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 has already created over 170,000 jobs and supported $110 billion in new clean energy manufacturing – with a majority of that investment headed to conservative-leaning states.

Now, as we head toward November’s presidential election, many Americans are wondering whether a second Trump Administration could unravel much of the work that’s been done.

In the first episode of the new season of Political Climate, hosts Julia Pyper, Brandon Hurlbut and Emily Domenech take stock of the IRA: they discuss how it’s been received politically, the roadblocks facing implementation, and look toward the different scenarios that could unfold after the election.

The show wraps up with our brand-new segment, “The Mark-up.” 

Subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter to get weekly updates on tech, markets, policy, and deals across clean energy and climate tech.

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 advantage of automation for operational efficiency and grid monitoring. 

But adoption will be uneven – and an autonomous superbrain for the electric grid may never fully materialize. 

In this episode, we’ll break down the pathways for AI on the electric grid, and test the market knowledge of a few leaders in this space.

We’re joined by David Groarke, who led the research for Latitude Intelligence on AI adoption; Sadia Raveendran, VP of industry solutions at Uplight; and Apoorv Bhargava, CEO and co-founder of WeaveGrid.

We’ll look at the influx of EVs, the rise of virtual power plants, and the growth in peak demand and ask: where is artificial intelligence and machine learning helping?

Are growing concerns over AI’s power demand justified? Join us for our upcoming Transition-AI event featuring three experts with a range of views on how to address the energy needs of hyperscale computing, driven by artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this live, virtual event on May 8.

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 bricks, heating coils, and cheap, intermittent renewables.

And that cheap PV that made solar thermal so difficult is now a critical input for decarbonizing factories and processing plants.

John distills his decade and a half in the solar thermal business to a simple lesson: don't be too innovative.

In this episode, we talk with John O’Donnell about the different methods for decarbonizing industrial heat, the use cases for heat batteries, and lessons learned from his days in solar thermal. 

Are growing concerns over AI’s power demand justified? Join us for our upcoming Transition-AI event featuring three experts with a range of views on how to address the energy needs of hyperscale computing, driven by artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this live, virtual event on May 8.

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 become computers on wheels, Tesla was scaling mass-market production, and vehicle autonomy was the hottest thing in the tech industry.

“It made sense that Apple, which has a massive prowess in manufacturing, an incredible design ethos and a high standard for safety…would try to take a crack at that market,” said Gurman, a chief correspondent at Bloomberg.

But after a decade of internal disputes, redesigns, and leadership changes, Apple is officially moving on from cars.

“This was a clear admission of failure and admission of a need to disperse some of the resources from that program to other projects at the company,” explained Gurman.

In March, Gurman co-authored a piece detailing exactly what happened over the last 10 years of secretive work. This week, we talk with him about the vision, the technological challenges, and ask: what if Apple had just acquired Tesla from the start?

This episode is brought to you by The Big Switch. In a new 5-episode season, we’re digging into the ways batteries are made and asking: what gets mined, traded, and consumed on the road to decarbonization? Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

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 lives up to its name. But across the industry, the reaction has been mixed – even among those who want to make the industry as clean as possible. 

Maeve Allsup, one of our reporters at Latitude Media, started asking around the industry: how are these rules impacting projects?

This week, we have a crossover episode with The Latitude, a podcast that brings you stories from our journalists and columnists reporting at the commercial edge of energy tech, markets, and deals. Editor Lisa Martine Jenkins presents two features from the pages of Latitude Media on how the US green hydrogen industry is responding to new rules and canceling some projects.

Like what you hear? For more of Latitude Media’s coverage of the frontiers of clean energy, sign up for our newsletter.

This episode is brought to you by The Big Switch. In a new 5-episode season, we’re digging into the ways batteries are made and asking: what gets mined, traded, and consumed on the road to decarbonization? Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

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 turn to someone who spends a lot of his time in the so-called data cloud: Tititaan Palazzi, the head of power and utilities at Snowflake.

“Data naturally ends up in different boxes, in different silos. And when you then want to ask questions of the data, it becomes really hard. You can't ask questions across the enterprise,” he explained.

In 2018, Palazzi co-founded Myst AI with Pieter Verhoeven, an engineer who built critical demand response applications for the Nest Thermostat. Myst was focused on AI-driven time-series forecasting for the grid. 

“In the energy industry, there is a lot of time-series data coming from the grid. At the same time, using AI for forecasting is quite challenging because every time you need to create a new prediction, you need to have the latest data. And so from an engineering perspective, it was quite complicated to do,” said Palazzi.

Palazzi and Verhoeven arrived at Snowflake after Myst was acquired by the company last year. 

This week, we feature a conversation with Snowflake's Titiaan Palazzi on busting data silos, some early wins for AI in the power sector, and what phase of the transition we're in. 

This episode is brought to you by The Big Switch. In a new 5-episode season, we’re digging into the ways batteries are made and asking: what gets mined, traded, and consumed on the road to decarbonization? Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

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 documentation, a lot of counterparties to deal with, and that information needs to be processed somehow. It felt like we were spending a lot of time just trying to process the information,” explained Li.

This problem has only grown over time as more distributed assets need financing, and policies like the Inflation Reduction Act support smaller clean energy projects at the community level. These small- to mid-sized projects often require as much diligence and paperwork as much larger deals.

