The Carbon Copy
A narrative news show about the trends shifting our carbon-based economy. Each week, host Stephen Lacey digs into the business and technology stories that explain the rise of clean energy, the challenge to fossil fuels, and how the energy system is transforming in dramatic ways. Produced by Latitude Media.
Episodes
April 17, 2024 • 41 mins
AI is suddenly in use everywhere – and it’s headed for the power sector.
New research from Latitude Intelligence and Indigo Advisory Group shows a coming wave of AI integration, inside and outside of utilities.
Distributed energy companies are increasingly integrating AI into their products, and many power companies are building teams to take advantage of automation for operational efficiency and grid monitoring.
But adoption wi...
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April 9, 2024 • 41 mins
John O’Donnell co-founded and ran two solar thermal companies. He watched as the technology shifted from being the most promising utility-scale solar technology, to getting out-competed by photovoltaics everywhere.
But he stayed passionate about heat. Today, he’s CEO of Rondo Energy, which makes a “heat battery” for industrial applications using bricks, heating coils, and cheap, intermittent renewables.
And that cheap PV that made ...
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March 28, 2024 • 32 mins
Mark Gurman has been covering Apple since 2009. His reporting career is full of scoops about new products or strategic decisions from inside the company.
His latest scoop in February: Apple is finally shutting down its efforts to build an autonomous electric car.
Apple first started exploring an electric car in 2014. At that point, cars had already become computers on wheels, Tesla was scaling mass-market production, and vehicle a...
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March 22, 2024 • 23 mins
The US green hydrogen industry is at a critical juncture.
After months of input and debate, the government put out draft rules for tax credits at the end of last year – setting strict requirements for matching new, local renewables to hydrogen production.
It was hailed by many as a really important step for ensuring that green hydrogen actually lives up to its name. But across the industry, the reaction has been mixed – even among...
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March 14, 2024 • 27 mins
There are many forces that could hold back AI in the power system: computing infrastructure, power availability, regulation, and corporate inertia.
The biggest one? Good data.
Utilities and grid operators are awash in data. But getting access to it – or making sense of it – is very difficult.
For a better understanding of how to change that, we turn to someone who spends a lot of his time in the so-called data cloud: Tititaan Pal...
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March 12, 2024 • 15 mins
Early in her career, Amanda Li worked on many deals in solar and storage as part of a billion-dollar sustainable infrastructure fund. And she discovered a problem that often hinders deployment: the underwriting process is cumbersome and slow.
“All of it was in spreadsheets, word documents, emails. When you look at a solar deal, there's a lot of documentation, a lot of counterparties to deal with, and that information needs to be pr...
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March 6, 2024 • 29 mins
When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts.
Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of ChatGPT 3.5, which ran on Microsoft’s data centers.
“That was the moment that I real...
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March 5, 2024 • 21 mins
In the early 2000s, Steve Cotton ran a company serving the fast-growing data center industry with backup battery systems.
And when those systems reached the end of their lives, the company monetized kilotons of lead-acid batteries by sending them to recycling facilities – industrial plants that break down and burn the components.
“It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You've got a bunch of people wearing hot...
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February 22, 2024 • 47 mins
Can a couple trillion dollars feel small?
Global investments in the energy transition – from the buildout of factories and power projects to project finance and government debt – hit nearly $1.8 trillion last year.
That’s almost as big as the GDP of South Korea. It’s nearly 20% more than the year before, and nearly eight times more than a decade ago. But even with those record levels of spending, we are astonishingly behind what’s...
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February 15, 2024 • 36 mins
If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants.
That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other distributed assets into dispatchable po...
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February 8, 2024 • 33 mins
The storage market is full of surprises. Last year, global storage installations were a third higher than expected, driven mostly by Chinese policy to attach batteries to renewables.
Meanwhile, a ramp-up in manufacturing is causing oversupply – and a potential shakeout for smaller battery makers.
By 2030, the world could see 1.8 terawatt-hours of storage capacity installed, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
Rapid manufac...
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February 1, 2024 • 56 mins
As President Biden’s green industrial policies reignite the US manufacturing base, AI computing workloads soar, and machines across the economy turn electric, the power grid is facing an historic increase in demand.
After almost two decades of flat electricity consumption, suddenly America’s grid planners are doubling their forecasts for demand – raising the urgency for new infrastructure.
This week, we’ll ask: what’s needed, and w...
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January 23, 2024 • 33 mins
Artificial intelligence is quickly accelerating drug discovery, healthcare services, product design, and manufacturing efficiency. Now it's here for materials development – and it could be one of the most influential uses of AI in energy.
A decade ago, Greg Mulholland started playing around with machine learning as a way to accelerate product development of materials inside LEDs. After seeing its potential – and witnessing the rapi...
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January 17, 2024 • 45 mins
Turbulent. Equilibrating. Those are the words that investors Gabriel Kra and Carly Anderson use to describe the last year for venture capital in climate tech.
We now have a full picture of the year for climate tech venture investing in 2023. Fresh data from Sightline Climate shows a decline in deal counts, round sizes, and a dropoff in repeat investors.
It was a year of rising interest rates, declining valuations, a bank collapse...
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January 9, 2024 • 30 mins
When the numbers for 2023 are finalized, there could be another 320 to 413 gigawatts of solar installed around the world – bringing global capacity to nearly 1.5 terawatts.
Solar is now on track to surpass coal and fossil gas capacity in the next few years, bringing generation to 10% of global electricity supply.
There's universal recognition that we're firmly in the solar era. But outlooks on how fast the technology will grow are...
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December 22, 2023 • 57 mins
The competing trends in the energy transition from 2023 were stark: a looming peak in demand for oil, gas, and coal; a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; and an increasingly realistic pathway to triple renewables development.
But we also experienced the hottest global temperatures in 125,000 years, record US oil & gas production, inflation headwinds that challenged large renewables projects, and a very tough yea...
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December 18, 2023 • 52 mins
In less than a decade, America has become the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas.
In the mid-2000s, the US was building terminals to import more fossil gas. But that all changed after the fracking boom unlocked vast reserves of hydrocarbons.
The US became a net exporter in 2017. Then, Russia’s war on Ukraine forced a scramble for new supplies of gas in Europe – and American companies stepped in.
The consequence: a ...
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December 12, 2023 • 55 mins
The nuclear industry is grappling with several issues: high interest rates, rising commodity prices, limited supply chains, fuel availability, and a regulatory environment that has been slow to adapt to new technologies.
In the west, nuclear knowhow has faded over the decades. Even with a surge in policy support and public interest, development is stagnant and capacity has fallen. Momentum has moved over to Asia, mostly China. But...
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November 29, 2023 • 64 mins
It took 12 years to triple global renewables – and now we need to do it in eight years.
As the latest UN climate summit begins, there’s a proposal on the table to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Countries may agree to it in theory, but can the market meet it in practice?
This week, we’ll look at why this tripling is necessary, how it could be done, and what technologies will dominate.
Then, we’ll address a confusing narr...
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November 16, 2023 • 63 mins
Weather forecasts for the grid depend on supercomputers to calculate the flow of heat, water, and radiation in the atmosphere, and then spit out predictions about what could happen next.
These supercomputers are powerful. But they are also expensive and slow, relative to how quickly the weather changes. A new class of AI-based weather forecasts could change the game for grid operators and renewable energy developers. Will they take...
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