Interchange Recharged

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.

What technology will become the dominant means of decarbonizing each part of the economy?The pattern we see now — and that we expect to continue over the coming couple decades — is a series of battles between consistent contenders: electricity, hydrogen and carbon capture. Electricity is hitting its stride. The power sector is getting cleaner, and electrification is spreading to light duty vehicles and even residential boilers. But electricity actually has only a 20% market share of all energy end uses. So what do we do with the remaining 80%?These are tough-to-decarbonize arenas that rely on hard-to-replace fossil fuels: heavy duty vehicles, aviation, maritime shipping, chemical manufacturing, iron and steel.  Shayle called up Andy Lubershane, Senior Vice President of Research & Strategy at Energy Impact Partners to game it out. Andy has been writing about the potential phases of the energy transition and the roles these three technologies could play in different sectors. Andy and Shayle got the inspiration for Deep Decarbonization Infinity War from Andy’s love of games. He not only uses games as a tool to think about the energy transition, but is actually in the process of creating his own board game. It’s Deep Decarbonization: Infinity War. Let’s go.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.

We are going to build a lot more wind and solar over the coming decades. It will inevitably lead to oversupply of these resources on the grid. But is that a good thing?That’s the focus of this week’s show, featuring a conversation between Shayle Kann and Columbia University's Melissa Lott.The stars have aligned for a rare win-win-win situation: Solar and wind are popular with politicians; they’re popular with customers; and they’re often the lowest-cost resource, making them an attractive bet for investors.As we build more solar and wind, many regions will start to look like California does on a sunny spring day, or like West Texas does on a windy night: power prices drop to zero or below, producers curtail excess electricity, creating the dreaded "overproduction” of renewables.So what do we do with all this carbon-free power?We asked Melissa Lott and it turns out quite a lot! She argues that renewable oversupply can actually be a feature of the grid, not a bug (even if it causes some minor pests along the way). There are all kinds of new resources we can harness with excess wind and solar. Melissa is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and she and her colleague, Julio Friedman, wrote a paper laying out the case for intentionally overbuilding capacity — and thus intentionally creating oversupply. They lay out a framework for figuring out what to do with intermittent excess energy and zoom in on a case study in New Zealand.What happens when an aluminum smelter — one that uses a whopping 12% of the county’s annual demand and is powered largely by hydroelectric power — closes down? It was one decarbonization modeler’s dream. 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.

Net-zero commitments went mainstream in 2020. There are now 22 regions, 452 cities, and over 1,100 companies with revenues over $11 trillion that have pledged to bring emissions to net zero by middle of the century. In 2021 we’re going to spend a lot of time working backward from that. We’ll be trying to understand the pathways to get to net zero and what it means for today — for the technology and business of decarbonization.That brings us to this week’s guest: Jesse Jenkins, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton. He’s a well-known expert energy-systems modeler.Last month Jesse and a team of colleagues at Princeton came out with a massive study called Net-Zero America that examines five pathways for the U.S. to decarbonize the entire economy.Even without reading the report, you can probably guess some of the headlines: More renewables. More transmission. Electrify transportation. Carbon capture and carbon removal. But there are some other conclusions that are less obvious.As more and more renewables come online, how will biomass, fossil fuels and hydrogen will fit into the multiple pathways to transition? We also examine the chicken-and-the-egg problem of CO2 transportation and CO2 conversion. And we ask: How much are these massive transition scenarios  going to cost, and who’s paying?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.We're also brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll feature part 3 of our series on the future of solar technologies with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran Dan Shugar.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s been a great year for "climate" oriented public companies. Virtually every clean energy or climate company has dramatically outperformed market indices and most now have record-high equity value. So what's going on here? And what might it mean for the next generation of climate technology companies?In this final episode of the year, Host Shayle Kann talks with Sameer Reddy, a partner at Energy Impact Partners.Sameer sits on the board of companies like Arcadia Power, Opus One, and Enchanted Rock. And he, like us, has been marveling over this public market madness and thinking about what it might mean. Shayle and Sameer discuss the state of the market, the factors driving stock prices upward, historical challenges in the sector, and what could go wrong.We're brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll tell you about some really important tech trends in solar with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran Dan Shugar.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives such as microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode: we try to figure out where hydrogen is headed.In the universe of clean energy, the world seems to rally around one big technology push each decade. This is when governments introduce subsidies, incumbents announce big projects, and a nascent technology gets a chance to scale from tiny to small, in the hopes of achieving liftoff. In the 1990s, it was wind. In the 2000s, solar. In the 2010s, lithium-ion batteries. And in the 2020s, it seems increasingly clear it's going to be hydrogen.But hydrogen is a different beast. For one thing, you can't just harness it like you can solar or wind -- you have to make it. For another, there is a dizzying array of potential end markets for it, ranging from power to transportation to industry. And finally, there's the pesky problem of the midstream. Assuming we start producing lots of clean hydrogen, and we find a market for it, how will we store it? How will we transport it? This week, Shayle is joined by Gniewomir Flis, who spends most of his days thinking about these questions. He's an energy & climate advisor at Agora Energiewende and has spent the last few years laser focused on the thornier issues of building a hydrogen economy.We're brought to you by Nextracker. Nextracker is building connected power plants of the future by integrating new solar technologies, storage, and advanced control software. At the end of the show, we’ll tell you about some really important tech trends in solar with Nextracker CEO and industry veteran, Dan Shugar.Support for The Interchange comes from Trina Solar, a global leader in PV modules and smart energy solutions. With decades of industry recognition and awards, Trina Solar is committed to delivering reliable and fully bankable solar technology to the world. Download the free TrinaPro Solution Guide Book on how to optimize utility-scale solar projects.The Interchange is brought to you by S&C Electric Company. Today, non-wires alternatives such as microgrids can provide more sustainable, resilient and economical ways to deliver reliable power. S&C helps utilities and commercial customers find the best solutions to meet their energy needs. Learn more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.