Catalyst with Shayle Kann

A mismatch between suppliers and buyers is making it hard to grow the supply of low-carbon products like cement, steel, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). If you want to produce a product like SAF, you want to find the cheapest place to do it — someplace where there’s cheap, low-carbon hydrogen, for example. But the buyers who have the incentive and money to pay for those products might be halfway across the world. Or say you’re a supplier of a low-carbon building material. Risk-averse contractors with tight margins may hesitate to pay a green premium — even if the final buyer of the building might be willing to pay extra to cut emissions. So how do you bridge the gap between the buyers and sellers of low-carbon products? In this episode, Shayle talks to Adam Klauber, vice president of sustainability and digital supply chain at World Energy, a low-carbon fuels company. They talk about book and claim, a system to separate the environmental attribute (avoided emissions) from the physical good (e.g. fuel). It’s a system that developed in the power sector as renewable energy credits (RECs) and is now spreading to SAFs and other industries. Shayle and Adam cover topics like:  Book and claim versus other systems of tracking environmental attributes, such as mass-balance and physical chain-of-custody Lessons from the most mature book and claim systems, like RECs and SAF Key challenges like double counting the interoperability of digital registries and certification  Other industries where book and claim may develop like maritime, trucking, steel, cement, and chemicals Recommended resources Roundtable On Sustainable Biomaterials: RSB Book & Claim Manual World Economic Forum: The Clean Skies for Tomorrow Sustainable Aviation Fuel Certificate (SAFc) Framework Sustainable Supply Chain Lab: Decarbonizing the Air Transportation Sector: New greenhousegas accounting and insetting guidelines for sustainable aviation fuel Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping: MaritimeBook & Claim RMI: Structuring Demand for Lower-Carbon Materials: An Initial Assessment of Book and Claim for the Steel and Concrete Sectors Catalyst: The complex path to market for low-carbon cement Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy. So what went wrong? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like:  What went well — from fundraising billions of dollars to securing major off-takers What didn’t go well — like trying to build multiple types of batteries, in multiple factories, on multiple continents How venture capital investors may have pushed the company to be too ambitious The tradeoffs of choosing NMC over LFP Challenges with their equipment supplier Wuxi LEAD The upside: Sam’s belief that Northvolt’s factory will ultimately make batteries Recommended resources Latitude Media: What Northvolt's bankruptcy means for Europe's battery ambitions Intercalation: Battery production is genuinely difficult Bloomberg: Northvolt Has Major Obstacles Ahead Even With Bailout In Reach Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Security experts often say there are two kinds of companies. “There are those companies that have been hacked, and those that don't know that they are being hacked – especially when we look at the energy industry,” says Bilal Khursheed executive director of Microsoft's global power & utilities business.  Khursheed works with companies to deploy digital technologies to speed up the clean energy transition. And he also focuses heavily on a threat that could derail the transition – cyber attacks. There are two reasons for this. One is the rise of internet-connected devices. There are now 15 billion IOT devices connected around the world, with a huge number of them on power grids. The other reason is sophistication. More attacks are now coming from organized groups, many of them with political motivations. “These aren't just your random hackers. These are highly sophisticated James Bond villain types that are targeting our energy systems,” explains Khursheed. In this episode, produced in partnership with Microsoft, Bilal Khursheed talks with Stephen Lacey about the evolution of cybersecurity threats in energy. They discuss how the threats are changing, their consequences for critical infrastructure, and how solutions are improving in the age of AI. This episode was produced in partnership with Microsoft. After listening to the podcast, you can read about how to navigate NERC CIP compliance in the cloud, learn how energy firms around the world partner with Microsoft on security, and dig into the 2024 Microsoft Digital Defense Report.

Every data center company is after one thing right now: power. Electricity used to be an afterthought in data center construction, but in the AI arms race access to power has become critical because more electrons means more powerful AI models. But how and when these companies will get those electrons is unclear. Utilities have been inundated with new load requests, and it takes time to build new capacity. Given these uncertainties, how do data center companies make the high-stakes decisions about how much to build? How sustainable is the rate of construction? And how much will these data center companies pay for electricity? In this episode, Shayle talks to Brian Janous, co-founder and chief commercial officer at data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Brian recently explained how he thinks about these questions in a LinkedIn post titled “The Watt-Bit Spread,” which argues that the value of watts is incredibly high right now, and the cost of those watts is too low. Shayle and Brian cover topics like: The unclear data center demand and high costs that are making data center companies hesitant to build How the skills required for data center development have shifted from real estate and fiber to energy Why higher power prices are needed to incentivize new generation Potential solutions for better pricing electricity and speeding up the construction of new generation Recommended resources Latitude Media: AES exec on data center load: 'It's like nothing we’ve ever seen' Latitude Media: Mapping the data center power demand problem, in three charts Latitude Media: Are we thinking about the data center energy problem in the right ways? Catalyst: Can chip efficiency slow AI's energy demand? Catalyst: Under the hood of data center power demand Sequoia Capital: AI’s $600B Question Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

