Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Will inference move to the edge?

18 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today virtually all AI compute takes place in centralized data centers, driving the demand for massive power infrastructure. But as workloads shift f...

Can AI revolutionize EPC?

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big construction projects in the U.S. are notoriously unpredictable, often finishing over budget and behind schedule. Part of the problem is the inher...

Who benefits from the AI power bottleneck?

04 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The bottleneck holding back AI is a scarcity of power, or so goes the story. That may be true — and plenty of reporting backs it up — but differen...

Looking for a turnaround in transmission

20 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After years of stalled transmission buildout, there are new signs of progress. Earlier this month, SPP approved $8.6 billion in transmission projects ...

New Mexico proves America can still build [partner content]

18 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Across the country, people are asking the same question: why is it so hard to build in America? From transmission lines to clean energy factories, pr...

Driving down the cost of green hydrogen

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A few years ago, industry and political leaders embraced hydrogen as a solution to a laundry list of hard-to-abate decarbonization challenges — stee...

Inside a $300 million bet on AI for physical R&D

06 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A big problem with using artificial intelligence to discover new materials? It struggles to predict beyond its training data. That means AI might be b...

Unpacking DOE's proposal to transform data center interconnection

30 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Last Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to consider rulemaking to fast-track interconnection fo...

Five big questions about the future of energy

23 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve covered AI’s massive power appetite in depth over the past year – with good reason. It’s the driving force behind much of the change and...

Frontier Forum: The new power map for AI infrastructure

21 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As AI reshapes the industrial landscape, companies are questioning whether the grid can keep pace. Permitting delays, transmission constraints, and re...

Calibrating hype with Akshat Rathi

16 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the climate space, every idea sits somewhere along the hype continuum. Some command outsize attention. Others fly under the radar despite big poten...

How insurance can narrow the valley of death [partner content]

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jamie Daggett started his career as a mechanical engineer working for cleantech startups in Silicon Valley. But after five startups and three buyouts,...

How Base Power plans to use its fresh $1B

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Yesterday, Base Power announced a $1 billion series C, giving the residential battery company an eye-popping $4 billion post-money valuation. Base man...

Frontier Forum: A new playbook for clean energy growth

06 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After the failure of federal climate legislation in 2010, clean energy advocates realized they had to look elsewhere for momentum. The result was a sh...

The new wave of DERs

02 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Demand response was the original distributed energy resource. In its early days, it was surprisingly manual: a grid operator would call up a large loa...

Ag residue and carbon removal

25 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Agricultural byproducts like corn stover, wood chips, and soybean husks typically get left to decompose and release carbon dioxide. Don’t call them ...

Is now the time for DERs to scale?

18 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A decade ago, DERs were hot. The hype was that things like batteries, smart devices, and other distributed energy technologies would offset the need f...

When to colocate data centers with generation

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The idea of colocating data centers with behind-the-meter generation is picking up steam, including large projects in Memphis, Texas, and Utah develop...

AMA: Geoengineering, nuclear, power prices, and more

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

You sent in great questions, and today we’re answering them. In this episode, Shayle hands it over to Lara Pierpoint, the managing director of Trell...

The mechanics of data center flexibility

28 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Adding flexibility to data center loads could ease strain on the grid and reduce the need for costly new generation. And, according to one study, shav...

The Green Blueprint: Terrawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy

21 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Editor's note: With the Trump administration's efforts to roll back California's electric trucking rules, there's new attention on heavy duty transp...

The case for sodium-ion

14 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Our first episode covering sodium-ion batteries featured a cautious take on the chemistry: Back in February Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER ...

Explaining the ‘Watt-Bit Spread’

07 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Editor’s note: The uncertainties of data center construction — like when, where, and how much to build — are as pressing as ever. So we’re rev...

PJM and the capacity crunch

31 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The PJM capacity auction this month broke records with sky-high wholesale power prices — and that was by design. Under PJM’s auction rules, tigh...

Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The job of an EV battery is unforgiving. If its performance slips too far — say, lost acceleration or range — it's probably off to the recycling h...

Five big questions emerging from the OBBB

17 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) complicates things. Together with a related executive order, it dismantled key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act,...

Tumult in residential solar

10 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Residential solar has had a rough couple of years. In 2024, the market contracted 31% and major companies like Sunpower and Titan went bankrupt. Now, ...

Fresh intel from state utility regulatory filings

03 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

You’ve probably heard about Nat Bullard’s massive decarbonization slide decks, filled with charts and insights into decarbonization drawn from cli...

