Supercool

In America today, it can be faster to build a factory than to get enough electricity to run it.
Time to power has become a major bottleneck for factories, data centers, EV charging depots, and other infrastructure being built across the country.

After more than a decade at SpaceX—including serving as launch chief engineer for Demo-2 and Director of Flight Safety—Bala Ramamurthy turned his attention to the electricity grid.

His company, Critical Loop, combines batteries, software, controls, automation, and generation to help customers get power faster.
It’s indicative of a trend we often see on Supercool: building the low-carbon future is as much about breakthrough business model innovation as new hardware or software.

Critical Loop has already powered an 80,000-square-foot factory for nine months, operates a microgrid at San Diego Airport, and is helping customers unlock more power from the grid we already have—while enabling more renewable energy along the way.

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By fusing architect and developer, Alloy Development is proving that the riskiest choice in real estate isn’t electrification or Passive House — it’s clinging to the past.

CEO Jared Della Valle joins Supercool to share the company’s journey to developing Alloy Block in downtown Brooklyn—an effort to create the most sustainable block in the city. It’s anchored by 505 State Street, New York’s first all-electric skyscraper; two Passive House–certified public schools; and soon, One Third Avenue—the tallest Passive House tower in the world.

Della Valle describes how Alloy built investor confidence project by project—staying nimble, controlling risk, and executing at a standard that pulled institutional capital toward climate performance. He explains why going all-electric lowered long-term risk, how policy and pricing dynamics shifted investor expectations, and why the most competitive real estate today is also the cleanest.

Alloy is shifting how Wall Street perceives risk and return—redefining climate performance not as the exception, but the expectation.

Show Notes

Guest: Jared Della Valle, CEO

Company: Alloy Development

When Roger Griffiths first heard about Formula E in 2014, he was intrigued but skeptical. A veteran of IndyCar, Le Mans, and Formula 1—and a self-described petrol head—he wasn’t convinced electric racing could deliver credible performance.

Then he saw who was signing on.

Michael Andretti. Alain Prost. Emerson Fittipaldi. Frank Williams. Plus early backers like Richard Branson. Racing legends and global brands were putting their reputations behind an all-electric series built for city streets, digital-native fans, and a new kind of mobility.

That’s when Roger knew: failure wasn’t an option.

He joined Andretti Global to help lead its Formula E team. Today, he’s Team Principal and Chairman of the Formula E Teams Association.

Just over a decade later, Formula E is the fastest-growing motorsport on Earth. It races through city centers, draws 500 million fans, and connects with a global audience that legacy motorsports can’t reach.

Roger takes us inside how Formula E became the sport brands chase, fans love, and the future demands.

Nearly 50 years after Amory Lovins published his landmark Foreign Affairs article, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?,” we have made enormous gains in efficiency. But we have barely scratched the surface of what better design can deliver.

Few people have shaped modern thinking about energy more than Amory. He co-founded Rocky Mountain Institute—known today as RMI—and has spent five decades helping companies and governments dramatically reduce energy use while improving performance and lowering costs.

At the center of Amory’s work is integrative design for radical efficiency—optimizing whole systems rather than individual components to use less energy, material, equipment, and capital and achieve far greater efficiency gains.

In this conversation, Amory explains how redesigning pipes, pumps, and motors could dramatically reduce global electricity use; why integrative design remains largely absent from engineering textbooks, government forecasts, and climate models; and how his home in the Colorado Rockies stays warm enough to grow bananas without any mechanical heating system.

The most overlooked climate solution may not be another breakthrough technology. It may be better design, and one of our most powerful tools for profitably solving climate change.

Rare earth magnets power the modern world and the clean energy transition. They’re inside every electric vehicle motor, wind turbine, MRI machine, and computer hard drive in a data center. But the world throws most of them away. Less than 1% are ever recycled. And today, China controls nearly 90% of the global supply.

That’s the crisis Cyclic Materials was built to solve — by turning circularity into industrial reality.

In this episode, co-founder and CEO Ahmad Ghahreman explains how his team figured out what the industry long thought impossible: separating rare earth magnets from steel before they’re lost forever. We explore the engineering that makes rare earth recycling commercially viable, the spoke-and-hub logistics model to power urban mining where end-of-life products are abundant, and why companies like Microsoft, Amazon, BMW, and Jaguar are already lining up to work with Cyclic Materials.

If the clean economy is going to scale, it needs rare earths. Cyclic Materials found a way to recover them — not from a mine, but from the discarded machines all around us.

