Supercool

In this end-of-year conversation, David Roberts, a renowned climate and clean energy journalist, lays out his headline for 2025: the rapid growth of AI data centers has forced long-delayed decisions about the power system. After two decades of mostly flat U.S. electricity demand, utilities are now facing sharp new load growth, tighter timelines, and major uncertainty—making grid capacity and interconnection central challenges. Roberts, who hosts and writes the Volts podcast and newsletter, argues that long-lead solutions like new nuclear power plants are poorly matched to this moment. The fastest, lowest-cost capacity available today comes from distributed resources: solar, batteries, flexible building loads, coordinated EV charging, and virtual power plants. Because hyperscalers face real financial pressure to get data centers online, he sees a potential opportunity to redirect some of that capital toward building distributed capacity that benefits the wider grid. The conversation also touches on political volatility and why clean energy and electrification continue to advance globally on their favorable economics, even amid U.S. policy uncertainty.Show NotesGuest: David RobertsCompany: VoltsFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Real estate companies say they want sustainability. They'll pay for it too, provided it comes with zero risk.Brad Pilgrim is co-founder & CEO of Parity, a remote HVAC optimization service for high-rises and hotels. Its customer team can walk into a building, spend 90 minutes going from the basement to roof, and tell the owner how much energy they can save—then guarantee it. After eight years, clients like AvalonBay—one of the largest multifamily REITs in the country—are seeing 20-30% cuts in HVAC costs with payback in one to two years.Brad joins Supercool to discuss how Parity overcomes real estate's risk aversion, why proof matters more than technology, and what happens when you can precondition a thousand-unit building before a heatwave hits. Plus: the one slide Brad had to add to his Series B funding round deck that changed everything.Show NotesGuest: Brad Pilgrim, co-founder & CEO Company: Parity Inc.For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

EVs for commercial fleets are increasingly attractive. Battery costs are down, range is up, and in many cases the total cost of ownership already beats gas. The problem isn’t the vehicles. It’s where they’ll charge.Voltera takes on the part of the EV transition most people never see: procuring the right real estate, securing stadium-scale power capacity, navigating zoning codes that rarely recognize EV charging as a primary use, and getting sign-off—sometimes from more than a dozen city departments—just to get started.Voltera CEO Brett Hauser joins Josh to show how the company has built a playbook for that messy middle, making EV charging viable for the country’s fleets. Now operating in markets from Los Angeles to Miami, Voltera does this work not so fleets don’t have to, but because fleets never will.Show NotesGuest: Brett Hauser, Chairman and Chief Executive OfficerCompany: VolteraFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Something big is happening inside buildings. They’re getting brains.Schneider Electric is a global giant in energy and building performance—nearly two centuries old, operating across 100+ countries, and already embedded in a million buildings. Manish Kumar, EVP of Digital Energy, joins me to unpack what it means when AI starts running the places we live and work. We dig into EcoStruxure Foresight, Schneider’s new AI assistant for buildings: a layer that links critical equipment, learns the rhythms of a space, flags waste in real time, and helps facility teams interact with their buildings as performance partners. From hospitals and data centers to hotels, airports, and offices, we explore what changes when these environments can diagnose themselves, tune performance daily, and keep improving over time—then push into the bigger horizon: what happens when that capability scales across millions of sites worldwide, how it reshapes the future of work, and the role intelligent buildings play in a modernizing grid.Show NotesGuest: Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Digital EnergyCompany: Schneider Electric Key Link: Innovation SummitFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive.That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to build the financial software layer the energy transition was missing.Crux connects developers, manufacturers, and investors across a marketplace for clean energy finance. In just two years, it’s closed over 120 transactions worth billions—turning a bureaucratic tangle of documents into a liquid market built for speed, trust, and scale.This conversation explores how liquidity, intelligence, and automation are accelerating capital into hard infrastructure—and how Crux is becoming the financial engine powering today’s clean energy industrial revolution.Show NotesGuest: Alfred Johnson, Co-Founder & CEO Company: CruxFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

