As we look ahead to SGT26, what do you want to see more of? Deeper collaboration, real-world case studies, honest conversations about what’s working (and what’s not)? In the first episode of Powering the Future, Mandana White puts these questions to leading SGT vendors Paul Van Dijk and Johan Malstrom. One planet. One power grid.…

In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terawatt Infrastructure with a bold mission: create the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution. Within its first year, Terawatt secured a billion-dollar investment. But as the company developed plans for a nationwide charging network, it confronted the daunting challenge of building infrastructure for an…

In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages. Customers across multiple markets were already excited about the new product, but Drew’s team struggled…

In 2018, LineVision was a young company with revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines. Its dynamic line rating sensors and software could increase the capacity of existing power lines by up to 40% without building new infrastructure — a critical solution for integrating renewables and meeting growing electricity demand. But to prove…

Dan Shugar has been trying to move solar panels around since the 1980s. What started with a few experiments as a young engineer has turned into one of the biggest solar tracker companies in the world. In 2012 he founded Nextracker with a single product. Since then, Nextracker has revolutionized tracking technology through an array of innovative pro…

When Raffi Garabedian co-founded Electric Hydrogen in 2020, he saw existing electrolyzers as too small and expensive to make green hydrogen economically viable. Instead of building standard sub-megawatt units, his team aimed for 100-megawatt systems at half the industry cost. Initial market enthusiasm brought millions in capacity reservations, fuel…

Leila Madrone founded Sunfolding in 2012 with an innovative idea – build a solar tracker using pneumatic "airbags" instead of motors and torque tubes. By 2015, the company was deploying the technology in a field test in Davis, California. Over the next six years, Sunfolding iterated on the technology’s design, built out the supply chain, and tried …

This week, we’re featuring an episode of Open Circuit, a new show from Latitude Media that reunites Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and Stephen Lacey. Many listeners may remember them from The Energy Gang, a show they co-hosted for eight years. They are back together, co-hosting a weekly roundtable that will cover the latest news – to explain what'…

In May 2024, Yanni Tsipis was watching as his team prepared to pour a low-carbon version of concrete — one that had never been used in a commercial project. As senior vice president of WS Development, he was in charge of the team building Boston’s largest net-zero office building for operating emissions (not embodied emissions), and he had spearhea…

When Chris Taylor and his team at GridStor were building Santa Barbara county's largest battery storage project in Goleta, CA they saw an opportunity: become one of the first companies to transfer tax credits under the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act. But there was no playbook to follow. Instead of working with smaller, specialized investors, …

On Christmas Eve 2023, Doug Chan wasn't celebrating with family. Instead, he was in Hellisheiði, Iceland with his team, preparing to commission Mammoth — what would become the world's largest operational direct air capture facility. Getting there wasn't easy. After building two successful smaller plants, Climeworks faced its biggest challenge yet i…

In 2022, John O’Donnell and Peter von Behrens figured out how to design a heat battery that would deliver heat at very high, constant temperatures. The breakthrough came on the heels of two years of research and development, some of which took place in Peter’s garage. Now, John and Peter were ready to prove their technology at commercial scale. So …

In the aftermath of the presidential election, the clean energy industry is scrambling to figure out what a second Trump administration would mean for their companies and projects. But Tom Burton isn't just looking at the next four years. After 25 years serving the industry with the law firm Mintz, he's thinking about the growth of the industry ove…

In 2022, Via Separations was getting ready to build its commercial-scale filtration system, a technology that could help cut emissions and costs for a wide range of industries like paper, chemicals, and food processing. And when the company faced two paths — scale up 10x or 100x — CEO and co-founder Shreya Dave decided to scale faster by building a…

In 2009, John Woolard’s team flipped the switch on a first-of-a-kind concentrated solar power project. The pilot paved the way for BrightSource Energy, where John was CEO, to build its first commercial CSP plant, a 440-megawatt project in the Mojave Desert called Ivanpah. John and his team believed they were far ahead of the competition, including …

We’ve already invented many of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But a big chunk of emission reductions will come from technologies that are not yet commercial. We don’t have decades to get these commercialized – we have years. So what can we learn from the people who are bringing new technologies from the lab to the market, c…

Since we stopped The Carbon Copy, some listeners had questions about what’s next. Here's a preview of our new podcast, the Transition-AI event in December, and a new newsletter called the AI-Energy Nexus. Stay tuned to the feed for our new show, dropping later this fall!By Latitude Media

