Inevitable

In this live episode of Inevitable from Climate Week NYC, Cody Simms explores the history and future of the electric grid with Ben Eidelson of Stepchange . Eidelson traces the evolution of the grid from J.P. Morgan and Pearl Street through the AC/DC debate, the rise of utilities, and Samuel Insull’s development of a scalable utility business model. The conversation then connects that history to to...

Jeff Lawson is the co-founder and CEO of Inertia , a fusion energy company working to commercialize inertial confinement fusion using advanced lasers and mass-manufactured fusion fuel targets. Lawson previously co-founded and led Twilio, scaling the company from an idea into a public company, and is now applying his product and company-building experience to one of energy’s most technically challe...

Charlie Nitschelm is the co-founder and CEO of Uplift , a company building affordable, rapidly deployable temporary housing. Uplift’s first product is a 90-square-foot, off-grid home designed for one to two people that can be transported fully assembled, placed with a standard forklift, and self-level without a foundation or skilled labor for deployment. In this episode of Inevitable , Nitschelm e...

Michael Thomas is the founder and CEO of Cleanview , a data and research platform tracking more than 10,000 clean energy projects and thousands of data center projects across the country. Back for his third appearance on Inevitable , Thomas has spent the past year investigating the explosive growth of AI infrastructure and the increasingly extreme measures companies are taking to get power online....

Alan Cooper is co-founder and CEO of ON.energy , a Miami-based company building battery-backed power systems for AI data centers. Its flagship product, AI UPS, sits between the grid and a data center, creating a buffer that isolates the grid from the massive volatility of AI workloads while providing uninterrupted power to the entire campus. In this episode of Inevitable , Cooper explains how a ca...

Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier , a company building modular, on-site hydrogen systems for long-duration energy storage and distributed hydrogen production. Fourier’s approach combines lithium-ion batteries for short-duration needs with hydrogen storage for longer durations, packaged into a single system designed to operate like a microgrid. In this episode of Inevitable , Yel...

Willie Phillips is the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and now a partner at Holland & Knight . During his time at FERC, Phillips helped lead major reforms to transmission planning and the electric grid’s interconnection process. He now advises the companies and utilities he once regulated, giving him a unique perspective on how developers can navigate the regulat...

Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics , a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers. Before founding Aalo, Yasir led the MARVEL microreactor program at Idaho National Laboratory. In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S. nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline....

Fiona Spruill is CEO of Overstory , a company helping electric utilities reduce power outages and wildfire risk using satellite imagery, aerial data, and AI-powered vegetation intelligence. Since joining as employee number 10 and later stepping into the CEO role, Spruill has helped Overstory evolve from a vegetation mapping startup into a resilience platform serving many of North America's largest...

Arch Rao is Founder and CEO of SPAN , the company behind the smart electrical panel that has expanded into utility grid management with SPAN Edge and distributed AI infrastructure with XFRA . What began as a smarter way to manage home electricity has evolved into a platform designed to digitize the electric grid, enable mass electrification, and unlock new AI compute capacity using existing reside...

Noah Schochet is the co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma , a construction technology company rethinking how infrastructure gets built. Founded by two former SpaceX engineers, TerraFirma combines robotics, remote operations, and software into a construction business that performs projects directly rather than selling technology. By vertically integrating its tools with field operations, the company ai...

Jake Jurewicz is the Co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy , a nuclear power plant developer. Blue Energy starts with proven, light water reactors and builds everything around them — prefabricating standardized nuclear plants as massive modules in shipyards and fab yards, then barging them to site. It pairs that with a patented gas-to-nuclear approach that energizes the plant on gas turbines first and...

Pete Johnson , Co-founder and CEO of Koloma , joins Inevitable to break down geologic hydrogen — naturally occurring hydrogen found deep underground — and why he believes it could be the first new primary energy source since nuclear power in the 1950s. Koloma has raised more than $400 million from Khosla Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Osaka Gas, and Mitsubish...

