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 Trellis Climate at the Prime Coalition and host of The Green Blueprint. Together they cover topics like:
- Whether solar radiation management will remain the “black sheep” of climate technologies
- What technologies will excel in a world of rising power prices
- Whether the nuclear renaissance is finally here
- Why Lara and Shayle are more bullish on vehicle-to-home than V2G
- The thorny plastics problem – and whether it’s core to climate change
Resources
- Catalyst: Solar geoengineering: Is it worth the risk?
- Latitude Media: Google, Kairos, and TVA ink historic next-generation nuclear deal
- Catalyst: The US power demand surge: The electricity gauntlet has arrived
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
Catalyst is brought to you by Anza, a solar and energy storage development and procurement platform helping clients make optimal decisions, saving significant time, money, and reducing risk. Subscribers instantly access pricing, product, and supplier data. Learn more at go.anzarenewables.com/latitude.
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.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
Shayle Kann: I’m Shayle Kann and this is Catalyst.
Lara Pierpoint: This is our last shot. We keep calling nuclear renaissance and we’ve got to actually mean it and do it this time. And also they’re not saying nuclear renaissance as loudly, right? I think we sort of made a lot of promises in the early 2010s that did not come to pass. So everyone’s gearing up for real this time.
Shayle Kann: I mean, that might be right that this is the last shot, but it’s a really good shot.
Lara Pierpoint: It is a good shot.
Shayle Kann: All of the puzzle pieces are in place here. There’s really no excuse, I don’t think if it doesn’t work this time
Coming up: You asked. We tried to answer.
I’m Shayle Kann. I invest in early stage companies in Energy Impact partners. Welcome. All right, this is the Ask Me Anything episode we’ve been teasing for probably too long. We got a ton of great questions. Thank you for sending them in. My friend Lara Pierpoint agreed to jump on and ask these questions. Help me answer them as well. Lara, you may know she hosts her own podcast called The Green Blueprint, which we’ve played on this feed a couple of times in her day job. Lara is the managing director of the Trellis Climate Program at Prime and we had a lot of fun answering these questions together. So with no further ado, here’s Lara.
Lara, welcome.
Lara Pierpoint: Thanks Shayle.
Shayle Kann: Thank you for doing this with me. I’m looking forward to it. There are a lot of really good questions actually there. We both went through and picked a bunch that we like, but there are many more that we’re not going to get to that are also good questions. So thank you to everybody for asking many good questions. I’m going to hand the reins over to you and let you take us through the questions that are at the top of our collective list.
Lara Pierpoint: That sounds great. We’re going to dive right in and we’re going to start with a totally non-controversial topic Shayle and get right into solar radiation management. So coming to us from Lewis Hoffenberg, do we think that solar radiation management companies will remain black sheep until the politics of stratospheric aerosols get better?
Shayle Kann: It’s an interestingly worded question because there’s multiple things assumed in there. One is that there are black sheep today, which is probably true. The other is that the politics of stratospheric aerosol injection will get better, which I think is a question mark like less certain. It’s a tricky one. I’ve looked at a bunch of SRM startups, not a bunch. There are a few out there. Let’s not get too crazy, but there are definitely they exist and I find I’m interested in your perspective on this. I find it to be a weird category to look at from a venture perspective because what you end up finding is that a company that is planning to inject aerosols into the stratosphere to create a cooling effect can spend very little money in principle and get an enormous cooling effect. So if you compare it to the cost of carbon removal, for example, on just a dollar per degree Celsius metric, it’s like orders and orders of magnitude cheaper.