In the next five years, Arizona Public Service estimates peak demand will grow by 40%. In order to meet that peak, the utility is increasingly turning to demand-side flexibility.  A few years ago, APS started working with EnergyHub to experiment with smart thermostats as a resource to manage peak demand. The initial resource was modest – a few megawatts, and then 20 megawatts.  That program eventually turned into a 190-megawatt virtual power plant made up of smart thermostats, behavioral demand response, commercial and industrial demand response, and some batteries. And the APS operations team now treats the VPP as a valuable resource. “We had to really build trust in this as a real resource. As it got bigger and you could see a noticeable difference when we called on these devices, that trust really began to build,” explained Kerri Carnes, director of customer-to-grid solutions at APS. This week, we’re featuring a conversation about the value of VPPs with APS’ Kerri Carnes and Seth Frader-Thompson, co-founder and president of EnergyHub. It was recorded as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum series.  What does APS’ experience tell us about what is working in VPP program design? How do we convince utilities that VPPs are reliable? And what is their role as load growth rises?  “A VPP is actually more capable in some ways than a traditional power plant,” explained Frader-Thompson. “My guess is that over the next few years we'll probably come up with some more nuanced things to call VPPs.” This is a partner episode, produced in partnership with EnergyHub. This is an edited version of the conversation. You can watch the full video here that includes audience questions about VPP design and implementation.

Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil used this Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Since it was published in June 2022, there has been increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors, especially for sustainable aviation fuel. Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more. And you can engineer it to capture extra carbon dioxide and sequester it underground or at the bottom of the ocean.  The catch: The world has a finite capacity for biomass production, so every end use competes with another. If done improperly, these end uses could also compete with food production for arable land already in tight supply. So which decarbonization solutions will get a slice of the biomass pie? Which ones should? In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. They cover biomass sources from municipal solid waste to kelp. They also survey the potential end-uses, such as incineration to generate power, gasification to make hydrogen, and pyrolyzation to make biochar, as well as fuel production in a Fischer-Tropsch process.  In a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Julio and his co-authors propose a new term called biomass carbon removal and storage, or ‘BiCRS’, as a way to describe capturing carbon in biomass and then sequestering it. Startups Charm Industrial and Running Tide are pursuing this approach. Julio and his co-authors think of BiCRS as an alternative pathway to bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).  They then zoom in on a promising source of biomass: waste. Example projects include a ski hill built on an incinerator in Copenhagen and a planned waste-to-hydrogen plant in Lancaster, California.  Shayle and Julio also dig into questions like: How to procure and transport biomass, especially biowaste, at scale?  How to avoid eco-colonialism, i.e. when wealthy countries exploit the resources of poorer countries to grow biomass without meaningful consent? If everyone wants it, when is biowaste no longer waste? And when there’s a shortage of waste—like corn stover, for example—what’s the risk of turning to raw feedstocks, like corn? How to pickle trees? (yes, you read that right) Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Shayle and his team at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) review a lot of climate-tech pitches. The best kind of pitch uses a solid techno-economic analysis (TEA) to model how a technology would compete in the real world. In a previous episode, we covered some of the ways startups get TEAs wrong — bad assumptions, false precision, focusing on parts instead of the system, etc. So what does a good TEA look like?  In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleagues, Dr. Melissa Ball, EIP’s associate director of technology, and Dr. Greg Thiel, director of technology. They apply their TEA chops to two technology pathways — green ammonia and synthetic methane. EIP hasn’t invested in either area yet because both struggle with challenging economics. Shayle, Greg, and Melissa talk about what would have to change to make those economics work, covering topics like: The basics of ammonia and methane production The cost stack of ammonia production and the surprisingly large role transportation plays The challenges of integrating ammonia production with renewables, like buffering hydrogen Novel approaches to ammonia synthesis, including scaling down the existing process, lower temperature, and pressure Recommended resources U.S. Department of Energy: Clean Hydrogen Commercial Liftoff Catalyst: Ammonia: The beer of decarbonization Catalyst: Climate tech startups need strong techno-economic analysis Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

