Supercool

Data centers have always pursued energy efficiency through better hardware—smarter chillers, advanced cooling systems. But there's a ceiling. You can only make hardware so efficient.Seven years ago, Jasper de Vries discovered the butterfly effect in data centers—something on a roof rippling through 300 billion sensor readings down to valves in server rooms. His company, Lucend, ingests that sensor data to generate operator recommendations. One facility cut power usage by 40% in a year, saving $4.3 million.Yet here's what most of us miss about AI's big energy problem: we focus on operational energy use while Scope 3 emissions—the embodied carbon from manufacturing hardware—creates massive impact, so much so that Microsoft won't hit its 2030 climate targets because of its data center growth plans. With JP Morgan projecting $5 trillion in AI infrastructure buildouts by 2030, the need to bring embodied carbon under control is urgent.Lucend's software addresses both challenges: it slashes operational energy while extending hardware life through predictive maintenance, reducing the physical wear that forces early replacement. Its technology is now deployed across over 50 facilities globally.Show NotesGuest: Jasper de Vries Company: LucendFor 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

What if we stopped trying to recycle and just used all our trash instead?UBQ Materials makes bio-plastics from entire trash bags—dirty diapers, greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones, mixed plastics. Everything. 100% utilization. Nothing returns to landfills.The material works in existing manufacturing equipment, costs the same as virgin plastic, and can be recycled 10+ times. It's already in Mercedes interiors and McDonald's products.CEO Albert Douer spent eight years in stealth mode perfecting the technology before selling a pound. The original plan: three years. Reality: ten. Most VCs would've killed it. He kept going.Now UBQ operates an 80,000-ton facility in the Netherlands proving the technology works at scale. The implications for waste, plastics, and the circular economy are staggering—and Albert's journey reveals what it actually takes to bring impossible-sounding innovation into the real world.Show NotesGuest: Albert Douer, CEOCompany: UBQ MaterialsFor 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

Jim Simonelli, CTO for Data Centers at Schneider Electric, and Vincent Petit, Senior VP of Climate & Energy Transition Research, delve into electrification's crucial role in economic modernization. Simonelli explains the transformation of data centers into AI factories and the necessity of modular, off-site solutions for rapid deployment. Petit highlights the need for robust grid infrastructure and predicts significant demand growth by 2050. They emphasize that maximizing efficiency not only benefits the environment but is vital for revenue in today’s tech-driven landscape.

Mass Timber is growing fast—expanding from a handful of commercial wood buildings in the U.S. just over a decade ago to more than 2,000 today, with 24,000 projected by 2034. Once considered niche, mass timber is moving mainstream—competing on price, speed, and domestic supply chains, not sustainability alone.Sterling Structural is leading that shift. As America's largest CLT manufacturer, the company produces one cross-laminated timber panel every 65 seconds, sourcing 100% of its wood from domestic sawmills. Sterling has recently produced its one millionth panel.This is mass timber for the masses—standardized, modular systems that contractors already understand.Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber at Sterling, joins Josh Dorfman to share how mass timber went from alternative to mainstream in a decade. She discusses how Sterling supplied 1,100 prefabricated CLT panels for Amazon’s new facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and why the industry is scaling by competing directly on price, speed, and practicality—with the carbon and forestry benefits included.Show NotesGuest: Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass TimberCompany: Sterling StructuralFor 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 

Clean power has never been cheaper. So why are electricity bills rising—and what's blocking faster deployment? Jigar Shah joins Supercool to explain why 2025 marked a turning point: for the first time in history, essentially 100% of new electricity demand worldwide was met by solar, wind, and nuclear. It happened because the same solutions that solve climate change are winning on affordability.But deployment could be moving much faster. The technology is proven. The finance exists. The barrier is political: governors and mayors don’t realize the leverage they have over utilities, and utility CEOs won’t act unless forced by law.In climate circles, Jigar needs no introduction. He pioneered solar financing at SunEdison, launched the Carbon War Room with Richard Branson, and ran the DOE Loan Programs Office that deployed over $100 billion in clean energy financing during the Biden Administration.We dig into what gives elected officials more power than they know, why some utility CEOs want to be mandated to deploy cheaper solutions, and why Jigar’s headline for 2026 isn’t more technology—it’s more workforce.Show NotesGuest: Jigar Shah, Co-Managing PartnerCompany: MultiplierFor 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

In 2025, the U.S. president called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, global clean energy investment hit a record $2.2 trillion. Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter covering climate and energy for Bloomberg. His read on the past year: China is becoming the modern Standard Oil. The same way Rockefeller's empire exported petroleum infrastructure globally, China is now exporting electrification—solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, grid tech, project finance—to countries racing to modernize their economies. Pakistan imported solar equal to half its grid capacity in twelve months. And Ethiopia went from zero to 7% EV market share. Developing countries treat electricity like a growth engine. Rich countries struggle to meet 4% annual demand increases. Rathi joins Supercool to walk through Trump's rollback, the ripple effects at home and abroad, and why none of it is stopping the global transition to the low-carbon future.Show NotesGuest: Akshat RathiRecent Articles: BloombergBook: Climate Capitalism  Podcast: Zero: The Climate RaceFor 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

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