Catalyst with Shayle Kann

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Catalyst with Shayle Kann episodes

February 20, 2025The promise and perils of sodium-ion batteries
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, Bedrock Materials, and Acculon Energy are jockeying for position in the market. Meanwhile, almost all of the world’s sodium-ion manufacturing capacity, current and planned, is in China. CATL’s CEO Robin Zeng suggested that sodium-ion could ultimately take up to half of LFP’s market share.
The potential advantages are exciting: Sodium-based chemistries could be cheaper and safer. They could also use domestically sourced materials, avoiding the geopolitical headaches of minerals critical to the lithium-ion supply chain, like nickel, cobalt, and copper.
So, amid all the sodium-ion hype, what's credible and what’s not?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Adrian Yao, founder of Stanford’s STEER program, a battery research group specializing in techno-economic analysis. He’s also a board member of lithium-ion manufacturer EnPower, where he was once a co-founder and CTO. Shayle and Adrian talk about the findings from a recent Nature paper Adrian co-authored exploring a techno-economic analysis of sodium-ion batteries. They cover topics like:
The differences between sodium-ion and lithium-ion, as illustrated by the battery sandwich
Misconceptions about sodium-ion, for example, that it’s necessarily safer
The biggest challenges: energy density and cost competitiveness
How players in the lithium-ion supply chain could pivot to sodium-ion
Why the technology’s success may hinge on the price of nickel, copper, and other lithium-ion materials
Recommended resources
Nature Energy: Critically assessing sodium-ion technology roadmaps and scenarios for techno-economic competitiveness against lithium-ion batteries
Latitude Media: Peak Energy’s quest to build US sodium-ion battery dominance
Heatmap: Is Sodium-Ion the Next Big Battery?
WSJ: U.S. Battery Rush Spurs $1.4 Billion Sodium-Ion Factory in North Carolina
Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
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.
45 min
February 13, 2025The case for colocating data centers and generation
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 the founder and CEO of Intersect Power believes there’s a workaround that enables larger data centers and speeds up time to power: colocating behind-the-meter generation and storage on megasites rich with renewable resources.
In short, instead of bringing clean generation to load, bring load to clean generation. Major partners are on board with the strategy. Last December Intersect announced $800M in investment from Google and private equity firm TPG, along with a goal of catalyzing $20B in projects by 2030.
So how does colocation work? And how far does it go?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Sheldon about how colocation can help sidestep the challenges associated with grid upgrades, transmission, and permitting. They dig into topics like:
Major forces shaping the market, like AI demand, the IRA, and tariffs
Optimal PPA prices and tenures
The right mix of grid-connected and behind-the-meter power
The extreme version of colocation: off-grid data centers
Megasite developers for hydrogen and crypto and how they took advantage of the AI boom
Whether DeepSeek will cause energy demand to temper or accelerate
Recommended resources
Latitude Media: Google’s new data center model signals a massive market shift
Latitude Media: Load growth is changing how Silicon Ranch develops solar projects
Latitude Media: Amazon’s data center strategy: ‘Get back to being grid-tied’
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 executive editor.
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.
45 min
February 06, 2025More 2025 trends: DeepSeek, plug-in hybrids, and curtailment
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 conversation with Nat, the former chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon.
In this episode, Shayle and Nat dig into topics like:
Rising solar installations and stagnating wind
Why we’re wasting so much renewable power amid skyrocketing load growth
The rise of Chinese plug-in hybrids and exports
Whether DeepSeek’s efficiency will temper or turbocharge load growth
The woeful state of transmission buildout, despite demand for it
Why one quarter of Virginia’s power demand comes from data centers
Recommended resources
Latitude Media: Does DeepSeek call the data center boom into question?
Latitude Media: To get data centers online, one Virginia co-op is proposing a new business model
Latitude Media: A dizzying year at the AI energy nexus
Catalyst: Demystifying the Chinese EV market
Reuters: Exclusive: Global solar capacity hits 2 TW on path to climate goal, data shows

