Interchange Recharged

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...

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...