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Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Investor Shayle Kann is asking big questions about how to decarbonize the planet: How cheap can clean energy get? Will artificial intelligence speed up climate solutions? Where is the smart money going into climate technologies? Every week on Catalyst, Shayle explains the world of climate tech with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives. Produced by Latitude Media.

technology investing

All Episodes

38:53

Terrawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/05/15

This week, we're bringing you a special episode of The Green Blueprint, a show about the stories behind first-of-a-kind climate projects. In this episode: Terawatt Power's first commercial electric truck charging depot, which opened in April near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It was a significant milestone for the industry. So how’d Terawatt pull it off? Host Lara Pierpoint talks to Terawatt’s founder Neha Palmer about the financing, offtakes, and market demand for electrified trucks

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40:27

The U.S. nuclear groundswell

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/05/09

The nuclear renaissance of the 2000s turned out to be something of a mirage. Buoyed by rising fossil gas prices, growing climate awareness, and steady load growth, nuclear seemed poised for a breakout moment. But that momentum stalled. Electricity demand flatlined. The fracking boom sent gas prices plummeting. And Fukushima rattled public confidence in nuclear power. Ultimately, only two new reactors, Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia, reached completion over a decade later.So is this latest wave of

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26:16

Frontier Forum: Unlocking next-generation VPPs

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/05/06

In the mid-2000s, Ben Brown started his career designing demand response programs that relied on pagers and telephones. Today, as Renew Home's CEO, he's leveraging AI and tens of millions of connected smart devices to help households save energy and create an entirely new approach to grid management.Renew Home is building a new kind of virtual power plant that moves beyond occasional emergency events toward continuous, subtle energy shifts across millions of connected households. "The biggest

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46:55

Catalyst Live at SF Climate Week

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/05/01

It’s a Catalyst first-of-a-kind: our very first live event! We hosted it last Wednesday at San Francisco Climate week. In this episode, Shayle talks to Mike Schroepfer, co-founder and partner at Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta, and Nick Chaset, CEO of Octopus Energy US. Together they cover:Lessons on building products that consumers love Over and under hyped trends, including data center load growth, carbon removal, and fusion What areas will benefit most from the current

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34:24

The geopolitics of rare earth elements

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/24

China’s new export controls on rare earth elements (REEs) are a problem for EVs, renewables, and other industries that rely on the minerals, especially the permanent magnets they’re used in. The vast majority of the global supply chain is in China. Plus, Chinese companies control supply chain operations around the world. So is it possible to stand up a rare earth supply chain outside of China’s control? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ahmad Ghahreman, co-founder and CEO of REE recycler Cyclic

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20:04

What’s next for the battery storage boom? [partner...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/23

The U.S. storage market is experiencing hockey-stick growth, with multiple gigawatts being installed quarterly. But new policy uncertainties around tariffs and the Inflation Reduction Act are threatening this momentum.But Jeff Waters, the CEO of Powin, remains optimistic. "This industry will figure out a way to work with it," says Waters, who brings decades of experience from the semiconductor and solar industries. "What we're doing is important." Powin is a leading storage integrator that

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39:07

Serving data center load with carbon capture

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/17

Big tech’s data center construction boom is fueling a flurry of natural gas development, despite the fuel’s challenges, and it’s complicating big tech’s climate goals. But carbon capture and storage (CCS) could mitigate emissions from those new plants, and hyperscalers could secure low-carbon power while meeting their needs for speed and reliability. So how could natural gas with CCS serve data center loads? In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, who

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35:01

How climate disasters are shaping insurance markets

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/10

Premiums are rising. Insurers are leaving markets. But people keep building in risk-prone areas, and the climate disasters just keep coming.Can insurance markets adapt? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Judd Boomhower, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-San Diego and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He studies how insurance markets are reacting to climate change. Shayle and Judd cover topics like: Why insurers are

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28:58

Frontier Forum: Future-proofing data center power...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/07

Data centers face a critical timing problem. They need massive amounts of power immediately, but grid upgrades can take more than seven years to complete. Microgrids could be a solution to this growing power gap."How do you future-proof your systems through adaptability of technologies? Microgrids are really a nice technology to address that," explains Adib Nasle, CEO of Xendee. In this episode, recorded as part of a live Frontier Forum, Latitude Media's Stephen Lacey speaks with Xendee

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39:02

Specialized AI brains for physical industry

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/04/04

Everyone wants a piece of general purpose models. Instacart has deployed ChatGPT for recipes and meal planning. The Mayo Clinic is using it to summarize patient records. Schneider Electric is using an OpenAI LLM to generate sustainability reports. With such powerful models, what’s the need for specialized models built for specific industries, especially in climate tech? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Smith-Eppsteiner, partner at Innovation Endeavors. She recently wrote a blog post arguing