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor.
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.
48 min
February 04, 2025 Are utilities ready to fully harness demand flexibility? [partner content]
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 tools for managing a cleaner grid — demand flexibility.
Demand response and time-varying rates have been in use for decades. But many utilities still haven't fully embraced demand flexibility in their planning. As utilities push toward higher penetrations of renewable energy, the ability to shift demand becomes increasingly vital for maintaining grid stability.
The challenge? It requires a fundamental shift in mindset: from controlling power plants with knobs and dials to empowering customers through smart rate design.
"For years and years and decades and decades, the utilities' incentive has been to sell customers more of their product," says Scott Engstrom, chief customer officer at GridX. "But this idea of much more targeted demand flexibility as a requirement to manage a grid dominated by intermittent renewable resources is quite new."
In this episode, produced in partnership with GridX, Scott Engstrom talks with Stephen Lacey about why demand flexibility deserves more attention — and how utilities can better harness it as they transition to cleaner energy.
Learn more about how GridX delivers detailed analytics for time-of-use rates, helping utilities harness grid flexibility as part of their decarbonization efforts.
31 min
January 30, 20252025 trends: aerosols, oil demand, and carbon removal
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 and current co-founder at data insights company Halcyon.
In part one of their two-part conversation, Shayle cherry-picked the most interesting slides and sat down with Nat to unpack them. They cover topics like:
Accidental solar geoengineering and the state of aerosols
The United States’ record-setting fossil fuels exports
Whether Chinese oil demand is peaking
Conflicting indicators for the state of ESG investing
Whether you can have too many carbon removal startups
Recommended resources
Catalyst: Putting a halt to geoengineering — by accident
Catalyst: 2024 trends: batteries, transferable tax credits, and the cost of capital
Catalyst: 2023 trends: biomass, ESG, batteries and more
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.
34 min
January 23, 2025The climate-ag grab bag
Here’s a three-part puzzle for global agriculture: How do you increase calories for a growing population, while zeroing out emissions and minimizing land usage?
The stakes are enormous. According to the UN, the world has to feed an estimated 9.8 billion people by 2050. But agriculture currently accounts for about a third of global carbon emissions and is driving the conversion of important ecosystems – like rainforest and grasslands – into farmland. Converting land is especially problematic because it releases additional carbon into the atmosphere.
So what do we do about it?
In this episode, Shayle talks to journalist Mike Grunwald, who recently penned a defense of industrial agriculture in The New York Times. He’s also the author of the upcoming book “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.” Shayle and Mike cover topics like:
The drawbacks of industrial agriculture, like the overapplication of fertilizer and the mistreatment of animals and employees
Why calories per acre need to grow substantially to feed a growing global population
Why minimizing land usage through industrial agriculture may cut more emissions than alternative methods of farming like regenerative agriculture
Why feed additives are not as important as the land efficiency of beef production
Potential solutions, like biofertilizers, cultivated meat, and addressing food waste
Why vertical farming requires too much electricity to be viable
Recommended resources
Simon & Schuster: We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate
The New York Times: Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food
Canary Media: Why vertical farming just doesn’t work
Reuters: Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs
Catalyst: Mitigating enteric methane: tech solutions for solving the cow burp problem
Catalyst: From biowaste to ‘biogold’
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.
39 min
January 16, 2025FOAK tales
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 worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But infrastructure investors are notoriously conservative and convincing them to bite can be challenging.
So what do infrastructure investors really want?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Mario Fernandez, head of Breakthrough Energy’s FOAK finance program. It has worked with companies like Rondo, Form Energy, and Lanzajet to overcome challenges on the path to infrastructure investment. Coincidentally, the program is also called Catalyst (no relation to our show). Mario and Shayle talk about the journey from lab-proven technology to a fully de-risked infrastructure investment, covering topics like:
Why investors want to see a path to multiple, repeatable projects
Mario’s prescription for a scale-up path: pilot, demo, and FOAK project
The difficulty of following that path on a limited financial runway
The commercial construct and the tension between negotiating a flexible offtake and securing a customer
Developing the right capital stack and accurately estimating capital needs
Recommended resources
The Green Blueprint: Rondo Energy’s complicated path to building heat batteries
CTVC: Venture to Project Finance Duolingo
Catalyst: Financing first-of-a-kind climate assets
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.
56 min
January 09, 2025Making DERs work for load growth
To meet AI-driven load growth utilities and big tech companies have been building — or reopening — big power plants. Georgia Power, for example, is planning to expand its fleet of natural gas plants. And Microsoft signed a deal last September to re-open Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant
But could we meet a portion of that load growth with distributed energy resources? Pier LaFarge thinks so.
In this episode, Shayle talks to Pier, co-founder and CEO of Sparkfund. (Energy Impact Partners, where Shayle is a partner, invests in Sparkfund). DERs can come online much faster than large, centralized generation, Pier argues. He makes the case that utilities are especially well-positioned to lead what he calls “distributed capacity procurement” (DCP) of customer-sited solar, storage, and other assets. Shayle and Pier cover topics like:
How host agreements work, using utility-owned assets sited at customer locations
How the effective load carrying capability (ELCC) of DERs compares to large, centralized power plants
The relationship between DCP and VPPs
The key tradeoff of DCP: DERs are faster to build, but cost more and have lower ELCC than large, centralized plants
Who should pay for those higher costs?
Why vertically-integrated utilities are best-positioned to take advantage of the value DCP creates for capacity, distribution, and transmission
The limitations of DCP at a systems level
Recommended resources
Latitude Media: Can distributed energy answer AI’s power problem?
Latitude Media: Jigar Shah: It’s time for VPPs to get simpler
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.
39 min
January 02, 2025Lithium’s wild ride
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 2022 and then came crashing back down by 2024 — with big consequences for batteries and EVs that depend on the mineral.
So what happened? And what could happen next, especially as EV sales have been slower than expected?
In this episode, Shayle talks to Ernest Scheyder, author of “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives” and senior correspondent at Reuters. They walk through the basics of lithium production and the recent timeline of key events affecting the industry, covering topics like:
Why more of the world’s lithium comes from hard rock spodumene than salt brines
How lithium is not one commodity at one price, but actually a variety of forms of the mineral at different prices
Lithium’s shift from a niche industry serving nuclear and pharmaceutical supply chains to a global force supplying the battery transition
The current oversupply, driven by Chinese producers that operate at a loss, and the western companies that are trying to challenge them
Chile’s efforts to nationalize its lithium industry and shift to direct lithium extraction, which has not worked at commercial scale
Recommended resources
Simon & Schuster: The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
Latitude Media: Are things about to turn around for the U.S. battery sector?
Catalyst: The EV market’s awkward teenage years
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.
37 min
December 26, 2024Drew Baglino on Tesla’s Master Plan
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.
1 hr 3 min

About Catalyst with Shayle Kann

From the publisher's feed

A weekly podcast featuring veteran investor Shayle Kann interviewing experts about the state of the energy sector and the technologies powering decarbonization.