Interchange Recharged

Net-zero commitments went mainstream in 2020. There are now 22 regions, 452 cities, and over 1,100 companies with revenues over $11 trillion that have pledged to bring emissions to net zero by middle of the century.  In 2021 we’re going to spend a lot of time working backward from that. We’ll be trying to understand the pathways to get to net zero and what it means for today — for the technol...

It’s been a great year for "climate" oriented public companies. Virtually every clean energy or climate company has dramatically outperformed market indices and most now have record-high equity value.  So what's going on here? And what might it mean for the next generation of climate technology companies? In this final episode of the year, Host Shayle Kann talks with Sameer Reddy , a partner...

In this episode: we try to figure out where hydrogen is headed. In the universe of clean energy, the world seems to rally around one big technology push each decade. This is when governments introduce subsidies, incumbents announce big projects, and a nascent technology gets a chance to scale from tiny to small, in the hopes of achieving liftoff.  In the 1990s, it was wind. In the 2000s, sola...

This week, Shayle Kann talks with Kiran Bhatraju , the CEO of Arcadia, about who's buying clean energy. Every pathway toward economy-wide decarbonization drives straight through a dramatic transformation in the electricity sector. But so much of the discussion in that sector focuses on the supply side: how fast will wind and solar displace fossil fuels? what will happen with natural gas? But there...

For all the hype around autonomous vehicles, we're still in the very early stages of a rollout. While most of the attention is being paid to the Waymos and Zooxs of the world, trying to build fully autonomous passenger vehicles on public roads, there's an entirely separate category being created: off-road. These are similarly autonomous vehicles that are mostly all-electric. But they don't ride on...

This is a sponsored episode produced by GTM Creative Strategies in collaboration with Wärtsilä.  In August, California’s grid operators shut off power for millions of residents during an historic heat wave. The blackouts caused confusion and outrage in the state. People were looking for someone to blame: an agency, a utility, or a technology like renewables. We now know what happened. The cau...

Need a distraction from the election? Shayle Kann and Adam James have you covered, with an energy-themed version of the game show "Would I Lie to You?" Rules: Each person selects three energy related facts or stories. Any number of the three can be lies, and at least one has to be a lie. They have to be clear lies, not slight adjustments of the truth. The other person can ask three questions. And...

Net-zero carbon pledges are heating up. Japan just committed to reaching net zero, just four weeks after China did the same. In total, seven of the 10 largest economies in the world (not including America, India and Brazil) have made such commitments. And that's on top of all the subnational players, the corporates, and others. It has become increasingly clear that we're unlikely to reach net-zero...

When we talk about climate change on this show, and what causes it, we are usually talking about gases that come from vehicles or from the electricity sector.  But what about the built environment? This week: we’re talking about the embedded emissions in our buildings. There’s the natural gas that gets burned in them, and there’s all the electricity that it takes to power them.  And then...

This week: consolidation and cooperation in the distributed energy market. Just as federal regulators in the U.S. are making batteries, solar systems, electric cars, generators and other similar resources more valuable in wholesale markets, we’re seeing a new wave of business activity. Wood Mackenzie predicts that U.S. distributed energy resource capacity will reach nearly 390 gigawatts by 2025 ....

California plans to ban new internal-combustion vehicles by 2035. But are electric vehicles ready to take their place? We know that there are dozens and dozens more models of electric cars on the market. Ranges are increasing. Consumers like the driving experience. And total costs are creeping downward. But America’s electric vehicle market is anemic. Dealers aren’t pushing them. Consumers aren’t...

In recent weeks, five million acres have burned across California, Oregon and Washington State -- killing dozens, displacing tens of thousands of people, and causing untold damage. In California, over three million acres have burned since the start of the year. At the height of the current wildfire outbreak, western cities had the worst air pollution in the world for days. It makes the solutions w...

The market for initial public offerings dropped way down this year. Or did it? There is a surge in activity in a different kind of IPO: a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It’s also known as a reverse merger. These are shell companies listed on exchanges with a mission to buy private companies and convert them into public ones. According to a tally from Barron’s, there have been 70 IPO...

There are still questions about what exactly caused California’s blackouts during last month’s heat wave. We know that imports were down, natural gas plants tripped off line, and wind generation fell.  But what about all those air conditioners, batteries and industrial loads that are supposed to support the grid? What role did they play -- or didn’t they play -- in helping California’s stress...

This week: how an innocuous grid-modeling project became a threat to Trump’s efforts to save coal -- and then languished inside the Department of Energy. It’s one of many pieces of research that have been suppressed by the current administration. What is the study? What does it tell us about the systematic dismantling of government under Trump? What are the implications for a cleaner grid? Journal...

Before the pandemic, one of the biggest news stories of the year was BlackRock’s decision to make climate risk a central part of its investment strategy. This isn’t your average family office; this is BlackRock, a company with $7 trillion under management. It brought more mainstream attention to ESG, or environmental, social, governance. ESG is a set of standards for valuing ethical business pract...

We’re constantly going through waves of hype in different energy sectors: flexible solar panels, vertical-axis wind, electric planes, vehicle-to-grid, the smart home, blockchain. Some are real, some are not. Some just need to mature. So what phase are we in now? In this episode, Shayle and Stephen are digging into different sectors and trends at various stages of the climate tech hype cycle. ...

We may be facing one of the worst economic downturns in American history, but it hasn’t stopped the surge in battery storage development. We’re constantly hearing the phrase “world’s largest” or “record breaking” as new gigawatt-scale projects are unveiled weekly.  Small-scale batteries are being attached to more than one-third of residential solar systems for leading installers, making distr...

The world looked bleak for startups in the spring.  According to figures from Crunchbase , venture capital deals were down 44 percent from March to June compared with last year. Seed-stage deals took the biggest hit, down nearly 60 percent. But series B deals also took a hit. It was difficult at any stage of funding. Deals are finally coming back. Obviously, travel startups won’t be a hot cat...

Coronavirus is reshaping the way we move around. Will we emerge from this pandemic with smarter planning? Or will it dismantle already-weakened public transportation systems? When economies across the world shut down all at once in March, the impact on transportation systems was immediate. According to the International Energy Agency, activity on roads globally was down 50% compared to the 2019 av...

Earlier this month, Sunrun, the largest residential solar company in the U.S., declared its intent to acquire Vivint Solar, the second largest installer. It’s an all-stock transaction that would value the combined entity at over $9 billion. It's a big deal -- literally. The enterprise value attached to Vivint is $3.2 billion, which makes it the largest single transaction in the history of the dist...

This week: is carbon transparency finally coming? Electronics maker Logitech became the most recent company to offer carbon labels on its products. Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell called carbon “the new calorie.” It’s one of many attempts by food and consumer goods producers to make the lifecycle emissions of their products clearer to consumers.  In this episode, we’ll examine the new generation...

There is a widely-held perception that data centers -- the giant facilities that hold networks of society’s supercomputers -- are an out-of-control energy suck. We’ve all seen headlines like this:  “Your Netflix binge may be frying the planet” “Cut back on email if you want to save the environment” “Every Google search you do contributes to climate change” “Bitcoin could be the final nail in...

A boisterous CEO who brags of “out-Eloning” Elon Musk; a reverse merger that makes a little-known fuel cell trucking company as valuable as Ford; and no actual cars or trucks in production. This week, we try to make sense of Nikola Motor.  Nikola Motor went public last week through a reverse merger, achieving a ~$13 billion valuation. As the markets closed on Wednesday, the company’s market c...

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 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 fue...