The installation is a two-day affair, starting as I’m writing this, Monday, May 4. It involves finding spots for and running electrical wiring for the two outdoor units (luckily, this won’t require any additional work, it’s easy enough, if slightly daredevil, to get to the subpanel in my garage along the side of my house). Then, there are four wall units to install. One is in the main room of the top floor (open concept living, dining room and kitchen), and one in each of the three bedrooms. For the most part, finding the locations was pretty straightforward. The trickiest spot was my bedroom. The units have to be on outside walls, because they have drainage pipes that have to go through to the outside (I’m curious how much condensation will result and whether I should put plants or cisterns underneath!).

The outside of my bedroom is two stories up, there’s an overhang above the deck below, and complicating matters, there’s also a pool. (I feel like I should note here that the pool already has a heat pump for heating, because obviously my priorities are … solid.) That means there wasn’t enough deck space for the wide base of the VERY tall ladder that’s required to get up to the roofline of the house. But builders and installers are nothing if not deeply MacGyver, so after lunch I glanced down and saw … this.

No notes, honestly. Here’s a collection of some of the other install pics. It’s quite the production.

The only interesting note from the installer (shout-out Air Synergy, your MacGyver skills are unmatched) is that during a previous Quilt install, he encountered a problem where the system wouldn’t turn on out of the box because it needed a software upgrade first, which took about four hours. He was installing it in a new build home, he said, so it wasn’t that big a deal, but he didn’t seem impressed. I said, “oh, so like when you get your Xbox out but you haven’t played in a while so you have to download two hours of firmware updates before you can shoot aliens?”

He didn’t seem impressed with that analogy, either. He’s very nice otherwise, though.

This week on Everybody in the Pool

And on the podcast this week, a climate solution hiding in plain sight: shipping and trucking efficiency. Trillions of dollars of goods move around the planet every year, and an astonishing amount is lost, spoiled, or delayed because shippers simply don’t have real-time visibility into where things are, or what condition they’re in. Tive trackers change that by monitoring location and conditions like temperature (like for a pallet of strawberries that has to stay at 32°F). This helps companies intervene if there’s a problem, which prevents all that waste, avoids redundant emissions-creating trips, and can even help create more efficient routes that also save on gas.

CEO Krenar Konomi told me Tive is a stealth climate solution and a resilience solution during what he calls our “state of permanent disruption” — extreme weather, geopolitical shocks, and supply shortages. In other words, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

So, you know. Data centers. Those are a thing.

Even as many cities and states offer tax breaks and loosened restrictions on new infrastructure, citizens and politicians are pushing back on new projects over land use, water use, noise, and energy usage. Just as many states are contemplating or passing bans and moratoriums, and data center project cancellations quadrupled between 2024 and 2025, according to Construction Dive.

But hey, what about the data centers we already have? Who’s working on the energy, water, and environmental impacts of those data centers?

One answer is in this week’s podcast episode. I spoke with Jasper de Vries, co-founder and CEO of Lucend, a company using machine learning plus massive amounts of sensor data to help data centers operate more efficiently. Jasper told me working with data centers is kind of a dream, because of, uh, all the data. A typical facility is absolutely festooned with sensors, gathering everything from heat and power draw, humidity, water flow pressures, chiller performance, power quality, UPS and generator reliability, filter pressure drops and fan speeds for airflow purposes, leak detection, and even smoke and air-quality monitoring for early fire detection.

But for the most part, all of this is contained in what Jasper calls a “black box” of operations, and it’s not being used to optimize efficiency — it’s mostly about uptime and safety. By opening the box and analyzing the data with efficiency in mind, Jasper says Lucend typically finds big savings hiding in plain sight — on the order of 25% energy savings on average and 30% water savings — without needing any retrofit or rebuild.

But implementing changes within a facility that depends on 99.999% uptime is super complicated and operators are intensely risk-averse. A seemingly tiny operational tweak can trigger weeks of risk-management process, he said.

Lucend shows operators the entire trail from symptom to diagnostics to recommendation so teams can validate the logic, de-risk the change, and confirm the impact afterward. (You could imagine all that paperwork coming in handy as communities demand accountability, and regulators jump in, as well.)

Down the road, Jasper said, he hopes this technology can enable energy flexibility, the thread we’ve been pulling on all season. He sketched a future where data centers don’t only consume power. As they add on-site renewables and storage, they could become flexible resources that can dial demand up or down, or even support the grid, at peak times. If cities are going to live with more data centers (admittedly still an open question, it seems), the best possible bargain is: fewer wasted megawatt-hours, less water use, and a path for these facilities to improve energy infrastructure, not strain it.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Better data centers through design

At the beginning of last year, I did a series called Feeding the Matrix, anticipating many of the energy issues data centers faced and would be facing. One of my favorite interviews was with JoAnn Garbin, who was formerly the head of a regenerative data center project at Microsoft. The mission was to reimagine data centers that would be maximally energy and water efficient, designed to integrate smoothly into landscapes, use low-carbon building materials and eliminate waste. Microsoft … went a different route. Everyone did, actually.

So this month (April, 2026), JoAnn went ahead and published all of it. To quote from her post on how it can be done:

Picture a 2 to 20-megawatt cluster sited at the edge of a mid-sized city or a county seat. Sitting on 1 to 20 acres. Not a campus. A modular cluster. Flatbed-deliverable, prefabricated, deployable in 90 to 120 days instead of five to eight years of active construction.

Inside: AI-class compute with warm-water direct liquid cooling at 45°C — the threshold that eliminates the chiller entirely and makes the waste heat usable.

Outside: heat exchangers routing that waste heat into a district heating system, a commercial greenhouse or aquaculture facility, pools, laundry, airports, microbreweries.

Underneath: a grid-interactive battery stack and power architecture designed from day one as an interruptible load, participating in demand response, shaving utility peaks, returning flexibility to the grid.

Around town or across the state: many small clusters like this one […]

Before any of it rolls out of the factory: a community partnership with real economic value — local fiber and green energy, workforce training, municipal revenue share, biodiversity net gain, a heat offtake contract — negotiated before the first permitting conversation, not offered defensively after opposition forms.

All the technology exists, JoAnn writes — even the vendors, the deployment dockets, the timelines, all of it. It’s all here if you really want to geek out. And have a peek at one of the concept drawings and let yourself imagine a better world, for a second, won’t you?

SF Climate Week Wrap-Up

I attended a tiny fraction of the many events that happened at San Francisco Climate Week this year, which has ballooned in just a few short years into a truly exciting, vibrant, busy gathering — congratulations to everyone who put on an event or sponsored the whole thing this year. I spoke at a delightful event that was right up my philosophical alley, called Life, Upgraded, hosted by Xooglers in Climate. They curated and spotlighted cool, real-life solutions like seaweed packaging from Sway (featured on episode 44), electric heaters from Focal, regenerative bedding from Knotted Weaves, recycled textiles from Rhea's Factory, and plastic-free packaging from Shellworks, sustainable 3D-printed boards from Swellcycle.

I also attended the Female Founders and Funders event, where I took possibly the coolest photo I’ve ever taken, below Salesforce Park:

And finally, I went to my absolute dream event these days, a panel on whether VPPs can solve our capacity crunch, featuring Copper (episode 122), Lunar Energy (who’ll be on the show soon!), Prelude Ventures, and Sunrun. Standing room only, folks. I’m not the only VPP nerd in town — at least during SF Climate Week. A couple photos to wrap this one up. See you next week!

I, like many people I know, absolutely swooned this week at the news that NPR had received $113 million in charitable donations, including a staggering $80 million gift from Connie Ballmer, who runs the Ballmer foundation alongside her husband, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. (As is so often the case, she’s the one who got him into charitable giving in the first place.)

And I was equally thrilled to find out that while the Ballmers’ top giving priority is “economic mobility,” their oldest son, Sam, leads the efforts around their second giving priority: climate. However, climate-related donations only account for about 20% of their portfolio, tops.

And that’s the story of climate philanthropy writ large — except that the overall story is much sadder. Only about 2% of philanthropic money goes toward climate and environmental issues.

There are lots of reasons for the gap, but complexity is a big one. It’s hard to know what it means to fund “climate,” which is a huge tent that can include everything from environmental justice to tree planting to city and state initiatives to research and on and on and on.

Also, although I used billionaires as examples above, the truth is that anyone with some means can be a philanthropist, and specifically a climate philanthropist, but, you know the old saying, everybody in the pool will make a bigger splash. (That saying is at least three years old, you guys, work with me here.)

So on this week’s episode of the podcast, I talked with an organization that’s trying to make climate giving more accessible, and aggregating dollars for maximum impact.

I talked with Greg Rock, executive director of 1.5 Climate, a national donor collaborative that curates and vets high-impact climate giving opportunities, and then brings them to its members through energetic, Shark Tank–style virtual pitch events.

Greg explained how 1.5 Climate looks for opportunities where relatively modest checks can have outsized impact: catalytic early funding, high-leverage bets (including unlocking matching funds), and gap-filling support for work that’s getting overlooked. The organization interviews hundreds of groups a year and ultimately elevates a small number to pitch to its community. Greg told me the organization tries to be as non-partisan and local as possible, as well.

Here are a few examples of initiatives they’ve helped fund:

• Next‑gen geothermal (Utah) — the group helped fund what Greg called the first utility‑scale next‑gen geothermal plant coming online in Utah.

• Data center policy campaigns — the donors supported state legislative efforts aimed at making data centers pay their own way for grid/infrastructure upgrades, and pushing policies that require data centers to bring new clean energy capacity as they expand.

• Agrivoltaics — 1.5 helped fund an initiative to combine farming and ranching with solar infrastructure, so that grazing and ag production could happen in the shade of solar PV. (Greg said this particularly appealed to members as a cross‑partisan, co‑benefits solution.)

• Iowa renewables permitting streamlining — Greg previewed an upcoming event focused on Iowa: a policy effort to streamline permitting for solar, wind, and other renewables in a red‑trifecta state.

Obviously, we also discussed the bigger giving landscape—why climate still gets such a small share of philanthropy, how complexity (and perceived partisanship) holds people back, and why this moment calls for doubling down. Greg makes a strong case that state and local action can be both practical and scalable, with ripple effects that spread far beyond one project or one geography—and that seeing concrete solutions in motion can be the optimism jolt people need right now.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

From the Discord

We’ve been having a conversation in the Discord about where to start when you’re thinking about getting solar and/or a battery on your home, and it echoes a conversation I was having with a friend recently, as well.

