Climate Now

A micro-grid is a local grid. That means that energy generation occurs locally (no giant transmission lines) to support local energy demand, and it has the option to operate independently from a traditional regional power grid. These kinds of grids are attractive because they can take advantage of growing renewable energy infrastructure like rooftop solar, and they can create resiliency against regional grid failures, which are becoming increasingly frequent with the climate change-related uptick of extreme weather events.But wouldn’t utility companies, whose revenue is generated from conventional grid use, and who control more than 99% of the nation’s electricity supply, use their enormous lobbying weight to prevent the proliferation of microgrids?Not necessarily, according to Cecilia Klauber, an engineer working on the security and resilience of power system infrastructure at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Cecilia provides a business case for why regional utility companies might want to invest in microgrid infrastructure, and explains how the growing microgrid network across the US will provide energy resiliency and reliability for both energy providers and users. Stay tuned!Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Is the battery revolution here? Or have we already been living in it for three decades?Renewable energy sources - wind and solar - have become the cheapest and fastest growing form of electricity generation. But the industry has not yet escaped the perennial criticism that keeps many from believing that the world could run entirely on renewable energy: what happens when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing? To date, batteries have not been a particularly convincing answer, due both to their cost and their limited ability to store industrial scale electricity for more than a few hours at a time.But that might be changing. After more then three decades of remarkable innovation, the price of lithium batteries has dropped 97%, and the power storage potential of a battery has increased 3.4-fold. Nate Blair, who manages the Distributed Systems and Storage Analysis Group at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), joined Climate Now to discuss where we are today in developing grid-scale energy storage systems. Stay tuned to find out what role batteries will play in the transition to clean electricity, why lithium batteries are currently leading the way in grid battery storage, and what other technologies we might expect in grid storage portfolio in the next 10-30 years.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Since its founding in 1952, the mission of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been to meet urgent national security needs through scientific and technological innovation. Expanding from its focus on nuclear weapons science at the height of the Cold War, LLNL has become a national research leader in counterterrorism, intelligence, defense, and energy, with its emphasis in the latter being to advance national energy security while also reducing its impact. And critical to reducing the environmental impact of the national energy sector is determining how to remove historical greenhouse gas emissions (what has already been released) from the atmosphere in parallel with ongoing global decarbonization efforts.Climate Now’s James Lawler was invited to tour LLNL’s Carbon Capture Lab, home to a team of scientists working to reduce the cost and bottlenecks of implementing large-scale carbon capture facilities, to learn how this research is developed, where the state-of-the-art is in carbon capture technology, and where we could go next (Direct Air Capture skyscrapers?).#carboncaptureFollow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

How many crises can we address at once?In October of this year, headlines broke that the global animal population in 2018 is 69% smaller than it was a half century ago, in 1970. It is the latest bad news in a string of studies on biodiversity loss, which is happening at a rate not seen on this planet since the last mass extinction. It also follows on the heels of an analysis from the U.N. World Food Program, estimating that due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a record 345 million people are at risk of starvation this year, and that it is likely that by the end of this decade, the cumulative progress made in reaching the U.N.’s 2015 goal of eradicating hunger by 2030 will be 0%.Conservation of natural lands and freshwater ecosystems are critical to biodiversity preservation efforts, but how do you feed the world without agricultural development, and how do you stem the impact of climate change without developing land-intensive clean energy solutions like wind and solar? It turns out, solutions to these issues do not have to be mutually exclusive.Melissa Ho, Senior Vice President of the World Wildlife Fund, joined Climate Now to discuss how WWF addresses the competing priorities for humanity and the natural world, and why a holistic valuation of the services healthy ecosystems provide can help us develop co-beneficial solutions to all of these crises.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

The side benefit of reducing building emissions? Increasing quality of life.Building operations (heating, cooling and electrification) account for 27% of global CO2 emissions, but represent some of the lowest-hanging fruit in the challenge of global decarbonization. With efficient design and transitioning to cleanly-sourced electricity, like solar panels, building-related emissions could be decreased by as much as 80%.Katy McGinty, vice president and chief sustainability officer of Johnson Controls and Ian Harris, business development manager at BlocPower, joined Climate Now to discuss how implementing smart control technologies, more insulated building envelopes, and clean-energy technologies like solar power and heat pumps, aren’t just critical to reaching global net-zero goals, they also make homes and buildings safer, more comfortable, and more affordable to live and work in. And with smart business approaches and community buy-in, building decarbonization can be a tool for environmental justice as much as climate mitigation, by engaging low-income communities, underserved communities and communities of color in the fight against climate change.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

