What are the biggest challenges to widespread adoption of electric vehicles? Cost, range anxiety and charge time. Kedar Munipella, CEO of TAE Power Solutions,  joins the show to talk about how his company solves for all that. Working with a radical new approach to power distribution, battery performance is optimized and charge time is reduced. That, in turn, will make EVs less expensive.

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Industrial heat accounts for 25% of global energy consumption to make products ranging from steel to cement to paper and so many other things you've probably never thought about. It’s a huge chunk of our climate problem — and it’s uniquely hard to decarbonize. That’s where John O’Donnell’s company, Rondo Energy, steps in. Rondo is using hot bricks to store energy as heat. And since industrial processes need energy in the form of heat anyway, it’s a no-brainer. “It happens to be the world’s most efficient way of storing energy,” O’Donnell said of his technology.

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.
 

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Priya Donti, co-founder and executive director of Climate Change AI, joins Good Clean Energy to talk about the role AI and machine learning can play in transforming America's power grid to optimize clean power production and consumption.

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Dr. Ernie Moniz, an acclaimed nuclear physicist and former U.S. Secretary of Energy,  joins Good Clean Energy again to discuss the film “Oppenheimer” and the dawn of the nuclear age through the lens of today.

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Willy Shih, Professor of Management Practice in Business Administration at Harvard Business School, joins Good Clean Energy to talk about the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act on reshoring manufacturing and how it can help the U.S. reassert itself as a leader in innovation, particularly in the transition to clean energy.

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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 About 90 percent of the world's trade is transported by sea, on giant polluting cargo ships that burn particularly dirty oil. Last week, the International Maritime Organization, the UN body responsible for regulating  global shipping, set a new CO2 reduction target for the industry to get to net zero by 2050. To help us make sense of the transition that will need to happen, Maria Gallucci, a clean energy reporter at Canary Media, joins Good Clean Energy to talk about new green fuels and technologies for the industry.

For a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Paul Eremenko, co-founder and CEO of Universal Hydrogen, believes that there is a relatively simple way to solve the aviation industry’s carbon emissions problem. Today’s sustainable fuels aren’t really all that sustainable, he says, and electric planes, while great in theory, don’t scale. That leaves one obvious choice for Eremenko: green hydrogen. “There is a very significant sort of low-hanging fruit opportunity with no significant tech risk to put hydrogen in service and solve in one fell swoop half of aviation emissions problems by 2035,” Eremenko says.

Covered in this episode:

• [3:52] The aviation industry’s current carbon footprint
• [5:40] Why sustainable fuels aren’t really all that sustainable
• [7:12] Why electric planes aren’t feasible
• [8:27] Explaining the color spectrum of hydrogen
• [9:22] How hydrogen is safer than jet fuel
• [12:40] Technology for hydrogen fueled aviation
• [17:45] Why you can’t just fill up the existing fuel tanks with hydrogen
• [19:02] The “Nespresso pod of hydrogen”
• [21:23] Universal Hydrogen’s inaugural flight
• [23:20] How the range of a hydrogen craft compares to a regular jet-fuel plane
• [23:50] Major challenge is availability of green hydrogen
• [26:39] The economic competitiveness of hydrogen
• [27:31] A new commercial aircraft configuration
• [34:39] A few ways the aviation industry could look by 2045

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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As a former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission with both a law background as well as a PhD in applied physics, Richard "Dick" Meserve is uniquely qualified to speak on the future of both nuclear fission and fusion in the U.S. 

“We have a huge challenge in confronting climate change, and it's my view that we need to marshal all the resources we can to address it," says Meserve. "And that obviously includes a heavy emphasis on renewables, but you need a backup. You need firm power as a supplement to renewables. And nuclear is a natural component of that.”

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Jamie Alexander is working to make capitalism compatible with a climate-safe world. Alexander is the director of Drawdown Labs, a branch of the nonprofit organization Project Drawdown that works directly with corporations to think beyond net zero and use their existing social, political, financial, and employee power to accelerate climate solutions at an unprecedented scale. "The more that companies can identify what their superpower is and use that to help the world get closer to our climate goals — that's where I think capitalism and climate change are going to meet in the middle.”

For show notes and a full transcript, head to the episode page.

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Jane Hotchkiss, the president and cofounder of nonprofit Energy for the Common Good, is on a mission to educate the public about the promise of fusion and to support the buildout of a future fusion energy sector. For the full transcript, head to the episode page.