Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Latest Episodes:

Making DERs work for load growth Jan 09, 2025

Show notes

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 plant

But 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 Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Sparkfund). DERs can come online much faster than large, centralized generation, Pier argues. He makes the case that utilities are especially well-positioned to lead what he calls “distributed capacity procurement” (DCP) of customer-sited solar, storage, and other assets. Shayle and Pier cover topics like:

How host agreements work, using utility-owned assets sited at customer locations
How the effective load carrying capability (ELCC) of DERs compares to large, centralized power plants
The relationship between DCP and VPPs
The key tradeoff of DCP: DERs are faster to build, but cost more and have lower ELCC than large, centralized plants
Who should pay for those higher costs?
Why vertically-integrated utilities are best-positioned to take advantage of the value DCP creates for capacity, distribution, and transmission
The limitations of DCP at a systems level

Recommended resources

Latitude Media: Can distributed energy answer AI’s power problem?

Latitude Media: Jigar Shah: It’s time for VPPs to get simpler

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Lithium’s wild ride Jan 02, 2025

Show notes

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” and senior correspondent at Reuters. They walk through the basics of lithium production and the recent timeline of key events affecting the industry, covering topics like:

Why more of the world’s lithium comes from hard rock spodumene than salt brines
How lithium is not one commodity at one price, but actually a variety of forms of the mineral at different prices
Lithium’s shift from a niche industry serving nuclear and pharmaceutical supply chains to a global force supplying the battery transition
The current oversupply, driven by Chinese producers that operate at a loss, and the western companies that are trying to challenge them
Chile’s efforts to nationalize its lithium industry and shift to direct lithium extraction, which has not worked at commercial scale

Recommended resources

Simon & Schuster: The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

Latitude Media: Are things about to turn around for the U.S. battery sector?

Catalyst: The EV market’s awkward teenage years

Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan Dec 26, 2024

Show notes

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, Shayle talks to one of the executives behind the plan, Drew Baglino, who was senior vice president for powertrain and energy at Tesla until April when he resigned. In his 18 years at Tesla he worked on batteries, cars, and even Tesla’s lithium refinery. Shayle and Drew cover topics like:

Why Drew isn't sure that AI-driven load growth “is going to be as dramatic as people think”
Drew’s optimism about the U.S.’ ability to build out enough transmission for decarbonization
How to deal with the high rates of curtailment and what to do with that excess power
Meeting the material requirements of decarbonization and Drew’s experience with permitting Tesla facilities

Recommended Resources:

Tesla: Master Plan Part 3

CNBC: Tesla execs Drew Baglino and Rohan Patel depart as company announces steep layoffs

The Carbon Copy: AI's main constraint: Energy, not chips

Catalyst: Understanding the transmission bottleneck

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Scaling low-carbon products with book and claim systems Dec 19, 2024

Show notes

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 with tight margins may hesitate to pay a green premium — even if the final buyer of the building might be willing to pay extra to cut emissions.

So how do you bridge the gap between the buyers and sellers of low-carbon products?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Adam Klauber, vice president of sustainability and digital supply chain at World Energy, a low-carbon fuels company. They talk about book and claim, a system to separate the environmental attribute (avoided emissions) from the physical good (e.g. fuel). It’s a system that developed in the power sector as renewable energy credits (RECs) and is now spreading to SAFs and other industries. Shayle and Adam cover topics like:

Book and claim versus other systems of tracking environmental attributes, such as mass-balance and physical chain-of-custody
Lessons from the most mature book and claim systems, like RECs and SAF
Key challenges like double counting the interoperability of digital registries and certification
Other industries where book and claim may develop like maritime, trucking, steel, cement, and chemicals

Recommended resources

Roundtable On Sustainable Biomaterials: RSB Book & Claim Manual

World Economic Forum: The Clean Skies for Tomorrow Sustainable Aviation Fuel Certificate (SAFc) Framework

Sustainable Supply Chain Lab: Decarbonizing the Air Transportation Sector: New greenhousegas accounting and insetting guidelines for sustainable aviation fuel

Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping: MaritimeBook & Claim

RMI: Structuring Demand for Lower-Carbon Materials: An Initial Assessment of Book and Claim for the Steel and Concrete Sectors

Catalyst: The complex path to market for low-carbon cement

What went wrong at Northvolt? Dec 12, 2024

Show notes

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 went well — from fundraising billions of dollars to securing major off-takers
What didn’t go well — like trying to build multiple types of batteries, in multiple factories, on multiple continents
How venture capital investors may have pushed the company to be too ambitious
The tradeoffs of choosing NMC over LFP
Challenges with their equipment supplier Wuxi LEAD
The upside: Sam’s belief that Northvolt’s factory will ultimately make batteries

Recommended resources

Latitude Media: What Northvolt's bankruptcy means for Europe's battery ambitions

Intercalation: Battery production is genuinely difficult

Bloomberg: Northvolt Has Major Obstacles Ahead Even With Bailout In Reach

How cyber attacks could threaten the energy transition [partner content] Dec 10, 2024

Show notes

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 are two reasons for this. One is the rise of internet-connected devices. There are now 15 billion IOT devices connected around the world, with a huge number of them on power grids. The other reason is sophistication. More attacks are now coming from organized groups, many of them with political motivations.

“These aren't just your random hackers. These are highly sophisticated James Bond villain types that are targeting our energy systems,” explains Khursheed.

In this episode, produced in partnership with Microsoft, Bilal Khursheed talks with Stephen Lacey about the evolution of cybersecurity threats in energy. They discuss how the threats are changing, their consequences for critical infrastructure, and how solutions are improving in the age of AI.

