The Green Blueprint

This week, we’re presenting a drop-in episode of Critical Capital, a new partner podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios.

The rush to build data centers has sparked an energy debate: will gas meet the growing demand or will clean firm power like nuclear step in? Nuclear has bipartisan support, new contracts from tech companies, and the capital to build. What it needs, according to Lara Pierpoint, is to be built on time and on budget with government support that lasts.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Lara Pierpoint, managing director of Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition and a nuclear engineer by training, to talk about what it will take to build clean power for the data center era.

Together, they dig into whether nuclear can get out of its own way on costs, why data centers now draw the local opposition that nuclear once did, and what AI means for the security of the grid. They also cover what hyperscalers will pay for and how to make government funding promises last from one administration to the next.

Subscribe to Critical Capital on Apple, Spotify, or any podcast platform.

While living in Delhi, Sorin Grama gave a window air conditioner to an employee. He found out weeks later she wasn't using it because the electricity costs were too high. It was a stark reminder that access to global cooling isn't about upfront equipment costs. It’s about the high electricity costs needed to run air conditioners.

To slash those costs, Sorin co-founded Transaera. His team deployed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are highly engineered crystalline structures that act like super-desiccants. By capturing water molecules and drying the air before it is cooled, Transaera bypasses the massive energy costs of refrigerating airborne moisture. 

The startup initially planned to build residential units for emerging markets, but then they got a nibble from Amazon. They pivoted away from residential efforts to integrate their MOF materials into larger commercial units. By partnering with an existing US manufacturer, they went from CAD drawings to a pilot unit on a rooftop in Houston in less than six months. That successful pilot ultimately led to a commercial agreement with Amazon.

So could this be the beginning of the end for conventional air conditioning?

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

When David Fauvre and his co-founder entered the battery space in 2015, they started as brokers exporting American battery waste to recycling partners in Korea and Japan. But as the industry grew, shipping companies increasingly refused to transport the hazardous materials, making it clear that the U.S. desperately needed its own domestic processing capabilities.

Rather than attempting to build a fully integrated, end-to-end "closed loop" recycling system—an incredibly complex and capital-intensive endeavor—Blue Whale Materials is focusing on doing one thing exceptionally well: pre-processing. Using a specialized thermal system to burn off impurities, the company liberates critical minerals like cobalt, nickel, and lithium from battery foils to create a highly concentrated product they’ve trademarked as “Black Sand.” This premium material is designed to seamlessly integrate into the supply chains of downstream refiners.

After proving their technology with a demonstration plant in Japan, Blue Whale secured private equity funding and recently commissioned its first full-scale commercial facility in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with David about the capital-intensive reality of building industrial infrastructure outside the venture capital ecosystem, how an outdoor battery fire at their facility forced a major overhaul of their emergency response protocols, and how a $110 million expansion project backed by the Department of Energy is accelerating their roadmap.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

“Good fires" naturally regenerate forests. But a rise in high-severity blazes in the American West are leaving behind barren moonscapes filled with dead trees. These scorched trees act as hazardous fuel for future fires, but clearing them to replant the landscape is astronomically expensive. Add to that a massive shortage in the conifer seed supply chain, and land managers simply don't have the resources to regenerate these forests on their own.

Grant Canary, CEO and founder of Mast Reforestation, is changing that.  

Today, Mast Reforestation tackles the ultimate financial bottleneck by burying fire-killed trees deep underground in oxygen-free clay vaults. This permanently stores the timber's carbon, generating high-quality credits that pay for the expensive work of clearing the land and hand-planting new, fire-resilient forests.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Grant about the realities of shutting down a beloved hardware project, the financial arbitrage of buying a legacy seed bank, and how founders should make the case for dramatic startup pivots to their investors.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

To build the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition — from wind turbines and grid stabilization to massive new AI data centers — the world needs more copper between now and 2050 than humanity has produced in its entire history. But new copper mines take anywhere from 10 to 16 years to permit and build, meaning we’re not on track to meet our rapidly growing demand.

Liz Dennett, CEO and founder of Endolith, thinks the solution lies in material that has already been pulled from the earth. Endolith uses naturally occurring microbial communities, paired with real-time data, to extract more copper from low-grade ore at existing heap leaches. By bringing a mobile bio-rig directly to mine sites, Endolith continuously adds optimized microbes into existing sulfuric acid irrigation lines, essentially turning decades-old, multi-billion-dollar assets into precision engineering tools without disrupting downstream operations.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Liz about why the climate tech bias against biological approaches needs updating, how to navigate the notoriously risk-averse nature of the mining industry, and why she deliberately kept corporate venture capital (CVC) off her cap table to preserve the company's optionality.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

For decades, the promise of new nuclear power in the West has been stifled not by the technology itself, but by the “construction problem.” Massive, multi-billion dollar mega-projects plagued by schedule creep and labor shortages have made nuclear a financial non-starter for commercial project finance. 