Some advice:

• Ask your friends or neighbors who they went with. Do not, under any circumstances, enter your personal information into one of those online questionnaires about getting a quote for solar installation. Unfortunately, this industry is deeply about the financing, and you will end up getting thousands of phone calls, possibly for the rest of your life. (I wrote about this back in 2022, I’m still dodging calls!)

• Do you plan to own or lease? Leasing is cheapest up front, but most likely not in the long term, and can be a real problem if you want to sell your house.

• Look into green financing and incentives! Many states offer loan programs with low-interest options for clean energy and electrification upgrades.

• Who is the actual installer, are they licensed and well-reviewed, and will they handle ongoing customer service?

• Research your inverter types, especially if you plan to electrify in the future (solar installers may offer more than one, so it’s good to know the options). Plan for the system, you will want in the future.

• Does your utility offer net metering or other incentive programs for sharing energy?

• Do you want or need a battery?

• Are you interested in a smart panel like SPAN or similar for managing your system and your electricity use?

This is just a starting place, of course, but it’s a fairly useful starting place, and your geeky mileage may vary in terms of system research, multiphase inverters, adding on your own inverters over time, how much you want to stalk your kilowatt hours, etc.

Got more thoughts? Join the conversation!

Mill is back on the show! You may recall that Mill is the maker of a home composting appliance (they call it a “food recycler”) that takes your food scraps, heats and dries them overnight, and turns them into dry, slightly sweet smelling grounds that can be used in the garden, tossed in your green bin, or mailed back to Mill to feed chickens.

And now, the company is going commercial. Co-founder and President Harry Tannenbaum joined the show to tell me that Mill is rolling out a larger, modular version of its dehydrating food-waste system designed for working kitchens. It’ll be roughly the size of a commercial dishwasher and built to handle hundreds of pounds a day. The headline partnership is Whole Foods: Mill plans to deploy the equipment across all Whole Foods locations in 2027, with Amazon involved (and invested) via the Climate Pledge Fund.

And while a Mill at home reduces emissions and wasted food, feeds those chickens, and over time can even change your buying habits as you start to realize how much you waste (damn you, arugula), a Mill at the commercial level does all those things and also saves money.

Harry reminded me that “about $400 billion dollars worth of food thrown away every year in the us, which is like one and a half percent of GDP.” If you’re a restaurant or a working kitchen at Whole Foods, you don’t want to buy more than you need, and you want to use what you buy. The commercial Mill machines will have cameras inside to characterize what’s being thrown away. That will help make waste more preventable.

Oh and don’t worry, the chickens are still, as Harry said, “the star of the show.” For Whole Foods, the dehydrated output is expected to go into its own chicken-and-egg supply chain as feed, creating a tighter loop from leftover food to chicken feed to eggs.

By the way, Harry told me he has, indeed, gotten to enjoy Mill-fed eggs. Let me know in the comments or email whether you think Mill should make a sticker for future egg partnerships. I mean, I’d buy Mill-fed eggs, wouldn’t you?

Book recommendation

I love it when my guests recommend books. Harry’s reference was Junkyard Planet (yes, I linked to a used bookstore, circularity, hello). Here’s a quote from the audio that didn’t make it into the episode, but he mentioned it in the context of all the ways a company like Mill could, in the future, try to capture value from wasted … well. All kinds of things! Here’s what he said:

HT: When we were first starting [Mill], I just like tried … there are like 28 books on waste so okay, we’re just gonna read em all. Junkyard Planet’s a great book. It’s about the scrap metal industry and there’s a chapter in Junkyard Planet that’s about recycling Christmas tree lights. I don’t think about Christmas tree lights as recyclable but like sure enough there’s a a town in China. They’re really good at recycling Christmas tree lights.

If you you know you get the lights you pop the bulbs off, test the bulbs, strip the wires, melt on the copper or reline the copper, put the bulbs back in. You get tangles of old, half-broken Christmas tree lights that go in one side and then you get brand new Christmas tree lights that go out the other side.

But you need to get the Christmas tree lights to that town, right, which is highly inefficient. It’s hard right now

… So you know there’s all sorts of kinds of things that don’t feel like you could get the value out of them. But if you can get them to the right place — if you can get to the mouth of a chicken, you know, it’s value.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Happy Heat Pump Week!

You may remember when Panama Bartholemy of the Building Decarbonization Coalition was on the show recently, talking about how heat pumps are everywhere and only expanding? Well, the BDC has declared this week — April 11-18, to be precise — to be Heat Pump Week. It’s a statewide celebration in California, across multiple cities, with in-person and virtual events, videos, education campaigns, and actually they’ve even rounded up and are offering special rebates and incentives all month for people who are shopping for a heat pump, so definitely check that out.

And that makes this the perfect week to announce that I, myself, am getting a heat pump! I’ve actually partnered with Quilt, who was on the show back in February. They’ll be providing me with the Quilt system, and I’ll be paying for the installation, and I’ll be doing a six-month review that covers the install, usage, any changes in bills, any pros or cons, etc. We’ve agreed that this editorial process will be entirely independent, and I think my longtime followers know I’ve got a minimal filter, so don’t worry — no compromises.

Here’s where things stand so far, and I’ll be updating with writing and video as installation and usage progress. I’ll also be as transparent about cost.

This will be a ductless system, meaning each room will have its own wall unit for heating and cooling. You may remember from the interview that Quilt’s whole deal is making these indoor units as attractive as possible, since Americans aren’t used to and can be resistant to the mini-split look inside the house. But the benefit of a smart ductless system is that you can control each room individually, meaning, for example, my basement might not need any heat or cooling at all if I’m not in there. Maximally efficient, energy-wise.

Plus, this is huge for me, because I currently don’t have air conditioning at all! That’s not uncommon in the Bay Area, but I live up on a hill with, as I like to joke, “nothing between me and God,” and however hot it is outside, it’s the same or hotter inside. Witness my feelings on the topic when we had an early-season heat wave in March.

So yeah, this is awesome. Ok, let’s talk cost.

The money

I’m working with Air Synergy, which is a local installer who carries the Quilt system. I got a couple bids and while they weren’t the cheapest, they did a comprehensive site visit and checked out every single part of the house, electrical panel, and spec’d out all the locations for the indoor units in a way that made their bid extra believable.

The cost for installation of two outdoor condenser units and four indoor wall units is just under $20,000, and that could rise a bit with permitting. One minor downside of the Quilt system is that its outdoor units only support three “zones” — aka, three indoor units. I want to heat and cool four zones (upstairs main area, primary bedroom, and two downstairs bedrooms), so I have to get two outdoor condensers.

Heat pumps from other manufacturers, like Mitsubishi or Daikin, can support more indoor units — up to eight, in Daikin’s case. Quilt says in its FAQ that the reason for this is, basically, not to overbuild. It says its smaller units are more compact, quieter, and energy-efficient, and make it easier to control each room individually, for maximum energy efficiency. I guess if I have two outdoor units and one only has one indoor unit attached, I do have some flexibility to add more wall units if need be (for example, I’m skipping my downstairs family room, which I guess I could theoretically want to heat and cool at some point after all.

I’m financing the installation through the state of California’s GoGreen program, which helps finance residential and business upgrades with (relatively) low-interest loans for decarbonization and electrification projects. (If you’ve been wanting to get solar and a battery but not pay for a solar lease that goes up in interest every year, this is a great option, as but one example.) So that’s great, and I got a two-year loan at 3.99%, but it definitely has slowed down the process significantly. It’s taken about a month to get all the approval, and then get the contractor to upload the project to GoGreen to get verified, but I think we’re closing in on scheduling, so I thought it was safe to go ahead and announce it now.

Please email me if you have any questions as this goes along! I’ll keep you posted, and friends, I am super excited. I’ve been meaning to get back to my roots as a proper tech reviewer, and what better way to start than here?

I don’t want you to miss my interview with Gridmatic, which is sort of best described as a new kind of power company that sites in the messy middle between renewables, batteries, and electricity markets — and which uses AI to make that whole system work better.

I’ll admit it took me a minute to understand it, but I think I got it:

Gridmatic is trying to incentivize and improve the rollout of renewable energy by making cheap, clean power behave more like dependable (fossil fuel) power. The company sells electricity to commercial and industrial customers, but they also do a bunch of behind-the-scenes work that makes clean power more reliable and cheaper.

1. They line up clean supply by signing contracts (PPAs) with wind/solar projects.

2. They forecast (weather, grid conditions, and prices) to predict when that clean supply will be plentiful or scarce.

3. They use batteries and wholesale market automation to shift energy through time: store cheap, abundant power, then deliver it when the grid is tight and power is expensive.

Upshot: grid operators can be less worried about integrating renewable energy sources, thanks to reduced volatility; customers get steadier prices; and the grid gets greater flexibility, which reduces the need for fossil-fuel powered peaker plants.

And actually, not to geek out even more but I can’t help it. The flexibility and the reliability piece is the whole deal. The problem with increasing load demand isn’t actually not having enough power. It’s not having enough power at the right time, which means we have to overbuild grid infrastructure to keep things stable, or fire up coal or gas-powered peaker plants.

But if grid operators and utilities can be convinced that aggregated power or what I now know are called “controllable load resources” are actually reliable sources of dispatchable power (ie, it can be turned off and on when needed), then actually, even data centers that are willing to engage in flexible power agreements can be grid assets, too!

That’s all in the interview, I’ll stop now because, as you’ll see below, I have a lot more to say on a totally different topic.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Big thoughts

I heard an interview with a clean energy tech company on Marketplace this week (yes, I still listen!) that absolutely blew my mind. And not in a good way.

The company is Radiant Nuclear, which is producing micro nuclear reactors that can be built in a factory and then deployed as clean backup power for data centers, military bases (their top two customers so far), hospitals, or other businesses. The company says they’re designed to replace dirty diesel generators in areas and installations where grid stability might be in doubt or reliable backup power isn’t optional.

Now, as Marketplace host (and my old co-host) Kai Ryssdal points out in the Radiant interview, people do still have a lot of questions about nuclear power — where the waste goes, what it means to have a nuclear energy facility nearby, how it works, why we need it over other clean energy sources, that sort of thing.

Kai Ryssdal: So let’s say I’m on a farm in Iowa, or I’m a software developer in San Francisco, or whatever, just a random person in this economy. Make me care about this.

Radiant CEO Doug Bernauer: Do I need to?

Ryssdal: Yeah, I think you do. Because people are, honestly, people are going to say, oh my god, nuclear reactor is right next to my farm at this data center, and, you know?