So on one hand, from a venture perspective, you’re like, this is just way better pending. Obviously a whole host of questions that fall from that. On the other hand, it’s actually hard to get to a big market size for it ultimately because it is so cheap. I don’t remember exactly the number, but we did an episode on this, I dunno, a couple years ago, and it was something like a couple billion dollars might get you half a degree Celsius of global cooling, truly ludicrous numbers. So if we get to the point where we pass some point of no return from a climate perspective, probably we should do that. The world should do that. I’m not sure it’s a venture company though. Governments should do that. A billionaire should do that themselves, but I don’t know how that becomes a successful startup. So I’m very intrigued by SRM generally and think that it should not be a black sheep of a research category, which it kind of is still. But from a venture perspective, I can’t quite square the circle. I know you’ve spent a little time around this world as well. I’m curious what you think.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I mean I think this probably won’t surprise you, but I am extraordinarily aligned with your viewpoint. I think this is one of those categories of climate solutions that feels icky and we get worried about it for good reason. The question around what other effects is this going to have on our environment regardless of the particular methodology, I think is a really big one. But I think you’re right, and a lot of folks in my inner circle these days are right that we are getting to where we’re past the point of no return and this kind of stuff probably is going to need to happen and potentially on a very wide scale. So yes, absolutely on the research, absolutely on understanding that on when and how it’s needed and ideally doing it with as much clear information as possible. But yeah, big questions about this being venture backed.
And just to break that down a little bit, because I think about this across a lot of technologies. I think one question is the demand question, which you’ve alluded to who’s going to buy this stuff, what is the market for what you’re ultimately producing as an SRM company? I think that’s a big challenging issue. And then there’s the question of the public perception and the pushback. And so we both live here in the Bay Area Shayle and of course in Alameda just a year ago there was a startup company that was releasing sea salt particles that are at least trying to into that atmosphere and it went real bad, real fast and the city council effectively shut it down out of a lot of fear. And so I think that’s the other thing to understand is that the level of community interaction and storytelling and other things that are required to start to help people understand these things is pretty astronomical in this category.
Shayle Kann: If you’re going to be a startup in this category, there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it. I mean I think about the corollary to carbon removal and particularly direct air capture, which also, I mean there weren’t as many, this is going to ruin the environment kind of concerns about dac, but certainly Dak was a backwater of a category for a long time. And so it took the pioneers like carbon engineering and climb works and so on, global thermostat to a decade in the wilderness basically to just plug away at it and eventually the market came around to them. And whether or not DAC works out, it’s definitely more mainstream now. You can imagine something like that happening with SRM. You can also imagine, not imagine, I can tell you about the opposite, which is there is another startup called Make sunsets, which a lot of people have heard about who has decided to just do SRM Braly in the open, kind of flouting all rules and regulations to the extent that they can. I actually went to a party a couple of years ago where they were on a porch releasing balloons into the atmosphere. It was like a gimmicky thing to do. That is the wrong way, in my opinion, to go about building an SRM startup. I’m not sure there is a right way exactly, but that is not it least
Lara Pierpoint: A party though. Shayle. Let’s talk about the important features here.
Shayle Kann: It was a pretty cool party. Yeah. Okay, good. Alright, we should move on. We
Lara Pierpoint: Should. Okay. So next question coming at us from Philip Healy and other fellow Californian, which clean energy sectors would be the best use of funds and which of those areas overlap with delivering the most near term cost decreases in electricity prices?
Shayle Kann: Well, I like the second part of that question the most, right? I don’t know that I have the strongest opinion at the high level on which clean energy sectors are the best use of funds overall. But the second part of the question implies that the best place to place your funds right now within a clean energy world is to deliver near term cost decreases for electricity. And you mentioned this guy also is a Californian like us. We both appreciate, I think we’re actually kind of at the vanguard of what’s going to happen nationally to some extent, maybe not for the same reasons. California power prices in California are ludicrous, are astronomical, they’re ridiculously high. Everybody in California who’s listening to this podcast is immediately going to agree. Now that is for a host of reasons in California, we have wildfire costs and all sorts of other things from the utilities here, but in my mind it’s a harbinger of what’s coming in the rest of the country.
