At the beginning of the pandemic, energy prices crashed. We did an episode of this show trying to figure out how oil prices fell to negative $40 per barrel. Times have changed. Oil is up over $100/barrel. But far more acute is what’s happening with natural gas, particularly in Europe and Asia. In the US, natural gas prices have doubled in the last year. But in parts of Europe, the price has risen more than 5 times. The disruptions are clear. We're seeing stories of power shortages in China, fertilizer plants being shut down in the UK, and fears about home heating costs in the Northea ..read more

The U.S. Department of Energy is crucial for funding, researching, and testing emerging energy tech. Now, in the Biden era, the agency is orienting itself toward deployment. How difficult is that transition? Our former co-host Jigar Shah joins Stephen, Katherine, and Ed to discuss his experience running the Energy Department’s loan programs office. In March, Jigar left his position at Generate Capital (and this podcast) to head into government service and run the loan programs office. Jigar has $40 billion in authority to back a wide range of climate technologies -- and he’s been working ..read more

EIA and IEA are out with projections for emissions and fossil fuel consumption. And they don’t look good.  On our current policy trajectory, there is no peak in sight, according to EIA By 2050, we will likely see a 50% increase in energy consumption. And even though renewables will be the fastest-growing new source of energy, hydrocarbon liquid fuels will meet the majority of demand. That means emissions could rise through 2050, absent massive changes to policy. In July, the International Energy Agency issued a similar analysis showing that carbon emissions will h ..read more

Suddenly everyone is talking about green hydrogen.  From South Africa to the United Arab Emirates. From China to Utah. Governments and developers are eyeing hydrogen as a decarbonization tool.  But the rush is also raising lots of questions: Where will hydrogen be most useful? How do you create a supply chain to support it? And how can we ensure it has climate integrity? For answers, we turned to two experts who are obsessing over the future of hydrogen: Janice Lin and Stephen Lamm. Janice Lin is the founder and CEO of Strategen. And she’s president of the green hydrogen coalition.&n ..read more

Ride sharing has swept transportation systems over the last decade -- bringing convenience, but also congestion, inequities, and political fights. Now a new category of transportation networking is emerging: TransitTech. It makes up a class of companies that are using tech to help maximize public transit systems. So what does TransitTech look like post-pandemic? Tiffany Chu joins Katherine and Stephen this week to discuss the path forward for transit. Tiffany is the co-founder and CEO of Remix, which was recently acquired by Via for $100 million. We’ll also dig in ..read more

Shayle has been brewing up an investment thesis around how decarbonization will create stratification in traditional commodity sectors, like chemicals and materials. If you can produce the same thing in the same cost range -- but you can do so in a CO2-free or carbon-negative -- you'll reap the rewards. Lanzatech is a great test case for that thesis, as well as a great story to tell about the history of this sector. It was founded in 2005 as a biofuels company. Now, it captures industrial waste gasses, such as CO2 and CO, and recycles them into the chemicals used to make everything from p ..read more

In January 2020, Brad Smith, the President of Microsoft, announced that the company had set a target of becoming carbon negative by 2030. How does the company plan to do it? What does going carbon negative actually entail? Brandon Middaugh, the Director of Microsoft’s $1B Climate Innovation Fund, comes on the show to explain. The fund invests in various climate technologies as a part of the company’s overall climate efforts. Investments in its portfolio cover carbon removal, carbon marketplace innovation and the circular economy, among others. (The fund’s first investment was i ..read more

The road to solar glory has been littered with failed companies -- the ones you may know (Solyndra) and hundreds you probably do not. Will the burgeoning hydrogen space follow a similar bumpy road? Hydrogen is at a similar phase of market and technological maturity, with similar levels of hype.  In this episode, Shayle talks to Raffi Garabedian, the former CTO of pioneering solar manufacturer First Solar and now the co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen Co. (Disclosure: Shayle just led Energy Impact Partners’ investment in the company). First Solar was one of the very few Western ..read more

In the world of venture capital, climate tech is about as hot as it gets. In the first two quarters of 2021, climate tech companies raised $16B from VCs. New designated funds are announced regularly, startup valuations are sky high, and times are frothy. It's never been a better time to be a climate tech entrepreneur. It's easy to get lost in the noise -- so what does the hard data say? How much investment are we talking about, really? Where is it coming from, and who is it going to? And what does that tell founders about how to operate and grow their businesses? To answer these questions, Sh ..read more

There is no path to deep decarbonization that doesn't involve a clean power sector. And there is no path to a clean power sector that doesn't involve deploying massive amounts of wind, solar, and lithium-ion batteries. Those three technologies don't solve the entire problem of climate change, but they are the workhorses that will power a broader, multi-sector decarbonization approach. The power sector itself is around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. And a net-zero electricity sector is the key that unlocks a host of other decarbonization pathways, from hydrogen to carbon removal to ..read more