To build nuclear at scale, we need a paradigm shift.

Jake Jurewicz, CEO of Blue Energy, believes the solution lies in treating nuclear plants less like bespoke civil engineering projects and more like manufactured products. By borrowing techniques from the offshore oil and gas and LNG industries, Blue Energy is building nuclear plants as massive, prefabricated modular blocks that can be built in shipyards and barged to their final destination—a strategy Jake likens to assembling "Duplos" rather than the complex LEGO sets.

But construction efficiency is only half the battle. To de-risk the capital stack, Blue Energy is introducing a "gas-to-nuclear" strategy, where the plant begins its life as a natural gas facility before transitioning to nuclear, allowing for early revenue generation and a more attractive risk profile for institutional lenders.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Jake about why he thinks nuclear engineers don’t need to be reinvent the wheel, how to bring fixed-price contracting to nuclear builds, and why this hybrid approach might be the "missing middle" that finally enables commercial project debt in the nuclear sector.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

Climate tech companies are often forced to rely on expensive equity to bridge the gap between government grant awards and the cash needed to get projects off the ground. But for founders building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, dilutive capital isn't always the right tool. For many, it’s not even an option.

Dimitry Gershenson, CEO and co-founder of Enduring Planet, is proving that a specialized approach to debt can fix that. 

By underwriting government grants and providing working capital to climate startups, Enduring Planet is solving a critical, often-overlooked friction point in the transition. Its model, which hinges on operational efficiency and profitability, provides a blueprint for how climate-focused debt can scale without the pitfalls of traditional venture debt. But also, according to Dimitry, it isn’t always wrong to accept venture debt, contrary to widespread belief.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Dimitry about the dynamics of climate debt, the "brutal reality" of fundraising in a volatile macro environment, and why Enduring Planet's approach to working capital is more critical than ever for the next generation of climate founders.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for global food security, yet its production is a hyper-centralized, fossil-fuel-intensive process that accounts for 5 to 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As geopolitical instability threatens traditional supply chains, the vulnerability of this industry has never been clearer.

Nico Pinkowski, CEO and co-founder of Nitricity, initially set out to decentralize fertilizer production with compact devices that farmers could use right on their fields. But market realities demanded a pivot. Today, Nitricity is producing liquid organic fertilizer from recycled almond shells at a centralized facility in California.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Nico about the "brutal reality" of scaling a new solution for a mature industry, the intricacies of financing a first-of-a-kind commercial plant, and why their mission to decarbonize a critical global commodity is more urgent than ever.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized energy storage, but inexpensive, truly long-duration batteries may still have a significant role to play in backing renewables and decarbonizing the grid. Form Energy is tackling that challenge with a new class of iron-air batteries. By oxidizing and reducing iron — essentially rusting and unrusting the earth's most abundant metal — Form is creating low-cost, multi-day storage that competes directly with natural gas peaker plants.

Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and co-founder of Form Energy, has spent over two decades in the battery industry, including building Tesla’s storage business. At Form, he’s leading the charge to bring these "E-peakers" to utilities across the country. The company recently achieved a major milestone: completing a 550,000 square-foot factory on the site of an old steel mill in Weirton, West Virginia.

In this episode, Mateo talks with host Lara Pierpoint about the grueling realities of scaling up manufacturing, why they chose to build in West Virginia, using AI to drive material science discovery and dig a data moat, and the immense logistical challenges of building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon, Anne Bailey, and Stephen Lacey. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.

If you’re building a consumer software startup, your investors may expect you to project hockey stick-style growth. But if you’re building the physical infrastructure of the clean energy transition, you’re likely in a very different position.

Frank O’Sullivan, Managing Director at S2G Investments, argues that the climate finance ecosystem is suffering from a structural mismatch. While there is plenty of capital for early-stage innovation and mature infrastructure projects, there is a "missing middle" — a gap where hard tech startups are generating revenue but aren’t yet bankable enough for infrastructure investors.

In this episode, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Frank about why we’ve been trying to finance infrastructure companies like they’re software startups, the concentration risks in venture capital, and why large infrastructure allocators should be stepping into this growth-stage gap to seed their own pipeline.

Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced and edited by Ross Kenyon and Anne Bailey. Technical direction by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this show, subscribe to Latitude Media's newsletter.