I’m very concerned about retail electricity prices. I don’t see a trend that points in the opposite direction right now. We’ve been living in a world for a while where T&D costs have been rising, but it’s been offset largely by cheap natural gas prices. Right now we have the cost of new generation going up, natural gas prices, natural gas, new generation is getting more expensive. Everybody talks about the cost of installing a new natural gas turbine has gone up a lot. There’s in general inflationary pressures across the board. Of course we just removed a bunch of incentives for solar and wind, which were the cheapest costs on a per kilowatt hour basis and are now going to become more expensive as a result of that. We have tariffs that we’re introducing, not to mention all of this load growth that causes a need for a bunch of new T&D investment, which is going to get rate based and passed through to customers.
And so I’m super concerned that electricity prices, they’re already starting to rise more than they have in the past decade or so, but we’re just at the front end of it. And I think as a broad statement, that’s one of the biggest risks to decarbonization actually in the near term. So I like that question for that reason. What clean energy sectors would best cause a near term decrease in electricity prices? I’ve been thinking lately about what feels to me, at least from a tech and venture perspective, the most unloved sort of workhorse of decreasing electricity costs to customers, which is energy efficiency. We don’t really talk about energy efficiency that much anymore, at least in venture climate, techy circles. But I think it might make a roaring comeback actually, because rates are going to cause bills to become really painful for customers. So I’m sort of freshly interested in a whole universe of things that just deliver lower energy consumption overall, whether at the consumer level or obviously lots of folks are thinking about this at the data center level and the chip level and stuff like that. But anyway, I’ll say energy efficiency deserves more love than it gets.
Lara Pierpoint: I love that and I definitely agree with that one. I would just maybe add demand flexibility and then also this I think is probably obvious, but anything that decreases infrastructure, build out costs, because I think at the end of the day that’s the question is how much does it cost to build that interconnection with the new data center? How much more capacity do you need to put on the transmission and distribution and the delivery systems there and how can you do all that stuff unbelievably cheaply? And that by the way points to my one thought on the first question, which is I think we spend a lot of time often as an ecosystem thinking about what sort of clean energy sectors, how do we compare one to another? But I wish we could reframe the question a little bit around where are the leverage points? And so one of the things for example, that I think about with how do we get more electric vehicles on the road, if we could decrease the cost of laying wire in a way that made it very easy and very cheap to build charging infrastructure, that’s something that would be a massive unlock going into the future. So I would love to think more about those kinds of things.
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I agree with you there, but I think to me the biggest risk to EV adoption right now above all else is rising electricity prices. Oh, for sure. No, I agree. This is going to hurt electrification to the extent that it continues to happen. By the way, I totally agree with you on demand flexibility. We’ve talked about that a bunch on this part too. I would say I’m bullish on DERs in general more so than I have been, right? I’ve lived the journey of excitement around DERs that happened a decade ago and then deployment occurred. It happened, it’s happening, but we didn’t decentralize the electricity grid in the way that a lot of people thought we were going to. But I think that the macro is so favorable now to various types of DERs, be it demand flexibility, be it behind the meter generation, be it storage, whatever it is, there’s going to be an entirely new category of companies that get created and innovate around that that I think are going to have a lot of tailwinds.
Lara Pierpoint: Sure. Here. Alright. We’ve already started segueing into this question pretty strongly, but Adam Smith who comes to us from Massachusetts, so one of our fellow high payers of electricity, he’s asking about when the price of electricity is rising in many parts of the country, what can we do about that? How do we expect customers to choose things? How do we keep this electrification movement going? To your earlier point about that being the biggest barriers to EVs right now?
