Interchange Recharged

There were about eight years when climate tech was wandering in the wilderness, so to speak. It started after the Solyndra bankruptcy in 2011 and ended about two years ago, when the market began heating up again. During that time, people in this space examined the valleys of death. What are the stages in a climate tech company’s life cycle that might be painful -- or even fatal -- to go through? A...

We spend most of our time on this show talking about what's happening in climate tech. What technologies, business models, and markets are being developed? By whom? And how much impact will they ultimately have on decarbonization? But there's an equally interesting topic. What isn't happening? In other words, where is the white space? What areas, technologies, or markets need more attention? ...

The array of AI applications within climate tech is staggering -- and rapidly expanding.  There are lots of exciting point solutions, but there’s no clear example of AI directly and meaningfully reducing GHG emissions on a global scale. Yet. Last year we had Priya Donti on the show . She’s a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and co-chair of the Climate Change AI organization. This week, she came...

Was 2020 the year of carbon transparency? That’s what our host Shayle predicted back in 2019. Today, we’re checking in on that prediction with a rebroadcast of one of our favorite episodes. It originally aired almost a year ago in late June 2020.  A handful of companies have experimented with labeling the carbon content of their products, but it's never really caught on. Now that might be cha...

The excitement around green hydrogen has grown dramatically in recent years. Will it live up to the hype? This week, we turn to technologist, author and investor Ramez Naam.  Ramez and Shayle examine the drivers behind cost improvement -- namely the costs of electricity and different electrolyzer technologies -- and why they are likely still a long way off the deep declines hydrogen needs to...

A decarbonized power sector will unlock massive opportunities across nearly every other sector, either via direct electrification or via indirect electrification via the production of low-carbon fuels, like green hydrogen. But here’s the rub. Many of the companies that are working on these solutions rely on pretty heroic assumptions around the cost, availability and cleanliness of electricity in o...

The pandemic has forced just about every part of society to reckon with resilience, but for cities the question is especially urgent. Will the global trend toward urbanization, which has been underway for more than 50 years, change its trajectory? Will increasing density remain the norm? The intersection of these two issues -- resilience and urbanism -- is relevant in a COVID context, but it's als...

The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office might be the most talked about -- and yet least understood -- part of the federal government’s efforts to support climate tech.  It has already invested more than $35 billion in everything from Tesla's first big factory to the first two nuclear reactors to begin construction in the U.S. in more than 30 years. It was crucial in getting the fir...

There are few areas harder to decarbonize than heavy industry. But the stakes are high. Altogether, industry represents over 30% of global GHG emissions, when counting both direct process emissions and industrial energy use. It’s also a huge opportunity for innovation. This week, Shayle talks with Rebecca Dell , the Director of the Industry Program at The Climateworks Foundation, about the technol...

There’s money to be made in climate tech, broadly defined. But where exactly? As investment pours into climate tech, it’s true that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in markets -- especially fast-changing markets, like batteries, hydrogen, carbon capture, just to name a few -- those boats don't all get the same lift.  Certain parts of the value chain, from upstream mining or manufacturing to...

The grid of the future lies 850 miles off the coast of Portugal, on an island in the Azores called Graciosa. The island has always been dependent on fossil fuels. But in 2018, that changed. That’s when a group of developers kicked off a hybrid wind-solar-battery storage power plant to slash diesel consumption. The plant consists of 1 megawatt of solar, 4.5 megawatts of wind, and a 6 megawatt/3.2 m...

This week: artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the many ways they can decarbonize the economy. From optimizing buildings to modeling new industrial processes to better managing the grid, AI and machine learning are core to many technology strategies for addressing climate change. So how, exactly, will they be implemented? And what problems can they solve? With us is  Priya Donti ,...

In 2017, Google became the first major company to reach 100% renewable energy through corporate renewables procurement.  But it was also the first major company to acknowledge that 100% renewable is not really 100% carbon-free. So Google set out to go further, and match procurement on an hourly basis, to reach the promised land of 24/7 zero carbon energy. It's going to be hard. But Micha...

