Supercool

Industrial hemp always had believers. What it lacked was a supply chain. Hempitecture is changing that—starting with the first commercial-scale factory in the U.S. making high-performance home insulation from hemp. Headquartered in Idaho, the company has shipped to 5,000+ customers across 48 states. It’s now the largest buyer of industrial hemp fiber in North America—proving that a crop once sidel...

Consumers want the upgrades. The climate does too. But the electrical panel in the garage stands in the way. EVs, heat pumps, induction stoves—electrification is becoming more attractive. The products are faster, cleaner, cheaper to run. But nearly 48 million U.S. homes still rely on outdated 100-amp service. That means expensive utility upgrades, long delays, and a halt to progress. Arch Rao, for...

America invented the clean energy future. Now it may be dismantling it, just as the rest of the world hits the accelerator. The U.S. was first. The first silicon solar cell in New Jersey. The first wind turbine in Cleveland. The first microinverter in a California garage. But now it’s China scaling the clean energy transition—building factories, locking in supply chains, and racing toward a low-ca...

TerraCycle takes on waste the rest of the world ignores—cigarette butts, diapers, pharmaceutical blister packs. But what makes the model work isn’t what they recycle. It’s how they get companies to pay for it. Even with one of the boldest missions in climate tech—eliminate the idea of waste—TerraCycle doesn’t lead with sustainability. It leads with the business case. In this episode, CEO Tom Szaky...

When Roger Griffiths first heard about Formula E in 2014, he was intrigued but skeptical. A veteran of IndyCar, Le Mans, and Formula 1—and a self-described petrol head—he wasn’t convinced electric racing could deliver credible performance. Then he saw who was signing on. Michael Andretti. Alain Prost. Emerson Fittipaldi. Frank Williams. Plus early backers like Richard Branson. Racing legends and g...

Grid battery storage has gone from niche to necessary. Fast. Projects that were once 300 megawatt-hours are now hitting 9 gigawatt-hours. And companies like Wärtsilä are leading the charge, taking on the hardest, highest-stakes deployments around the world. In this episode, Dave Hebert, VP of Global Sales & Business Strategy for Wärtsilä's Energy Storage division, takes us inside the systems p...

Jaime Pumarejo helped lead Barranquilla, Colombia, through a stunning transition. When he first joined the city’s government in his twenties, Barranquilla was under bankruptcy protection, poverty was high, and public trust was fractured. Today, it serves as a global model for how climate action can drive economic growth, attract investment, and deliver tangible benefits to people’s lives. In 2020,...

The energy grid we know today was built for a different era—centralized generation, one-way power flow, no rooftop solar, no EVs, no AI-driven demand. If Thomas Edison were alive, he’d recognize it instantly. And that’s the problem. Raghu Belur bet the system would have to change. In 2006, he co-founded Enphase Energy and started from the distributed edge, designing a microinverter that made every...

If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter, right behind the United States and China, accounting for 8-10% of global carbon emissions. It’s a staggering problem: 30% of all food produced globally goes to waste. And for supermarkets already operating on razor-thin margins, that waste translates into billions of dollars lost every year. At the heart of the problem? A broken...

Before becoming the youngest elected mayor in Quito’s history, Mauricio Rodas had already founded a political party, launched a think tank in Mexico City, and run for president. In 1944, when the global financial system was designed, just 29% of the world lived in cities. Today, that number has nearly doubled to 56%. Cities now account for more than 70% of global emissions and 80% of energy consum...

Circularity isn’t just about keeping t-shirts and jeans out of landfills. Done right, it’s a growth engine for brands. That’s exactly what Trove is building: the recommerce technology that drives margins, attracts new customers, and streamlines operations. As the resale platform behind Patagonia, Levi’s, Brooks, Arc'teryx, Carhartt, and Canada Goose, Trove helps brands give their products a second...

As mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees helped launch a billion-pound public-private partnership to decarbonize his city, one of the most ambitious deals of its kind anywhere in the world. This wasn’t just about climate targets. It was about results: cutting emissions, cutting energy bills, creating jobs, and improving housing — all while building a long-term investment model that gave private partners c...

Rare earth magnets power the modern world and the clean energy transition. They’re inside every electric vehicle motor, wind turbine, MRI machine, and computer hard drive in a data center. But the world throws most of them away. Less than 1% are ever recycled. And today, China controls nearly 90% of the global supply. That’s the crisis Cyclic Materials was built to solve — by turning circularity i...