GM's big new battery tech push

26 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Lithium-manganese-rich (LMR) batteries could offer a rare combination in energy storage: high energy density at lower costs. They swap much of the exp...

The story of steam

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Addison Stark thinks waste heat is a waste of time. The real opportunity, he argues, is decarbonizing industrial steam, which accounts for roughly 30%...

The state of play of data center development

12 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The future of the grid increasingly hinges on where and how data centers get built. To forecast the kind of power infrastructure we need to meet AI’...

The gas turbine crunch

05 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Demand for turbines is growing fast, but so are lead times — causing serious headaches for developers. In Texas, one of six projects that pulled pro...

How geothermal gets built

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Geothermal seems to be nearing an inflection point. With rising load growth, clean, firm power is more valuable than ever. Next-gen geothermal players...

What to make of Trump's deep-sea minerals push

22 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In April, the Trump administration issued an executive order to accelerate the development of deep-sea minerals — part of its broader push for “en...

A former race car engineer on battery safety and supply chains [partner content]

20 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

From his days as an IndyCar race engineer to his current role as chief product officer for a leading storage integrator, Tristan Doherty has always wo...

Terrawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy

15 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 epis...

The U.S. nuclear groundswell

09 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Frontier Forum: Unlocking next-generation VPPs

06 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Catalyst Live at SF Climate Week

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The geopolitics of rare earth elements

24 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

China’s new export controls on rare earth elements (REEs) are a problem for EVs, renewables, and other industries that rely on the minerals, especia...

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

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. storage market is experiencing hockey-stick growth, with multiple gigawatts being installed quarterly. But new policy uncertainties around ta...

Serving data center load with carbon capture

17 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Big tech’s data center construction boom is fueling a flurry of natural gas development, despite the fuel’s challenges, and it’s complicating bi...

How climate disasters are shaping insurance markets

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Premiums are rising. Insurers are leaving markets. But people keep building in risk-prone areas, and the climate disasters just keep coming. Can insu...

Frontier Forum: Future-proofing data center power infrastructure

07 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Data centers face a critical timing problem. They need massive amounts of power immediately, but grid upgrades can take more than seven years to compl...

Specialized AI brains for physical industry

04 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Everyone wants a piece of general purpose models. Instacart has deployed ChatGPT for recipes and meal planning. The Mayo Clinic is using it to summari...

The potential for flexible data centers

27 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Tyler Norris says regulators have been getting two different stories. On one side, they’ve been hearing that data centers are largely inflexible loa...

Frontier Forum: How tax credit transfers are reshaping energy finance

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 cre...

The coming robotics wave

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Robots are becoming cheaper to make and more powerful because of AI. In the climate tech space, they’re already laying transmission lines, inspectin...

An ode to electrochemistry

13 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Batteries were electrochemistry’s breakout hit. For years it was a field that kept a low profile, outshined by flashier cousins like biotech and com...

How AI is solving real utility challenges [partner content]

11 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Laurent Boinot, a power and utilities leader at Microsoft, remembers the moment he discovered the power of artificial intelligence. Years ago, as a st...

A skeptic’s take on AI electricity load growth

06 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Cultivated meat’s “trough of disillusionment”

27 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between 2013 and 2023, cultivated meat companies raised a total of nearly $3 billion. In 2020, Singapore approved the world’s first cultivated meat ...

The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries

20 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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, Bedroc...

The case for colocating data centers and generation

13 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

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

06 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 c...

Are utilities ready to fully harness demand flexibility? [partner content]

04 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

2025 trends: aerosols, oil demand, and carbon removal

30 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 an...

The climate-ag grab bag

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s a three-part puzzle for global agriculture: How do you increase calories for a growing population, while zeroing out emissions and minimizing...

FOAK tales

16 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Making DERs work for load growth

09 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, i...

Lithium’s wild ride

02 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan

26 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Pl...

Scaling low-carbon products with book and claim systems

19 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

What went wrong at Northvolt?

12 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown su...

How cyber attacks could threaten the energy transition [partner content]

10 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 a...

Explaining the 'Watt-Bit Spread'

05 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Frontier Forum: Why utilities should go big on VPPs

02 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

From biowaste to “biogold”

28 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

TEA breakdown: green ammonia and synthetic methane

21 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Getting heat pumps right

14 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ca...

Fixing the refrigerant problem

07 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The bad news: The refrigerants we use in air conditioners, fridges, and vehicles absorb hundreds to thousands of times more heat than carbon dioxide d...