A few months ago, Quilt became the first company in residential HVAC history to deliver an over-the-air upgrade—making its systems 20% more powerful overnight.Quilt is rethinking how homes heat and cool themselves. Its software-driven, ductless HVAC system combines intelligent controls, high-efficiency heat pumps, and a design language that fits seamlessly into modern architecture. By bringing the pace and polish of consumer technology to an overlooked industry, Quilt transforms comfort into a catalyst for electrification.Founder and CEO Paul Lambert joins Josh Dorfman to share how Quilt’s approach—what he calls “technical arbitrage”—adapts proven innovations from EVs and connected devices to reimagine the American home for the electric age.This episode explores how software, design, and emotion converge to make clean energy aspirational and why desire may be the most powerful tool in decarbonization.Show NotesGuest: Paul Lambert, Founder & CEOCompany: QuiltBTS Video SeriesFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

In an industry that moved fast and defied cities, Veo chose a different path: partnership over disruption. Co-founder and CEO Candice Xie is building one of the only profitable micromobility companies in America by leading with discipline, transparency, and respect for the people shaping urban life. While competitors flooded streets and flamed out, Veo continues to earn trust — winning 90% of city RFPs and operating in over 50 markets nationwide. Candice joins Josh Dorfman to unpack how Veo’s strategy of asking for permission, designing durable hardware, and prioritizing community needs became its true growth engine. This is a masterclass in scaling deliberately, proving that in 2025, the climate-tech companies that endure aren’t the ones that move the fastest — they’re the ones that build trust the deepest.Show NotesGuest: Candice Xie, CEO and co-founderCompany: VeoFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Husk Power Systems operates the largest fleet of community-level clean-energy minigrids in the world—over 400 sites across India and Nigeria. Each system combines solar, battery storage, and biomass generation into a modular platform called PRISM, engineered to deploy and power an entire village within 24 hours. Behind the technology is an AI-driven operating system that forecasts demand, manages generation in real time, and keeps every site running autonomously. Co-founder and CEO Manoj Sinha shares how Husk plans to scale to 5,000 minigrids by 2030—delivering reliable, renewable power to millions and redefining what energy access means at civilization’s edge.Show NotesGuest: Manoh Sinha, Co-founder and CEOCompany: Husk Power SystemsFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

SolarCycle is building the next supply chain that makes the clean energy transition possible. Co-founder Jesse Simons spent two decades at the Sierra Club leading national campaigns to accelerate renewable energy before seeing the constraint built into solar’s own success. There aren’t enough raw materials to keep scaling, and communities are starting to resist projects without end-of-life plans.With a deep bench of industry founders, operators, and visionaries, SolarCycle is closing that loop. They’ve developed technology to extract glass, aluminum, copper, silicon, and silver from old panels—and the reverse logistics to move them efficiently from field to factory.This episode explores how SolarCycle is making recycling cost-competitive with landfilling—and why that threshold could define the future of solar. As circularity becomes essential to project approvals, investor confidence, and long-term supply, renewable energy is entering its next phase—where even the panels must become renewable too.Show NotesGuest: Jesse Simons, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer (corrected)Company: SOLARCYCLEFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Supercool on Instagram  * Supercool on LinkedIn

Ken LaRoe has done what no one else in U.S. history has: founded three banks. His first two were financial successes. His third—Climate First Bank—is his answer to unfinished business. Built to align money with mission, it’s now America’s fastest-growing new bank, surpassing $1.4 billion in assets while financing the clean energy economy.In this episode, Ken shares what he learned across 25 years of banking—why financial performance and climate action can’t be opposites, and how being, in his words, a “rabid environmentalist and rabid capitalist” became his edge. He explains how Climate First’s fintech arm, OneEthos, built proprietary software that powers $30 million in solar loans each month across 700+ installers—without relying on tax credits or Wall Street intermediaries.Now, as the bank prepares for an IPO, Ken is proving that mission-driven finance can outperform the market—and that the clean energy transition runs on something deeper than capital: conviction.Show NotesGuest: Ken LaRoe, CEO of Climate First Bancorp and Executive Chairman of Climate First BankComnpany: Climate First BankFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks that drive their adoption—subscribe or follow the podcast, plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* YouTube Channel* Supercool on LinkedIn and Instagram