Concrete is the second most-used material in the world, right behind water. It’s everywhere – in our bridges, our buildings, our homes, our roads. It’s the literal foundation for much of our lives.

And cement is a key ingredient in that foundation. It acts as the glue that binds together the water and aggregate to make concrete. Globally, we produced more than four billion tons of cement in 2021, and demand is expected to grow.

But for each ton of cement produced, a ton of carbon is emitted due to the fossil fuel-powered heat and reactions needed to produce it. Altogether, the cement industry accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions. To build our net-zero future, we'll need even more concrete for new and existing infrastructure, but we'll also need to clean up cement production to prevent ever increasing emissions.

And that's what this month's Watt it Takes guest, Sublime Systems CEO and co-founder Leah Ellis, is doing.

Leah and her colleagues at Sublime Systems are decarbonizing the cement industry by creating a process that produces cement with electricity instead of fossil fuels.

Emily spoke with Leah about developing the science behind low carbon cement. They also talked about the importance of getting experience in the industry while she was still an academic, and Sublime's ultimate goal of launching a plant capable of producing a million tons of cement a year.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

The U.S. is on track to deploy 550 gigawatts of new renewables on the grid by 2030. That's a massive amount of solar, wind, and other renewables powering buildings, EVs, appliances, and industrial processes in our increasingly electrified world.

Last year electric vehicles (EVs) hit a massive milestone by making up 5% of all new car sales in the U.S. And Bloomberg estimated that more than half of new car sales could be EVs by 2030.

That future looks bright, but to keep the headlights on and the wheels turning, the grid will have to be prepared to provide power at triple its current capacity by 2050. Fossil fuel peaker plants have been filling in the gaps left by renewables during times of peak demand. But to reach net-zero by 2050, the U.S. will need more sources of firm power that don't come from coal or natural gas.

Thomas Folker, CEO and co-founder of Leap, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company, is working to solve that problem. 

Leap has built the platform needed to turn all of our various grid-connected devices into virtual power plants that can be called upon during times of high demand. Thomas and the team at Leap are helping to prevent the use of fossil fuel power plants called peaker plants, many of which only run during times of high energy and don't actually run on a daily basis.

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, aggregate the combined power of EVs, rooftop solar, residential and commercial batteries and other distributed energy resources, or DERs, and make that energy available to areas of high demand. Leap's API makes it simple for these smart, grid-connected devices to collectively act as virtual power plants, and their platform allows their customers to sell that energy to buyers.

I spoke with Thomas about leveraging software solutions to solve hard, real-world problems on the grid. We also talked about how his early roles helping build energy projects both big and small gave him a realistic view on what it takes to make lasting change.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Forests make up a third of all land on Earth,  and they're one of our major defenses against a warming world. 45% of the carbon stored in land exists in forests.

Today, our forests are struggling to adapt to human activity and a rapidly changing climate. Deforestation and wildfires continue to ravage habitats like the Amazon. In the U.S.destructive wildfires have increasingly ravaged the West. To protect these valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks, we need to radically change the way we restore, conserve and expand these landscapes.

And that's exactly what Vibrant Planet CEO and co-founder Allison Wolff is doing.

Allison and the Vibrant Planet team are modernizing forest conservation and restoration with a product called Land Tender, a digital platform that leverages data to help Forest Services, municipalities and tribal lands better manage their conservation and restoration efforts. Allison describes it as the operating system for forest restoration. 

By digitizing forest conservation and restoration, Land Tender makes it easy for municipal fire districts, conservations districts, nonprofits, and NGOs to coordinate and plan with each other.

Different interventions like removing vegetation and prescribed burns can be mapped over time using machine learning and AI to adjust treatments accordingly.

Emily spoke with Allison about the process of merging nature-based climate solutions with cutting edge technology, how she developed Land Tender, and Allison’s  long career pushing big tech companies to make positive choices for people and the planet.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Industrial processes are one of the hardest sectors of the economy to decarbonize. Fossil fuels have been the go-to way of powering the facilities that make paper, plastics, food, beverages, and chemicals. 

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions from industry means changing the way companies produce their raw materials.

The problem: sometimes the hardest sectors to decarbonize are the ones that may not believe in climate change at all, and thus don’t feel the need to change their practices.

And that's what Shreya Dave, CEO and co-founder of Via Separations, is changing.