Show Notes:

Guest: Ahmad Ghahreman - CEO, President, and co-founder

Company: Cyclic Materials

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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Resale has become more than a sustainability initiative. For billion-dollar brands like Patagonia, Levi's, and Michael Kors, it's become core business strategy.

In this episode, Josh Dorfman talks with Terry Boyle, CEO of Trove, the platform helping leading fashion and apparel brands launch and grow their own resale businesses.

Terry explains why resale is gaining momentum for reasons that go well beyond climate impact. Done right, it attracts new customers, improves margins, creates revenue from products already in circulation, and gives brands greater control over inventory and supply chains.
He also shares how Trove has evolved from operating warehouses into a software platform that enables brands to build resale programs across products, markets, and sales channels.

For Terry, the environmental benefits of resale are real. But they're not what gets the deal done. The strongest case for resale is the business case.

Show Notes:

Guest: Terry Boyle, CEO

Company: Trove

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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What do China, a sustainable furniture startup, and a blog called The Lazy Environmentalist have to do with Supercool?

This week, we're taking a short summer break from new interviews, but not before sharing the story behind the show.

In a special extended introduction, Josh Dorfman traces the unexpected path that shaped his philosophy on climate innovation—from working in bicycle-lock factories in China, to launching a modern sustainable furniture company, to the accidental creation of The Lazy Environmentalist. Along the way, he shares the question that has guided every company he's built for more than two decades: How do you get millions of people to adopt better technologies without asking them to become environmentalists first?

Then, we revisit one of Josh's favorite conversations with Tom Szaky, founder and CEO of TerraCycle, whose remarkable entrepreneurial journey began with a simple but radical idea: that waste could become a valuable resource.

Show Notes

Guest: Tom Szaky, founder and CEO

Company: TerraCycle

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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In 2019, Amazon made one of the biggest EV bets in business: 100,000 electric vehicles by 2030. Today, it is halfway there.

Amazon now has more than 50,000 EVs on the road globally, including 40,000 Rivian delivery vans. But getting to that number has required much more than replacing gas vans with electric ones. It has forced Amazon to rebuild delivery around the realities of electricity: where vehicles charge, how far they can go, how weather, hills, elevation, route density, and time of day affect range, and which vehicle actually fits each market.

That is why Amazon’s electric fleet now includes more than vans. It includes heavy-duty trucks moving containers out of ports, e-bikes delivering Whole Foods groceries in New York City, scooters in India, and other formats chosen for the way deliveries actually happen.
In this episode, Josh talks with Emily Barber and Tom Chempananical about the operating discipline behind Amazon’s push to remake delivery at global scale.

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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If net zero is better, why isn’t it normal?

We have the technology and the know-how. Schools, hospitals, and skyscrapers are already being built that are beautiful, cheap to operate, and carbon-free.

And yet less than 1% are net zero.

Drew Shula is founder and CEO of Verdical Group, whose team has worked on green building projects for clients including Apple, Meta, and NASA. He also founded the Net Zero Conference, now in its thirteenth year, bringing together more than a thousand building professionals annually.

In this episode, Josh and Drew talk about Malibu High School, embodied carbon, California’s building policies, and the debate running beneath it all: what gets us to a net-zero world faster—better solutions or better rules?

Show Notes

Guest: Drew Shula, founder and CEO

Company: Verdical Group

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

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Some of the biggest, most sophisticated companies in the world have almost no real visibility into one of their largest costs: power.

Contracts are complex. Prices swing. Grid capacity is scarce. Costs are rising. For some companies today, electricity can account for 30% to 40% of OpEx. For data centers, access to power determines whether a project begins operating or waits for years in a queue.
Verse gives large power buyers visibility into their electricity use, so they can see what they use, what they pay, and where they can reduce costs.

For data centers, Verse goes further. Its new product, Dispatch Intelligence, uses on-site batteries and software to make demand more flexible for the grid, helping projects begin operating faster without slowing down compute.

This week, Josh talks with Verse co-founder and CEO Seyed Madaeni, who has spent his career at the intersection of power markets, grid software, and large-scale batteries — from PG&E to Tesla to Fluence.

Today, Verse announced a $54 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Google Ventures, NVIDIA, and others.
Seyed also explains how the fastest, cheapest path to power is often the cleanest.

Show Notes

Guest: Seyed Madaeni, Co-founder & CEO

Company: Verse

For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:

* Weekly Newsletter

* Climate Adoption Playbook

* Supercool on Instagram 

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