In 2010, solar modules cost a little over $2 per watt. Many people questioned whether solar costs could come down another 50%.Well, here we are today with solar modules well below 50 cents per watt, far cheaper than most expectations. And it wasn’t some breakthrough revolutionary technology -- it’s been the crystalline-silicon solar panel the whole time.History has a tendency to repeat itself. Our guest, Jessika Trancik, an associate professor at MIT’s the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, published research earlier this month showing, quantitatively, that lithium-ion batteries have been repeating history and get cheaper, faster, than nearly anyone anticipated. This matters because it could happen again. The obvious next candidate is hydrogen electrolysis, where experts are saying we might be able to reach the promised land of $1 per kilogram by the end of this decade. Jessika and Shayle dug into her findings around batteries to see what broader lessons we could learn. We also talked about some other, related and fascinating research she’s done to examine what it will take to reach mass-market EV adoption.The Interchange is brought to you by Smarter Grid Solutions, a leading enterprise energy management software company. Find out how Smarter Grid Solutions’ software can give you real control over your clean energy assets.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The oil majors are slowly recognizing that in a decarbonized world their fundamental business is going to have to change. So what are they thinking? Where are they deploying resources -- and not deploying resources? Ed Crooks is the right person to ask. He’s our oil major whisperer. He Vice Chair for the Americas at Wood Mackenzie.Last time we had him on the show was in May of 2020 when the pandemic-driven collapse of oil demand sent key oil prices negative.Ed talks with our host Shayle Kann about the rebound since then and how oil and gas companies are using this new influx of cash.They discuss the longstanding differences between American and European oil majors: The Europeans are more aggressive on new energy investments; the Americans are more conservative. Does this distinction still hold, even under the rising pressure of shareholders, employees and governments on these companies to take climate action? And if they’re not going to invest directly in renewables and power, how will their business models change in a decarbonized world? Shayle and Ed talk about what it would mean to become a “carbon management company.”They also talk about the differences between 1.5- and 2.0-degrees-celsius worlds and what each would mean for oil and gas companies.Finally, they read the tea leaves on carbon pricing. Does the Biden administration’s aggressive stance on climate change the political chances of legislation in the U.S.?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Heather Rock joined PG&E as director of climate resilience in 2018 -- just two weeks before a faulty PG&E line sparked the most destructive wildfire in U.S. history. It’s hard to imagine a more complicated or politically-charged role.Back in November 2019, our host Shayle made a bet. In a Medium post called “The World around Us,” he wrote: “I think we’re on the cusp of a cultural transformation, one in which the idea of investing in resilience gains mainstream status for anyone who owns something worth protecting.”Heather is one of the people trying to bring a culture of climate resilience into the mainstream.We desperately need it. Hurricanes, wildfires, winter storms, sea level rise, floods and heat waves, among other threats, have exposed the incredible fragility of our infrastructure and underlined the dire need to bake climate resilience into every utility’s decision-making processes.So how exactly do we do it? In this episode, Heather and Shayle talk about the tools organizations need -- namely new models and data supported by our national labs and agencies like NOAA. But they also identify some of the cultural barriers to adopting these tools, plus how to overcome them. The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Imagine a battery that costs less than half of today's costs, can charge a vehicle in less than ten minutes, run for ten or more years with heavy usage, lasts over a million miles, and is produced with abundant raw materials found all over the world.None of those things are true of today's lithium-ion batteries. But our guest this week, Gene Berdichevsky, predicts that will change in the next decade.Gene was the seventh employee at Tesla and is now the co-founder and CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, one of the biggest players in the battery space.Our host Shayle Kann, a partner at the venture capital firm Energy Impact Partners, talks with Gene about new battery designs and chemistries that are hitting the market right now. By themselves, these advances are incremental. But taken together, they could usher in the kinds of batteries that would revolutionize the grid. Gene and Shayle cover the fundamental tradeoffs between key battery features, namely energy density, charging speed, cost and longevity. They also talk about more sustainable raw materials, battery recycling, the limits of new investment in this space, and why Gene believes that existing big players will continue to dominate, while the new entrants face an uphill battle. The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Two years ago, we made an episode called “Cleantech Venture Capital Is Back.” After a decade in the wilderness, the world of climate tech has experienced a resurgence of investment and early-stage innovation. So much has happened since then -- an election, a stimulus, low interest rates, SPACs, corporate commitments, and an explosion of advocacy around climate.So where is the climate tech investment space now?We check in with Abe Yokell, our guest from that February 2019 episode. He’s a managing partner at Congruent Ventures. He talks with our host Shayle Kann, who is a partner at Energy Impact Partners. They talk about the persistent problem of access to capital for some early stage climate tech startups, SPACs, the Mr. Burns Test, and which technologies are underhyped or overhyped.The Interchange is a production of Post Script Audio in partnership with Wood Mackenzie.