Dynamic pricing is everywhere – and impacts all of us. Whether it's the time of day, your location, or the amount of demand, so many of our decisions are driven by real-time pricing changes. But it's still a relatively new concept in electricity. This week, we're featuring a conversation with Scott Engstrom of GridX and Economist Ahmad Faruqui on t…

Some news: this will be our final installment of The Carbon Copy. But don’t go anywhere! Later this fall, the feed will be transformed into a new show that will profile the people architecting the clean energy economy. We promise it will be a valuable part of your media diet. For our last episode, we brought back some old friends: Jigar Shah, direc…

When millions of smart meters rolled out across the country at the turn of the last decade, many people hoped it would create the backbone of a digital grid. Today, you’ll find few who think meters lived up to expectations. One survey found only 3% of advanced meters supported by the 2009 stimulus bill brought customer savings. Mike Phillips, the C…

Solar is the fastest growing electricity-generating technology in history. That rapid scaling was a result of squeezing cost reductions out of every step of production. But there's one critical piece that hasn't changed much: frames. Aluminum frames now make up one-quarter of the cost of a PV module. And that metal mostly comes from China, a countr…

A lot of climate tech investors are still trying to figure out how to invest in artificial intelligence. Will it become a unique investment category? Or just a natural enhancement of what many startups are already building? There’s an emerging class of startups with AI at the center of their business. Citrine Informatics is using generative AI to s…

We need to invest many trillions of dollars every year to build a climate-positive economy. We know what those technologies are – but they're all at very different levels of readiness. So what would it take to scale critical climate technologies? That was the simple-but-complicated question recently posed by a group of energy, industry, and high-te…

Data centers are an impressive energy success story. Over the last 25 years, internet traffic has climbed more than 500x while data center electricity use has remained flat. The servers and energy infrastructure have gotten wildly more efficient, and the biggest tech companies have focused on powering those warehouse-scale computers with renewables…

The origin of Tesla was rooted in two goals: electrify transportation to drive down emissions that are warming the planet; and do it by driving down the cost of EVs to make them accessible to the masses. Is Musk now walking away from both? “He's decided I'm not a car company. I’m an AI and robotics company. It's astonishing what's happening with Te…

This week, we have something a little different: a news quiz. We recently took the stage with four investors at the Prelude Climate Summit — armed with a bell, a buzzer, and four different categories of questions. We tested two teams of venture investors on their knowledge of the most recent industry news. Shayle Kann and Cassie Bowe, partners at v…

This week, we have a drop-in episode from our new podcast at Latitude Media: Political Climate. Since the Inflation Reduction Act became law in August 2022, we’ve asked ourselves a big question: could the government and the private sector actually get this sprawling set of climate programs up and running? So far, many would answer “yes.” The IRA ha…

AI is suddenly in use everywhere – and it’s headed for the power sector. New research from Latitude Intelligence and Indigo Advisory Group shows a coming wave of AI integration, inside and outside of utilities. Distributed energy companies are increasingly integrating AI into their products, and many power companies are building teams to take advan…

John O’Donnell co-founded and ran two solar thermal companies. He watched as the technology shifted from being the most promising utility-scale solar technology, to getting out-competed by photovoltaics everywhere. But he stayed passionate about heat. Today, he’s CEO of Rondo Energy, which makes a “heat battery” for industrial applications using br…

Mark Gurman has been covering Apple since 2009. His reporting career is full of scoops about new products or strategic decisions from inside the company. His latest scoop in February: Apple is finally shutting down its efforts to build an autonomous electric car. Apple first started exploring an electric car in 2014. At that point, cars had already…

The US green hydrogen industry is at a critical juncture. After months of input and debate, the government put out draft rules for tax credits at the end of last year – setting strict requirements for matching new, local renewables to hydrogen production. It was hailed by many as a really important step for ensuring that green hydrogen actually liv…

There are many forces that could hold back AI in the power system: computing infrastructure, power availability, regulation, and corporate inertia. The biggest one? Good data. Utilities and grid operators are awash in data. But getting access to it – or making sense of it – is very difficult. For a better understanding of how to change that, we tur…

Early in her career, Amanda Li worked on many deals in solar and storage as part of a billion-dollar sustainable infrastructure fund. And she discovered a problem that often hinders deployment: the underwriting process is cumbersome and slow. “All of it was in spreadsheets, word documents, emails. When you look at a solar deal, there's a lot of doc…