Bernauer: I mean, possibly. The thing is that I don’t need to sell a huge number of these and make them go everywhere. It’s really for people who need it, who want to have a hospital that when the grid goes out, they don’t have a room filled with 12 diesel generators that they’re going to just pump a bunch of exhaust fumes out into the environment with.

Reader, my mouth hung open for so long that a fly flew in. First of all, from a messaging (and of course, public policy and human health) perspective, there is no conversation about nuclear energy that doesn’t or needn’t include a real answer about waste, waste disposal, and storage, no matter how many you plan to sell, or where they plan to sit. Yeah. Uh. You need to.

The interview goes on:

Ryssdal: I get all that, but here we get back to the people screaming at me on the radio, saying, Kai, come on, nuclear. Right?

Bernauer: Well, I think that there’s this association with nuclear weapons and nuclear energy -

Ryssdal: I think there’s an association with Three Mile Island and Fukushima, and that’s what people worry about. And I don’t want to go down the nuclear catastrophe thing, right, because, look, you guys are working on the safety thing, and I appreciate that, but, you know, if this is part of the energy future, I think people have to understand what’s going on.

Bernauer: Sure. For a large reactor, typically a utility chooses to build that. The utility is a public service, right?

The utility has to get approval from the citizens who are going to have to increase the fees that they’re paying. This product doesn’t do that, so we sell to businesses. We sell commercially.

A data center company, Equinix, could buy a reactor, set it down somewhere, use it for clean power. You’re not going to feel it in your pocket directly like you will if some utility chooses to build.

So this is where this interview goes from a stunning lack of media training, PR awareness, and thoughtfulness to a genuinely disturbing presentation of goals, priorities, and values that is all too Silicon Valley.

What Bernauer has effectively said here is, if we were building utility-scale nuclear or working with utilities, we’d be regulated. But, says Bernauer, in effect, since we’re planning to sell to private companies and the Department of Defense, that won’t matter.

And indeed, as Ryssdal points out, data center Equinix has already pre-ordered 20 Radiant micro-reactors, and the Defense Innovation Unit and the Air Force have ordered at least one for an American military base.

I suppose Radiant has reason to think it’s clear skies (no pun intended) for future growth. For one thing, the company has ties to the Trump administration — its chief nuclear officer, Dr. Rita Baranwal, previously served as Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy in the first Trump administration.

Bernauer himself is also part of a very specific Silicon Valley club: he spent 12 years at SpaceX before founding Radiant, and many of the company’s investors come from that pool of funders, including Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, and the massive Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism fund, devoted to funding companies and fields that are closely aligned with Pentagon strategy. (Oh, and Chevron.)

And this is a good place to point out that the Trump administration has cultivated deep ties with Silicon Valley on the topic of nuclear energy, per Pro Publica from early April. This article reports on a meeting last summer at the Idaho National Laboratory (where Radiant Nuclear is testing its reactor), at which a lawyer who joined the Department of Energy via Elon Musk’s DOGE, “repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns” related to nuclear testing and waste disposal.

When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

“They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said.

“But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer pushed back. Babies, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups are thought to be potentially more susceptible to cancers brought on by low-level radiation exposure, and they are usually afforded greater protections.

“They’ve been downwind before,” another staffer joked.

Also from Pro Publica:

Four months into his second term, Trump signed a series of executive orders designed to supercharge nuclear power build-out. “It’s a hot industry, it’s a brilliant industry,” said Trump, flanked by nuclear energy CEOs in the Oval Office. He added: “And it’s become very safe.”

Under those orders, the NRC was directed to reduce its workforce, speed up the timeline for approving nuclear reactors and rewrite many of its safety rules. The DOE — which has a vast nuclear portfolio, including waste cleanup sites and government research labs — was tasked with creating a pathway for so-called advanced nuclear companies to test their designs.

The goal, Trump said, was to quadruple nuclear energy output and provide new power to the data centers behind the AI boom.

What could go wrong?

Back to Radiant Nuclear: it’s a red flag when you hear someone declare in an interview that they simply do not have to sell or explain themselves to communities or regular Americans, or even be prepared for such a question in an interview with a media serving a large mainstream audience.

And while I wished it were simply bad media training (I can help!), this attitude sadly appears to be the particular arrogance of a club that counts itself the winners of the future, and has no reason to believe otherwise. What Bernauer is effectively saying here is, I don’t have to worry about what you think because I’ll be doing private, commercial business with data centers and military bases with the full support and fast-tracking of the current administration, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

That bugs me for a couple reasons. One, it’s not the world I want to live in. I’ve spent 25 years in a tech industry that has transformed itself over time from innovators, inventors, and nerds into a series of monopolies and superpowers and sovereign characters with little obvious moral compass. And this industry is constantly attempting to manufacture consent for money-making “innovations” regardless of whether they’re actually a net benefit for people.

It also bugs me because when clean tech companies blow up, are careless with public safety, or are otherwise frauds or fakes, the whole industry suffers. The Solyndra bankruptcy set back federal clean energy investment by at least a decade; the Nikola scandal cast a huge pall on hydrogen trucking. The clean tech SPAC boom brought Silicon Valley BS to public markets like never before, and when most of them went out of business, it just made investors less likely to bet on the next electric bus startup or solar technology, and we don’t have time for that crap.

And here’s the other thing. Radiant Nuclear knows damn good and well that you do have to explain yourselves to consumers and communities, because they had to move their own microreactor plant to an entire state over concerns about nuclear waste!

They’d originally planned to build the plant in Wyoming — and Dr. Baranwal was trotted out to try to explain that they prefer the term “spent fuel,” that Radiant’s fuel is safe, their plans for storing it were safe, and that the company’s presence in Wyoming would continue the state’s long history of mining (in this case, for uranium to create the microreactors) and energy production.

It didn’t work. The company, citing Wyoming’s law banning spent nuclear waste storage, is now building its microreactor plant in Tennessee.

Ironically, the problem in Wyoming was in part messaging and perception, since the state has made at least one exception to its spent fuel law in the past. As this writeup from Cowboy State Daily notes:

Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, chairman of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, […] told Cowboy State Daily the Freedom Caucus “draws the line at out-of-state waste storage.”

She said the group is standing up to California billionaires who “insist on saddling our landscapes with their windmills, their solar panels and now their radioactive waste.”

This trend is only going to grow — this pushback against out-of-control technocrats, billionaires, manufactured consent, and Big Tech writ large. Communities are shutting down data center projects left and right, while other communities are shutting down solar and wind farms over misinformation and sheer NIMBYism.

I believe in the power of technology, the uniquely human ability to invent and innovate and create — from electricity to skyscrapers to truly miraculous medical developments to the incredible spring bloom of scientific joy and discovery that was the (publicly funded!) Artemis II moon mission in April.

And therefore, it offends me to see a company carrying a clean energy banner try to run roughshod over humans and communities because they believe they’ve been anointed by the current administration and the particular slice of Big Tech that’s decided that the ends of progress justify any means they want.

First, a correction and an apology! In the original release of this episode, I said I was speaking with Josh Garrett of Redwood Earth Communications, when in fact it’s Redwood Climate Communications. The audio has now been updated!

Hey, so, this week on the show, I talked with Josh Garrett of Redwood Climate Communications about a topic I’ve weirdly neglected (considering it’s what I try to do every single day): climate storytelling and communication.

Josh and I dug into the specific difficulty around this work — the fact that “climate” has become a political tripwire again. His take (and mine, as it happens) is basically: don’t go silent, but do get ruthlessly context-aware.

For some audiences, especially anyone depending on federal funding, that can be as practical (and bleak) as scrubbing certain words from public-facing comms and leading with “co-benefits” instead: pollution and public health, affordability, efficiency, reliability, and the “this is just better tech” argument. If people won’t listen to “greenhouse gases,” they will often respond to “pollution.”

We also talked about the messaging mismatch: fossil fuel interests have basically unlimited money and decades of coordinated, consistent propaganda muscle—while climate/clean energy is comparatively scattered and, ahem, prone to over-explaining (don’t @ me, you know this is true, my science-minded friends). Josh’s prescription: get pithy, repeat a few sticky truths (his favorite is “clean energy is cheap energy”), and coordinate like you mean it.

And on the “what can people actually do?” side, he argues for talking about climate out loud (the anxiety is there; the conversation often isn’t) and showing up locally—zoning meetings, town halls, the unglamorous places where solar and wind projects get approved or killed—because the loudest voices in the room shouldn’t automatically be the ones saying “no.”

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Recommended reading

Here’s a good piece that happens to quote Josh, on Bad Bunny’s use of broken power lines during his Super Bowl performance, and how effective it can be to simply tie real-world experience to climate events. Unfortunately, this is likely to become more effective as more and more people experience climate shocks.

A very problematic note from the article linked above:

The public is also hearing less about climate change. The fall 2025 Climate Change in the American Mind survey found that only 17 percent of Americans say they hear about global warming in the media “at least once a week,” the lowest percentage since the question was added to the twice-yearly effort in 2015. Yet the same study found that 64 percent of Americans are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming.

More than one climate communicator I’ve talked with has told me the that a really impactful thing you can do to combat climate change is simply to talk about it with friends, family, and at work. Social permission is very, very real. (And yes, don’t get me wrong, the mainstream media are deeply failing us on this issue, but that’s … a whole other topic.)

Also, if you’re really into this topic, Yale launched a new 14-week certificate program in strategic climate communication. The application window is closed for this year, but keep an eye on it for the future if you’re in one of the fields below.

From the Discord:

Some things that have jumped out and been interesting in our Everybody in the Pool Discord server, which is up to almost 100 members (join at the link in this here sentence!):

• A writeup on the Geely Galaxy G9 plug-in hybrid, a Chinese SUV that, with its gas-electric motor, gets an estimated 800-mile range, about which Edmunds writes: “In track and on-road testing, this three-row SUV exceeded almost all of our expectations. Chinese cars are ready for prime time in America.”

• This cool video on what to do and what not to do as you build a net-zero home

• This amazing post (Bluesky) on how 1,200 years of Japanese records of cherry blossom blooms have accidentally created a treasure trove of climate data (this year’s bloom is the earliest on record)

• A discussion on best used EVs to buy in a time of skyrocketing gas prices (or anytime, really)

Hope to see you in there!

This week, I’m going with one big essay to try to pull all of these energy efficiency and VPP threads and whatnot together into one big vision of a better future.

As regular listeners know, we’ve been circling around versions of a theme since the beginning of the year: how to meet surging electricity demand without slow, expensive, and, heaven forbid, fossil fuel-powered infrastructure buildouts. I’m going to illustrate this with a metaphor — you’re trying to increase your household savings. Stay with me, this might be imperfect, but I think it’s going to work. We’ve got three big steps, here.

