Everybody in the Pool

Energy Peace Partners co-founder and managing director Sherwin Das joins Molly Wood to explain how renewable energy can do more than cut emissions—it can also support peace, security, and economic opportunity in some of the hardest places in the world to build. They dig into the links between fossil fuel dependence and conflict, why clean power matters differently in parts of Africa where electricity access is still limited, and how a new kind of renewable energy credit is helping unlock investment for solar mini-grids, run-of-river hydro, streetlights, hospitals, and jobs.

• Why fossil fuels and conflict are so often connected—from global wars and supply shocks to local fuel supply chains controlled or taxed by armed groups
• Energy Peace Partners’ focus on countries with low electrification, high climate vulnerability, and conflict risk, including South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria, Chad, Uganda, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo
• How renewable energy can improve safety, extend business hours, power hospitals, and create alternatives to joining armed groups
• The Peace Renewable Energy Credit, or P-REC: a high-impact renewable energy credit designed to help finance clean power in places traditional REC markets have overlooked
• Why off-grid and distributed renewable energy systems in Africa needed a new approach to verification, financing, and impact measurement
• How corporate buyers including Microsoft and Google have helped unlock more than $1.6 million through P-REC purchases so far
• The new P-REC Aggregation Facility, backed by the African Development Bank and Nordic Development Fund, and its goal of supporting dozens of new projects and first-time electricity access for hundreds of thousands of people
• How Energy Peace Partners measures peace impact using community-level data, baseline surveys, and the Positive Peace Framework
• Why renewable energy success should be measured not just in megawatts and carbon avoided, but also in safety, income, jobs, health, education, and stability

• Energy Peace Partners: https://energypeacepartners.com/
• Peace Renewable Energy Credits: https://energypeacepartners.com/peace-rec/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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Climate Cabinet founder and executive director Caroline Spears joins Molly Wood to explain why some of the most important climate decisions in America are happening far below the level of Congress—in mayor’s offices, public service commissions, land commissioner races, county commissions, state legislatures, and even obscure budget committees. They dig into how Climate Cabinet uses data science, AI, and on-the-ground intelligence to find and support overlooked state and local climate champions, and why data centers have suddenly become the hottest local energy-policy fight in the country.

• Why state and local offices are often the real bottleneck for clean energy deployment
• Climate Cabinet’s “Moneyball” approach to climate politics: finding overlooked races and candidates with data science, AI, and local intelligence
• The climate power of local offices people may not think about, from municipal utility mayors and public service commissions to land commissioners, state legislatures, and budget committees
• How Climate Cabinet helps climate and clean-energy champions run, win, and govern with better policy support once they are in office
• The data center explosion: rising electricity demand, possible cost-shifting to families and businesses, opaque deals, and lawmakers signing NDAs with developers (yes, REALLY!)

The future of U.S. climate policy may depend less on the headline fights in Washington, D.C., and more on the overlooked people and rooms where energy, transportation, land use, housing, insurance, and infrastructure decisions actually get made.

• Climate Cabinet: https://climatecabinet.org/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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This week, in honor of the July 4 holiday and a commitment to the importance of free speech, activism, and the power of a citizenry to determine its own future, I want to revisit a conversation from way back in season 2, with Dana R. Fisher. Fisher is the author of “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” and in this conversation, we talked about the importance of activism in addressing the climate crisis. She explains that while the state and the market have not been able to solve the crisis, civil society has a crucial role to play. Fisher highlights the role of the radical flank, which engages in attention-getting actions to raise awareness and expand the movement (like throwing orange cornstarch on Stonehenge).

She emphasizes that these actions are nonviolent and aim to draw more people who are sympathetic to the cause. Fisher also discusses the need for a mass movement that pushes back against fossil fuel interests and works through various channels, including the electoral process and lobbying. And we discuss what it takes to turn attention-getting actions into mass mobilization.

• Saving Ourselves, the book: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/saving-ourselves/9780231557870
• Buy from the publisher with discount code CUP20
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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Utah Clean Energy climate scientist and energy analyst Logan Mitchell joins Molly Wood to explain how a deeply conservative state can still become a proving ground for clean energy—by focusing on affordability, reliability, and coalition-building. They dig into the rapid rise of next‑generation geothermal in Utah (including the DOE’s FORGE project and private-sector follow‑on development), why geothermal could deliver clean firm power faster than new gas turbines or nuclear, and why this is one of the rare climate technologies with real bipartisan momentum.