Shreya and the team at Via Separations are making it attractive for their customers to decarbonize by providing a cheaper alternative to an often overlooked source of emissions: chemical separations and purification.

The traditional way of separating desirable materials is very resource-intensive. Shreya likens the whole process to separating pasta from water in a pot. The water, which is the waste product, is boiled off using heat from fossil fuels to get to just the cooked pasta, or the desirable material, at the bottom of the pot.

Via Separations is changing the way separations are done by developing and deploying filtration systems that act like a pasta strainer, filtering out the waste product using less energy and producing less emissions.

The energy savings can't be understated. Chemical separations and purification make up a whopping 12 percent of the country's yearly energy consumption. That's on par with all the energy used in gasoline powered cars and trucks in the U.S. every year. 

Emily spoke with Shreya about the work needed to scale the tech, the importance of speaking to customers about their needs, and the industries Via Separations is going after first.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Large swaths of the global economy are very hard to decarbonize with renewables and batteries alone. Steel, cement, aviation – these industries are run on the high heat and explosive force of burning fossil fuels. 

Together, these activities make up the industrial basement of society; the often overlooked and essential sectors of the economy that can only be made possible, in part, by burning liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.

Cleaning up these sectors requires an energy-dense alternative that can go the distance.

And that's exactly what today's guest, Electric Hydrogen CEO and co-founder Raffi Garabedian, is building.

Raffi and the team at Electric Hydrogen are building the electrolyzers and supporting infrastructure that can produce the clean, green hydrogen needed to fuel our net-zero future.

Hydrogen has the potential to replace the role of petrochemicals altogether. Burning hydrogen could generate the high temperatures that heavy industry requires – without any added carbon emissions. And it could also be used for synthetic fuels in aviation or shipping. But in order to do so, hydrogen production has to clean up its act.

And that's what Raffi and Electric Hydrogen are doing by building massive electrolyzers – tractor trailer-sized machines that run electricity through water, splitting it into its basic elements: oxygen and hydrogen.

Commercial electrolyzers today are typically 5-10 megawatts. But Electric Hydrogen is aiming for 100 megawatts to drive down costs. By building larger and more efficient electrolyzers with much higher energy inputs, the company aims to produce greater amounts of hydrogen at a price that would make it competitive with natural gas.

Emily spoke to Raffi about what it takes to move fast and break bonds in their journey to get green hydrogen down to fossil fuel price parity. They also talked about the balance between being a technologist and entrepreneur, and the infrastructure and innovation we'll need for widespread green hydrogen use in tough to decarbonize industries.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.  

Over the last decade, solar growth has exploded. Just last year, the U.S. added a record 13 gigawatts of utility-scale solar to the grid. And despite supply chain disruptions and inflation, the average solar panel cost still dropped by 11%. 

New solar plants are now cheaper to build than new gas or coal-fired power plants. But according to the Department of Energy, for the country to achieve a zero-carbon grid by 2050, we'll need 1,600 gigawatts of solar compared to the 13 we added last year. This means solar will have to break through its current single digit share on the grid. And doing that means drastically rethinking the way developers, owners, and operators keep tabs on new and existing solar projects. That's exactly what Nikhil Vadhavkar, CEO and co-founder of Raptor Maps, is doing. 

Raptor Maps help utility scale solar owners and operators to build, monitor, maintain, and expand their solar plants. Before Raptor Maps, each solar farm operated in its own silo, essentially disconnected from other solar plants, and relied on old school paper, spreadsheets, and emails to record and track important information.

By introducing cutting edge software, Raptor Maps’ took an inefficient process and streamlined it. 

Emily spoke to Nikhil about what it takes to bring new innovation to the now well-established solar industry. They also talked about Raptor Maps' early transition from potato farms to solar farms and the work it took to build their reputation as an industry standard.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.

To deploy enough solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion batteries needed to decarbonize the grid, we'll need more of the critical minerals that make these technologies possible.

Growing demand for clean technology means an even bigger need for lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and other minerals. Right now the world is on track to double its overall mineral requirements for clean technology by 2040. Yet our domestic mining capacity for these materials is a fraction of what exists overseas.

And with the Inflation Reduction Act requiring EV manufacturers to source at least 40% of their critical materials for EV batteries domestically by 2024, demand has already quickly surpassed supply. Battery recycling could help us make up the difference, but today the U.S. recycles less than 5% of its lithium-ion batteries. 

