Investor Shayle Kann is asking big questions about how to decarbonize the planet: How cheap can clean energy get? Will artificial intelligence speed up climate ...
Scaling low-carbon products with book and claim systems
A mismatch between suppliers and buyers is making it hard to grow the supply of low-carbon products like cement, steel, and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
If you want to produce a product like SAF, you want to find the cheapest place to do it — someplace where there’s cheap, low-carbon hydrogen, for example. But the buyers who have the incentive and money to pay for those products might be halfway across the world.
Or say you’re a supplier of a low-carbon building material. Risk-averse contractors with tight margins may hesitate to pay a green premium — even if the final buyer of the building might be willing to pay extra to cut emissions.
So how do you bridge the gap between the buyers and sellers of low-carbon products?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Adam Klauber, vice president of sustainability and digital supply chain at World Energy, a low-carbon fuels company. They talk about book and claim, a system to separate the environmental attribute (avoided emissions) from the physical good (e.g. fuel). It’s a system that developed in the power sector as renewable energy credits (RECs) and is now spreading to SAFs and other industries. Shayle and Adam cover topics like:
Book and claim versus other systems of tracking environmental attributes, such as mass-balance and physical chain-of-custody
Lessons from the most mature book and claim systems, like RECs and SAF
Key challenges like double counting the interoperability of digital registries and certification
Other industries where book and claim may develop like maritime, trucking, steel, cement, and chemicals
Recommended resources
Roundtable On Sustainable Biomaterials: RSB Book & Claim Manual
World Economic Forum: The Clean Skies for Tomorrow Sustainable Aviation Fuel Certificate (SAFc) Framework
Sustainable Supply Chain Lab: Decarbonizing the Air Transportation Sector: New greenhousegas accounting and insetting guidelines for sustainable aviation fuel
Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping: MaritimeBook & Claim
RMI: Structuring Demand for Lower-Carbon Materials: An Initial Assessment of Book and Claim for the Steel and Concrete Sectors
Catalyst: The complex path to market for low-carbon cement
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.
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37:48
What went wrong at Northvolt?
Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy.
So what went wrong?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like:
What went well — from fundraising billions of dollars to securing major off-takers
What didn’t go well — like trying to build multiple types of batteries, in multiple factories, on multiple continents
How venture capital investors may have pushed the company to be too ambitious
The tradeoffs of choosing NMC over LFP
Challenges with their equipment supplier Wuxi LEAD
The upside: Sam’s belief that Northvolt’s factory will ultimately make batteries
Recommended resources
Latitude Media: What Northvolt's bankruptcy means for Europe's battery ambitions
Intercalation: Battery production is genuinely difficult
Bloomberg: Northvolt Has Major Obstacles Ahead Even With Bailout In Reach
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.
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39:15
How cyber attacks could threaten the energy transition [partner content]
Security experts often say there are two kinds of companies.
“There are those companies that have been hacked, and those that don't know that they are being hacked – especially when we look at the energy industry,” says Bilal Khursheed executive director of Microsoft's global power & utilities business.
Khursheed works with companies to deploy digital technologies to speed up the clean energy transition. And he also focuses heavily on a threat that could derail the transition – cyber attacks.
There are two reasons for this. One is the rise of internet-connected devices. There are now 15 billion IOT devices connected around the world, with a huge number of them on power grids. The other reason is sophistication. More attacks are now coming from organized groups, many of them with political motivations.
“These aren't just your random hackers. These are highly sophisticated James Bond villain types that are targeting our energy systems,” explains Khursheed.
In this episode, produced in partnership with Microsoft, Bilal Khursheed talks with Stephen Lacey about the evolution of cybersecurity threats in energy. They discuss how the threats are changing, their consequences for critical infrastructure, and how solutions are improving in the age of AI.
This episode was produced in partnership with Microsoft. After listening to the podcast, you can read about how to navigate NERC CIP compliance in the cloud, learn how energy firms around the world partner with Microsoft on security, and dig into the 2024 Microsoft Digital Defense Report.
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23:46
Explaining the 'Watt-Bit Spread'
Every data center company is after one thing right now: power. Electricity used to be an afterthought in data center construction, but in the AI arms race access to power has become critical because more electrons means more powerful AI models.
But how and when these companies will get those electrons is unclear. Utilities have been inundated with new load requests, and it takes time to build new capacity.
Given these uncertainties, how do data center companies make the high-stakes decisions about how much to build? How sustainable is the rate of construction? And how much will these data center companies pay for electricity?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Brian Janous, co-founder and chief commercial officer at data center developer Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Brian recently explained how he thinks about these questions in a LinkedIn post titled “The Watt-Bit Spread,” which argues that the value of watts is incredibly high right now, and the cost of those watts is too low. Shayle and Brian cover topics like:
The unclear data center demand and high costs that are making data center companies hesitant to build
How the skills required for data center development have shifted from real estate and fiber to energy
Why higher power prices are needed to incentivize new generation
Potential solutions for better pricing electricity and speeding up the construction of new generation
Recommended resources
Latitude Media: AES exec on data center load: 'It's like nothing we’ve ever seen'
Latitude Media: Mapping the data center power demand problem, in three charts
Latitude Media: Are we thinking about the data center energy problem in the right ways?
Catalyst: Can chip efficiency slow AI's energy demand?
Catalyst: Under the hood of data center power demand
Sequoia Capital: AI’s $600B Question
Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.
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42:59
Frontier Forum: Why utilities should go big on VPPs
In the next five years, Arizona Public Service estimates peak demand will grow by 40%. In order to meet that peak, the utility is increasingly turning to demand-side flexibility.
A few years ago, APS started working with EnergyHub to experiment with smart thermostats as a resource to manage peak demand. The initial resource was modest – a few megawatts, and then 20 megawatts.
That program eventually turned into a 190-megawatt virtual power plant made up of smart thermostats, behavioral demand response, commercial and industrial demand response, and some batteries. And the APS operations team now treats the VPP as a valuable resource.
“We had to really build trust in this as a real resource. As it got bigger and you could see a noticeable difference when we called on these devices, that trust really began to build,” explained Kerri Carnes, director of customer-to-grid solutions at APS.
This week, we’re featuring a conversation about the value of VPPs with APS’ Kerri Carnes and Seth Frader-Thompson, co-founder and president of EnergyHub. It was recorded as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum series.
What does APS’ experience tell us about what is working in VPP program design? How do we convince utilities that VPPs are reliable? And what is their role as load growth rises?
“A VPP is actually more capable in some ways than a traditional power plant,” explained Frader-Thompson. “My guess is that over the next few years we'll probably come up with some more nuanced things to call VPPs.”
This is a partner episode, produced in partnership with EnergyHub. This is an edited version of the conversation. You can watch the full video here that includes audience questions about VPP design and implementation.
Investor Shayle Kann is asking big questions about how to decarbonize the planet: How cheap can clean energy get? Will artificial intelligence speed up climate solutions? Where is the smart money going into climate technologies? Every week on Catalyst, Shayle explains the world of climate tech with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives. Produced by Latitude Media.
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