Shayle Kann: I mean I’m not sure you can actually. There’s certainly a lot you could do theoretically from a policy perspective you can incentivize and provide rebates and all sorts of things like that. But we should be really honest that at the end of the day there is an economic calculus customers are doing if they’re going to electrify, particularly once we get past the early adopter stage and we’re trying to get into the mainstream adoption and that calculus historically, generally speaking, electrification is a game where you pay more CapEx upfront and then save money over time because what you’re using is more efficient. And that value proposition erodes when electricity prices relative to natural gas prices. So this is a spark spread conversation when those electricity prices relative to natural gas prices are especially high. So I think again, there’s policy stuff you can do and you can try to innovate around the products themselves and make them more flexible so that you can pay less for electricity, you use them at off peak and all that kind of stuff is real. But the fundamental underlying factor of higher electricity prices makes electrification less attractive to me is unshakeable.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, totally with you. I definitely converted to all electric HVAC in my house and now I pay almost twice as much as what we paid before on a gas-based system. And so this is what you do if you’re someone who cares about the climate, but most people are going to be price motivated. They’re not like me.
Shayle Kann: Yeah. I am curious, I don’t know, maybe it’s too early in the curve on electricity prices outside California I should say has bent upward but fairly recently. I’m curious whether there is anybody’s done a study of if there’s a noticeable change in adoption of let’s just say heat pumps as an example, when electricity prices rise substantially or whether we’re still in the phase of adoption where customers aren’t really thinking that way?
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I think it’s also important to think about the backlash here. And so one of the big debates that I had with a bunch of grad school friends via text a few years ago was around do we encourage people or otherwise incentivize them or admonish them to get rid of their gas stove and to get electric stoves? And one argument goes, you shouldn’t do this. Particularly again in places where you might want to have the gas as kind of a backup in situations where you can’t access your electricity, you’re still able to cook things, all that sort of stuff. People like gas stoves, there’s sort of a big question around is this the hill that we die on as climate people? So what do you think about that?
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I had this conversation, we did a crossover pod with David Roberts, I dunno, a couple years ago, and we had to do an overhyped under hyped gimmick. My overhyped thing was electric stoves. I do not think it’s, listen, the argument to really push for electrification of stoves is if you want to try to remove gas hookups entirely, then you got to do it. But I don’t know, I just look from a practical standpoint, it is a small load in the house. If what you care about is electrifying stuff, you should really push people toward electric vehicles and electric HVAC and stoves don’t really matter at the end of the day. So I just don’t get it. I don’t get why that’s a a separate local health thing, air pollution thing. But if you set that aside and it’s just on a pure climate perspective, it is to me very clearly not the HIL to die on.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay, next question, time to be vulnerable. Vipul Devluk is asking what is the biggest thing or area that you’ve been wrong about over the past five years in either direction? Either you were too optimistic or too pessimistic?
Shayle Kann: Let’s see. Let me give you one of each. I will say so too optimistic. I think I under counted the likelihood that the inflation reduction act was going to get shredded in the way that it ultimately partially was anyway. The thinking at the time was after the bill passed, it was like, okay, what would have to happen in order for the IRA to really take a big hit? First of all, republicans would need to take control of the president, see the Senate and the House, and then they would need to decide to go after the IRA. And historically speaking, there had been a long precedent of the US never really removing existing tax credits. We would let things expire, but we never really pulled them back. I mean, just look at the ethanol tax credits as an example. And so the thinking was like, okay, there’d be a huge political shift and then this would have to be the hill that they would decide to die on. Obviously that is exactly what happened and I think I underappreciated the likelihood of that possibility and the degree to which when it got tied up into this bigger budget bill, a small number of fairly hardliner republicans could really dictate a lot of the terms. Now it ended up being fairly nuanced and some sectors are fine, some sectors are hit harder, et cetera. But if you had asked me prior to the election, what’s the likelihood that any real big substantial changes are going to occur to the ira, I think I would’ve gotten that
Lara Pierpoint: Wrong.
