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PODCAST

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

30:49

Are utilities ready to fully harness demand...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/02/04

When it comes to decarbonization planning, utilities tend to focus heavily on the supply side. But they may be overlooking one of their most powerful tools for managing a cleaner grid — demand flexibility.Demand response and time-varying rates have been in use for decades. But many utilities still haven't fully embraced demand flexibility in their planning. As utilities push toward higher penetrations of renewable energy, the ability to shift demand becomes increasingly vital for maintaining grid

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35:34

2025 trends: aerosols, oil demand, and carbon removal

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/01/30

Out today: Nat Bullard’s 200-page slide deck with data from across the energy transition. Nat is the former chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon. In part one of their two-part conversation, Shayle cherry-picked the most interesting slides and sat down with Nat to unpack them. They cover topics like: Accidental solar geoengineering and the state of aerosols The United States’ record-setting fossil fuels exports Whether Chinese oil demand is

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40:44

The climate-ag grab bag

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/01/23

Here’s a three-part puzzle for global agriculture: How do you increase calories for a growing population, while zeroing out emissions and minimizing land usage?The stakes are enormous. According to the UN, the world has to feed an estimated 9.8 billion people by 2050. But agriculture currently accounts for about a third of global carbon emissions and is driving the conversion of important ecosystems – like rainforest and grasslands – into farmland. Converting land is especially problematic because

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57:34

FOAK tales

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/01/16

First-of-a-kind projects need infrastructure investment, the kind of money that costs less than venture capital and usually comes in the form of deals worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But infrastructure investors are notoriously conservative and convincing them to bite can be challenging. So what do infrastructure investors really want? In this episode, Shayle talks to Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy’s FOAK finance program. It has worked with companies like Rondo, Form

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40:21

Making DERs work for load growth

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/01/09

To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, is planning to expand its fleet of natural gas plants. And Microsoft signed a deal last September to re-open Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plantBut could we meet a portion of that load growth with distributed energy resources? Pier LaFarge thinks so. In this episode, Shayle talks to Pier, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund. (Energy Impact

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38:26

Lithium’s wild ride

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2025/01/02

If you’ve followed global lithium prices over the past few years, you know what a wild ride it’s been. Chinese spot prices shot to record highs in 2022 and then came crashing back down by 2024 — with big consequences for batteries and EVs that depend on the mineral. So what happened? And what could happen next, especially as EV sales have been slower than expected? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ernest Scheyder, author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives”

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64:47

Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/26

Editor’s note: For the holiday break, we’re bringing you one of our most popular episodes of the year — a conversation about Tesla’s Master Plan 3 with Drew Baglino, who stepped down as the company’s senior vice president for powertrain and energy in April.Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3 lays out the company’s model for a decarbonized economy — and makes the case for why it's economically viable. It outlines a vision for extensive electrification and a reliance on wind and solar power. In this episode,

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37:48

Scaling low-carbon products with book and claim systems

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/19

A mismatch between suppliers and buyers is making it hard to grow the supply of low-carbon products like cement, steel, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).If you want to produce a product like SAF, you want to find the cheapest place to do it — someplace where there’s cheap, low-carbon hydrogen, for example. But the buyers who have the incentive and money to pay for those products might be halfway across the world. Or say you’re a supplier of a low-carbon building material. Risk-averse contractors

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39:15

What went wrong at Northvolt?

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/12

Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy.So what went wrong? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like: What

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23:46

How cyber attacks could threaten the energy...

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/10

Security experts often say there are two kinds of companies.“There are those companies that have been hacked, and those that don't know that they are being hacked – especially when we look at the energy industry,” says Bilal Khursheed executive director of Microsoft's global power & utilities business. Khursheed works with companies to deploy digital technologies to speed up the clean energy transition. And he also focuses heavily on a threat that could derail the transition – cyber attacks. There

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42:59

Explaining the 'Watt-Bit Spread'

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/05

Every data center company is after one thing right now: power. Electricity used to be an afterthought in data center construction, but in the AI arms race access to power has become critical because more electrons means more powerful AI models.But how and when these companies will get those electrons is unclear. Utilities have been inundated with new load requests, and it takes time to build new capacity. Given these uncertainties, how do data center companies make the high-stakes decisions about

