Supercool

When any part of the economy modernizes, it electrifies. New HVAC systems? Electric heat pumps. Autonomous vehicles? Battery-powered electric cars. Next-generation factories? Not a smoke stack in sight. Which means the US needs to build as much grid infrastructure in the next decade as we built in the last 50 years. Schneider Electric is a 189-year-old infrastructure company that makes everything...

Mass Timber is growing fast—expanding from a handful of commercial wood buildings in the U.S. just over a decade ago to more than 2,000 today, with 24,000 projected by 2034. Once considered niche, mass timber is moving mainstream—competing on price, speed, and domestic supply chains, not sustainability alone. Sterling Structural is leading that shift. As America's largest CLT manufacturer, the com...

Clean power has never been cheaper. So why are electricity bills rising—and what's blocking faster deployment? Jigar Shah joins Supercool to explain why 2025 marked a turning point: for the first time in history, essentially 100% of new electricity demand worldwide was met by solar, wind, and nuclear. It happened because the same solutions that solve climate change are winning on affordability. Bu...

In 2025, the U.S. president called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, global clean energy investment hit a record $2.2 trillion. Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter covering climate and energy for Bloomberg. His read on the past year: China is becoming the modern Standard Oil. The same way Rockefeller's empire exported petroleum infrastructure globally, China is now exporting electrification—solar pa...

In this end-of-year conversation, David Roberts, a renowned climate and clean energy journalist, lays out his headline for 2025: the rapid growth of AI data centers has forced long-delayed decisions about the power system. After two decades of mostly flat U.S. electricity demand, utilities are now facing sharp new load growth, tighter timelines, and major uncertainty—making grid capacity and inter...

Real estate companies say they want sustainability. They'll pay for it too, provided it comes with zero risk. Brad Pilgrim is co-founder & CEO of Parity, a remote HVAC optimization service for high-rises and hotels. Its customer team can walk into a building, spend 90 minutes going from the basement to roof, and tell the owner how much energy they can save—then guarantee it. After eight years,...

EVs for commercial fleets are increasingly attractive. Battery costs are down, range is up, and in many cases the total cost of ownership already beats gas. The problem isn’t the vehicles. It’s where they’ll charge. Voltera takes on the part of the EV transition most people never see: procuring the right real estate, securing stadium-scale power capacity, navigating zoning codes that rarely recogn...

Something big is happening inside buildings. They’re getting brains. Schneider Electric is a global giant in energy and building performance—nearly two centuries old, operating across 100+ countries, and already embedded in a million buildings. Manish Kumar, EVP of Digital Energy, joins me to unpack what it means when AI starts running the places we live and work.  We dig into EcoStruxure Foresigh...

There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive. That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to...

A few months ago, Quilt became the first company in residential HVAC history to deliver an over-the-air upgrade—making its systems 20% more powerful overnight. Quilt is rethinking how homes heat and cool themselves. Its software-driven, ductless HVAC system combines intelligent controls, high-efficiency heat pumps, and a design language that fits seamlessly into modern architecture. By bringing th...

In an industry that moved fast and defied cities, Veo chose a different path: partnership over disruption. Co-founder and CEO Candice Xie is building one of the only profitable micromobility companies in America by leading with discipline, transparency, and respect for the people shaping urban life. While competitors flooded streets and flamed out, Veo continues to earn trust — winning 90% of city...

Husk Power Systems operates the largest fleet of community-level clean-energy minigrids in the world—over 400 sites across India and Nigeria. Each system combines solar, battery storage, and biomass generation into a modular platform called PRISM, engineered to deploy and power an entire village within 24 hours. Behind the technology is an AI-driven operating system that forecasts demand, manages...

SolarCycle is building the next supply chain that makes the clean energy transition possible. Co-founder Jesse Simons spent two decades at the Sierra Club leading national campaigns to accelerate renewable energy before seeing the constraint built into solar’s own success. There aren’t enough raw materials to keep scaling, and communities are starting to resist projects without end-of-life plans....