Step 1: Cut spending

So the first step in your plan is to just save money, right? Not spend so much. Maybe you do a better job shopping your closet or renting clothes instead of buying new ones, keeping your car longer, eating all the food you buy, cooking instead of going out.

In energy terms, this means making our existing infrastructure more efficient with more strategic use of the resources we have.

That can include PG&E and the Building Decarbonization Coalition’s efforts to electrify one neighborhood and city at a time, to reduce the need for adding or replacing aging gas pipes and equipment. If you’re a utility, you put in advanced power flow control systems to better balance the power you have. You use demand-response programs to incentivize customers to turn down the heat or air conditioning at peak times, or charge their cars a little slower overnight, the way your iPhone does. Smarter management of these resources means we can meet peak demand moments without fossil-fuel powered peaker plants, and we can extend the use of the infrastructure we have.

Step 2: Invest to save more

Cool, so we’re starting to save. But with a few smart changes and investments, we can save even more. You pay off your car so you’re not making a car payment and accruing interest. You refinance your mortgage to a lower rate (ok, maybe not today, but in theory, interest rates willing). You insulate your house so you stop heating the outdoors all winter. You cancel the three streaming services you forgot you were paying for. Suddenly you’re starting to return real money to the bottom line. Retirement feels real(er)!

In energy infrastructure terms, this starts to look like utilities and programs that don’t just save energy. They actually harness and redistribute the excess. Let’s say you’ve got a bunch of heat pumps in a neighborhood that are smart and Internet-connected, like the ones from Quilt. You’re piloting a program to put Copper’s battery-powered induction stoves into homes. You’re talking to a network of homes equipped with solar and backup batteries, and you’re using even more sophisticated demand-response programs that pay customers for using what they need, and offering the rest up to the grid when the grid needs it. Right now, this is mostly happening at a small scale, wherever these assets happen to be installed or incentivized. But this is where the future potential lies.

Step 3: Monetize your assets

Back to the budget. Now we’re saving money like a boss. But we’re also looking around the house being like, huh. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I could probably sell. I’m not going to go out and get another job or anything, but I can actually start to generate money off of the stuff I already have. So you get on eBay and DePop and Nextdoor and you start selling things — and this is just stuff around the house, you know? You’re not taking up a new hobby and selling your knitwear on Etsy. You’re just making money off your pile of stuff.

Now we’re talking VPPs, people.

Last week, with Budderfly, we expanded into the idea that a whole, connected network of maximally efficient and centrally controlled buildings can start to act like a virtual power plant. It’s not new power generation, no. But harnessing together what would otherwise be idle capacity, delivering it to the grid when needed in a coordinated and intelligent way? That’s still a little like creating something from nothing.

And all of this gets me to this week’s episode with Marco Krapels from Enphase, which kind of gets us to the holy grail version of this theme we’ve been working on. Because Enphase started as the microinverter behind your solar panel, and then moved into home batteries, and is now realizing, oh hey, holy crap, we’ve got tons of batteries in a bunch of houses all over the country, and soon we’re launching a bidirectional EV charger that so cars in driveways can help power the home and eventually sent power back to the grid, and that, sweet baby child, is now a pretty big decent-sized power plant, come to think of it.

Here’s where your budget and efficient energy usage and deployment actually converge. Because if your next investment is solar, a whole-home battery, and an EV, then you can lower your own costs, keep your lights on when the grid fails, and also let a utility or aggregator tap a slice of that capacity when the grid needs it most — and as these programs evolve, you can and should get paid for the power your little house-plant is generating.

Basically, if we treat data centers and even electrification as “new load equals new gas,” we lock in fossil infrastructure for decades. But if we can meet a meaningful slice of peak demand with orchestrated flexibility—batteries, EVs, buildings—we give the grid a different option.

And then there’s my favorite topic: bidirectional EV charging! The long-awaited moment when the battery sitting in your driveway stops being idle “storage” and starts being a flexible grid asset. Enphase is soon to launch a true bidirectional EV charger (ball’s in your court, automakers). Say your car battery is multiple times larger than a typical home battery, and many are, and software can ensure you still wake up with the range you need, then a whole new kind of capacity shows up much faster than traditional infrastructure.

What I love is the virtuous future flywheel. Electrification isn’t a drain, it’s the future of the grid. It creates more tools, and incentivizes more renewable energy installation instead of less. Homes and buildings become genuinely more resilient, thanks to battery backups and renewable energy that isn’t dependent on the price or availability of oil or natural gas.

Our install base is already pretty solid: according to SEIA, US homes and businesses have already installed 28 gigawatt-hours of behind-the-meter battery storage (meaning it’s kind of like the stuff sitting around your house that you could sell on DePop). Without draining everybody’s battery to zero, you could still dispatch gigawatts of capacity during peak demand, and certainly enough to offset multiple large peaker plants’ worth.

Oh and as of 2025, residential battery installations in the US are growing roughly 50% year over year.

So. I mean. Pretty cool, right? This is not going to single-handedly solve America’s load growth issues, and there are a lot of complexities I’m skipping in order to get to the bigger vision, but it’s still a directionally correct illustration of the concept. Squint and we get to a cleaner, more resilient, more decentralized power system where data centers don’t force the grid into building a bunch of new capacity just to cover a few peak hours a year. And one where consumers don’t just pay for power. We can actually get paid for flexibility, too.

Boom. Step 4: retire.

Listen to the latest episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Quick context reminder: The US power grid has an uphill climb to meet exploding demand for electricity over the next several years. Most of this is because of data centers and manufacturing, some of it is from home electrification, electric vehicles, and just all of us plugging in more devices and gadgets all the time.

The challenge, of course, is to meet that demand without raising electricity rates — which means, ideally, not building a ton of new infrastructure, which we talked about recently with Quinn Nakamura of PG&E, and to avoid having to bring or keep more dirty power online, like coal and even natural gas, in order to get there. And meanwhile, the march to meeting demand is impeded by long interconnection queues to hook up new renewable energy sources, the need for grid innovation, and politics.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s get back to solutions! A profoundly under-appreciated grid asset is the the energy we never have to generate in the first place. In this week’s episode of Everybody in the Pool, I talked with Al Subbloie, CEO of Budderfly, an “energy as a service” company that goes after the 25–35% of energy we routinely waste in buildings. Here’s how it works: Budderfly takes over as the customer of record for a business’s utility bill, invests its own money upfront to upgrade everything behind the meter, and then gets paid back over time out of the energy savings. The customer gets immediate budget relief and a newly upgraded site. Budderfly gets predictable cash flows. The model lowers demand to the grid, and smart, connected buildings that can predictably control their own usage.

And eventually, all that efficiency can start to look like power generation. The electricity you’re not using is an asset, and your thousands of sites become one big virtual power plant (scroll down a little for an explainer on virtual power plants, because this has and will be coming up a lot).

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts! Next week, I’ll be talking with Enphase, best known for home batteries and EV chargers and the like, about how its network of batteries is also distributed energy storage that can be contributing to the grid, as well. The future is interestingly decentralized, if we can get the policy, the business models, and the incentives aligned.

Explainer: What is a virtual power plant?

The key to harnessing distributed energy resources is something called a virtual power plant (VPP). This is a network of many smaller energy resources, harnessed together with software, that can be coordinated to behave like a power plant when the grid needs help. Those resources can include batteries, smart thermostats, HVAC systems, water heaters, refrigeration systems, EV chargers, actual EVs (once we get bidirectional charging!), or onsite solar. The software is the orchestra conductor that directs these disparate devices to ramp up or down, shift demand to a different time, or inject stored energy back onto the grid.

Where VPPs currently exist, they mostly help deal with energy spikes — peak demand, when lots of things turn on at once, which is expensive and difficult for the grid to serve. So on a hot August afternoon, a VPP might free up meaningful capacity by slightly adjusting thermostats across many buildings, staggering equipment start times, or discharging batteries for an hour. That means utilities don’t have to fire up peaker plants, which generate expensive electricity in a pinch, often using fossil fuels and sometimes (gasp) even coal. The hope and the goal, now that battery technology is more advanced and more affordable, is to use grid-scale batteries to totally replace peaker plants where possible, and augment all of that with the batteries installed in homes and businesses.

So that gets to the dream vision for VPPs, which is that you take these thousands of home batteries, solar panels, smart thermostats, and EVs, bundle them together through software, and dispatch them as a single resource, like one big power plant made up of a swarm of little ones that already exist, instead of building a new natural gas plant or a nuclear reactor or what-have-you.

This is a developing trend, and in practice, most of the country doesn’t allow this yet. In 2020, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued Order 2222, which told regional grid operators to open their wholesale markets to aggregated distributed energy resources. But it’s been very slow going as grid operators struggle with technology and some states just flat-out refuse to allow it. But it’s moving.

Texas, America’s funny little deregulated hotbed for energy innovation, actually launched a pilot in 2023 wherein utilities are incentivizing customers to install solar and batteries and then feed that power back to the grid in exchange for a credit on their bills — aka, the dream. Google and NRG are partnering on a VPP in Texas that could harness up to 1GW of energy from homes with smart thermostats from Nest and Vivint. Dozens of states are trying VPP programs in one way or another, and from what I’ve been told, Northeastern states are moving quickly in this direction.

To sum up why, here’s a good set of numbers from a piece in Utility Dive (yes, I signed up for all the newsletters):

Utilities, regulators and policymakers view expanded virtual power plant capacity as an expeditious, cost-effective solution for load growth and grid congestion.

Increasing VPP capacity to 80 GW to 160 GW by 2030 could save about $10 billion annually in grid costs, the U.S. Department of Energy said last September. Separate studies by Brattle Group found VPPs could enable up to $35 billion in avoided nationwide utility capacity investment over 10 years and up to $755 million in annual avoided power system costs by 2035 in California alone.

Recommended reading

This week, the Department of Energy announced $1.9 billion in funding for what it calls “urgently needed” grid upgrades, with applications due by May 20, 2026. Sounds great, right? They get it! Nope. This is actually much smaller than previous DOE grid investments. The Biden-era GRIP (Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships) Program authorized $10.5 billion over five years, and deployed $7.6 billion between 2023 and 2024. This new program, called SPARK, replaces the third round of GRIP funding that had been planned, and knocks about a billion dollars off the amount that had been in the pipeline.

Also worth noting: GRIP was just one piece of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law's grid spending, which also included a $2.5 billion Transmission Facilitation Program and up to $3 billion in Smart Grid Grants. And if you're wondering if we need grid upgrades to support our magical VPP future, in addition to the regulatory changes, well. Yes. Yes, we do.