In 2010, solar modules cost a little over $2 per watt. Many people questioned whether solar costs could come down another 50%. Well, here we are today with solar modules well below 50 cents per watt, far cheaper than most expectations. And it wasn’t some breakthrough revolutionary technology -- it’s been the crystalline-silicon solar panel the whole time. History has a tendency to repeat itself. O...

The oil majors are slowly recognizing that in a decarbonized world their fundamental business is going to have to change.  So what are they thinking? Where are they deploying resources -- and not deploying resources?  Ed Crooks is the right person to ask. He’s our oil major whisperer. He Vice Chair for the Americas at Wood Mackenzie. Last time we had him on the show was in May of 2020 wh...

Heather Rock joined PG&E as director of climate resilience in 2018 -- just two weeks before a faulty PG&E line sparked the most destructive wildfire in U.S. history.  It’s hard to imagine a more complicated or politically-charged role. Back in November 2019, our host Shayle made a bet. In a Medium post called “ The World around Us ,” he wrote: “I think we’re on the cusp of a cultural...

Imagine a battery that costs less than half of today's costs, can charge a vehicle in less than ten minutes, run for ten or more years with heavy usage, lasts over a million miles, and is produced with abundant raw materials found all over the world. None of those things are true of today's lithium-ion batteries.  But our guest this week, Gene Berdichevsky , predicts that will change in the n...

Two years ago, we made an episode called “ Cleantech Venture Capital Is Back .” After a decade in the wilderness, the world of climate tech has experienced a resurgence of investment and early-stage innovation.  So much has happened since then -- an election, a stimulus, low interest rates, SPACs, corporate commitments, and an explosion of advocacy around climate. So where is the climate tech...

Leading climate models point to a sobering reality: Even if the world’s economy reaches net zero emissions by midcentury, we will still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. And so if we have to not just emit less, but remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how do we do it? Today we dive into carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It’s an increasingly diverse and vibrant technology landscape, with s...

Last summer a record-setting heat wave in California caused rolling blackouts throughout the state . This week, a record-setting freeze knocked out power for millions of people in Texas and the Midwest. It’s too early for a post-mortem on what happened, but we know that the cold affected all fuel sources, most of all natural gas. Wellheads and gas lines froze. Gas supplies were diverted to residen...

Climate change has gone macro -- as in macroeconomics. It’s not just an environmental, health and justice issue. It has become an economic imperative for financial analysts, finance ministers and the biggest asset managers in the world. For the second year in a row, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink singled out climate change as the biggest priority for the world’s largest asset manager: “I believe that th...

Solar scaled first to become king in residential smart energy. But as other residential DER tech has advanced -- EVs, batteries, smart panels, and so forth -- has solar been dethroned as the anchor product in this space?  We’ll walk with Arch Rao, the CEO of Span , about the biggest technological changes underway in home energy. How should we sell and manage distributed energy resources?...

What if we could see into the future? In 2020, we got our clearest view yet. Last March, lockdowns swept across Europe, forcing an eerie silence on some of the world’s most iconic and bustling cities. It caused a steep drop in electricity consumption -- putting pressure on thermal generators and giving renewables a greater share of the generation mix. “And all of that has really provided us a bit...

What technology will become the dominant means of decarbonizing each part of the economy? The pattern we see now — and that we expect to continue over the coming couple decades — is a series of battles between consistent contenders: electricity, hydrogen and carbon capture.  Electricity is hitting its stride. The power sector is getting cleaner, and electrification is spreading to light duty...

We are going to build a lot more wind and solar over the coming decades. It will inevitably lead to oversupply of these resources on the grid. But is that a good thing? That’s the focus of this week’s show, featuring a conversation between Shayle Kann and Columbia University's Melissa Lott. The stars have aligned for a rare win-win-win situation: Solar and wind are popular with politicians; they’r...