Oh, the heat pump — a climate tech darling that still hasn’t hit the big time yet. One challenge for heat pumps is that the customer experience can be difficult, involving a complex installation process, poor installation jobs, and even technicians that don’t want to sell you one. What’s it going to take to get heat pumps right?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Paul Lambert, founder and CEO of the heat-pump company Quilt. They talk through the nuts and bolts of the customer experience and how to improve it. (Shayle and Energy Impact Partners invest in Quilt). They cover topics like: Why many technicians are ambivalent or resistant to selling heat pumps The cost stack for heat pumps, including the surprising cost of materials The complex labor involved that ratchets up the total price of installation Lessons from other industries, such as solar and auto Whether users actually save money on heat pump installations The challenges of vertical integration of the value chain Recommended resources Latitude Media: We have more data on the energy benefits of heat pumps — and they’re big Catalyst: Ramping up the pace of home electrification Catalyst: Unleashing the magic of heat pumps Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.= On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide does. The good news: We’re in the middle of a global effort to replace them with lower impact alternatives.  Will we replace them fast enough to hit climate targets? And in the meantime, can we prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ian McGavisk, senior advisor at RMI for carbon-free buildings. An industry veteran, he recently co-authored a report on recovering residential AC refrigerants in the U.S., which have the carbon equivalent of 1.7 million cars. (Ian also works in business development at Transaera. Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle works, invests in Transaera.). Shayle and Ian cover topics like: The sources of emissions in the refrigerant lifecycle  The economics of recovering and reclaiming refrigerants Alternatives with low global warming potential and their tradeoffs, such as efficiency, flammability and concerns about forever chemicals Recommended resources RMI: Refrigerant Reclamation Project Drawdown: Refrigerant Management Project Drawdown: Alternative Refrigerants EPA: Transitioning to Low-GWP Alternatives in Commercial Refrigeration UN Environmental Programme: Montreal Protocol On Substances That Deplete The Ozone Layer, Report Of The Technology And Economic Assessment Panel, May 2024  Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA.  Before a startup proves its technology is commercially viable, it models how a technology would work. These TEAs include things like assumptions about inputs, prices, and market landscape. They help investors and entrepreneurs answer the question, will this technology compete? TEAs are important to the success of an early-stage climate-tech company. And a lot of startups get them wrong. As an investor at Energy Impact Partners (EIP), Shayle and his team see a lot of TEAs—and have some pet peeves. So what can startups do to improve their TEAs? This episode is a re-run from October 2023. We’re making a new episode on TEAs soon – stay tuned. But to start, we’re running this episode as a way to set up our next one. In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleagues Dr. Greg Thiel, EIP’s director of technology, and Dr. Melissa Ball, EIP’s associate director of technology. They cover topics like: Bad assumptions about things like levelized cost of production  Focusing on a component instead of a system Focusing on unhelpful metrics Using false precision—something Shayle calls “modeling theater” Recommended Resources: Activate: Techonomics: Establishing best practices in early stage technology modeling Department of Energy: Techno-economic, Energy, & Carbon Heuristic Tool for Early-Stage Technologies (TECHTEST) Tool National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Techno-Economic Analysis Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

We capture concentrated methane emissions from point sources like dairy barns, landfills, and coal mines. Mitigating methane emissions is essential to hitting net-zero targets, but could we capture diluted gasses straight from the atmosphere, too?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus, Chief Scientist at the Institute For Governance & Sustainable Development, about a National Academy of Sciences report on the unexplored area of methane removal. Gabrielle chaired the committee behind the report. Shayle and Gabrielle cover topics like: Why methane removal may be critical to addressing methane from hard-to-abate sources, like enteric emissions and tropical wetlands Key differences between methane removal and carbon dioxide removal How reducing methane in the atmosphere may also reduce its atmospheric lifetime  Technological pathways, including reactors, concentrators, surface treatments, ecosystem uptake enhancement, and atmospheric oxidation enhancement The potential for combining methane and carbon dioxide removal in direct air capture Recommended resources Catalyst: Why are we still flaring gas? Catalyst: Mitigating enteric methane: tech solutions for solving the cow burp problem Catalyst: Why methane matters Latitude Media: A look under the hood of EDF’s methane detection satellite Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