As the administration appears to be actually cutting funding for grid upgrades, it has thankfully gone 0 for 5 in attempts to kill wind projects that are expected to bring multiple gigawatts of clean energy onto the grid.

Yay?

So yes, electric car sales here in the US have hit a bit of a slump (although as gas prices almost certainly keep going up, we’ll see how long that slump lasts). But for businesses that run fleets of any size, electrifying is still the best dollars-and-cents decision.

My guest Galina Russell, co-founder and CEO of Mitra EV, is building for exactly the people who tend to get left out of the shiny future-of-transportation narrative: the plumbers, electricians, restoration crews, local delivery operators, and other small-to-midsize fleets that are constantly driving around our neighborhoods. Incredibly, 99% of registered fleets are exactly these businesses. That means a huge amount of tailpipe pollution is coming from those stop-and-go work trucks in dense communities, not just the big headline fleets. The motivator is simple. Fuel savings (she says 50% to 75% is what they have seen), lower maintenance, and no big upfront capex.

Mitra’s pitch addresses the real barrier to going electric, which is asking fleet owners to become charging experts. Instead, Mitra leases the electric vehicles and makes sure the charging is there when the truck shows up, kind of like buying a laptop that actually comes with the charger. Most vehicles get an installed Level 2 charger for overnight charging at the warehouse, and then Mitra adds a small number of fast chargers on-site in locations where the grid can actually handle it. Better still, those fast chargers can be shared, which means other fleets can pay to use them and the host site gets some of that revenue back. It is “electrify your fleet” as a turnkey service, not a multi-year construction project.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Big thoughts

I’m happy to see Paul Krugman and others picking up on the thread that renewable energy is actually national security – you don’t have to fight wars over sunshine and wind. I also appreciate that we’re starting to put this in economic terms. Like this, from this excellent newsletter about the various costs of our fossil fuel economy:

“The United States spends more than $81 billion every single year just to protect the global supply of oil.”

That figure comes from Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), a nonpartisan national security organization led by retired senior military officers. They calculated that about one fifth of the entire Department of Defense base budget exists, at least in part, to keep oil flowing through vulnerable choke points like the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal, shipping lanes in the South China Sea.”

Then there’s the $3 trillion we spent on the Iraq war, according to this piece, and the estimated $1b a day we’re spending to apparently release all of the emissions of a massive oil depot in Tehran at the same goddamn time (in addition to the generational poisoning from the toxic fumes).

We have all the money we need for the energy transition. Just as we have all the money we need for healthcare, public education, libraries, scientific research, and hell, even space exploration. Oh, and peace. Also, and most importantly, we have all the money we need for peace.

On that note: The United States military “is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any institution on Earth,” reports the BBC, using calculations from researchers at Penn State University. It emits more than Sweden or Portugal – it’s the 47th largest emitter on the planet.

Not only do we not have to fight wars over renewable energy, but stopping fighting wars could also put a massive dent in global warming.

Recommended reading

I’m just going to say now that I loved my conversation with Galina of Mitra EV and I think we are exactly the same kind of nerd. And that’s why I’m recommending a book to you before I’ve even finished it! I’m in the middle of

I’m in the middle of The Grid by Gretchen Bakke, and it’s fascinating in a million ways, not least of which because it’s answering a question that comes up in almost every conversation I have about the energy transition (especially in this moment of talking about VPPs and decentralized power generation and of course adding more and more renewable energy): Cool, ok, but what about the grid?

The grid is the blocker and Bakke explains why. Yes, the aging infrastructure, and that’s like, so for real. But also, the American electrical grid was designed for a one-way system: big centralized power plants push electricity out to passive consumers. Everything about its architecture, its regulation, its economics, and its culture assumes that model. So when you try to introduce distributed generation, variable renewables, demand response, or anything that makes the grid more dynamic and two-directional, you’re not adding new tech to a neutral platform — you’re fighting the fundamental logic the whole system was built on.

She also predicts the decentralization we’re starting to see, which I’m currently obsessed with – microgrids, virtual power plants, and grid-edge assets, and this whole evolution into a world where distributed resources like rooftop solar, batteries, smart thermostats, and EVs could collectively function as flexible generation if the grid were smart enough to coordinate them. (Note: I have an interview coming up with a company that is specifically trying to coordinate that flexibility, so stay tuned.)

One important caveat: This book was published in 2016, before utility-scale battery storage was economically viable and before renewables had their massive cost declines. The whole intro talks about intermittency and storage as pretty much unsolvable, so that feels a little dated, since the tech has leapfrogged forward in that regard (and that’s a hopeful outcome, also). But the structural, economic, and regulatory barriers she describes haven’t really changed. Anyway, it’s a great read for understanding the systems-level scale of the grid problem, and kudos to Gretchen, it’s actually a legitimately interesting read.

Buying advice

If you’re in the market for a car and you just know gas prices aren’t going to come down anytime soon, now is just the absolute perfect time to get yourself … a used EV. There are lots of cars still under warranty for less than $25,000, per the Los Angeles Times, there are finally lots of them for sale, and charging your car overnight with a slower level 2 charger was already cheaper than gas even before countries started blowing up each other’s supply.

Historically, when gas prices go up, people buy smaller cars (which use and emit less gas), and now is an opportunity to get more EVs on the road for the most capitalist reason of all: affordability. Tell your friends.

And just for fun, you know what I’m super into right now? Plants. Houseplants. Houseplants are my new empty-nest obsession and honestly, in terms of stuff to buy when realistically we don’t need to buy anything? Houseplants for the win. My recent favorites include a ponytail palm, a variegated hoya, and a colorful croton plant, and my literal pride and joy, which I fawn over constantly, is a polka-dot begonia (a begonia maculata, to be precise). I got her on discount from an overpriced plant store because she was sick and down to only two leaves and I’ve spent two years nurturing her back to glorious life – and I even propagated a baby begonia! Look, I’m just saying, times are tough. But a plant takes your stress away (and cleans your air, to boot).

First, a couple of hard truths:

• The number of billion-dollar storms in the U.S. is increasing dramatically (and, obviously, around the world)

• Three million homes are damaged by natural disasters in the U.S. every year

• Slow recovery after natural disasters can lead to long-term financial decline for affected families

Disaster recovery is still stubbornly stuck in the past. After the storm comes, sadly, a parade of fraudsters, mountains of paperwork, and a confusing patchwork of who pays for what. Improving this industry is, functionally speaking, climate adaptation, and rebuilding after storms is also an opportunity to build in resilience to the next major event.

On the latest episode of Everybody in the Pool, I talked with Susan Hunt Stevens, founder and CEO of Tessi AI, which is building a tech layer for disaster recovery that’s meant to match the speed and scale of the problem. Tessi brings homeowners, vetted contractors, insurers, and government and nonprofit funders onto one platform, and uses AI-driven damage assessments (including aerial imagery) to evaluate homes quickly, often within 24 hours. We also got into why so few households are truly covered when floods and hurricanes hit, how scammers exploit the chaos after a disaster, and a surprisingly hopeful angle: repairs can be a moment to rebuild smarter, with climate-adaptive upgrades that make the next disaster less devastating.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Recommended reading

Boy, no one is prepared for the hard realities of climate change, are they? It turns out that the Department of Defense just now started tracking the cost of extreme weather to military installations, despite already incurring at least $15 billion worth of damage over the past 10 years. And despite being required to strengthen resilience as part of disaster recovery (see? it’s a thing), of something like 500 military installations, only 47 had completed that requirement.

• DoD only recently began tracking the cost of extreme weather, despite billions in damage (Defense News)

Hey, speaking of resilience, I mentioned in a recent newsletter that wind and solar are relatively evenly distributed assets, and that you don’t have to fight wars over sunshine. Also, renewable energy remains cheaper and faster to deploy than fossil fuel sources. So as we’re in the midst of this new god-only-knows-what-it-will-bring conflict in the Gulf region, renewables are starting to look even better, all over again. First, you know I’m obsessed with insurance being the be-all, end-all of financial incentive structures? Well, this happened:

• 5 oil tankers hit, insurance companies cancel coverage

Bloomberg has a writeup about how prolonged conflict in the Middle East could reshape the oil and gas industry and make the need for renewables even greater (with, of course, some predictable hand-wringing about how “it’s not that simple,” but it simultaneously never is and always is that simple, actually):

• What the War With Iran Means for Renewable Energy Deployment

I like this bit in particular, pointing out that renewables deployment is also resilience:

The European Union has already seen the benefit of pivoting to renewables after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though it also sought alternative sources of gas which are now under threat. Between 2019 and 2024, EU countries installed enough wind and solar capacity to avoid burning 92 billion cubic meters of gas and 55 million tons of hard coal in 2024, according to Agora Energiewende.

“We’ve had tangible results,” said Frauke Thies, the think tank’s Europe director. “It was thanks to renewables that Europe wasn’t hit harder by the last energy crisis.”

The case for renewable energy is and actually always has been a national security case. Here’s a good writeup making that exact point:

• Renewable energy is a national defense imperative

And finally, in good news on the renewables front, as is almost always the case, the economics are already winning.

• US renewables hit record high despite Trump pushback

Buying advice

Last week I went on an art tangent; this week I’m talking about art again, but it’s related. I have been following Nicole Kelner for a while now. She uses beautiful watercolor art to tell stories about climate change and inspire climate action, and she’s just wonderful. And now, in the midst of what feels like the polar opposite of a calm and peaceful time, she’s got a new book out called Quietest Places in New York City: Finding Calm & Peace in Urban Chaos. It’s art and travelogue and contains hints for finding peaceful places in your own city, and honestly, even though I’m on an entirely opposite coast, I just loved flipping through (and making a list for next time I’m there). Peace is a luxury, and never more so than in terrible times. I appreciate the push to seek it out.

Climate adaptation is, and always has been, a complicated topic. Those who’ve been following me for a while will know that climate adaptation was the thing that got me interested in climate technologies in the first place.

When I wrote about it for Wired in 2019, I said it wasn’t surrender, it was survival. To my northern plains, practical way of thinking, it made — and makes — perfect sense that we’ve already done damage to the planet that’s showing up as increasingly severe weather and unpredictable climate patterns, so who’s working on making sure we don’t die or starve or drown or burn when that happens?

As the years have passed, adaptation and resilience have increasingly become a climate justice issue, as well. The parts of the world experiencing the most extreme impacts of climate change are often the parts that have done the least to contribute to global warming, and have the fewest resources to tackle rising seas, worsening storms, and dying crops.