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27:43

Frontier Forum: Why utilities should go big on VPPs

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/12/02

In the next five years, Arizona Public Service estimates peak demand will grow by 40%. In order to meet that peak, the utility is increasingly turning to demand-side flexibility. A few years ago, APS started working with EnergyHub to experiment with smart thermostats as a resource to manage peak demand. The initial resource was modest – a few megawatts, and then 20 megawatts. That program eventually turned into a 190-megawatt virtual power plant made up of smart thermostats, behavioral demand

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42:23

From biowaste to “biogold”

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/11/28

Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil we’ll be using this Thanksgiving, we’re re-running an episode on biowaste. There’s also increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors, especially for sustainable aviation fuel. So we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more

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42:26

TEA breakdown: green ammonia and synthetic methane

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/11/21

Shayle and his team at Energy Impact Partners (EIP) review a lot of climate-tech pitches. The best kind of pitch uses a solid techno-economic analysis (TEA) to model how a technology would compete in the real world. In a previous episode, we covered some of the ways startups get TEAs wrong — bad assumptions, false precision, focusing on parts instead of the system, etc.So what does a good TEA look like? In this episode, Shayle talks to his colleagues, Dr. Melissa Ball, EIP’s associate director of

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43:27

Getting heat pumps right

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/11/14

Oh, the heat pump — a climate tech darling that still hasn’t hit the big time yet. One challenge for heat pumps is that the customer experience can be difficult, involving a complex installation process, poor installation jobs, and even technicians that don’t want to sell you one.What’s it going to take to get heat pumps right? In this episode, Shayle talks to Paul Lambert, founder and CEO of the heat-pump company Quilt. They talk through the nuts and bolts of the customer experience and how to

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30:08

Fixing the refrigerant problem

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/11/07

The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide does. The good news: We’re in the middle of a global effort to replace them with lower impact alternatives. Will we replace them fast enough to hit climate targets? And in the meantime, can we prevent them from leaking into the atmosphere? In this episode, Shayle talks to Ian McGavisk, senior advisor at RMI for carbon-free buildings. An industry

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49:38

Why climate tech startups get this one thing wrong

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/10/31

This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA. Before a startup proves its technology is commercially viable, it models how a technology would work. These TEAs include things like assumptions about inputs, prices, and market landscape. They help investors and entrepreneurs answer the question, will this technology compete? TEAs are important to the success of an early-stage climate-tech company. And a lot of startups get them wrong. As an investor at Energy Impact Partners

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42:49

The unexplored frontier of methane removal

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/10/24

We capture concentrated methane emissions from point sources like dairy barns, landfills, and coal mines. Mitigating methane emissions is essential to hitting net-zero targets, but could we capture diluted gasses straight from the atmosphere, too? In this episode, Shayle talks to Dr. Gabrielle Dreyfus, Chief Scientist at the Institute For Governance & Sustainable Development, about a National Academy of Sciences report on the unexplored area of methane removal. Gabrielle chaired the committee

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27:08

Frontier Forum: An energy-first approach to data centers

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/10/22

AI is enabling a multitude of solutions across power, industry, and transportation. But AI energy demands are increasingly stressing the electric grid — creating a bottleneck for growth and new challenges for clean energy supply.The mounting tension highlights the need for an energy-first approach to computing. Developer Crusoe is building AI infrastructure that takes advantage of clean energy to power workloads for AI modeling. Likewise, Nvidia, Crusoe’s primary GPU supplier, has been

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40:06

The complex path to market for low-carbon cement

Catalyst with Shayle Kann ·

2024/10/17

Getting the construction industry to try a novel form of cement is like turning a giant ship. It’s hard to redirect the immense momentum behind existing ways of doing business, especially involving cement, the most energy-intensive ingredient in concrete. Industry insiders point to tight margins, concerns about messing with the ingredients that literally hold up buildings, and the long list of stakeholders will agree to try a new material. So how do you get a risk-averse construction supply chain

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