AI is enabling a multitude of solutions across power, industry, and transportation. But AI energy demands are increasingly stressing the electric grid — creating a bottleneck for growth and new challenges for clean energy supply. The mounting tension highlights the need for an energy-first approach to computing.  Developer Crusoe is building AI infrastructure that takes advantage of clean energy to power workloads for AI modeling. Likewise, Nvidia, Crusoe’s primary GPU supplier, has been consistently improving the energy efficiency of its GPUs. Both demonstrate the innovation that’s happening in the marketplace to create a 'climate-aligned cloud' for customers.    In the AI era, how do you build data centers with an energy-first approach? In this Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey explores all sides of the AI-energy nexus with talks with Chase Lochmiller, the co-founder and CEO. They discuss innovations in data center design, why the energy demands of AI could be higher than projected, and why that shouldn't scare us. Chase Lochmiller will be speaking at Latitude Media’s Transition-AI conference on December 3rd in Washington, DC. Get your tickets here.

Getting the construction industry to try a novel form of cement is like turning a giant ship. It’s hard to redirect the immense momentum behind existing ways of doing business, especially involving cement, the most energy-intensive ingredient in concrete. Industry insiders point to tight margins, concerns about messing with the ingredients that literally hold up buildings, and the long list of stakeholders will agree to try a new material.  So how do you get a risk-averse construction supply chain to try decarbonized cement? In this episode, Shayle talks to Leah Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Sublime Systems, a company that recently landed its first commercial deployment of decarbonized cement. (Shayle is an investor in Sublime). Shayle and Leah cover topics like: The long list of parties involved in a single pour of concrete Why the green premium is a burden for margin-squeezed contractors but “budget dust” for the building buyer How to align stakeholders, once there's buy-in from financers How a book-and-claim system could work for decarbonized cement How major concrete consumers, like governments, can create demand  Why the boom in data center construction creates a window of opportunity for decarbonized construction materials Recommended resources Catalyst: Pathways to decarbonizing steel Catalyst: Fixing cement’s carbon problem Latitude Media: With climate venture capital down, industrial investments had a ‘breakout year’ in 2023 Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

Chinese battery companies are manufacturing the cheapest cells in the world right now, and it’s not just because of cheap labor and state subsidies. They’ve streamlined the process in a way that has industry experts wondering how international competitors can ever catch up. In this episode, Shayle talks to James Frith, principal at the battery investment firm Volta Energy Technologies. He argues that there are multiple factors behind Chinese manufacturers’ efficiency and speed, like the know-how to operate plants with high yields, easy access to suppliers, and ability to squeeze margins to near zero. Shayle and James cover topics like: The confluence of overcapacity, softening demand, and low commodity prices that could result in a “bloodbath” of market consolidation in China Why the low cell prices on the spot market hit stationary storage harder than EVs Cost drivers of cell manufacturing, like labor, power, and environmental regulations What Western companies can learn from China’s cheap prices Why James is bullish on partnerships between Chinese and Western companies  Recommended resources Latitude Media: How Northvolt’s bet on lithium metal batteries fell apart Latitude Media: A summer of ups and downs in the battery sector Latitude Media: DOE designates $3 billion for the advanced battery supply chain Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

Tannice McCoy grew up in a mining family, but she never imagined herself in the mining business. Today she’s the president and general manager of NewRange Copper Nickel. Jenna Lehti never imagined herself in the mining industry either. She’s a member of the Bois Forte band of the Ojibwe tribe in Northern Minnesota, and grew up on a reservation adjacent to the Iron Range, a collection of mining districts around Lake Superior. Today, she’s the tribal relations advisor for NewRange. Together, they’re taking a proactive approach to harnessing tribal support for the critical minerals boom. NewRange is a Minnesota company pursuing a new copper, nickel, and cobalt mine in the northeastern part of the state, called NorthMet. It would supply minerals for a wide range of clean energy technologies. But under a previous owner, the project faced setbacks – in part because of a lack of engagement with local tribes.  “I think part of that came from a lack of understanding of the tribe's sovereignty and their water quality standards,” said McCoy. In this episode, produced in collaboration with NewRange, Tannice McCoy and Jenna Lehti sit down with Stephen Lacey. They explain what has changed with the NorthMet project, the importance of working with tribes, and the future of critical minerals mining in America. “It's really about how we are partnering with the tribes to move forward and progress,” said Lehti. This episode was produced in collaboration with NewRange Copper Nickel.