Ken LaRoe has done what no one else in U.S. history has: founded three banks. His first two were financial successes. His third—Climate First Bank—is his answer to unfinished business. Built to align money with mission, it’s now America’s fastest-growing new bank, surpassing $1.4 billion in assets while financing the clean energy economy. In this episode, Ken shares what he learned across 25 years...

Cambium is building the operating system for reuse—a digital supply chain connecting the fragmented network of companies needed to turn fallen trees into finished goods. Every year, tens of millions of urban trees come down. The scale is staggering, and most end up chipped, burned, or buried. Cambium links tree-removal crews, haulers, mills, and end customers through a unified digital platform—tra...

AI, electrification, decarbonization—they all hinge on how effectively the grid is orchestrated. Yet thousands of clean energy projects are stuck in U.S. interconnection queues. The backlog is twice the size of all the energy we use today. It’s not a cost problem. It’s the grid—the largest machine on earth—built last century for stability and missing the cloud-scale infrastructure to handle what’s...

Curbside charging sounds obvious—plug in outside your apartment, wake up to a full battery. Yet more than 40 million potential urban EV owners are still waiting for someone to figure it out. it’s electric, co-founded by Tiya Gordon, is designing EV charging for cities—making curbside charging possible by inventing what didn’t exist: hardware powered directly by buildings, a revenue model that pays...

By fusing architect and developer, Alloy Development is proving that the riskiest choice in real estate isn’t electrification or Passive House — it’s clinging to the past. CEO Jared Della Valle joins Supercool to share the company’s journey to developing The Alloy Block in downtown Brooklyn—aiming to create the most sustainable block in the city. It’s anchored by 505 State Street, New York’s first...

Mike Faherty grew up surfing the Jersey Shore, surrounded by coastal style but chasing something that felt more enduring. Even as a kid, he obsessed over fabrics—the way silk ties carried weight, how colors layered, how clothes gained character through texture. By seventeen, he had already mapped the outlines of the brand he wanted to build. In 2012, he launched Faherty with his twin brother Alex...

Forum Mobility is electrifying how America moves freight. Every year, more than 30,000 diesel 18-wheelers haul containers in and out of California’s ports, logging over a billion miles, generating enormous carbon emissions and polluting nearby communities. Electric semis are powerful, quiet, and clean. But at $500,000 apiece with uncertain charging and maintenance, the math doesn’t work for the in...

Most U.S. homes aren’t wired for electrified living, even though the clean energy future depends on it. Upgrading panels and wiring can cost thousands before a single new appliance is even installed. Plus, consumers aren’t demanding electrification. They want lifestyle upgrades—faster, more precise cooking, backup power in a pinch, and appliances that cost less and perform more. Copper has designe...

Interface is a public company proving that carbon-negative is possible at scale. The billion-dollar flooring brand has more than 400 carbon-negative products on the market today and a plan to take its entire business carbon-negative by 2040. Liz Minne, Head of Global Sustainability Strategy, shares how Interface is operationalizing that ambition through product innovation, supply chain engagement,...

At Amazon, speed isn’t a carbon cost—it’s a carbon advantage. The company now runs 30,000 electric delivery vehicles, delivered 1.5 billion packages on battery power last year, and has built over 600 renewable energy projects in more than 20 countries—20 gigawatts of clean energy capacity, making it the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable power. Inside that scale is a playbook for how...

For fifty years, Brompton has been the most iconic name in urban cycling. Engineered and made in London, beloved by city riders, and still unrivaled in how fast it folds and how good it feels to ride. But in the U.S., where biking is still mostly recreational and folding bikes barely register, the brand faces a different challenge: how to scale a joy-filled, performance-driven mobility tool in a m...

To scale climate solutions, you have to know how to talk about them. The companies driving climate adoption don’t just offer better solutions—they tell better stories. Stories that reframe clean energy as the smarter, cheaper, everyday choice. Stories that win customers, sway skeptics, and shift markets. Keith Zakheim has spent two decades working with climate brands to sharpen their strategy and...