So in 2018, Amanda co-founded Banyan Infrastructure, a software platform that simplifies transactions for a wide range of sustainable infrastructure projects – replacing spreadsheets, email, and PDFs with digitized loans and workflows.

The company has raised more than $42 million and works with green banks, Wall Street firms, and local lenders to make deals simpler. 

“If at every single layer there aren't standards, there aren't connected processes, it's going to move really slowly,” said Li.

In this episode, produced in partnership with Banyan Infrastructure, we explore the shifting world of sustainable finance. 

Stephen Lacey talks with Banyan COO Amanda Li about solving financial bottlenecks, how the IRA is bringing in new players to the market, and what it will take to unlock trillions of new dollars per year for the energy transition.

Banyan Infrastructure is simplifying and accelerating the financing of sustainable infrastructure. Read the company’s white paper on unlocking the full potential of sustainable finance, or request a demo to learn how the software works.

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 ChatGPT 3.5, which ran on Microsoft’s data centers.

“That was the moment that I realized we were going to need a bigger boat. This is a massive leap in a period of like six months – and the amount of time that it takes to actually build infrastructure was measured in years,” said Janous.

Projections show data center energy demand could double in the next couple of years, driven by artificial intelligence. Janous saw the hockey stick growth coming, and he realized the disconnect between how fast AI is moving and how the core input to data centers – electricity supply – is struggling to keep pace.

After decades of flat demand, load forecasts are doubling because of data centers, expanding ports, new manufacturing plants supported by the IRA, and electric cars. 

Janous recently co-founded a company, Cloverleaf Infrastructure, to help utilities unlock grid capacity with grid-enhancing technologies, batteries, and other flexible resources to meet the onslaught of new demand. He also advises LineVision, a dynamic line rating company that is helping expand transmission capacity.

This week: we talk with Janous about why we don't need energy miracles – we need to think creatively about planning, and squeezing more out of the system.

This episode is brought to you by The Big Switch. In a new 5-episode season, we’re digging into the ways batteries are made and asking: what gets mined, traded, and consumed on the road to decarbonization? Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.

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 dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You've got a bunch of people wearing hot suits, literally chucking batteries into high temperature furnaces. And it is not a healthy environment,” said Cotton.

Two decades later, the technology has shifted – and lithium-ion batteries are now the dominant form of storage. But recycling hasn't changed a lot.

Today, there are two types of dominant battery recycling methods. One is using high heat, similar to the process that Steve witnessed at the lead-acid facilities. The other is giving batteries a chemical bath, in a process known as hydrometallurgy. Both create a lot of waste.

Steve saw how big the battery recycling waste problem could become. And in 2015, he invested in a company called Aqua Metals. And he became so convinced by Aqua Metals' novel approach to recycling, he became the CEO.

“We're using electricity to drive the process and the electricity itself comes from renewable resources. And that can produce this metal supply chain with a true opportunity to have a net zero environmental impact,” said Cotton.

The battery recycling industry is experiencing rapid growth, as companies and countries look to build secure, circular supply chains for critical minerals.

In this episode, produced in partnership with Aqua Metals, Steve Cotton sits down with Stephen Lacey to talk about the growing battery waste problem, and the urgency to invest in recycling techniques that don't lock in new sources of waste.

This is a partner episode, brought to you by AquaMetals. Aqua Metals is pioneering cleaner and safer battery metals recycling through innovation. The company is building the first sustainable battery recycling operation in North America in Tahoe-Reno. Watch a tour of the company’s pilot facility, and learn more by reading the company’s recyclopedia.

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 ago. But even with those record levels of spending, we are astonishingly behind what’s needed to stay on a net-zero trajectory this decade. 

This week, we’ll talk about what’s growing, what’s lagging, and what the trillion-dollar scale means at the ground level.

Then, geoengineering is nudging closer to the mainstream of scientific and environmental discourse. Are we giving up, or just being realistic?

Katherine Hamilton of 38 North and Shalini Ramanathan of Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners join us this week to sift through these trends.

For more of Latitude Media’s coverage of the frontiers of clean energy, sign up for our newsletter.

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, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other distributed assets into dispatchable power plants.

The US already has tens of gigawatts of VPP capacity, mostly in the form of “bring your own device” programs that harness thermostats or water heaters for demand response services. But there are new models emerging that harness rooftop solar, batteries, and EV charging to enable bigger, longer-lasting load shifts.

“I like to say that the term VPP is kind of like the term sandwich. There are lots of different kinds, they're full of different ingredients, and they serve lots of different purposes,” said Jen Downing, an engagement officer at the DOE, who leads the agency’s work on the space. 

The concept of VPPs has been around for nearly 30 years. But as the US faces a dramatic increase in peak demand by 2030 – and with distributed resource capacity set to double – the urgency for deploying them has increased.

“We're going to need clean, firm [power]. We're going to need more transmission capacity to transport that electricity. But one way to address that increase in peak is to use distributed energy resources to either serve that peak locally or to shift that peak outside of peak hours. And so that's where VPPs come in,” said Downing.

This week on The Carbon Copy, we spoke with DOE’s Jen Downing about the different ways that virtual power plants are getting built – and the need to build many more.

Read our show notes and all our industry coverage at Latitudemedia.com.