And that's exactly what Megan O'Connor, CEO and co-founder of Nth Cycle, is changing. 

Megan and the Nth Cycle team believe they can cut through tons of electronic waste generated each year while shoring up the country's supply of the critical minerals needed to get us to net-zero emissions. Nth Cycle's device, dubbed the OYSTER, uses electro-extraction to selectively filter out individual minerals from e-waste.

But recycling batteries is just the beginning. In the near future, the Nth Cycle system can be adapted to refine and process ore coming directly from mining sites - enabling 92% less emissions than traditional processes.

Emily spoke with Megan about what it takes to build an entirely new mineral supply chain from the ground up. They also talked about developing Nth Cycle's technology from the lab to the field, and the challenges of building hardware.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.

The energy we use in our homes remains one of the largest sources of emissions in the country. About 20 percent of our energy-related GHG emissions comes from the fossil fuels used to power gas furnaces, stoves, water heaters, and AC units. 

With the U.S. predicted to add more than 62 million new homes by 2050, getting fossil fuels out of our houses, apartments and condos is crucial. And we have the tools to do it.

Weatherization, insulation, and heat pumps can drastically reduce emissions. But we need to increase consumer awareness and decrease upfront costs for the improvements and technologies needed to decarbonize our homes.

Getting there means incentivizing homeowners to view residential energy solutions not as a financial risk, but as a comfort and savings reward. And that's exactly what Lauren Salz, CEO and co-founder of Sealed, is doing.

Sealed takes the guesswork out of decarbonizing homes by pairing homeowners with contractors and footing the initial bill themselves. By tying Sealed’s financial performance to homeowners’ energy savings, Sealed provides a massive incentive for homeowners who otherwise might be leery of making their homes more energy efficient.

And by monitoring real time energy consumption for their customers, Sealed is able to show up at the end of the day with clear proof of savings. That's real dollars saved and up to 60% less in energy used for Sealed homeowners. 

Emily spoke with Lauren about what it takes to encourage new growth in the residential efficiency and electrification market. They also talked about her experience as a young founder and CEO.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.

Earlier this year, solar reached a historic milestone: 1 terawatt of capacity around the world. One trillion watts is a huge achievement. But solar still only makes up 3 percent of the world's electricity. 

To deploy dozens of terrawatts in the coming years, we'll need to do something about the bottlenecks holding back the planning, design, and construction of the massive solar farms that will make up a renewable-powered grid.

Enabling dozens of terawatts of solar development is exactly what this month’s guest, Terabase Energy CEO and co-founder Matt Campbell, is doing.

Terabase's mission is to accelerate the build out of utility-scale solar by combining new modeling and design tools with robotics and automation. This combination of modeling software and automation robots is already bringing strong results. 

Today, Terabase has over 500 engineering, procurement and construction companies, developers, and independent power producers using their platform. Ten gigawatts worth of solar projects have been supported by Terabese across 30 countries. 

Emily spoke with Matt about what it takes to automate the buildout of utility-scale solar. They also talked about his decade-and-a-half career expanding solar worldwide at SunPower, and what the solar industry's early years taught him about pushing the technology forward.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.  

Our homes account for 20 percent of America’s greenhouse gas emissions. The fastest way to cut those emissions is to electrify the systems that heat, cool, and power our homes with heat pumps, solar, batteries, and EVs.

These technologies are the pillars of residential electrification. But, as more and more homeowners seek to electrify, they’re discovering that a key piece of antiquated technology in their homes is holding them back from their all-electric dream: their electrical panel. 

That's why our guest, SPAN founder and CEO Arch Rao, is building the electrical panel of the future.

Arch and the team at SPAN decided it's time to reimagine the circuit breaker as an enabler of decarbonization. The Span panel gives detailed data on energy use from every device through a companion app – making it easy for homeowners to see how they're saving the most energy, how efficiently each appliance is running, and how to control distributed energy resources.

Emily sat down with Arch to talk about what it takes to turn the electrical panel into a product that people will actually care about – and love. They talked about the valuable lessons he learned during his first time as a co-founder of a startup, and how SPAN is making its mark in smart home electrification.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by our exclusive sponsor, Google Nest. Want to do more to address climate change? Nest Renew offers a simple place to start. To learn more about Nest Renew, visit nestrenew.google.com.