And also, in this exact moment, the fact is that some of the conversations about adaptation are, in fact, surrender. At Davos in January, conversations that used to be about reducing emissions and slowing warming were, instead, about coping and rebuilding and surviving and turning to nature for solutions. Some of this is welcome, of course—a realization that climate change is no longer a problem we can punt to future generations.

On the other hand, some told Politico exactly what it really is.

“It’s middle ground, to avoid confrontation with Trump,” said Nicolás Galarza, a former deputy minister of the environment in Colombia.

So I embark on these next episodes with some fatalism, some trepidation, some apocalyptic optimism, as Dana Fisher might say. Because whatever the grim realities that have turned our focus to adaptation, let’s let it also be an area for creativity and momentum, since the scale of the task is immense and the potential outcomes are so tremendously significant.

There has been a massive funding and attention gap around adaption, and as is our way here, let’s flip the script from gaps and obligations to innovation and opportunity.

My guest in episode 123 is Niall Murphy, co-founder and managing partner of Morphosis, a unique investment firm that’s aggregating capital to invest in commercially viable adaptation opportunities — ie, figure out how to get the private sector involved because there are real returns to be had.

Today, roughly 90% of adaptation funding is public money, which is a problem because the need is growing faster than governments can keep up. Niall makes the case that climate impacts look a lot like emerging markets and investable opportunities, from solar-filtering polymers to micro-scale desalination.

And of course, we talk about insurance — the reality that might be the tipping point we have been waiting for.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Recommended reading

CES is legendary for vaporware announcements, and therefore it was with appropriate skepticism that folks received an announcement of a potentially completely game-changing battery technology from Donut Labs. From Electrek:

The Holy Grail of Energy Storage

Consider the implications. A battery that lasts 100,000 cycles is effectively immortal in human terms. You could charge it every single day for 270 years, and it would still be working. It means the battery outlives the vehicle, not just once, but ten times over. It changes the economics of transportation entirely: you buy the battery once, and you swap it into your next five cars.

The power density required for a 5-minute charge and the 400 Wh/kg of energy density opens the door to commercial electric aviation, a sector currently strangled by the weight and slow charging speeds of lithium-ion. It solves the grid storage problem by offering a medium that doesn’t degrade, meaning utility companies could amortize the cost over a century rather than a decade.

If this is real, the internal combustion engine didn’t just die today; it was buried 100 feet deep, and every other battery is not far behind. But, and this is a massive “but”, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and Donut Lab has yet to release that proof.

Well, as I’m writing this, Donut Labs has revealed … what would we call it. Micro-proof? Part of proof? The company announced that it charged the battery cell from 0-80% in 4.5 seconds, as tested by Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre. Unfortunately, it got so hot (which Donut had claimed wouldn’t be an issue) that they had to pause the testing, and these results don’t prove anything about the energy density that might enable electric airplanes, or the 100,000 promised cycles.

We’ll keep watching. I’d much rather watch the familiar CES/tech industry overpromising/astonishing founder hubris story unfold on tech that could bury dinosaur juice forever than on like, yet another tiny laptop, you know?

On a wildly different note

I’ve recently learned about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish surrealist painter who might have been Western civilization’s first abstract artist, who was deeply immersed in the occult and spirituality but also botany, science, and a love for the natural world. She literally had a coven of fellow artists who engaged in religious study and also seances. She created her first abstract paintings at age 44, and created work so wildly inventive and provocative and intense that she directed it not even be shown for 20 years after her death (which was in 1944). In fact, it wasn’t even displayed publicly for the first time until 1986. Anyway. I’m obsessed and I hope you take a moment to be slightly obsessed as well, because, well, sometimes we just need art.

Hey, you guys wanna watch water boil with me?

I know you don’t think you do, but actually you kind of do, since first of all, it happens in like 90 seconds flat, and second, it’s water boiling on top of the coolest induction stove on the market (that I’ve seen, anyway).

Bonus points if you’re the same age as me and you get my Knight Rider reference.

For the latest episode of Everybody in the Pool, I visited the Berkeley headquarters of Copper, which is rethinking the stove (and future appliances) as a home electrification upgrade and also, my favorite thing, a grid asset.

The company’s flagship product, Charlie, is a 30-inch induction range with a built-in battery. That battery is the secret sauce: it means you can buy and install the stove without any wiring or electrical panel upgrades. Plus, you can use it when the power goes out. And induction ranges offer the the kind of precise, responsive cooking most people associate with gas — without the toxic fumes or the heat of standing over a stove with an open flame.

Um, also? These stoves are sexy.

Then, of course, just as I did with Quilt, we zoomed out to the bigger story, including how incentive programs are making electrification feel less out of reach, and why Copper thinks appliances like this could eventually become grid-interactive assets that help balance the grid instead of just drawing power from it. Plus I got to talk with Copper’s in-house chef about how she wanted one of these stoves so bad she un-retired to take a job there and get to the top of the waiting list.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Recommended reading

I know it’s been in fashion lately to retreat from the topic of climate, investing in climate, believing in climate change, that sort of thing. But of all the walk-backs that are definitely going to occur as the political pendulum swings, I suspect the brand-new climate deniers are going to walk back the fastest. Here’s why: Do you want to do business internationally, or do you not want to do business internationally?

• Don’t let Donald Trump distract you; the rest of the world is finally making real progress on climate (paywall, with my apologies)

Also, as Bill McKibben points out, El Niño is coming, and it is not likely to be pretty. Reality hits hard when it’s everywhere all at once.

• An El Niño is brewing

Finally, I love this piece in Public Notice, an interview with Volts founder David Roberts, about the legal battle facing the Trump administration’s attempt to void the EPA’s legal foundation for the federal government’s regulation of greenhouse gases, the endangerment finding.

• “Just making s**t up” — David Roberts sounds off on the EPA

But all is not lost even if the Supreme Court does allow the Trump administration to just make s**t up (per usual, really). Because it’s starting to circulate that getting rid of the endangerment finding would actually take away a key protection that keeps states and individuals from suing fossil fuel companies over emissions.

• Repealing EPA’s endangerment finding may unleash climate lawsuits against polluters

And suing oil companies is starting to get real popular.

• Lawsuits Against Big Oil for Climate Harm and Deception Can Proceed

• Michigan Tries a New Legal Tactic Against Big Oil, Alleging Antitrust Violations Aimed at Hobbling EVs and Renewable Energy

One of my favorite things to say in these troubled times is that I believe in science — including the Newtonian principle of an equal and opposite reaction. Sometimes, the best equal and opposite reaction is good old-fashioned lawyers.

Buying advice

I mean, I don’t know about you, but I am going to scrounge the earth for all the incentives that exist to get myself a Copper stove. I want the white one, so I might have to wait a minute until it comes back in stock. But that one, honestly, is a no-brainer.

Last week, I assured you that heat pumps are super hot right now. This week, we're talking about some super hot heat pumps. Quilt makes intelligent, connected, and really attractive, ductless heat pumps for homes and apartments. Because one thing people might not realize is that when you get a heat pump, if you get a ductless system, you have mini-split boxes on the walls inside your house. That's a very common aesthetic in other countries, but Americans aren't necessarily used to it.

Ductless systems are wildly more efficient because they mean you can control each room individually, you don't have to be heating or cooling rooms when you aren't using them, or you can have rooms set to different temperatures, as needed.

But since we know that the levers of adoption include affordability, innovation, but also aspiration and desirability, Quilt founder Paul Lambert told me the company very deliberately set out with a focus on design and even customizable units.

Also, because all the systems are Internet connected, the company has been able to issue over the air updates that actually made some installed heat pumps, more powerful, just with software.

And of course, this is all part of the conversation about how electrification technology becomes a grid asset, and none of this is lost on Lambert. Much like how Arch Rao talked to me about each Span panel being part of a larger system of intelligent power management, Quilt can also help utility customers participate in demand response programs — that is, get rebates or discounts for using less energy during high demand times, but because of the room by room controls, you could turn down the air conditioning on a hot day in every room, except the room you're in, for example.

Down the road, the hope is that technology like this can be used to free up capacity on the grid, so we can harness more electricity without having to build more expensive infrastructure. And I'm obsessed with this in the context of reinvention, because the fact is that right now, a lot of energy is simply wasted, a lot of infrastructure is duplicated, and with intelligence and broad adoption, we could electrify homes and buildings, and turn those homes and buildings into little power plants that mean we don’t have to bring new fossil fuel power plants online.

This fits into my other obsession about how the future of everything is decentralization, but that is a topic for a much longer newsletter.

For now, listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts! And as a sneak peek, I'll continue this conversation about sexy appliances that are also grid assets next week, with a field trip to visit Copper, maker of the battery-powered induction stove that lives rent-free in my head.

Recommended reading

I love sports. Sports are a complicated topic, I know, but I’ve always loved sports. And lately, especially with the Olympics back in swing, I’ve been thinking a lot about how sports are going to be impacted by a warming planet — and already are. Some interesting reading on that topic:

• In a few decades, many cities that once hosted the Winter Olympics won’t get enough snow to do so again

• It’s a problem for summer Olympics also (paywall)

• Tennis is in real trouble already; last month, play was suspended at the Australian Open after the ATP added new rules to address extreme heat during matches

• And although sports is one of the parts of the global economy that seems like it will always make money, a recent report by the World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman suggests climate change could cost the industry $1.6 trillion by 2050

Buying advice

I have spent a day and a half, as I write this, obsessing about every little detail of the Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance, or as we are apparently calling it, Benito Bowl. But one of the details that thrilled me the most was discovering that the ineffably cool, neutral knitwear on many of the dancers came from a Puerto Rican brand, YOMAS, that’s all about circular design, sustainability, and natural fibers. 🥹 And it’s a woman designer, to boot. (Yes, I put a freaking emoji in there. I don’t even care!! I love it so much!) There’s even a collection called “Let the Mother Rest,” which would be reason enough to love the brand. Shop the collection here!

Reinvention and innovation are all well and good. But in a vacuum, nothing really gets done. The key to true, lasting, durable change is a spider at the center of the web, willing to do the hard work of diplomacy, coalition-building, policy framework development, and of course, encouraging innovation and reinvention where we need it. So for this episode, I went and found a spider, who’s spinning a web of change specifically for decarbonizing buildings.

As a refresher, buildings represent about a3 of US greenhouse, gas emissions, and 90% of those emissions come from space and water heating.

Panama Bartholomy founded the Building Decarbonization Coalition seven years ago after recognizing that utilities, manufacturers, installers, and nonprofits all agreed on what needed to happen with building decarbonization but had no forum to work together.