When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts. Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of…

In the early 2000s, Steve Cotton ran a company serving the fast-growing data center industry with backup battery systems. And when those systems reached the end of their lives, the company monetized kilotons of lead-acid batteries by sending them to recycling facilities – industrial plants that break down and burn the components. “It's very dangero…

Can a couple trillion dollars feel small? Global investments in the energy transition – from the buildout of factories and power projects to project finance and government debt – hit nearly $1.8 trillion last year. That’s almost as big as the GDP of South Korea. It’s nearly 20% more than the year before, and nearly eight times more than a decade ag…

If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants. That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermost…

The storage market is full of surprises. Last year, global storage installations were a third higher than expected, driven mostly by Chinese policy to attach batteries to renewables. Meanwhile, a ramp-up in manufacturing is causing oversupply – and a potential shakeout for smaller battery makers. By 2030, the world could see 1.8 terawatt-hours of s…

As President Biden’s green industrial policies reignite the US manufacturing base, AI computing workloads soar, and machines across the economy turn electric, the power grid is facing an historic increase in demand. After almost two decades of flat electricity consumption, suddenly America’s grid planners are doubling their forecasts for demand – r…

Artificial intelligence is quickly accelerating drug discovery, healthcare services, product design, and manufacturing efficiency. Now it's here for materials development – and it could be one of the most influential uses of AI in energy. A decade ago, Greg Mulholland started playing around with machine learning as a way to accelerate product devel…

Turbulent. Equilibrating. Those are the words that investors Gabriel Kra and Carly Anderson use to describe the last year for venture capital in climate tech. We now have a full picture of the year for climate tech venture investing in 2023. Fresh data from Sightline Climate shows a decline in deal counts, round sizes, and a dropoff in repeat inves…

When the numbers for 2023 are finalized, there could be another 320 to 413 gigawatts of solar installed around the world – bringing global capacity to nearly 1.5 terawatts. Solar is now on track to surpass coal and fossil gas capacity in the next few years, bringing generation to 10% of global electricity supply. There's universal recognition that …

The competing trends in the energy transition from 2023 were stark: a looming peak in demand for oil, gas, and coal; a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; and an increasingly realistic pathway to triple renewables development. But we also experienced the hottest global temperatures in 125,000 years, record US oil & gas production…

In less than a decade, America has become the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas. In the mid-2000s, the US was building terminals to import more fossil gas. But that all changed after the fracking boom unlocked vast reserves of hydrocarbons. The US became a net exporter in 2017. Then, Russia’s war on Ukraine forced a scramble for new…

The nuclear industry is grappling with several issues: high interest rates, rising commodity prices, limited supply chains, fuel availability, and a regulatory environment that has been slow to adapt to new technologies. In the west, nuclear knowhow has faded over the decades. Even with a surge in policy support and public interest, development is …

It took 12 years to triple global renewables – and now we need to do it in eight years. As the latest UN climate summit begins, there’s a proposal on the table to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Countries may agree to it in theory, but can the market meet it in practice? This week, we’ll look at why this tripling is necessary, how it coul…

Weather forecasts for the grid depend on supercomputers to calculate the flow of heat, water, and radiation in the atmosphere, and then spit out predictions about what could happen next. These supercomputers are powerful. But they are also expensive and slow, relative to how quickly the weather changes. A new class of AI-based weather forecasts cou…

This is a partner podcast episode, brought to you by Intersect Power. The U.S. grid is in trouble. It's old; it's really hard to build new transmission lines; and that is limiting the amount of wind and solar we can add to the system. Sheldon Kimber, Founder and CEO of the clean energy developer Intersect Power, says the grid is “broken.” But he ha…

Microsoft was an early mover in integrating OpenAI’s LLM into its Azure cloud services. And now every part of Microsoft’s technology stack — from cloud infrastructure to data analytics to consumer apps — will be “reimagined” for the AI era, said Nadella. As a result, every industry will inevitably be impacted by AI. Utilities will also find themsel…

Wind, solar and batteries have seen steady, fairly predictable cost drops over the last two decades. But a combination of pressures – supply chain turmoil, grid constraints, interest rates, labor costs – has raised costs for products and projects. And they’re challenging the commercial viability of emerging sectors like offshore wind and hydrogen. …