The global shipping industry emits ~1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, about as much as the sixth highest emitting nation in the world. In hopes of changing course, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has mandated that starting in 2023, most commercial vessels will have to document their CO2 emissions, and demonstrate progress towards reaching the IMO objective of an industry-wide 40% reduction in emissions by 2030.But that is easier said than done. As we learned in earlier conversations on maritime shipping (here and here), low-emission alternatives to the cheap and extremely dirty bunker fuels that ships currently use are far from ready to deploy at scale. So what can ship owners do to start cutting their emissions as soon as next year?We spoke with Co-founder and CEO of the start-up Seabound, Alisha Fredriksson, about her teams' proposed solution: equipping ships with carbon capture devices that trap and store CO2 from fuel exhaust. The CO2 can be brought to port and either sold for CO2 utilization projects, or permanently stored underground. Learn more about how their technology works and their business case for why it is a good idea to get onboard with carbon capture.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

For some sectors of our economy, electrification as a decarbonization strategy is a whole lot easier said than done. Take the steel industry - which is responsible for 11% of global CO2 emissions. A large part of those emissions come from the ‘coking’ process - where coal-fired furnaces burning at up to 1,100 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) are used to break the bonds between iron and oxygen in the ore materials used to make steel. Driving this reaction with electricity, instead of a coal furnace, is an enormous challenge - but one that Boston Metals are taking the lead on.Climate Now sat down with Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president of Boston Metals, to better understand the landscape of developing clean steel technologies, and why the electrification process they are developing - “molten oxide electrolysis” - could be the decarbonization solution that the steel industry needs.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Mitigating climate change is a race against time, requiring “rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the IPCC, who says we need to halve global emissions by 2030. But Tom Dinwoodie of Epic Institute argues that this kind of rapid change actually isn’t unprecedented, when compared to technologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, which repeatedly went from expensive and obscure to globally adopted in the course of a few decades: electricity, automobiles, aviation, television, computers, the internet.In this episode, we are joined by Tom, who explains why he thinks clean energy technologies like wind and solar are on a similar path of exponential growth, and John Witchel, CEO of King Energy, who provides a ‘boots-on-the-ground’ perspective of how these industries are changing. Through the lens of his company’s work, incentivizing rooftop solar installation in multi-tenant commercial buildings, John explains why the capitalistic and innovative spirit of industry might just provide the “rapid and unprecedented” change we so critically need.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

Calls for transparent information on the carbon footprint of a product, service, company or government are getting louder from consumers and investors, and will likely be soon codified in regulations like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule on climate risk reporting for publicly traded companies. But how do you actually account for all the emissions released in the production process or in a company activity? Is it even possible to accurately quantify?Charles Cannon, a manager of RMI’s climate intelligence program, investigates ways to improve the quality of product level greenhouse gas information (like how much CO2 was released to manufacture your new refrigerator?). He sat down with Climate Now to explain the challenges involved in carbon accounting - the term for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions - and how those challenges might be addressed.Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into U.S. law by President Joe Biden on August 16th, might be the biggest climate investment in history, but it does not look much like the kinds of policies that have been most championed by climate activists and economists. There is no carbon tax, no cap and trade program, no specific emissions targets. Instead, the law combines a slew of incentives like rebates and tax credits aimed to encourage significant growth of the clean energy and electric vehicle sectors.To understand what is in the IRA, and what exactly its impact could be on reducing national greenhouse gas emissions, we spoke with Dr. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project at Princeton University. Dr. Jenkins’ team performed an independent climate and economic impact analysis of the IRA, and he walked us through the details of the climate mitigation measures in this package: what decarbonization strategies are being employed, who is most impacted by the measure, and how much emissions reduction will result from the policies of this bill. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.Contact us at contact@climatenow.comVisit our website for all of our content and sources for each episode.