The world’s first large-scale, commercial direct-air capture (DAC) plants are coming online – or are about to. How soon will we see a boom in high-quality, durable DAC supply?  In this episode, Shayle talks to Andreas Aepli, chief financial officer of Climeworks, the world’s largest provider of DAC. They talk about Climeworks’ challenges with its two commercial plants – the kinds of challenges Andreas argues the industry needs to be transparent about in order to earn the trust of skeptical buyers. Shayle and Andreas also cover topics like: The real-world challenges of building a DAC plant, like extreme weather, supply-chain quality issues, CO2 purity, and more Why Andreas advocates a step-by-step scale-up of progressively larger deployments How to set pricing and and structure a carbon removal contract How to build a capital stack for a carbon removal plant Why Andreas believes the market will become even more supply-constrained in the next few years Recommended resources Latitude Media: Google says it's the first to purchase direct air capture for $100 per ton Latitude Media: Can a new generation of DAC companies overcome the tech’s big challenges? Latitude Media: Climeworks begins to offer “PPAs” for carbon removal Catalyst: Fixing the messy voluntary carbon market Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Kraken, the advanced operating system for energy. Kraken is helping utilities offer excellent customer service and develop innovative products and tariffs through the connection and optimization of smart home energy assets. Already licensed by major players across the globe, including Origin Energy, E.ON, and EDF, learn how Kraken can help you create a smarter, greener grid at kraken.tech. On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

Editor’s note: There’s some big money flowing into low carbon ammonia right now. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1.56 billion conditional loan guarantee for Wabash Valley Resources, an Indiana low-carbon ammonia facility. In August, oil and gas producer Woodside Energy spent $2.35 billion on a low-carbon ammonia plant in Texas. Both of these facilities will produce low-carbon ammonia while using carbon capture and storage. We thought it would be a good time to revisit an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. He explains how ammonia could be used as a low-carbon fuel in everything from ships to heavy industry.  The irony of ammonia is that it accounts for a whopping 2% of global emissions, but it could also become an important low-carbon fuel.  It’s the primary ingredient in agricultural fertilizer. But when combusted, it also emits no carbon, making it a promising low-carbon fuel, too — for ships, heavy industry, and even thermal power plants.  But making the stuff takes massive amounts of energy, and ammonia’s feedstocks – hydrogen and nitrogen – also require energy. So what would it take to slash emissions from ammonia production? And how would we actually use ammonia as a low-carbon fuel? In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. Julio and a team of colleagues just co-authored a report on low-carbon ammonia for the Innovation for Cool Earth Forum. They cover topics like: Why some countries like Japan, Singapore, and Korea are especially interested in developing ammonia infrastructure How ammonia compares to other low-carbon fuels like methanol and hydrogen How we would need to retrofit coal and gas power plants to co-fire with ammonia Addressing ammonia’s corrosion and toxicity issues The areas that need more research, such as ammonia’s impact on air quality and radiative forcing Key constraints like human capital and infrastructure Recommended Resources: Innovation for Cool Earth Forum: Low-Carbon Ammonia Roadmap Canary: Watch this TED talk to get up to speed on green ammonia and shipping Canary: The race is on to build the world’s first ammonia-powered ship Chemical & Engineering News: Will Japan run on ammonia? Catalyst is brought to you by Kraken, the advanced operating system for energy. Kraken is helping utilities offer excellent customer service and develop innovative products and tariffs through the connection and optimization of smart home energy assets. Already licensed by major players across the globe, including Origin Energy, E.ON, and EDF, Kraken can help you create a smarter, greener grid. Visit kraken.tech. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a revolutionary platform enabling solar and energy storage equipment buyers and developers to save time, increase profits, and reduce risk. Instantly see pricing, product, and counterparty data and comparison tools. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the global leader in integrated marketing, public relations, creative, and public affairs for energy and climate brands. If you're a startup, investor, or enterprise that's trying to make a name for yourself, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help tell your story and accelerate your growth engine. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

The U.S. and U.K. could see 500 gigawatts of distributed resources hitting the power system in the next few years.  But after years of watching DERs grow quickly, utilities and grid operators are still figuring out how to utilize them. Are we finally reaching an inflection point? “When you move to a world where you have millions and millions of generators, that whole system falls apart. And that's where you need not only digitalization, but also automation. They're the two things that we can't do the energy transition without,” says Charlotte Johnson, global director of markets at Kraken, which has 40 GW of DERs under management. In this episode, Charlotte Johnson sits down with Stephen Lacey to talk about the state of connected distributed energy resources – and why Kraken is so focused on expanding into the U.S. market. This episode was produced in partnership with Kraken. Kraken's end-to-end platform offers full network intelligence, DER controls, asset health, and reporting for power providers around the world. To learn more about Kraken's capabilities, go to kraken.tech.

