home or who live in apartments are unable to host a solar system and reap the benefits. So, what’s the solution? Community solar. Community solar projects subscribe multiple customers, including households, businesses, municipal buildings, and community organizations. These subscribers receive en...

The energy transition is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ journey. As we know, there is no silver bullet or golden ticket that will get us to where we need to be. Just like our economy, it is compiled of complex systems, smaller markets, and key stakeholders. Another thing about our economy? It is always in a state of motion. Moving from one system to the next - carbon is an invisible stakeholder that is si...

Geothermal technology is a hugely untapped sustainable energy source. In this episode of the Interchange: Recharged, we drill Carlos, the CEO of Quaise Energy, on all things geothermal and the opportunities it presents to decarbonise energy production. Quaise seeks to unlock the potential of geothermal at the Terawatt scale. Carlos studied at MIT and then spent 15 years with Schlumberger, before h...

America's energy transition is a complex and intricate process with a lot of moving parts. When discussing decarbonizing the globe, the electrical grid is usually overlooked and left out of the conversation. With an influx of renewable energy entering the grid, a constantly growing energy demand, coupled with record-breaking weather events and ageing infrastructure we have seen the strength o...

On the Interchange this week, we are joined by Alight CEO and founder Dr Harald Overholm. Harald was previously a cleantech venture capitalist and an advisor on solar markets to the WWF and the Swedish Government. He earned his Ph. D. from the University of Cambridge with a thesis on solar diffusion and PPA. Alight is the leading solar Power Purchase Agreement provider in the Nordics. The company...

President Biden’s Build Back Better bill includes tax incentives for consumers to switch to electric vehicles, and a multi-billion dollar plan for charging stations and infrastructure. The intent is there, but why is EV adoption in the US still lagging behind the rest of the world?  This week on The Interchange, we are joined by Professor Gil Tal from UC Davis, and Professor Peter Wells from...

You can develop enough renewable energy to power the world, but without energy storage systems, those developments are rendered somewhat moot. To achieve President Biden’s target of 90% renewables by 2035, the US needs an additional 9 terawatts of solar storage. What do our current storage solutions look like? Are batteries leading the charge? To answer those questions we turn to  Rebecca Cie...

Why wouldn’t everyone invest in solar? Well, for that reason exactly: it’s an investment. Although it’s praised for its low maintenance costs and long-term savings, it is still a hefty investment in terms of individual finance cost, manufacturing, and installation. The production of solar panels requires expensive raw material, such as high-grade silicon, and silver for the wiring and cells. If th...

An announcement: this is Shayle Kann's last episode of the show. In Shayle's final episode, he shares a few words about the history of the show. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

At the beginning of the pandemic, energy prices crashed. We did an episode of this show trying to figure out how oil prices fell to negative $40 per barrel. Times have changed. Oil is up over $100/barrel. But far more acute is what’s happening with natural gas, particularly in Europe and Asia. In the US, natural gas prices have doubled in the last year. But in parts of Europe, the price has risen...

We’re rebroadcasting one or our favorite episodes, called “Would I Lie to You?”  We originally ran it right after the 2020 election as a light-hearted distraction during a dark news cycle. Shayle Kann gets together with Adam James, the Chief of Staff and Senior Vice President at Energy Impact Partners (where Shayle also works) to play an energy-themed version of the British game show Would I...

Shayle has been brewing up an investment thesis around how decarbonization will create stratification in traditional commodity sectors, like chemicals and materials. If you can produce the same thing in the same cost range -- but you can do so in a CO2-free or carbon-negative -- you'll reap the rewards. Lanzatech is a great test case for that thesis, as well as a great story to tell about the hist...

In January 2020, Brad Smith, the President of Microsoft, announced that the company had set a target of becoming carbon negative by 2030. How does the company plan to do it? What does going carbon negative actually entail? Brandon Middaugh , the Director of Microsoft’s $1B Climate Innovation Fund , comes on the show to explain. The fund invests in various climate technologies as a part of the comp...

The road to solar glory has been littered with failed companies -- the ones you may know (Solyndra) and hundreds you probably do not. Will the burgeoning hydrogen space follow a similar bumpy road? Hydrogen is at a similar phase of market and technological maturity, with similar levels of hype.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Raffi Garabedian , the former CTO of pioneering solar manufacture...

In the world of venture capital, climate tech is about as hot as it gets. In the first two quarters of 2021, climate tech companies raised $16B from VCs. New designated funds are announced regularly, startup valuations are sky high, and times are frothy. It's never been a better time to be a climate tech entrepreneur. It's easy to get lost in the noise -- so what does the hard data say? How much i...

There is no path to deep decarbonization that doesn't involve a clean power sector. And there is no path to a clean power sector that doesn't involve deploying massive amounts of wind, solar, and lithium-ion batteries. Those three technologies don't solve the entire problem of climate change, but they are the workhorses that will power a broader, multi-sector decarbonization approach. The power se...

The Nobel prize in chemistry in 1918 was awarded to a German man named Fritz Haber for a process to fix nitrogen from the air. The technique, which later became known as the Haber-bosch process, is probably one of the four or five most important inventions of the last century. Because nitrogen feeds crops. And as our population boomed during the 20th century, nitrogen fertilizer became the core fu...

We use the term “energy transition” to define markets, technology, business models. But what about people? The transition away from fossil fuels isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must-have. The hardest part isn’t building out the clean resources. It’s shutting down the dirty stuff at a pace the science demands. And that means disrupting entire classes of employment and communities that depend on fossil...

Carbon accounting and disclosure is getting attention at the highest levels. Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, said in July: "I think updates to public company disclosures and to fund disclosures [on climate] could bring needed transparency to our capital markets. When it comes to disclosure, investors have told us what they want. It’s now time for the Commission to take the baton." Gensler d...

In the great debate over crypto mining vs. climate, there are two camps. First, the crypto enthusiasts, like Square, say things like, "Bitcoin is key to an abundant, clean energy future ".  And then there are the energy wonks, who point out that, if bitcoin mining were a country, it would already be in the top 30 for total energy consumption , rivaling Ukraine.  The energy camp tends to...

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 company, now Form Energy, that has been toiling on this problem in...

This week, we’ll take a peek at the news. Last week, president Biden unveiled his administration's plan for a $3.5 trillion infrastructure plan which the democrats hope to pass through reconciliation. While the details are still sparse, we do know that one of the linchpins of the Biden administration's climate strategy -- a national clean electricity standard (CES) -- is included in the plan. It's...

In this episode, we’re measuring the energy transition -- using “Price is Right” rules.  Our former co-host Stephen Lacey is back on the show to face off against our current host, Shayle Kann. Producer Daniel Woldorff steps in as arbiter.  We’ll guess stats and trivia about climate tech, and discuss what those figures mean for the energy transition. They cover the MSRPs of popular EVs, t...

Elon Musk’s magic is making huge promises to transform a tech sector -- and then, after a series of setbacks, ultimately deliver.  But the Solar Roof never delivered on its promise of chic, affordable solar-power generating roof shingles, as Dana Hall’s recent article in Bloomberg lays out. Today, there are some solar roofs on homes. The Gigafactory that was meant to churn them out in Buffalo...