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Leading climate models point to a sobering reality: Even if the world’s economy reaches net zero emissions by midcentury, we will still have too much CO2 in the atmosphere. And so if we have to not just emit less, but remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, how do we do it?Today we dive into carbon dioxide removal, or CDR. It’s an increasingly diverse and vibrant technology landscape, with some fundamental business model questions yet to be answered.To take stock of this space, we spoke to Sarah Sclarsic, a carbon removal researcher at MIT with business acumen to boot: She co-founded the mobility company Getaround. She’s now an investor and on the boards of two SPACs (one of which took XL Fleet public).We survey the existing technologies, ranging from the old school, like planting trees, to the novel, like direct air capture. And then we take a dive into some theoretical bioengineering approaches. Sarah argues that we already use powerful biotech tools for medicine and food. She shares her research on the potential to apply these biotech approaches to CDR, laying out what these technologies might look like, such as bioengineering microbes to assist with enhanced rock weathering or cultivating fields and fields of carbon-locking cassava.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Last summer a record-setting heat wave in California caused rolling blackouts throughout the state. This week, a record-setting freeze knocked out power for millions of people in Texas and the Midwest.It’s too early for a post-mortem on what happened, but we know that the cold affected all fuel sources, most of all natural gas. Wellheads and gas lines froze. Gas supplies were diverted to residential heating rather than power. This slice of the problem underscores how deeply we still rely on natural gas.It is arguably the most important current source of energy in the U.S. and many parts of the world. Most long-term net zero projections phase out natural gas, but it’s going to be with us for decades, particularly in heavy industry.So what do we do with it in the meantime? How do we tackle natural gas emissions and ultimately phase out natural gas in heavy industry?We spoke to an expert in this space: Cate Hight, a principle at RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute). Last year she wrote a report called “The Role of Gas in the Energy Transition.” Now she’s working on RMI’s Mission Possible Partnership, which aims to decarbonize heavy industries.Shayle and Cate talk about the rapidly changing emissions detection space, differentiated gas, and the many different colors of hydrogen. The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Climate change has gone macro -- as in macroeconomics. It’s not just an environmental, health and justice issue. It has become an economic imperative for financial analysts, finance ministers and the biggest asset managers in the world.For the second year in a row, Blackrock CEO Larry Fink singled out climate change as the biggest priority for the world’s largest asset manager: “I believe that this is the beginning of a long but rapidly accelerating transition – one that will unfold over many years and reshape asset prices of every type,” he wrote in his 2021 letter.Over many years, “alternative energy” just became “energy.” In the near future, will “climate finance’ just become “finance?” This week, we have the exact right person to run through this: Kate Gordon, the Director of the Office of Planning and Research for California Governor Gavin Newsom. She's also senior advisor to the governor on climate. Kate has been on the show before. She was one of the founders of the Risky Business Project, which was among the first ambitious projects to calculate climate risk and infuse it into financial systems. As you'll hear in her conversation with Shayle Kann, she's thinking about how this will all play out in the world of money every day.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Solar scaled first to become king in residential smart energy. But as other residential DER tech has advanced -- EVs, batteries, smart panels, and so forth -- has solar been dethroned as the anchor product in this space? We’ll walk with Arch Rao, the CEO of Span, about the biggest technological changes underway in home energy.How should we sell and manage distributed energy resources?Who buys them, and what do we actually do with them?What will scale to the mass market?How will consumers interact with their DERs?Span is a startup making a new kind of smart electrical panel. It just raised a $20m VC round and announced an integration with Alexa. Prior to Arch, helped lead the product team at Tesla that built and launched the Powerwall.The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if we could see into the future? In 2020, we got our clearest view yet.Last March, lockdowns swept across Europe, forcing an eerie silence on some of the world’s most iconic and bustling cities. It caused a steep drop in electricity consumption -- putting pressure on thermal generators and giving renewables a greater share of the generation mix.“And all of that has really provided us a bit of a glimpse of the future to a time where we will have much more flexible supply on the system and renewables will be consistently taking a much greater share of the market,” says Tom Heggarty, a principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie.The covid crisis proved that the European grid can handle large amounts of renewable energy -- at levels we didn’t expect to see for another five to ten years. So how do we take this knowledge and game out the future? For more answers, we turn to Jyrki Leino, a senior manager for business development at Wärtsilä. “We kind of stepped to the future right away. We saw the systems in a situation where in normal conditions would be in five or 10 years time,” he says.Jyrki and his team at Wärtsilä wanted to help answer some simple questions: what happens to European power markets if the trends we saw during covid persist? And what happens if renewables are meeting nearly all load? So they built an open-data test environment, called the Wärtsilä Energy Transition Lab or WET Lab. It’s like a fact-based choose-your-own-adventure for energy geeks. Or a crystal ball.In this episode, brought to you by Wartsila, we look into that crystal ball. Check out Wärtsilä's Energy Transition Lab to see the impact of Covid-19 on energy markets, and for clues about Europe’s clean energy transition. It’s an open-source data set that anyone can use.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.