Shayle Kann: I was too optimistic there. On the pessimistic side, I would say if you had asked me five years ago the likelihood that there was going to be a real nuclear renaissance
In the US I would’ve said, I hope so. But it seems unlikely to me because again, it was one of these, a number of things have to happen. You have to have all this political will and momentum to make changes at the NRC. You’ve got to get public on board, you’ve got to get a bunch of these companies through the gauntlet of regulatory approvals, financing would have to show up all these things. And I guess what I didn’t appreciate probably is the degree to which those things are correlated with each other. And so what has ended up happening? I’m now very optimistic about it. I’m realistic about the timeframe of it, I think,
Which is a lot of people are not, but I do think it’s going to happen and it’s because basically all of those chips are falling, nothing is done yet. There’s a long journey here. But what I didn’t appreciate five years ago I started to appreciate maybe 3, 2, 3 years ago is that there was a sort of quiet building momentum of support that was pretty bipartisan, pretty cross-cutting and would be a wave to galvanize a bunch of folks who generally don’t agree with each other to all push in the same direction. And if that happens and lightning strikes and everything plays out just right as it has now with all this load growth and AI wave and all that, then you can kind of break down a bunch of barriers in short order. So I’m much more optimistic now about the future of nuclear power in the US than I was five years ago.
Lara Pierpoint: I love hearing you say that Shayle, especially because as I was reading this question I was thinking about when we did some predictions a couple years ago, and I’m pretty sure that I was bullish on SMRs and I can’t remember what I said quantitatively over fast, how fast I would come to pass, but I think I was overly optimistic in that moment, particularly specifically about SMRs. But I agree with you that this is a moment for nuclear. I think by far the biggest question is can they take advantage of what’s happening with the AI data center, electricity rise boom that’s occurring right now and the timing of all of this and when they can actually deploy.
Shayle Kann: To me it’s like clearly yes, they can take advantage of that in the sense that you can get a PPA at a price that is going to be hopefully sufficient to make the project economics work. Those things are big deals. I don’t think that was true five years ago. So you definitely can get that now that’s necessary but not sufficient obviously. And there’s a bunch of other things that have to happen. The big ones being obviously sort of either in the regulatory realm like NRC approval and NRC process and cost, that’s one region. And then the other region is financing projects, which I think is the thing people are kicking the can down the road on, but somebody’s going to have to wear the risk of capital overruns. You got to figure out who that’s going to be. It could be the government through the loan programs office, but it could be private sector as well. But somebody has to wear that risk. And particularly for the first few larger scale projects, they could even be big SMRs, right? If it’s a 500 megawatt project, this is true too. It’s a lot of money. So there are still problems to figure out, but like I said, I think I was, I didn’t appreciate how correlated all these things were. And so if it all happens, it all happens kind of at once.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, it’s been really fascinating to me that when I hear folks from the nuclear industry talk right now, they basically say quietly, this is our last shot. We keep calling nuclear renaissance and we’ve got to actually mean it and do it this time. And also they’re not saying nuclear renaissance as loudly. I think we made a lot of promises in the early 2010s that did not come to pass. So everyone’s gearing up for real this time.
Shayle Kann: That might be right that this is the last shot, but it’s a really good shot.
Lara Pierpoint: It is a good shot.
Shayle Kann: All of the puzzle pieces are in place here. There’s really no excuse I don’t think if it doesn’t work this time.
Lara Pierpoint: All right. Nuclear industry, you’re on notice coming at us from Benjamin Tincq having been through a first clean tech boom and bust cycle a few years ago. Where would you say we are currently in this climate tech cycle and what do you think happens next?
Shayle Kann: We’re definitely, well, okay, let’s geographically constrained this first because I do think it is pretty markedly different in the US versus in Europe, for example, other parts of the world. But presuming that this is predominantly a US focused question, though I know Ben and he lives not in the us so apologies Ben, that I’m going to make this kind of a US centric answer. We’re clearly in the bust part of the cycle. I think it’s been one difference between this time and last time in my mind is that the fall from glory has been a lot steeper and faster because it was really driven by a political change, the change administration and then the swiftness with which that new administration has really gone on the attack against a lot of climate tech stuff is different. Last time around it was more of a slow roll, right?
