Watt It Takes

Every morning, 26 million children in the US get on a school bus. It is the largest mass transit system in America, and it has barely changed in 80 years. There is no real-time tracking, no route optimization, and no visibility for parents. Bus drivers still rely on walkie-talkies and dispatchers still use fax machines. Nearly half a million diesel buses are moving those 26 million children, produ...

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand. We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast,...

At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access. Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population. T...

Here’s a question: how many corporations do you know that have made a public commitment to cut their carbon emissions? Probably a lot. About 40% of the world’s largest companies have set full net-zero targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, according to Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report, with target-setting rising for the fourth consecutive year. But how many actually know how to achieve tho...

On this episode of Watt It Takes, we explore another approach to long-duration energy storage: compressed air. Curtis VanWalleghem, Co-Founder and CEO of Hydrostor, started the company in 2010 after confronting surplus power challenges at Bruce Power. Without a traditional founder background, he set out to build storage systems that use compressed air and underground hard rock caverns to deliver t...

If you spend any time on the water, you’ve probably heard the joke that the two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat… and the day they sell it. For today’s guest, that line isn’t just a joke. It’s a problem statement. Mitch Lee grew up around boats. He loved being on the water, but he also experienced firsthand how loud, smelly, maintenance-heavy, and frustrating boat own...

As an aging grid faces rising demand, increasing complexity, and more frequent stress events, one thing has become clear: we don’t just need more power, we need power that can show up at the right time, in the right place, and at the right price. What’s far less settled is how we get there. Should large energy users build their own power? Should they treat the grid as something to work around rath...

​​As load growth pushes the grid to its limits, the energy transition increasingly depends on one technology: storage. Batteries are becoming the backbone of reliable, clean power, and according to a recent UBS analysis, AI-driven data centers are set to trigger a “boom cycle” for energy storage in the next five years. As more clean energy comes online and global energy demand surges, batteries ar...

At a moment when our country can feel deeply divided, and when progress on clean energy can feel uncertain, this month's guest — former U.S. Secretary of Energy and two-term Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm — couldn’t be timelier. It was the perfect moment to take stock of where we are as an industry. After years of historic progress, we’re now facing growing uncertainty about what comes ne...

As we’ve covered in other recent episodes, the growth of data centers and the massive amount of power they require is reshaping the energy landscape. Today, I want to zero in on a specific challenge at the heart of it all: the watt bit spread, a phrase coined by this month’s guest.  The Watt Bit Spread is the gap between the cost of electricity and the value of computing—computing meaning, the pro...

The U.S. power sector serves more than 160 million electricity customers—across homes, businesses, and factories in all 50 states. But the grid that supplies that electricity wasn’t designed for the world we live in now, let alone the one that’s coming. Electrification is accelerating. Data centers—driven by the explosive growth of AI—are demanding more power than ever, often in places where the g...

If cement were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, behind only China and the United States. That’s because cement production alone accounts for about five and a half percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. And while that might seem really high, it actually makes sense. Just look around you: from roads to bridges, sidewalks to buildings, cement...

It’s been a few years since we last covered geothermal on Watt It Takes. Our 2021 episode with Tim Latimer, Founder and CEO of Fervo Energy, explored how next-generation geothermal was just beginning to emerge. Since then, the sector’s momentum has only grown. Meanwhile, electricity demand is rising fast, driven by data centers, AI, and the broader push to electrify everything. That’s putting pres...

You don’t meet many people like Jigar Shah. He’s one of the rare leaders who has shaped the clean energy transition from every angle — as a founder, as an investor, and most recently, as a government leader.  If you know Jigar, you already know the headlines: He founded SunEdison, led Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room, co-hosted the Energy Gang podcast, co-founded Generate Capital, and most recent...

There are a handful of people in the clean energy and infrastructure world whose knowledge and voices serve as guiding lights. Shayle Kann is one of those people. Known for his deep expertise, unique perspective, and distinct voice, Shayle has covered and shaped the energy transition for years. While regular listeners will know, we typically feature startup founders. But Shayle’s long-standing inf...

Here’s a thought experiment. You’re a seasoned clean energy developer. You’ve got a pipeline of projects. You’ve navigated permitting, secured financing, refined your technology stack. Everything’s lined up, and you’re ready to build. There’s just one problem: interconnection. To connect your projects, you have to go through a complex study process run by your utility, or your Regional Transmissio...

As a new year unfolds, 2025 has already brought devastating natural disasters. From blizzards to wildfires, climate chaos is impacting our neighbors and communities in real time. My heart goes out to the people of Los Angeles for the profound losses they suffered last month, and for the difficult path of rebuilding that lies ahead. This devastation brings to mind a tragedy that struck even closer...

2024 was a landmark year for the energy transition. With record-setting investments in climate infrastructure, we saw the price of renewables out-compete just about every electricity source worldwide, we saw advancements in industrial decarbonization (which we’ve featured prominently on this show), and we saw a breakout year for next generation energy storage just to name a few. While momentum is...

As we touched on in our last episode with John O’Donnell of Rondo Energy, industry is a major contributor to global CO2 emissions, and it is only forecasted to get worse. According to a recent report from Rhodium Group, by 2050, the industrial sector could emit as much CO2 as the power, transportation, and building sectors combined.  A term worth highlighting in this month’s episode is “Hard-to-ab...

In the same way that “Climate Change” and “Global Warming” went from scientific terms to colloquial ones, “Decarbonization” is slowly permeating modern discourse. Decarbonization is the process of significantly reducing or eliminating CO2 and other GHG emissions that result from human activity.  “Human activity” encompasses a lot of different sectors. From agriculture and forestry, to transport an...

Humans produce a lot of trash. How much trash you ask? We produce 2.3 billion tons of trash per year. That’s enough to fill about 800,000 Olympic pools every year. So, what do we do with it all and how does it get managed? Some of it, depending on your municipality, can be composted, some of it gets recycled, but despite our best intentions, most of it ends up in our landfills. In an ideal world,...

Extreme weather events are becoming more and more common. In July, Hurricane Beryl wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, causing 3 million Texans to lose power in the midst of a soaring heat wave, which killed 23 people.  Critics have raised questions about Houston’s power providers preparedness for a disaster like Beryl, and have raised concerns about the long delay in restoring power at a time where...

Carbon is everywhere, not just in the air around us, but also in the materials we use everyday. We talk a lot about reducing the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere through approaches like avoided emissions or removal. But, what do we do in a world where GHG avoidance and removals are not at the scale required to tackle all of the emissions that come from heavy industry like agriculture and...

One in ten American families own a Recreational Vehicle, and yet, the RV industry hasn’t seen meaningful innovation in decades, due in part to extreme consolidation and lack of competition. Despite this, 300-500,000 RVs are sold in the US every year, 90% of which are towable.  Towing an RV can seriously affect the fuel economy of your car. Drivers can expect their gas mileage to decrease about 1-2...

Even if all emissions stopped tomorrow, the excess carbon currently in the atmosphere would take thousands of years to naturally dissipate through processes like photosynthesis, oceanic absorption, or mineralization. In addition to forests, soils, and the ocean, naturally occurring minerals are one of our planet’s most important carbon sinks.  Over the span of hundreds or thousands of years, carbo...