The Green Blueprint

Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage, but inexpensive, truly long-duration batteries may still have a significant role to play in backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid. Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron — essentially rusting and unrusting the earth's most abundant metal — Form is creating low-co...

If you’re building a consumer software startup, your investors may expect you to project hockey stick-style growth. But if you’re building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, you’re likely in a very different position. Frank O’Sullivan, Managing Director at S2G Investments, argues that the climate finance ecosystem is suffering from a structural mismatch. While there is ple...

Silicon solar panels have led the market for decades but will soon hit a ceiling around 25% efficiency. Perovskite, a frontier material once dismissed for degrading too fast, is now being called the holy grail of solar. Saritha Peruri, VP of Commercialization at Tandem PV, is bringing it to market. The company stacks its proprietary perovskite on top of silicon, capturing a wider spectrum of light...

California recorded its second-lowest Sierra Nevada snowpack on record this spring. That's not just a bad ski season, it's a water supply crisis. Snowpack is where California's water comes from. And when it doesn't materialize, agriculture, hydropower, and fire suppression all feel the strain. Dacia Leon, CEO and co-founder of Supercool Earth, is building a company around a deceptively simple idea...

The global financial system is undergoing a structural shift into a "volatile new world order," where unpredictability is the norm, and climate tech is uniquely exposed.  Venture investor Susan Su says the war in Iran is complicating the landscape. That's because about 40% of the world's capital comes from just four Gulf states, and those states are exploring whether the war allows them to invoke...

 We already have the blueprint for decarbonizing the global economy. We've invented many of the solutions, but much of that tech is still sitting on the sidelines waiting to get financed and built at scale.  But over the last year, we've seen a wave of change that complicates and – in some cases – helps that mission.  In the first season of the Green Blueprint, we heard stories from the entreprene...

About 90% of global energy storage is pumped storage hydropower – which requires a mountain, a lake, and a whole lot of permitting. While lithium batteries have gotten drastically cheaper over the last decade, they’re still expensive for longer durations.   But Cindy Taff and her team at Sage Geosystems are developing geothermal technology that could revolutionize energy storage. Instead of pumpin...

In 2020, Microsoft announced a major goal: by 2050 the company aims to remove from the atmosphere all the carbon emissions it has produced since its founding in 1975.  When Phil Goodman joined the company in 2022, he quickly found that the market for Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) was just getting off the ground. That meant that in order to meet its climate pledge, Microsoft needed to help foster th...

Back in January, Captura CEO Steve Oldham was sitting in a conference room in Hawaii, entertaining reps from the company’s first potential customer. What the customer didn’t know was that Captura’s ocean-based carbon removal pilot –the whole reason for the visit – still wasn’t working. The stakes were high. Steve’s team needed to prove they could pull off a major pilot under intense time crunch —...

This year in the U.S., steel manufacturers will produce more than 71 million tons of steel – enough to build nearly 200 Empire State buildings. It's a stunning statistic, but not surprising. The steel industry has fueled economic growth and innovation in America since the early 1800s.  But for every ton of conventional steel produced, two tons of CO2 are emitted, making the coal industry responsib...

In 2007 Sam White, co-founder of Promethean Power Systems, was traveling through India looking for a rural electrification problem to solve. He and his team had just won a $10,000 grant in an MIT competition, and they wanted to find an industry in India that needed their help. After looking at the sugar industry and the grape industry, they finally settled on dairy.   India is the largest producer...

Clean energy founders love to talk about technology, capital, and scale. But few are prepared for the fourth pillar of success: government. Shomik Dutta, a co-founder and managing partner at Overture VC, learned that lesson firsthand after a career that spanned Obama’s White House, private equity, and venture capital. His takeaway: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Shomik thinks th...

For decades, nuclear has struggled with cost overruns and delays — Georgia’s Vogtle plant being the latest example. Kairos Power co-founder and CEO Mike Laufer thinks the solution is to flip the script: focus first on non-nuclear demonstrations and then iterate quickly.  It’s a counterintuitive and potentially risky strategy . Rapid iteration isn’t the way engineers or funders like the DOE have tr...

Deep into engineering studies for Project Cormorant, 8 Rivers' massive low-carbon ammonia facility, the team discovered new efficiencies that would create a safer, more advanced version of their hydrogen technology. But there was one problem: they'd already invested heavily in the current design. CEO Damian Beauchamp faced a classic dilemma. Should 8 Rivers stick with their existing approach and a...

Three years ago this month, the Inflation Reduction Act passed, marking the largest investment in climate policy in U.S. history. It included over $300 billion to address global warming and was expected to unlock nearly $3 trillion in private investment by 2032. But then came Donald Trump.  Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle much of that progress, includin...

In 2022, Zach Jones learned that his technical team at Graphitic Energy was secretly working nights and weekends on an unsanctioned approach to producing clean hydrogen from natural gas. It was an approach that abandoned the technology Zach and the company had spent years developing. And Zach wasn’t happy. With investors to answer to and a pilot plant ready for construction, Zach couldn't switch g...

In 2021, Commonwealth Fusion Systems proved it had built the most powerful magnet in the world. The breakthrough was based on a specific material - a tape - that conducts massive amounts of current with very little loss.  Rick Needham, Chief Commercial Officer for CFS, says the breakthrough led to a $1.8 billion Series B fundraising round. Since then, the company has turned its attention to turnin...

Clean energy attracts nearly $3 trillion in investment annually, but most of that capital flows to massive utility-scale projects through the world's biggest banks and large-scale asset managers. Meanwhile, smaller distributed projects — rooftop solar, batteries, microgrids — face a structural financing challenge that Amanda Li calls "death by a thousand cuts." As co-founder and COO of Banyan Infr...

This week, we're bringing you a special episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann, a show about how to decarbonize the planet. In this episode: what it takes to secure investments for first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects.  First-of-a-kind projects need infrastructure investment, the kind of money that costs less than venture capital and usually comes in the form of deals worth tens or hundreds of mi...

 In 2023, Sarah Jewett was on her honeymoon in France when she received a life-changing text: steam was flowing from Fervo Energy's first commercial geothermal project in Nevada. That moment confirmed their revolutionary approach—applying horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing from the oil and gas industry to tap heat resources previously considered inaccessible. Unlike traditional geotherma...

In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terawatt Infrastructure with a bold mission: create the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution. Within its first year, Terawatt secured a billion-dollar investment. But as the company developed plans for a nationwide charging network, it confronted the daunting challenge of building infrastructure for an electric truck market that barely existed.  High-...

In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages. Customers across multiple markets were already excited about the new product, but Drew’s team struggled to keep up with demand. With Powerwall 2 already...

In 2018, LineVision was a young company with revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines. Its dynamic line rating sensors and software could increase the capacity of existing power lines by up to 40% without building new infrastructure — a critical solution for integrating renewables and meeting growing electricity demand. But to prove its tech, it needed to win over notoriously cauti...

Dan Shugar has been trying to move solar panels around since the 1980s. What started with a few experiments as a young engineer has turned into one of the biggest solar tracker companies in the world. In 2012 he founded Nextracker with a single product. Since then, Nextracker has revolutionized tracking technology through an array of innovative products. This week, host Lara Pierpoint talks with N...

When Raffi Garabedian co-founded Electric Hydrogen in 2020, he saw existing electrolyzers as too small and expensive to make green hydrogen economically viable. Instead of building standard sub-megawatt units, his team aimed for 100-megawatt systems at half the industry cost. Initial market enthusiasm brought millions in capacity reservations, fueling construction of a Massachusetts manufacturing...