Shannon Miller is Co-founder and President of Mainspring Energy , a company developing a new category of power generation technology called the linear generator. Mainspring’s systems generate electricity through a low-temperature, flameless chemical reaction that converts fuel directly into electrical power. Shannon has been at this for about 15 years. She started the company on technology she dev...

Michael Spencer is the Founder and CEO of Zeno , an electric mobility company building electric motorcycles, battery-swapping infrastructure, and distributed energy systems across East Africa. Drawing on experience from nearly a decade building businesses in East Africa and four years at Tesla during its hypergrowth era, Spencer is applying lessons from EV charging infrastructure to one of the wor...

Marc Berte is the Co-founder and CEO of Overview Energy , a startup developing space-based solar power systems designed to turn existing solar farms into around-the-clock power generators. By placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit, collecting near-continuous sunlight, and beaming energy back to Earth as safe near-infrared light, Overview aims to dramatically increase the utilization of solar i...

Edward Shenderovich is the Founder and CEO of Roebling , a software platform that helps industrial companies evaluate, design, and finance manufacturing projects before breaking ground. After initially setting out to solve bottlenecks in biomanufacturing, Shenderovich and his team uncovered a broader challenge: the economics of scaling physical infrastructure are often poorly understood until it's...

Haroon Inam is Co-founder and CEO of DG Matrix , a company that makes the world's most compact Power Router, aggregating distributed energy for GenAI datacenters, microgrids, fleet electrification, and associated systems. As AI workloads drive unprecedented electricity demand and legacy grid infrastructure struggles to keep pace, DG Matrix has commercialized the world’s first multi-port solid-stat...

Peter Carlsson is Co-founder and former CEO of Northvolt, the European battery manufacturing company that raised more than $13 billion to build a homegrown battery supply chain for Europe, before filing for bankruptcy at the end of 2024. Before Northvolt, Carlsson spent more than a decade at Ericsson building global supply chains and later served as VP of Supply Chain at Tesla during the launch of...

Rob Black is Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department , and Bruce Brown is Head of Strategic Climate Initiatives at the New Mexico State Investment Council , the state’s $72B sovereign wealth fund. Together, they are driving one of the most ambitious state-level strategies in the U.S. to turn energy wealth into long-term climate innovation and economic growth. The conver...

Eddy Chiang is Co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy , a company building commercial-scale energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. By testing, certifying, and remanufacturing second-life battery modules, Moment Energy is creating lower-cost alternatives to new lithium-ion storage while extending battery lifespans by decades. In this episode of Inevitable , Chiang explains...

Joel Gratz is Founding Meteorologist and CEO of OpenSnow , a weather platform used by hundreds of thousands of skiers, snowboarders, and outdoor enthusiasts to track snow conditions and forecast powder days. What started as a text thread among friends has grown into a profitable, bootstrapped business combining expert forecasting, data science, and increasingly AI-driven weather models. In this ep...

Dave McColl is Executive Director of Stanford Climate Ventures (SCV) , a program designed to help students build climate companies through rigorous go-to-market strategy and hands-on company building. SCV is a project-based course at Stanford University that has helped launch dozens of startups across energy, infrastructure, and industrial decarbonization. In this episode of Inevitable , Yin Lu ,...

John Dean is Co-Founder and CEO of WindBorne , a company building next-generation weather balloons and an AI-powered forecasting layer to improve global weather prediction. WindBorne’s balloons can stay aloft for weeks — collecting critical atmospheric data across oceans and remote regions where traditional weather infrastructure doesn’t reach. In this episode of Inevitable , Dean explains why wea...

Alex Blumberg is Co-founder and CEO of DaisyChain Energy , a company building a hardware-enabled software platform that turns commercial buildings into flexible grid assets. Best known as the founder of Gimlet Media and co-creator of Planet Money , Blumberg’s second venture focuses on solving one of the most overlooked problems in climate: the misaligned incentives inside buildings. In this episod...