• Why Utah has become a surprising clean-energy leader (and why “business-friendly” permitting can accelerate deployment)
• How Utah Clean Energy works in practice: intervening in utility regulatory dockets, stress-testing long-term resource plans, and advocating for an affordable, reliable, clean power mix
• The grid value proposition: geothermal as clean firm power that complements wind/solar—especially during “quiet, cold” post-storm stretches when both wind and solar can underperform
• A plain-English breakdown of key grid terms:
• Baseload: power that runs steadily
• Dispatchable: power you can ramp up/down when needed
• Why geothermal may become more dispatchable (turn pumps off midday, produce more during high-price evening hours)
• Why Utah is the current hotspot:
• Public-private knowledge transfer from DOE’s FORGE research site to nearby commercial projects
• Streamlined, iterative permitting that reduces uncertainty for first-of-a-kind projects
• Strong geothermal resources across Utah and the broader West
• The scale and speed: a first ~100 MW phase expected to come online quickly, with expansion potential that rivals the footprint of major fossil plants—plus transmission constraints as the near-term limiter
• The politics: geothermal’s appeal across the aisle—jobs, energy security, reliability, and domestic know-how—and why keeping it “above the partisan fray” matters
• The workforce bridge: geothermal as a near 1:1 skills match with oil & gas subsurface expertise—extracting heat instead of hydrocarbons

Next‑gen geothermal offers a credible path to fast, scalable, cost-competitive clean firm power—potentially filling the reliability gap that makes high-renewables grids harder to manage, while staying politically durable in places where climate language alone doesn’t land.

• Utah Clean Energy: https://utahcleanenergy.org/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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In part two of my two-part field trip to Livermore, California, I sit down with Inertia Enterprises’ third co-founder — Annie Kritcher, the chief scientist at Inertia and a longtime physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Annie was the lead designer behind the December 2022 National Ignition Facility (NIF) shot that achieved ignition — a self-heating fusion “burning plasma” that produced more fusion energy out than was delivered to the target. In this episode, Annie walks us through what it took to get there (spoiler: not one magical breakthrough), what “the ignition cliff” actually means, and why Inertia is betting that manufacturing and economics — not brand-new physics — is the fastest path to commercial fusion.

• Annie’s path from nuclear engineering + plasma physics to becoming NIF’s lead designer on ignition platforms
• Why the historic ignition shot was the result of years of iteration (and a few duds along the way)
• The “pancake” shot (and the lab’s surprisingly extensive breakfast-food vocabulary for failed plasmas)
• What it felt like to get the 3:00am text — “I think we got ignition” — and why relief came before celebration
• Why many in the field had nearly given up on laser fusion ignition — and how close the NIF campaign came to being cut
• Why other fusion companies pursued different approaches: history, uncertainty, and the (very real) cost problem for lasers + targets
• The core commercialization challenge: scaling to high-repetition-rate shots (think “engine cycles”) and producing targets cheaply enough to fire millions per day

• Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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Fusion has been “ten years away” for decades — but one corner of the field just crossed a line that changes the conversation. In December 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility achieved ignition: a self-sustaining fusion reaction that produced net energy. And they’ve repeated it.

So what happens when you take the only fusion approach that’s proven to work, and focus less on new physics… and more on building the industrial supply chain to do it again and again, cheaply and reliably? You get a field trip!

In part one of a two-part field trip to Livermore, California, Molly visits Inertia Enterprises’ “House of Fusion” to meet two of the company’s co-founders:

• Jeff Lawson (yes, that Jeff Lawson — founder of Twilio and majority owner of The Onion) on the business case for commercializing ignition, and why Inertia thinks the economics are finally ready.
• Mike Dunne, former Lawrence Livermore power-plant designer and Stanford professor, on what it takes to turn a lab breakthrough into a power plant — from a gigawatt-scale “engine” that can follow renewables on the grid, to building a million precision fuel targets a day.

• What “ignition” actually means — and why it’s different from “fusion someday”
• Why Inertia is starting with the only physics regime that’s been proven to produce net fusion energy
• The two big bottlenecks: high-power diode lasers and mass-manufactured fusion targets
• How scaling semiconductor manufacturing could drive laser costs down (and why “1,000x” matters)
• What a fusion target is: a tiny fuel capsule inside a miniature “oven” (and why lead beats gold for economics)
• Why a fusion plant looks more like a high-RPM engine than a one-off experiment — and how that changes everything
• Potential early markets beyond electricity: high-temperature process heat for steel, cement, and fertilizer
• What it looks like to build a fusion company in Silicon Valley: Apple/Waymo-style process engineers, high-end metrology, and a Nerf gun used as a stand-in for high-speed target tracking
• Thunderdome. Yes, really.

• Inertia Enterprises: https://inertia.com/
• Everybody in the Pool: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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If you’re on a mission to make your home greener, solar panels might seem like an obvious place to start. But for renters, apartment dwellers, and homeowners who can’t afford a traditional rooftop solar installation, solar has long been out of reach — until now.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly talks with Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, about a simple climate technology that's already taken Europe by storm: plug-in solar.

Also known as balcony solar, these small solar systems can be installed without contractors, plugged directly into a standard outlet, and start generating electricity immediately. More than 4 million systems are already in use in Germany, but in the United States, regulations have kept the technology largely off the market.