Nothing precipitated the bust quite as much. It was just sort of a series of failures and lack of capital and so on. I guess you could say cylindra last time around, but I don’t actually think that’s true. That was just a marker of it was an example, it wasn’t the cause this time it has been pretty steep. So that is different and that’s probably more challenging because I think a lot of companies feel like they had the rug pulled out from under them, everything looked glorious to them nine months ago and all of a sudden it doesn’t. On the other hand, one thing that is different this time is that there’s a separate macro supercycle underway. This is specific to the energy world, but this was not true last time where last time the Cleantech 1.0 bust, we just lived in a otherwise fairly normal energy world.
This time we do not this time. There was a bit of a bust in the climate tech market while the energy sector rose to prominence as maybe the most important sector in the world apart from chip making. And that cuts both ways obviously. I mean it results in building a lot of new natural gas generation, a bunch of other stuff. But also there is a need. There are customers there, things are moving quickly. There’s willingness to pay. There’s willingness to innovate. So in some ways, I think that parts of the sector anyway are better off because the bubble burst, it was bound to burst. It burst quickly and then a new tailwind arrived right around that same time. And so that’s sort of lucky. Other parts of the climate tech sector don’t get that tailwind. And so it sort of depends. But that’s one thing that I think is different this time versus last time.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I agree with that. The way I think about this too is in the stages of innovation. And so one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in this clean tech cycle, we’re doing a better job with early innovation. I think we’ve got more support, more interesting patient venture capital. And so to your point about this being a bigger bust cycle, I think more companies raised more money right than during the clean Tech 1.0. So it’s a little bit more dramatic, the fall offs that we’re seeing right now. I also wonder how much of this do you think is about needing as a climate tech ecosystem to reckon with the reality of scale up and deployment? And obviously this is a little, this is what I focus on in my day job, but I think that might be part of the story too, is that we’ve got all these companies that have gotten to this point, they’ve got a proven technology, but now we’re trying to figure out how to cross that huge valley of death chasm into deploying on a global scale. And I don’t know that we’ve really figured that out as an ecosystem yet.
Shayle Kann: I think that that valley of death is real and remains an issue. And I’ve said before, I think it remains the biggest unsolved step in the journey for a lot of these companies. I don’t know that I think it is particularly worse in this cycle than the previous cycle. I think it was also true
In the previous cycle, as you said, a lot of companies raised a lot more money in this cycle because a lot of the rise to prominence of the climate tech world coincided with the ZIRP era and 2020, -20, -21 money was flowing abundantly to everybody, including to a lot of climate tech companies. So it’s true there is a lot of money in some cases that actually got some companies over the hump that the challenges as interest rates rose and that era of free money started to disappear, then we sort of entered back into the world of normalcy where you have to figure out how to do it.
But I continue to think that the big lesson of the current state of affairs and climate tech is that in a lot of the subcategories of the market, being clean, being green, whatever is insufficient being X, but clean, particularly if it’s X, but clean and more expensive is just not enough and you don’t have the durability of customer demand that you are going to need. And so a lot of the companies that have really had the rug pulled out from under them, I think it’s because of that. That was the logical fallacy. If we could do this thing that is already done, but we could do it particularly if it’s commodity, but we can make it green and a little more expensive, that’s a tough value proposition. But for a few sub-sectors where there’s policy support or something like that.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I hear that this is where if we were a more campy podcast, we would play a clip of Kermit singing. It’s not easy being green, it’s not easy. Alright, let’s talk about V2G. So Ari Naggar is asking us if we deploy V2G and especially AC alternating current V2G, it has the potential to have a much lower dollar per kilowatt hour installed cost than resi or industrial stationary storage. So it’s not scaling. Will it dig into why it could be impactful and what the hurdles are to scale?