This episode was produced in partnership with Microsoft. After listening to the podcast, you can read about how to navigate NERC CIP compliance in the cloud, learn how energy firms around the world partner with Microsoft on security, and dig into the 2024 Microsoft Digital Defense Report.

Explaining the 'Watt-Bit Spread' Dec 05, 2024

Show notes

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 how much to build? How sustainable is the rate of construction? And how much will these data center companies pay for electricity?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Brian Janous, co-founder and chief commercial officer at data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Brian recently explained how he thinks about these questions in a LinkedIn post titled “The Watt-Bit Spread,” which argues that the value of watts is incredibly high right now, and the cost of those watts is too low. Shayle and Brian cover topics like:

The unclear data center demand and high costs that are making data center companies hesitant to build
How the skills required for data center development have shifted from real estate and fiber to energy
Why higher power prices are needed to incentivize new generation
Potential solutions for better pricing electricity and speeding up the construction of new generation

Recommended resources

Latitude Media: AES exec on data center load: 'It's like nothing we’ve ever seen'
Latitude Media: Mapping the data center power demand problem, in three charts
Latitude Media: Are we thinking about the data center energy problem in the right ways?
Catalyst: Can chip efficiency slow AI's energy demand?
Catalyst: Under the hood of data center power demand
Sequoia Capital: AI’s $600B Question

Frontier Forum: Why utilities should go big on VPPs Dec 02, 2024

Show notes

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 response, commercial and industrial demand response, and some batteries. And the APS operations team now treats the VPP as a valuable resource.

“We had to really build trust in this as a real resource. As it got bigger and you could see a noticeable difference when we called on these devices, that trust really began to build,” explained Kerri Carnes, director of customer-to-grid solutions at APS.

This week, we’re featuring a conversation about the value of VPPs with APS’ Kerri Carnes and Seth Frader-Thompson, co-founder and president of EnergyHub. It was recorded as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum series.

What does APS’ experience tell us about what is working in VPP program design? How do we convince utilities that VPPs are reliable? And what is their role as load growth rises?

“A VPP is actually more capable in some ways than a traditional power plant,” explained Frader-Thompson. “My guess is that over the next few years we'll probably come up with some more nuanced things to call VPPs.”

This is a partner episode, produced in partnership with EnergyHub. This is an edited version of the conversation. You can watch the full video here that includes audience questions about VPP design and implementation.

From biowaste to “biogold” Nov 28, 2024

Show notes

Editor’s note: In honor of all the frying oil used this Thanksgiving, we’re revisiting an episode with Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, on the possibilities and perils of using biowaste for biofuels. Since it was published in June 2022, there has been increasing investment in biofuels from oil majors, especially for sustainable aviation fuel.

Biomass. It's the organic matter in forests, agriculture and trash. You can turn it into electricity, fuel, plastic and more. And you can engineer it to capture extra carbon dioxide and sequester it underground or at the bottom of the ocean.

The catch: The world has a finite capacity for biomass production, so every end use competes with another. If done improperly, these end uses could also compete with food production for arable land already in tight supply.

So which decarbonization solutions will get a slice of the biomass pie? Which ones should?

In this episode, Shayle talks to Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct. They cover biomass sources from municipal solid waste to kelp.

They also survey the potential end-uses, such as incineration to generate power, gasification to make hydrogen, and pyrolyzation to make biochar, as well as fuel production in a Fischer-Tropsch process.

In a report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Julio and his co-authors propose a new term called biomass carbon removal and storage, or ‘BiCRS’, as a way to describe capturing carbon in biomass and then sequestering it. Startups Charm Industrial and Running Tide are pursuing this approach. Julio and his co-authors think of BiCRS as an alternative pathway to bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).

They then zoom in on a promising source of biomass: waste. Example projects include a ski hill built on an incinerator in Copenhagen and a planned waste-to-hydrogen plant in Lancaster, California.

Shayle and Julio also dig into questions like:

How to procure and transport biomass, especially biowaste, at scale?
How to avoid eco-colonialism, i.e. when wealthy countries exploit the resources of poorer countries to grow biomass without meaningful consent?
If everyone wants it, when is biowaste no longer waste? And when there’s a shortage of waste—like corn stover, for example—what’s the risk of turning to raw feedstocks, like corn?
How to pickle trees? (yes, you read that right)

TEA breakdown: green ammonia and synthetic methane Nov 21, 2024

Show notes

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 technology, and Dr. Greg Thiel, director of technology. They apply their TEA chops to two technology pathways — green ammonia and synthetic methane. EIP hasn’t invested in either area yet because both struggle with challenging economics. Shayle, Greg, and Melissa talk about what would have to change to make those economics work, covering topics like:

The basics of ammonia and methane production
The cost stack of ammonia production and the surprisingly large role transportation plays
The challenges of integrating ammonia production with renewables, like buffering hydrogen
Novel approaches to ammonia synthesis, including scaling down the existing process, lower temperature, and pressure

Recommended resources

U.S. Department of Energy: Clean Hydrogen Commercial Liftoff

Catalyst: Ammonia: The beer of decarbonization

Catalyst: Climate tech startups need strong techno-economic analysis

On December 3 in Washington, DC, Latitude Media is bringing together a range of experts for Transition-AI 2024, a one-day, in-person event addressing both sides of the AI-energy nexus: the challenges AI poses to the grid, and the opportunities. Our podcast listeners get a 10% discount on this year’s conference using the code LMPODS10. Register today here!

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