Catalyst with Shayle Kann

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 Plan 3 with Drew Baglino, who stepped down as the company’s senior vice president for powertrain and energy in April. 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 outlines a vision for extensive electrification and a reliance on wind and solar power.  In this episode, Shayle talks to one of the executives behind the plan, Drew Baglino, who was senior vice president for powertrain and energy at Tesla until April when he resigned. In his 18 years at Tesla he worked on batteries, cars, and even Tesla’s lithium refinery. Shayle and Drew cover topics like: Why Drew isn't sure that AI-driven load growth “is going to be as dramatic as people think” Drew’s optimism about the U.S.’ ability to build out enough transmission for decarbonization How to deal with the high rates of curtailment and what to do with that excess power Meeting the material requirements of decarbonization and Drew’s experience with permitting Tesla facilities  Recommended Resources: Tesla: Master Plan Part 3 CNBC: Tesla execs Drew Baglino and Rohan Patel depart as company announces steep layoffs The Carbon Copy: AI's main constraint: Energy, not chips Catalyst: Understanding the transmission bottleneck 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.

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.

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.

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.