Supercool

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

Cambium is building the operating system for reuse—a digital supply chain connecting the fragmented network of companies needed to turn fallen trees into finished goods.Every year, tens of millions of urban trees come down. The scale is staggering, and most end up chipped, burned, or buried. Cambium links tree-removal crews, haulers, mills, and end customers through a unified digital platform—transforming what was once waste into market-ready material.Today, more than 500 companies across the U.S. and Canada coordinate each tree’s journey, forming a just-in-time network for reclaimed wood.Co-founder and CEO Ben Christensen calls it building a “tech-native forestry company”—one where reuse runs on code, data, and tight coordination. In this episode, Ben and host Josh Dorfman explore how mastering complexity becomes a competitive advantage, how data builds defensibility, and how scaling reuse could redefine how the material economy works.Show NotesGuest: Ben Christensen Company: CambiumFor 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

AI, electrification, decarbonization—they all hinge on how effectively the grid is orchestrated. Yet thousands of clean energy projects are stuck in U.S. interconnection queues. The backlog is twice the size of all the energy we use today. It’s not a cost problem. It’s the grid—the largest machine on earth—built last century for stability and missing the cloud-scale infrastructure to handle what’s ahead.Astrid Atkinson has run a machine like this before. At Google, she spent fifteen years in site reliability engineering, keeping Search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail online with 99.999% uptime. If google.com went down, her team got paged. Running one of the world’s largest critical infrastructure systems taught her a lesson: you don’t scale by adding infinite hardware. You scale with visibility, software, and flexibility.Now, as co-founder and CEO of Camus Energy, she’s applying that lesson to the grid. Camus builds a real-time data layer—linking past, present, and future—and turns it into signals utilities use to coordinate assets: charge later, ramp down, discharge when needed.With visibility and signals, utilities gain the control knobs they need—so projects connect in months instead of years and demand flexibility becomes part of the grid’s DNA.Show NotesGuest: Astrid Atkinson, co-founder and CEOCompany: Camus EnergyFor 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

Curbside charging sounds obvious—plug in outside your apartment, wake up to a full battery. Yet more than 40 million potential urban EV owners are still waiting for someone to figure it out.it’s electric, co-founded by Tiya Gordon, is designing EV charging for cities—making curbside charging possible by inventing what didn’t exist: hardware powered directly by buildings, a revenue model that pays property owners, and a way to work with cities that clears the path to install. Its chargers are already operational in Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, with more cities on the way.Tiya brings a unique background in public-facing technology and design to the challenge—she led the technology for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Now she’s assembled a team from transportation, design, and public projects—people who know how to connect landlords, planners, and engineers into the same conversation. That’s how It’s Electric moves swiftly through city permitting in days instead of years—and why the future of EV charging will feel less like bulky infrastructure, and more like disco and sunshine.Show NotesGuest: Tiya GordonCompany: it's electricFor 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

By fusing architect and developer, Alloy Development is proving that the riskiest choice in real estate isn’t electrification or Passive House — it’s clinging to the past.CEO Jared Della Valle joins Supercool to share the company’s journey to developing The Alloy Block in downtown Brooklyn—aiming to create the most sustainable block in the city. It’s anchored by 505 State Street, New York’s first all-electric skyscraper; two Passive House–certified public schools; and soon, One Third Avenue—the tallest Passive House tower in the world.Della Valle describes how Alloy built investor confidence project by project—staying nimble, controlling risk, and executing at a standard that pulled institutional capital toward climate performance. He explains why going all-electric lowered long-term risk, how policy and pricing dynamics shifted investor expectations, and why the most competitive real estate today is also the cleanest.Alloy is shifting how Wall Street perceives risk and return—redefining climate performance not as the exception, but the expectation.Show NotesGuest: Jared Della Valle, CEO Company: Alloy DevelopmentProject: The Alloy BlockBuilding: 505 State Street - All-Electric SkyscraperFor more Supercool climate solutions that cut carbon, improve modern life, and shape the new low carbon economy, subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Youtube Channel* Weekly Newsletter* Supercool on Instagram and Linkedin