It took over a century to build today’s power grid. Now we need to triple its capacity by 2050. Why? Because demand is surging, and a net-zero future depends on a bigger, smarter, and cleaner grid. Electrification is transforming how we power transportation, buildings, industry, and data. Renewables are decentralized and intermittent. And the current grid, built for centralized fossil fuel power,...

Rondo Energy is building a renewable energy battery using bricks and toaster wire. But it’s not for your home—it’s for the factories that run the world. Industrial heat drives 10% of global carbon emissions. It’s essential for making steel, cement, chemicals, food, paper, and fuel. And it’s one of the hardest challenges in climate—expensive to electrify, risky to retrofit, and central to the globa...

Fifteen years ago, smart thermostats promised to save you money and learn your habits. Today, they—and other grid-connected devices and appliances—are forming the backbone of the most sustainable power plant on the grid. Jeff Gleeson, Chief Product Officer of Renew Home, joins Josh to unpack how his team is transforming everyday home tech into a distributed, intelligent, always-on energy layer—one...

Mike Martin helped launch the first climate change concert tour with Dave Matthews. He’s worked with Billie Eilish to flip venues vegan and wrote the green touring playbook years ago that artists still follow today. But after decades trying to make recycling and compostables work at live events, Mike hit a wall. Zero-waste wasn’t working. Then he remembered what he saw on tour with U2 during the J...

Johnson Controls helped invent modern air conditioning. Now, it’s reengineering how buildings cut carbon — using AI and automation to make infrastructure smarter, cleaner, and more efficient. Reuben Petty, Principal Digital Sales Engineer, works with business leaders, facility teams, and city officials to connect legacy systems to the digital tools of tomorrow. His focus is OpenBlue — the company’...

E-bikes are booming—nearly as many were sold in the U.S. last year as electric cars. But while EVs get the attention, e-bikes are quietly reshaping how people move, cutting emissions, making urban life easier, and recreation more fun. The catch? Buying an e-bike is easy. Reselling one isn’t. That’s where Upway comes in. They’re building the Carvana for e-bikes—a seamless resale marketplace with ac...

How do you make solar adoption irresistible? By not selling solar. This week on Supercool , we’re joined by Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun, and Jessica Bergman, a marketing strategist who’s spent her career figuring out why clean energy adoption stalls—and how to fix it. Under Mary’s leadership, Sunrun stopped being just a solar company and became something much bigger: a storage-first, customer-obses...

Supercool regularly speaks with innovators working at the intersection of business, technology, and climate—AI giving buildings brains, pneumatic tubes hauling away trash, and electric school buses optimizing routes. With so much climate momentum underway, how do we properly assess this moment? Molly Wood has been tracking it from multiple angles. A veteran journalist (Wired, CNET, The New York Ti...

Since 2018, GoodLeap has financed home solar, batteries, and efficiency upgrades at an unprecedented scale—serving over 1 million customers and originating more than $30 billion in financing for sustainable solutions. Founder Hayes Barnard saw the bottleneck wasn’t price—it was friction. Homeowners needed fast, hassle-free financing. Contractors needed better tools to manage projects. GoodLeap bui...

CannonDesign is building a reputation for designing buildings that eliminate carbon and improve lives. In 2024, Metropolis Magazine recognized the firm as its Planet Positive Firm of the Year for leading the way in net-zero architecture. It wasn't always this way. As one of North America's largest and oldest firms, CannonDesign had the scale, heritage, and reputation—but no clear sustainability st...

What if buildings could think for themselves—anticipating energy needs, preventing breakdowns, and adjusting to outside weather conditions in real-time? In this episode, we explore how BrainBox AI, a Montreal-based company, is making that a reality. Their cutting-edge technology powers over 15,000 buildings across 17 countries, using advanced artificial intelligence to take the guesswork out of bu...

Industrial heat is one of the biggest, most stubborn sources of carbon emissions—responsible for nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gases. High costs, complex retrofits, and tight margins keep manufacturers locked into fossil fuels. But what if there were a way to swap out natural gas boilers without costly disruptions or major infrastructure overhauls? That’s exactly what Brenmiller’s thermal...