AI is working its way across climate tech, helping companies discover giant lodes of ore, catch battery defects, and monitor energy infrastructure. Could it help us find revolutionary new materials, too? Turns out, it’s complicated.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Ekin Dogus Cubuk, or Dogus, a researcher focused on materials at Google DeepMind. DeepMind is one of several players, including Microsoft, trying to discover new materials that could be used in things like better battery chemistries, powerful carbon-capture sorbents, and room-temperature superconductors. But so far, Dogus says AI-powered approaches haven’t actually yielded any commercially-deployable materials. Shayle and Dogus cover topics like: Existing approaches to materials discovery, like experimentation and density functional theory, and how AI could complement those techniques Why AI may actually require a lot more lab work – and larger datasets – before it becomes useful for material discovery The types of material properties that AI may be especially useful for, such as optical or electric qualities Recommended resources Latitude Media: Armed with AI, Microsoft found a new battery material in just two weeks Google DeepMind: Millions of new materials discovered with deep learning Catalyst is brought to you by Kraken, the advanced operating system for energy. Kraken is helping utilities offer excellent customer service and develop innovative products and tariffs through the connection and optimization of smart home energy assets. Already licensed by major players across the globe, including Origin Energy, E.ON, and EDF, Kraken can help you create a smarter, greener grid. Visit kraken.tech. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a revolutionary platform enabling solar and energy storage equipment buyers and developers to save time, increase profits, and reduce risk. Instantly see pricing, product, and counterparty data and comparison tools. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the global leader in integrated marketing, public relations, creative, and public affairs for energy and climate brands. If you're a startup, investor, or enterprise that's trying to make a name for yourself, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help tell your story and accelerate your growth engine. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Deploy or innovate? Scale up an existing technology or develop a breakthrough? Build, build, build, or invent a better mousetrap? The question isn’t which strategy to follow; it’s which strategy to use in which sector. Virtually no one thinks that solar needs brand new tech breakthroughs to scale. Crystalline silicone took the lion’s share of the market years ago from cadmium telluride, amorphous silicon, CIGS and other early solar technologies. But in carbon removal, batteries, nuclear, and other industries — should we develop new technologies, or scale up a promising few? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleague Andy Lubershane about the better mousetrap fallacy in climate tech. Andy is the head of research and a partner at Energy Impact Partners. He argues that, in certain industries, investing in building a better mousetrap is a bad use of capital, and that too many options causes analysis paralysis for would-be customers.  Shayle and Andy cover topics like: How scaling up technologies – as Chinese manufacturers have scaled up solar and batteries – drives down cost Why new technologies that aren’t five or 10 times better than an incumbent may fail to beat the cost curve Whether batteries need breakthroughs, and how Andy thinks about lithium-iron-phosphate, sodium-ion, thermal, and iron-air Why Andy thinks that the Nuclear Regulatory Commissions should license more new projects than new technologies The challenge of having more direct air capture technologies than buyers Recommended resources Catalyst: The cost of nuclear Latitude Media: Is large-scale nuclear poised for a comeback? Catalyst: Seeking the holy grail of batteries Catalyst: Growing the carbon dioxide removal market Catalyst is brought to you by Kraken, the advanced operating system for energy. Kraken is helping utilities offer excellent customer service and develop innovative products and tariffs through the connection and optimization of smart home energy assets. Already licensed by major players across the globe, including Origin Energy, E.ON, and EDF, Kraken can help you create a smarter, greener grid. Visit kraken.tech. Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a revolutionary platform enabling solar and energy storage equipment buyers and developers to save time, increase profits, and reduce risk. Instantly see pricing, product, and counterparty data and comparison tools. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the global leader in integrated marketing, public relations, creative, and public affairs for energy and climate brands. If you're a startup, investor, or enterprise that's trying to make a name for yourself, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help tell your story and accelerate your growth engine. Learn more at antennagroup.com.