The coalition focuses on electrification through heat pumps, which are 2-4 times more efficient than gas appliances.

Panama also delivered some great news, which is that heat pumps have now outsold furnaces in the U.S. for four straight years, and last year, the the US surpassed China to become the world’s biggest market for heat pumps.

And electrifying buildings is not just about decarbonization. It is about one of our favorite buzz words lately, affordability. Gas infrastructure is becoming increasingly expensive—two-thirds of gas bills now pay for pipes rather than the commodity itself, and rates are rising faster than electricity and inflation. If we are electrifying, and we are, and we are also building new gas infrastructure at the same time, then we are effectively building double the infrastructure we need when there's nothing gas can do that electricity can't do better.

In terms of getting there, the BDC is focused on getting installers educated and on board, building friendly policy conversations, and working toward neighborhood-scale electrification, where utilities could electrify entire sections of the gas grid at once before retiring those pipelines, saving the $3-6 million per mile it costs to replace aging gas distribution pipes.

It's not always fast, it's not always sexy, but what Panama describes as "shuttle diplomacy" is absolutely the best possible road to lasting change.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts, and checked out BDC Wrapped 2025 for some good news on our progress toward a better future.

Recommended reading

You may have clocked Panama mentioning Donella Meadows and her thinking on systems change — I know this is a topic that’s on our minds for all kinds of reasons right now, from corrupt systems of government to extractive monopolies to climate action. So please do check out her essay on Places to Intervene in a System, which breaks down the 12 points of intervention, in increasing order of effectiveness.

Also, in case you missed it, on Jan. 27, with little fanfare and with zero mention of sustainability or circularity or anything like that, Apple quietly did a big climate action. The company released a new version of iOS for phones, iPads, and Apple Watches that includes patches for devices going all the way back to 2013. This, by the way, includes the iPhone 5, the literal best iPhone ever made. This is a subjective opinion, but only kind of.

You may remember that I recently discovered and recommended Back Market for buying refurbished electronics, and Apple’s new update means the circular economy for these gadgets is now official and much more functional and secure, thanks to this software support. Now that you can get your battery replaced and your software updated, there’s virtually zero reason to get a new phone every year or even every other year. It also gives Apple itself another avenue to keep making revenue on its own refurbished products, the way Patagonia does and REI is experimenting with. This is great news.

Buying advice

Speaking of shopping, or not shopping, I was heartened to see, recently, a fashion creator who built a Victorian-era look, using a vintage fur-lined coat. (I’d link to it, but it was on TikTok, which I unfortunately no longer have — also, we all know you can never find anything again once it’s passed you by in the feed.)

Someone in his comments chastised him and said he should be wearing faux fur. And bless him, he responded and said, “absolutely not. Faux fur is plastic, and vintage fur is re-use.”

Now, I talked about this way back in Episode 45, and titled my newsletter “Vegan leather is a lie.” But it’s still taking a really long time to socialize the fact that “vegan” leather and faux fur are, like just about every other synthetic textile, made from plastic — which is, of course, fossil-fuel derived and toxic.

It’s taking so long, in fact, that a friend recently posted this AI summary in a group chat suggesting what we all might wear to a Depeche Mode cover band party:

While I’m delighted to see that AI thinks sustainable fashion is a 2026 trend consideration (win!), suggesting vegan leather is not it. This caused me to have to be That Person in the chat, and tell everyone that vintage fur or leather are actually vastly preferable — assuming you’re willing to wear either, for ethical reasons. If you’re not, that’s totally fine — both systems are massive sources of animal harm. But I am begging you not to buy new faux fur or faux leather as a replacement if you think you’re getting the look without the harm.

Ok, happy thrifting!

PG&E doesn’t actually want to be like this. I know, I’m as surprised as anyone to hear myself say that. But I put on my open mind hat for a chat with Quinn Nakayama, the Senior Director of Grid Research Innovation and Development (GRiD, see what they did there?) at PG&E, which is one of the nation’s largest investor-owned utilities.

PG&E serves some 5.5 million customers in northern and central California. It is unfortunately best known for the aging infrastructure that caused catastrophic fires in 2018 and 2019, including the 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California history.

The utility entered bankruptcy after being found criminally liable for the fires, exited bankruptcy in 2020, and has been trying to rehabilitate its image and, to be fair, its infrastructure, ever since.

So that would be a lot even if utilities in America weren’t also facing massive load growth coming from data centers, electrification, and growth in usage across the board. But that’s the reality, and it’s further complicated by the fact that California has set a statewide goal to be net zero by 2045 or sooner.

So what’s a beleaguered utility to do?

Look for some startups, obviously!

That’s not the only thing, of course, but among other things, the utility will invest $25 million to pilot innovative solutions resulting from a Pitch Fest held last summer (we’ll take a look at some of the finalists once they’re announced).

In addition, Quinn and I had an interesting conversation about making the most of the grid we already have, minimizing new infrastructure in favor of efficiency, clever demand-response programs, dealing with data center demand, managing electric car charging, and oh, right, keeping rates at something less than the cost of a mortgage.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Don’t Look Up

Climate change shouldn’t be political. The only reason it’s political is because of money, and simple fact is that in America, that money mostly goes to Republicans. And the Trump-Vance administration, with help from Congress, is, as the New York Times put it recently, “[adding] fuel to a warming planet.”

At the same time, the administration wants to weaken weather forecasting, and likely already has. Deep cuts to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration put accurate weather forecasts at risk during the height of hurricane season (Brookings: How politics is weakening America’s weather service), and stopped sharing data with international researchers, putting a dent in global weather forecasting and monitoring.

Most recently, the administration has threatened to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, CO, which is one of the premier facilities doing climate research — and weather forecasting — in the world. Officials referred to it as a center for “climate alarmism,” “left-wing climate lunacy” and something something “Green new scam.” This is not the language of serious people engaging in serious policy. It’s objectively insane.

The climate is changing. Weather and storms are getting more severe, and I write this as winter storm Fern has already caused death and dangerous power outages across much of the US. And in truth, none of this is about “alarmism” or “left-wing lunacy” or even a “scam.” It’s about privatizing weather forecasting — something specifically called for in Project 2025, and something that would benefit people with deep ties to the Trump administration.

Buying advice

I’m a recent empty nester, I work from home, and honestly, I get tired of thinking about preparing and shopping for food all the time. I was a prime target for the ads from Factor — high-protein, nutrient-dense, convenient, ready-to-eat meals, wheee! Reader, I’m not proud. But I signed up. I just wanted a little help, already!

I was filled with immediate horror and regret. How, in the year of our lord 2026, did I receive a box filled with plastic-covered packing material (Factor says this is made of recycled material but must be thrown away once you receive it) and two plastic-wrapped ice packs? One was the kind you can empty into the trash (leaving you with a plastic bag), and the other proudly proclaimed “reuse me.” If you were getting this box of meals every single week, you’d end up with a tower to the sky made of reusable ice packs.

And then each food container itself plastic, with plastic wrap on top, and all of it is of dubious reyclability, even by the company’s own admission. And there are, of course, zero instructions in the box on how to deal with all this material — I had to hunt around for it on the website (I think I ended up searching their help articles).

The packaging is obviously an issue — I found an entire Reddit thread of people trying to figure out how to get rid of the ice packs, and an entire guide from the Institute for Environmental Research and Education (um, BLESS you guys) on how to recycle Factor meal packaging specifically.

I canceled. It turns out that having meals prepared for me actually doesn’t save any time when dealing with the packaging of those meals is itself a part-time job. By comparison, when Leaft Foods sent me the Leaft Blade protein gel packs, the box and all the interior insulation were recyclable cardboard, and the cooling materials were dry ice, which simply evaporated into air — yes, that was wrapped in plastic, but I put it in my Ridwell plastic recycling and that was the end of it.

Too bad though, I admit the Factor food was actually pretty good. But not that good!

After my convenience fever dream passed, I realized my local grocery store has premade meals for when I’m really desperate, and the real key to not having to make food that often seems to be to make a lot of it at once, and eat leftovers.

A friend recommended Locale, which is doing my dream thing of delivering food in glass jars that they pick up the following week!! It’s startlingly expensive, but … maybe? If anyone has tried it, let me know!

We’re in the midst of a global obsession with protein—whether because of perimenopause and menopause, the popularity of GLP-1s, the longevity crowd, or just some impressive meat industry lobbying and influencing. At this point I feel like the word “protein” should come with a trigger warning.

Either way, this obsession now extends to the recently released new American food pyramid, which has red meat, whole milk, and cheese firmly at the top of the pile — making it an unqualified environmental disaster (not to mention firmly at odds with the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association).

One of my favorite climate resources is the Speed and Scale Tracker, which lists Fixing Food as the third most important objective on a list of 10 that we need in order to get to net zero. The global food and agriculture system is responsible for 7 gigatons of annual carbon emissions. Of that, 3 gigatons alone is attributed to cows.

Cutting out red meat and minimizing or eliminating dairy are massively impactful personal climate actions. Even a Mediterranean diet can reduce your carbon footprint by half or more, in addition to being pretty damn empirically better for you than the new American food pyramid.

And that, in a roundabout ranty way, gets us to this week’s startup, Leaft Foods.

Their tech extracts pure, high quality protein directly from the source—green leaves, specifically alfalfa—and in the process, potentially creating co-benefits that could improve the entire food system. Leaft isolates RuBisCO, the most abundant protein on the planet, from alfalfa, and have developed a nutritional powerhouse that outperforms eggs, whey, and beef in amino acid profile. Their first product is a nutritional supplement called LeafBlade, which crams 18 grams of protein and 58% of daily iron intake into a tiny 100ml pouch.

On that note, I tried it. It’s … weird. But they warned me it might be a little weird, so that’s ok. And it is, as I predicted, good in a smoothie!

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Behind the scenes

So much bonus content this week, but I didn’t want to leave this bit out even though it didn’t make it into the edited interview. As I think about reinvention, one of the things I often wonder is, why didn’t this happen sooner? Was there no economic incentive, did no one want to before, was the tech not available? Ross gave me a fascinating answer about science, failure, and how to go back to the drawing board to come up with something new.

Here’s the audio, and the transcript is below.

Molly Wood: Why are you the first? I feel like this is always the question. Like, why are you the first? Why didn’t anybody do, know, it’s clear Rubisco is known. We know it comes from green leaves, it sounds like, you know, why, why is this the problem that had not been tackled, do you think?

Ross Milne: It’s probably a combination of things. You’re right, it has been studied for a really long time, particularly within scientific communities. There’s a plethora of literature out there. You can Google it. You can see so many university literature papers saying this is the utopia protein. All of that knowledge about how it could be the solution, it sits there. I think...