Shayle Kann: Yeah, I want to get your take on this too. I agree with the premise of this just from a pure, well, let me say this. I have historically been more bullish on V2H as people call it than V2G, right? Using the battery in your vehicle as backup for your home because there is a large market for home backup. Its generators that’s a couple billion dollars a year now it’s batteries, powerwalls, whatever. Just from a pure economic perspective, the battery in your vehicle is a way, way, way cheaper way to do that home backup. And so to me that piece of it is obvious and it is happening, but it is true that it’s also not scaling all that fast. And I’m not entirely sure why that is, except for that I think nobody has quite figured out how to make the customer value proposition work. There’s a kit to backfeed that you have to buy and that has capital costs. So nobody’s quite solved that whole equation, but that should happen. V2G meaning injecting back into the grid should also make sense.
But I think there’s more of an economic question mark of what is the value, what’s the revenue that you can attain by backfeeding into the grid with your vehicle battery and is that worth it given that you’re going to be expending the battery in your vehicle and your charging patterns may or may not coincide with when there’s high value on the grid. So that one to me is a little bit more complicated, but either way we’re sitting, I mean I have a Kia E nine, it has a hundred kilowatt hour battery, so I have a hundred kilowatt hour battery that I could be using and I don’t commute by car every day. So that battery is sitting there idle. It’s a huge asset. I should be doing something with that and I’m not, so I’m bullish on V2G, but I’m not actually sure what’s going to take to unlock it.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I think I’m with you on all those points. I think V2G from a fleet perspective, yes, all day and I feel like I wish tomorrow that all of the school buses in the country were electric and supplying all kinds of grid backup, particularly in the summer when it’s needed and when those buses aren’t being used. So those sorts of things I think definite yes. I also agree with you on V two H. That seems like a really logical way to do home backup and agree that we need to figure out what’s going on there and how to scale. I think the only thing I’d add on the question of residential homeowner V2G is the psychology piece because I think there is just something about the idea of removing the charge from your car and supporting the broader grid. I think it’s one thing if you’re supporting your own home needs and you’re kind of able to make those decisions and balance within that small system, but I think there’s something about the idea of the broader grid taking out juice from your battery that provokes range anxiety even when it doesn’t make sense.
And I don’t know how we get over that.
Shayle Kann: I feel like that’s got to be solvable. I mean, I agree that it’s a thing, but if the numbers are there, if it’s enough, we got to be able to figure that out. And I don’t know what it is yet. Part of the challenge is I don’t know that there’s an independent business to be built around it. Exactly. I dunno who is supposed to be doing it, but certainly if Tesla made an announcement tomorrow that they’re going all in on V2G, I think it would scale.
Lara Pierpoint: Alright, Tesla, you’ve got your marching orders. Let’s talk for a second about plastics. So a question from Justin Brody, comet plastics are one of the cheapest materials on the planet and one of the largest uses of petroleum outside energy. How do we decarbonize our plastic sector Shayle?
Shayle Kann: Okay, so I’m not the expert here and I’m going to wait for a bunch of listeners to tell me the ways in which what I’m about to say are wrong. But I think there’s a common misconception where people conflate a couple of things. One, they conflate the use of petroleum with an emissions problem, which it’s not burning. Petroleum is an emissions problem using petroleum is not necessarily, so plastics do contain petroleum and hydrocarbons and stuff like that, but except to the extent that those things are burned, they do not create emissions that cause climate change. The second thing that I think people conflate is a broader environmental concern with plastics, with climate. There are many reasons from an environmental perspective that you might want to care about plastic pollution of the oceans, microplastics, blah, blah, blah. But those are not inherently climate problems. To my understanding, the majority of the reason that plastic has a lot of embedded emissions is largely the energy consumption of the production of the precursors.
