Catalyst with Shayle Kann
Episodes
The demand stack: Turning customers into grid capacity
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For years, demand-side programs like energy efficiency and demand response were treated as compliance, not real resources. Now, that’s changing. ...
The state and future of nuclear waste
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The nuclear power sector is gaining a lot of momentum. But even as SMRs continue to flourish, the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program moves...
Scaling America's domestic solar supply chain
19 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the dark cloud of federal policy hanging over the solar industry, skyrocketing load growth is driving demand. The question is whether supply c...
AI scaling pathways: on grid, on edge, off grid, off planet
12 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
As demand for data center power skyrockets, available options to provide that power have dwindled. And cohesive frameworks for finding sustainable gen...
Frontier Forum: How VPPs earn grid-scale trust [partner content]
10 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Can a grid operator tell the difference between a virtual power plant and a traditional one? That’s the idea behind the Huels Test, a framework dev...
Digging deep for super hot geothermal
05 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Despite its ability to deliver ample carbon-free energy, the potential of geothermal and EGS is limited by the number of drilling sites close enough t...
Volts crossover: Six big energy questions
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
They’re at it again. Two years after they last teamed up for a Volts/Catalyst crossover episode, David Roberts joins Shayle for another far-ranging ...
The rise of grid power electronics with Drew Baglino
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, the physical equipment underpinning the electric grid has remained largely unchanged: passive, "dumb" devices installed as far back as th...
PJM and ERCOT navigate a capacity rollercoaster
12 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, the PJM capacity crunch became a focal point for an entire industry struggling to navigate the explosive growth of hyperscaler data centers...
The path to market for new nuclear reactors
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Spurred by a suite of executive orders and investments from the federal government, new nuclear reactors are coming soon. Or the announcements are at ...
The rise of permissionless DERs
29 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Distributed batteries are having a big moment. On one hand, companies like Base Power and Tesla have leaned into large residential batteries that expo...
More 2026 trends: Solar costs, oil oversupply, and the startup slump
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We are back for Part 2 of Shayle’s double header conversation with the veteran energy analyst Nat Bullard, dissecting his annual presentation on the...
A ‘rain delay’ for the energy transition [partner content]
20 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 2024, Tom Burton described the clean energy transition as entering its “third inning” — a phase defined by execution and scale. A year later,...
2026 trends: Gas turbines, Texas’ load queue and China electrifies
15 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a new year, which means the veteran energy analyst Nat Bullard has dropped another annual, data-rich presentation on the state of energy and de...
The VC case for 'full stack deeptech'
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
For “deep tech” or industrial tech investors, a captivating idea on paper doesn’t always translate into a sustainable or viable business. Even a...
How AI is changing weather forecasting
02 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Weather forecasting drives billions of economic decisions — from grid operations to evacuation planning. Better forecasting could improve supply cha...
The gas turbine crunch
26 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Demand for turbines is growing fast, but so are lead times — causing serious headaches for developers and even cancellations. In Texas, one of six c...
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...