In this episode, Cora explains how plug-in solar could open up access to clean energy and lower electricity bills for millions of renters and homeowners. She also shares how Bright Saver is driving a wave of legislation across the country aimed at making these systems legal.

We talk about:

• What plug-in solar is and how it works
• Why millions of Europeans already use balcony solar systems
• How renters and apartment residents can benefit from generating their own electricity
• Why traditional rooftop solar remains so expensive in the United States
• The regulatory roadblocks slowing adoption, and whether safety concerns cited by utilities hold up to scrutiny
• How Utah, Maine, Maryland, Virginia, and Colorado are leading the way on legalization
• Why affordability may be the key to scaling climate solutions
• The surprising coalition of climate advocates, free-market supporters, and energy-independence champions backing plug-in solar

Links:

• Bright Saver: https://brightsaver.org
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
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• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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We need to triple global energy production by 2050. Renewables are scaling fast, but the real wild card that could change everything might just be fusion. The physics and engineering are closer than ever, but there’s a critical materials problem standing between us and unlimited clean energy.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly speaks with Dr. John Elling, a Los Alamos chemist turned serial entrepreneur who’s working on a solution that he believes will change the world. Both fusion and next-generation fission reactors rely on enriched lithium isotopes, and existing enrichment methods are slow, expensive, and require massive facilities. Dr. Elling’s company, Molten Salt Solutions, is developing a simpler, cheaper process and building the US's first commercial production facility for enriched lithium — the ingredient that could determine whether fusion energy ever actually reaches the grid.

• The big problem facing both fusion and advanced fission right now: the unmet demand for fuel
• A refresher on the science behind enriched lithium and nuclear energy
• The world’s growing energy demands, and why fusion will help us meet the 3x demand we’ll face by 2050
• Why the US dismantled its only enrichment facility and why Russia currently holds the only meaningful supply
• How Molten Salt Solutions' mercury-free, scalable process differs from how governments did it during the nuclear weapons era
• The race to supply fusion developers with material they need now, before commercial reactors even exist
• Why the current administration's push to reduce regulatory barriers for small modular reactors is accelerating demand for lithium-7
• John's case for why fusion is the final frontier of humanity’s energy evolution

• Molten Salt Solutions: https://www.moltensaltsolutions.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
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You’re doing all the right things to make your home greener: you switched to solar and induction, you remember your reusable bags, and you always compost your scraps. But some of the biggest climate impacts of the building you live or work in? They were locked in the day it was built — in the concrete, the steel, the glass. And that matters, because the built environment accounts for roughly 42% of global emissions.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Ben Stapleton, the CEO at the U.S. Green Building Council of California, to talk about what it actually takes to make our buildings work for the climate instead of against it. Ben has spent over 20 years at the intersection of sustainability, real estate, and innovation, and he’s got a refreshingly practical outlook: the solutions exist, the business case is there, and the work is already happening, even when the federal government is pulling back.

• Why buildings — not cars — are the biggest source of carbon emissions, and what that means for climate strategy
• The difference between operating carbon and embodied carbon, and why that means we need two different performance standards for buildings
• How building performance standards work and why California is building a statewide framework to get there by 2030
• How to get developers to root for performance standards: sell them on lower energy costs, lower insurance premiums, and higher resale values
• What rebuilding after the LA fires could look like if we get it right, and why waiving the all-electric requirement was a missed opportunity
• USGBC California's Net Zero Accelerator and the startup trends Ben is tracking in green building tech

• U.S. Green Building Council of California: https://usgbc-ca.org/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
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Home batteries are having a moment, but for years, getting one meant cobbling together a solar panel from one company, an inverter from another, a smart panel from a third, and hoping they'd all play nice. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly takes a field trip to Mountain View, California, to visit Lunar Energy, where founder and CEO Kunal Girotra has built the fully integrated solar-plus-battery ecosystem he always wished existed.

Plus: a tour of Lunar's working showroom, where we flip a breaker, watch the app react in real time, and find out what happens when you leave the oven on during a power outage.

• Why Kunal left Tesla Energy to build a fully integrated home energy ecosystem
• How Lunar's modular, stackable battery blocks work (think Lego bricks for your garage wall)
• The real math on savings: how a solar and battery system can cut your bill by $2,000/year, and Lunar's AI adds another $500 on top
• How "virtual power plants" are actually very real, and why Lunar wants to rename them "distributed power plants"
• Why Northeastern states are leading on VPP policy, and what utilities in other regions need to change to keep up

• Lunar Energy: https://www.lunarenergy.com/
• Sunrun (Lunar's leading VPP partner): https://www.sunrun.com/
• Green Mountain Power: https://greenmountainpower.com/
• All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/
• Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2z
• Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/
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