Why climate tech startups get this one thing wrong

31 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This might be our wonkiest topic yet: Techno-economic analysis, or TEA.  Before a startup proves its technology is commercially viable, it models how...

The unexplored frontier of methane removal

24 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We capture concentrated methane emissions from point sources like dairy barns, landfills, and coal mines. Mitigating methane emissions is essential to...

Frontier Forum: An energy-first approach to data centers

22 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

AI is enabling a multitude of solutions across power, industry, and transportation. But AI energy demands are increasingly stressing the electric grid...

The complex path to market for low-carbon cement

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 exis...

Unpacking China’s cheap battery costs

10 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Chinese battery companies are manufacturing the cheapest cells in the world right now, and it’s not just because of cheap labor and state subsidies....

Giving tribes a stake in the critical minerals boom [partner content]

08 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Tannice McCoy grew up in a mining family, but she never imagined herself in the mining business. Today she’s the president and general manager of Ne...

DAC’s bumpy road to commercial scale

03 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The world’s first large-scale, commercial direct-air capture (DAC) plants are coming online – or are about to. How soon will we see a boom in high...

Ammonia: the beer of decarbonization

26 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Editor’s note: There’s some big money flowing into low carbon ammonia right now. Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $1.56 billi...

The state of connected DERs [partner content]

24 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. and U.K. could see 500 gigawatts of distributed resources hitting the power system in the next few years.  But after years of watching DERs ...

Can AI revolutionize materials discovery?

19 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

AI is working its way across climate tech, helping companies discover giant lodes of ore, catch battery defects, and monitor energy infrastructure. Co...

The better mousetrap fallacy

12 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Deploy or innovate? Scale up an existing technology or develop a breakthrough? Build, build, build, or invent a better mousetrap? The question isn’t...

The rise of climate adaptation tech

05 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Cutting emissions is essential to avoiding the worst of climate change, but we also have to deal with the impacts of climate change happening now. For...

Why are we still flaring gas?

29 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Oil producers waste a lot of natural gas. Last year they flared 150 billion cubic meters of associated gas into the atmosphere, equivalent to about ha...

Hunting for geologic hydrogen

23 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Hydrogen has two big problems: cost and supply. As a low-carbon feedstock, it could decarbonize planes, industry, and power plants. It could even repl...

The cost of nuclear

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Editor’s note: There’s new interest in nuclear power from electric utilities, the White House, and the public. While NuScale’s deal to build a s...

Frontier Forum: Is America’s green bank ready?

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

America’s green bank – officially known as the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – is ramping up. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal...

Understanding the transmission bottleneck

08 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Editor’s note: There’s momentum behind permitting reform in the U.S. Congress right now. It could mean unstopping a serious bottleneck in climate ...

Pathways to decarbonizing steel

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Little-known fact: The primary product of steel mills is CO2. A conventional blast furnace produces almost two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of...

The EV market’s awkward teenage years

25 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Automakers got ahead of their skis. EV sales are up globally and in the U.S., but growth has been slower than expected and uneven. After enjoying a wa...

Can chip efficiency slow AI's energy demand?

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In March, Nvidia announced a new microchip designed for AI that is 25 times more energy efficient than its predecessor. Two months later, Google annou...

The reshoring of American solar trackers [partner content]

17 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

While we were all at home during Covid desperately trying to get our hands on toilet paper, exercise equipment, and home furnishings, solar executives...

Decarbonizing the high seas

12 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

While aviation may be converging on one main pathway to decarbonization — sustainable aviation fuel — maritime shipping may require a more diverse...

Going deep on next-gen geothermal

27 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Investment is on the rise in geothermal, where advances in drilling techniques are driving down the cost of generation right as the grid needs more cl...

Demystifying the Chinese EV market

20 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

New electric vehicles — including both battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles — make up nearly half of new car sales in China. Compared to s...

Under the hood of data center power demand

13 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Driven by the AI boom, data centers’ energy demand could account for 9% of U.S. power generation by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research I...

Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan

06 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 out...

Heavy duty decarbonization

30 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Batteries are making their way into more passenger cars and commercial vehicles than ever before, but the limits of electrification mean that we’ll ...

With Great Power: Why dynamic rates are gaining momentum

28 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week, we’re featuring a crossover episode of With Great Power, a show produced by Latitude Studios in partnership with GridX. Subscribe on Appl...

Could VPPs save rooftop solar?

23 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. rooftop solar market has tanked. Residential applications in California, the largest market in the country, plunged 82% from May through Nove...