In March of 2020, Covid shut down economies, closed off supply chains, and sent unemployment to historic levels. No one knew what would come next for energy. Oil prices went into negative territory. Industrial electricity use plummeted. Residential demand shot up. And there were big pipelines of renewable energy projects waiting to get built. “I think we were all a little bit nervous about how COVID was going to affect all of the deal flow in the market,” says Britta von Oesen, a managing dir...

It’s been a very intense year for America’s power grid. Across the country, the electricity system just faced another stress-test as extreme heat taxed power plants and grid operators in the Pacific Northwest, Texas, and New York. Since 2000, outages across the U.S. have increased by 67%. Is the power system ready for tomorrow’s extreme weather -- today? Stephen and Katherine are joined by Dr. Melissa Lott, a senior research scholar and the director of research at the Center on Global Energy...

We spend most of our time on this show talking about what's happening in climate tech. What technologies, business models, and markets are being developed? By whom? And how much impact will they ultimately have on decarbonization? But there's an equally interesting topic. What isn't happening? In other words, where is the white space? What areas, technologies, or markets need more attention?  The mandate of a new non-profit called Actuate is to identify and fill gaps across multiple areas, in...

There were about eight years when climate tech was wandering in the wilderness, so to speak. It started after the Solyndra bankruptcy in 2011 and ended about two years ago, when the market began heating up again. During that time, people in this space examined the valleys of death. What are the stages in a climate tech company’s life cycle that might be painful -- or even fatal -- to go through? And what resources can a company draw upon to cross these valleys? To tackle those questions, Shay...

The array of AI applications within climate tech is staggering -- and rapidly expanding.  There are lots of exciting point solutions, but there’s no clear example of AI directly and meaningfully reducing GHG emissions on a global scale. Yet. Last year we had Priya Donti on the show. She’s a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon and co-chair of the Climate Change AI organization. This week, she came back with her Climate Change AI co-chair Lynn Kaack, a postdoc researcher at ETH-Zurich.  Priya and L...

We can measure the energy transition in any number of ways. The hundreds of millions of solar panels and wind turbines installed. The gigatons of carbon reduced. Or the number of jobs created. But how do we measure the equity outcome? Our guest co-host, Dr. Destenie Nock, is focused on exactly this question. She is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  Dr. Nock is creating new models for energy-systems planning that factor in positive s...