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33:29

The potential for flexible data centers

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/27

Tyler Norris says regulators have been getting two different stories. On one side, they’ve been hearing that data centers are largely inflexible loads. On the other, last year the U.S. Department of Energy recommended data center flexibility, and EPRI launched its DCFlex initiative to demonstrate the same. So he and a few other researchers wanted to know, What’s the potential for data center flexibility? And what benefits could it have system-wide? In this episode, Shayle talks to Tyler, a PhD

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34:03

Frontier Forum: How tax credit transfers are...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/21

In 2023, the U.S. market for transferable clean energy tax credits was just getting started. One year later, that market has tripled in size, with credits diversifying beyond wind and solar into nuclear, manufacturing, and other technologies."The statistics on just how much it grew over that period are really impressive — indicating the transparency, efficiency, liquidity, and growing nature of the market," explains Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, which operates a debt and tax credit platform for

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45:53

The coming robotics wave

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/20

Robots are becoming cheaper to make and more powerful because of AI. In the climate tech space, they’re already laying transmission lines, inspecting wind turbines, and installing solar panels.. And with labor productivity stagnating, immigration restrictions tightening, and the cost of labor rising, they’re looking even more appealing. So where might robotics have the biggest impact on climate tech? In this episode, Shayle talks to Andy Lubershane, a partner and head of research at Energy Impact

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37:40

An ode to electrochemistry

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/13

Batteries were electrochemistry’s breakout hit. For years it was a field that kept a low profile, outshined by flashier cousins like biotech and computer science. That is until lithium-ion batteries became big business, showing that studying the relationship between chemicals and energy could unlock technical pathways that other disciplines could not. Now the field is making breakthroughs in critical areas like cement, metallurgy, and new battery chemistries.So what else can electrochemistry do

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17:32

How AI is solving real utility challenges [partner...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/11

Laurent Boinot, a power and utilities leader at Microsoft, remembers the moment he discovered the power of artificial intelligence. Years ago, as a student using a basic AI model to assess World Bank project risks, he was amazed to discover the technology outperformed human experts."With a very basic AI tool, we were able to replicate that risk analysis and do a better job than the human graders did," says Boinot. Today, Boinot works with utilities to implement AI solutions — an industry

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56:23

A skeptic’s take on AI electricity load growth

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/03/06

The predictions are coming in hot. Data centers could grow to consume more than 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030, according to EPRI. That’s more than double its current estimated data center load. AI will increase global data center power demand 165% by 2030, says Goldman Sachs. And billions of dollars are at stake. Utilities, megasite developers, and data center operators are all basing major decisions on predictions like these.But they’re also the kinds of predictions we’ve seen before

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43:48

Cultivated meat’s “trough of disillusionment”

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/02/27

Between 2013 and 2023, cultivated meat companies raised a total of nearly $3 billion. In 2020, Singapore approved the world’s first cultivated meat products, with the U.S. and Israel following close behind. But head to the meat department of any American grocery store today, and you won’t find cultivated meat for sale. After short-lived restaurant tasting menus in the U.S., it’s no longer available. Distribution in Singapore is growing but small, and no products have launched in Israel yet. So

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46:39

The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/02/20

Sodium-ion could be the next big thing. Last August, Natron announced a $1.4B factory in North Carolina. Other U.S. companies like Peak Energy, Bedrock Materials, and Acculon Energy are jockeying for position in the market. Meanwhile, almost all of the world’s sodium-ion manufacturing capacity, current and planned, is in China. CATL’s CEO Robin Zeng suggested that sodium-ion could ultimately take up to half of LFP’s market share.The potential advantages are exciting: Sodium-based chemistries could

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46:44

The case for colocating data centers and generation

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/02/13

Sheldon Kimber says the grid is broken — at least for new data centers and other large, industrial loads that need lots of clean power, fast. But the founder and CEO of Intersect Power believes there’s a workaround that enables larger data centers and speeds up time to power: colocating behind-the-meter generation and storage on megasites rich with renewable resources. In short, instead of bringing clean generation to load, bring load to clean generation. Major partners are on board with the

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49:45

More 2025 trends: DeepSeek, plug-in hybrids, and...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/02/06

Didn’t catch last week’s episode on Nat Bullard’s mega slide deck on energy transition? Start there. This is the second half of our extended conversation with Nat, the former chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon. In this episode, Shayle and Nat dig into topics like: Rising solar installations and stagnating wind Why we’re wasting so much renewable power amid skyrocketing load growth The rise of Chinese plug-in hybrids and exports Whether

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