The Adoption Gap

Jeff Wolfe started his career as a design engineer on hospitals and high-tech labs, then built ventures in solar, EV charging, battery storage, and retail energy before joining CLS Wind as co-founder and chief strategy officer. His focus is a lifting problem that is starting to cap the wind industry: turbines now stand 450 feet tall, and only five vessels in the world can install the biggest offshore units. CLS Wind takes 70-year-old rack-and-pinion technology from oil rigs and uses it to climb alongside the turbine tower. That cuts mobilization from about 80 truckloads to 20, halves lifting costs, and lets crews keep working in winds that ground cranes. We also dig into the business: why repairing a few turbines at a time in America’s aging fleet of 80,000 is the smartest way in, why CLS will sell to service companies through OEM referrals instead of becoming one, and how US politics pushed the company’s prototype from Houston to Scotland. As Jeff puts it, the biggest competitor is “the status quo.”

Alice Chun went from teaching architecture at Columbia to founding Solight Design after her son’s asthma diagnosis pushed her research toward clean solar technology. Her origami-inspired Solar Puff folds flat and pops open into a solar lantern, a safer alternative to toxic kerosene for the 1.6 billion people without electricity. Alice shares how her lights reached Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominica, and Ukraine, and how that work led to Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s Gutsy and support from Bob Iger. We also dig into the business: losing B2B revenue when USAID was dismantled, negotiating big-box distribution margins, and why she thinks of her product as “individualized infrastructure.”

Chris Faranetta, co-founder of NearStar Fusion, joins the show to explain how his team skipped lasers and magnets altogether and built what is essentially a rail gun for fusion — firing a projectile down a barrel at 10 kilometers a second until it slams into a target and ignites a mini thermal nuclear explosion inside a chamber the size of a soda can.

We get into why NearStar isn't racing to be first in fusion, but first to be practical — the "Model T" strategy, not the moonshot. The part that surprised me most: the fastest path to revenue isn't power generation at all — it's medical isotopes. The same neutrons this machine produces can fuel a cancer treatment with a track record of curing stage four prostate cancer, years before the first kilowatt of fusion electricity ever sells.

We also cover the $10+ billion already poured into private fusion, why a floating power plant on a cargo ship might beat anything built on land, and what it actually takes to convince a venture investor that a mini nuclear explosion is a business, not just a physics experiment.

If you've ever wondered whether fusion is real — or you're in the camp that thinks it's 30 years away and always will be — this conversation might change your mind.