So the production of ethylene uses is steam cracking of natural gas predominantly, and that does produce a fair amount of emissions. But that’s a very specific thing. And so you could solve that in a bunch of ways. You can introduce new mechanisms of producing ethylene. You can electrify that process, which some people are doing. But that’s really what it’s about. And I don’t worry personally about the fact that plastics use petroleum inherently because that petroleum is locked up inside the plastic. It’s not being emitted as CO2 into the atmosphere generally. So I think that plastic is a climate challenge, but I think it is not as big a climate challenge as a lot of people make it out to be. It may be a big environmental challenge.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I think it’s important to think about these interactions between decarbonization and the overall environmental space. And one of the things that we see a lot are folks who say, invest right now in my waste to energy project. And when you dig into what they’re doing with waste to energy, it’s like if you’re burning tires and putting whole bunch of really horrible stuff into the atmosphere, we really have to ask ourselves, is that necessarily better than keeping these things locked up in its tire form and putting it into a landfill? But these are big questions and I think these come up in the plastic sector as well, and certainly moving to alternatives make sense, but we were just discussing this, I don’t know what alternatives are there to plastic. Not a lot out there. Yeah,
Shayle Kann: It’s pretty good. It turns out.
Lara Pierpoint: Turns out
Shayle Kann: There are bioplastics and biodegradable and blah, blah, blah, and those are good in many other ways. I just want to be clear that they’re not necessarily better from a global climate perspective.
Lara Pierpoint: Well, and I don’t know if you compost here in the Bay Area Shayle, but we just found out that our green compost bags are actually not accepted by Oakland Waste Management for composting. So we’ve just had to switch to paper. So even sometimes the bioplastics that are supposed to be biodegradable, you got to check that.
Shayle Kann: That stuff is always so complicated.
Lara Pierpoint: So complicated. It’s so hard for consumers. Okay, one final question. What are you optimistic about right now?
Shayle Kann: Well, I think I alluded to it earlier, but the thing that makes me most optimistic and excited every morning is that the energy sector is so dynamic right now. It is so important. It’s so central, so many eyes are on it. So much money and innovation is flowing through it and it has emerged as a choke point for the suite of technologies. That is the most important area of innovation in the world right now, which is AI and being the focal point of all that is an opportunity. It must be grasped. We could do it the right way or the wrong way, or we could not do it. But you don’t get those kinds of opportunities all that often. The world has turned to the energy sector and wants to solve a bunch of these problems as quickly as possible. We’ll throw whatever resources are required at it. So what you can look at that as a bad thing. I look at it as an opportunity. And so I’m optimistic that out of this mushy mess of solving these energy problems is going to emerge a host of things that will have long-term legs well beyond this current wave of data center build out and will serve to make the energy economy better.
Lara Pierpoint: I love that vision. I have one more brief thing to add, which is the people. We’ve got some really incredible people working on climate and especially all of you who sent in really good questions. And there were a couple in here about what do I do now when it’s so hard to find a job in the climate sector, which we were talking about a little bit. I think keeping the faith and working on this and remembering something that Scott Jacobs told a group of us at a big meeting that we were having where he pointed out, this is Scott Jacobs is the CEO of Generate. And he said, the thing is that it feels bleak right now, but the CEOs of companies, including all of the biggest major companies, oil companies, everyone here in the us, they’re smart people. They know that climate change is real. This is going to be a revolution that will happen. This is a rough moment, but as you say, we’ll get there.
Shayle Kann: Love it. Well, Lara, thank you again. This was super fun. As I said before, we have many questions we didn’t get to, so maybe we’ll do this again sometime.
Lara Pierpoint: Let’s definitely do it again. Thanks so much for having me, Shayle..
Shayle Kann: Lara Pierpoint is the managing director of Trellis Climate at Prime and the host of the Green Blueprint. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitude media.com for links to today’s topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. This episode is produced by Daniel Woldofff, mixing a theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I’m Shayle Kann, and this is Catalyst.