There’s a couple of things. technology is more readily available now than what it was 20, 30 years ago from a processing point of view. We started this company at the, when that, let’s call it a bubble, when that bubble.

of investment or when that large amount of investment was getting pushed into oat proteins. So that that point in time, it really enabled us to raise the kind of capital required to give this a real go. But it’s also worth mentioning that there’s been just about every large multinational food company in the world has at some stage explored Robisco. Either had their own internal team or funded an R &D project into it. There’s been some serious money deployed into this.

I think we build on top of the shoulders of giants in the sense that we read the first year we read every single piece of literature we contacted every team that would talk to us who had worked on Robisco and asked them you know as much as they would share with us we tried to capture. From that

we developed what we thought was a suitable process and the process that would work. We scaled that up to pilot scale. It did not work. We were not able to achieve what we needed to from a yield point of view, which would ultimately lead to an economic viability point of view. And so that meant at that point, we had to actually go all the way back to first principles. It forced us, that failure, that early failure forced us to completely rewrite the book on Robisco. And there was a lot of stuff in that existing knowledge and literature that turned out to not be true in reality. As we scaled things, they just did not hold true. There was sort of quite critical assumptions in...

built all the way back to like the early 60s that people had kind of taken as an assumption and then built upon and then it turned into a truth. And yeah, we had to go right back to the beginning. And it probably just located all the way down here in New Zealand is sometimes an advantage.

Molly Wood: Wow.

Ross Milne: We’re not influenced by other research. We’re geographically a long way away. It forces us to come up with our own hypotheses and own approach. And then we probably got lucky a few times. There was a few things that surprised us. This shouldn’t work, but it does work. That’s odd. And so you make your own luck in life, but there’s definitely a few things that surprised us.

Molly Wood: Right, let’s not underestimate your turbo genius, know. That’s cool though. So you’re like the fusion of protein. Like, always theoretically possible, but needed the right approach to crack it.

Ross Milne: Yeah, definitely needed the right approach and the right team and the right environment with the right funding, the right timing. There’s been great teams that have worked on this before. Maybe the timing was just not right. They either didn’t have the capital to keep going or whatever the challenge was at that point.

Further reading

It’s possible that some of the protein obsession may be starting to lift (after all, the pendulum is real. A couple examples this week:

• Thanks but we already eat plenty of meat, says MSNOW

• Per the BBC, “fibremaxxing” is the new hotness

• This all reminds me of a conversation I had way back in episode 16 about veganism, where Jessica Resler made the point that in fact, yes, Americans already get plenty of protein and almost no one gets enough fiber.

This newsletter feels long enough without more buying advice, but next week, I’ll have a review of the shortest experiment ever in trying a convenient meal service that just left me with a giant pile of plastic and waste. Pardon me while I go make myself a plant-forward lunch. See you next week!

The podcast hiatus is over, and we’re back in the swing for the new year. The first episode out of the gate features an extra audacious startup founder looking to totally upend the built environment. Nathan Silvernail is co-founder and CEO of Plantd, which is creating carbon-negative building materials, starting with a replacement for engineered wood that’s made out of grass.

Side note: Nathan is one of a few founders I came on who originally started at SpaceX, and in the process of trying to find ways off this planet, found himself interested in making this planet better, instead. What I find is that these founders tend to have a big vision, and have been taught to think about what the world might look like if you stripped away what we currently have and started over. They all call this “first principles thinking,” but I’d rather explain it because I don’t want to sound like a total tech bro and half the people they say this to don’t know what it means.

So anyway, here comes Nathan with an audacious vision for the built environment. I say this because the Plantd model puts Nathan in the business of agriculture, manufacturing, and hardware, all at the same time. No big. But despite total reinvention on the back-end, the product that comes out can serve as a drop-in replacement for engineered wood, known as OSB (oriented strand board).

The ultimate vision is one of abundance — trees simply can’t scale to build the number of homes we need to build affordably; more local supply chains; and reduced exposure to climate risk that makes engineered wood a riskier proposition than it already is.

Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts!

You know I love a theme …

That gets me to what I hope will be an over-arching theme for me in 2026: reinvention. I actually like this idea of first-principles thinking, despite how jargony it can be, because it upends the idea that we have to do things the way we are currently doing things. Everything was up for grabs at one point, and some path dependency occurred that put us where we are, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it over, and do it better, sometimes by hacking the systems we already have. Look for more writing on this topic in the coming year, and you might be hearing it a lot in episodes, as well.

Recommended reading

On that note, 2026 started off with a reminder of the crappy way we have been doing things for decades now: fueling our lives and economic expansion with fossil fuels, specifically oil, and using oil as a pretext to make imperialistic land grabs. Be honest, invading a country for oil is actually the most traditionally Republican thing the Trump administration has done so far, in addition to trying to sell us the ongoing lie about trickle-down economics.

Just after the Venezuela assault, Bill McKibben offered a must-read reminder that, in fact, it really does not have to be this way. The energy transition doesn’t just ensure a livable planet for humans and animals—it could also lead to an end to the resource wars that, themselves, make the planet a lot less livable.

Buying advice

I went to CES on fairly short notice this year, because I was invited to moderate a panel at what turned out to be an amazing event held by Back Market, which is a marketplace for refurbished technology.

The event was called The Slow Tech Awakening; it featured a short documentary about what happens to discarded technology — let me put it this way, you could do a drone shot of the CES floor and then do a slow dissolve to the Dandora dumpsite in Nairobi, Kenya, where waste pickers comb through mountains of waste looking for discarded electronics, which they disassemble without protective gear and often burn into toxic smoke and sludge to get at the valuable raw materials within.

Then, I moderated a panel with Sandra Goldmark of the Columbia Climate School, Liz Chamberlain of one of my favorites, iFixit, and Joy Howard, the CMO of Back Market, formerly of Sonos and Lyft. We talked about how to break the chokehold of the “upgrade economy,” how reuse, repair, and circularity are huge economic opportunities, and we previewed iFixit’s Worst in Show awards, which tackle environmental impact, privacy, repairability, overall shitification (their word!), and that feeling you so often have about new technologies — who even wants this?

It was an awesome event, I loved it, and it was a cool alternative to CES itself and, for me, a bit of atonement for all the years I spent telling people to buy shiny new tech.

Anyway, that’s a combination of a humble brag about what I was up to at CES but also legitimate buying advice, because it turns out … Back Market exists! For buying used and refurbished technology! Anytime you want! And selling used technology too, not for nothing. But just because a shiny new thing comes out every year does not mean you need a new thing every year. I’ve been trying to buy used whenever I can, and consumer electronics in particular have a huge environmental footprint to produce, so this is a site where you can get just about any brand you want, way cheaper than new, and feel all kinds of smug across the board. Find out how smug, in fact, by reading the research they published in 2023 about the environmental impact of buying used versus new gadgets. Or, here it is in picture form:

Ok, that’s it for this week, everyone. I’m excited to be back. The last year was a hard one in a variety of ways; I’m lucky to work for myself and be able to take the time I need, but I’m also energized, recommitted to this work and this audience, and excited to put all that behind me and do awesome stuff in 2026. Thanks for bearing with me.

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re taking a second look at the humble electrical panel with Arch Rao, founder and CEO of Span. Span makes a very slick, very smart electrical panel that could turn out to be one of the most important tools for electrifying homes — and maybe even the grid.

Span’s whole pitch is simple and surprising: most homes don’t actually need more power. They just need smarter power management.

Why the Smart Panel Matters

Most homes in America have 100-amp service, and for decades that was totally fine. But now we’re adding EV chargers and heat pumps and electric water heaters and rooftop solar and batteries — and suddenly everyone is being told they need to upgrade to 200 amps or more.

But in reality, homes almost never hit their full capacity. Arch told me homes only bump up against their limit for something like 10 hours a year. So instead of ripping out wires and upgrading transformers and spending five or ten or twenty thousand dollars, Span steps in and manages the peaks — throttling the EV charger for a few minutes, pausing a heating element, smoothing out the spikes, and keeping everything running.

In other words: electrify everything, without the utility upgrade.

And yes… there’s an app. And you will absolutely check it too often. And you will absolutely show people your circuit-level data at dinner parties (maybe that’s just my nerdy circle? Probably.)

Turning Homes into Grid Assets

Here’s where things get even more interesting.

Utilities — including PG&E — are starting to look at Span as grid infrastructure, not just a homeowner upgrade. Because if you can avoid upgrading a whole neighborhood’s transformers and instead just give everyone a smart, flexible panel, that’s much cheaper, much faster, and a lot more elegant.

Arch told me Span could double the usable capacity of the existing grid without adding new wires.

Considering all the conversations I’ve been having and will be having about spiking load growth. data center power needs, and electrification demands, the ability to harvest untapped energy resources without more infrastructure is huge.

The best part is that once you have a bunch of these panels in the wild, every house becomes a tiny energy control center that can shift demand, help stabilize the grid, and participate in virtual power plants. It’s decentralization meets electrification meets resilience, and you know how I feel about that. (I LOVE IT.)

Listen to the Episode

You can listen to the full conversation here and learn more about Span and find an installer here.

If you want to support the show directly, and get an ad-free version, consider becoming a paid subscriber!

And finally, let me know what you think — have you run into panel upgrade problems? Would you install a smart panel? I’d love to hear your stories, and I hope to get a Span installed in 2026 and share my experience and my review.

As always, thank you for listening, reading, and being in this pool with me.
Together, we can get this done.

If you’ve been following battery tech for a while, you know “solid-state” has been one of those phrases that sounds perpetually “five years away.” But Will and his team have made a breakthrough that might actually change that timeline: a self-healing separator that lets lithium-metal batteries charge faster, stay safer, and last longer — without inventing a whole new factory system.

Adden’s design is built to work on existing lithium-ion manufacturing lines. That means the same machines that produce the batteries in your phone or your EV could, in theory, produce batteries that charge as fast as filling your gas tank.

The trick is in the separator — the part of the battery that keeps the two sides from touching (and exploding). Over time, tiny cracks form, and lithium “dendrites” can grow through those cracks, shorting the battery. Adden figured out a way to make the separator repair itself whenever that happens. It’s a chemical reaction that fills the gaps and stops those runaway spikes before they cause problems.

If it works at scale, the implications go far beyond cars. We’re talking about faster, safer power for everything from delivery drones to electric planes to — yes — robots.

Fitzhugh says the batteries could be about 30 percent cheaper than current lithium-ion packs at scale because they deliver more energy for the same weight. That kind of cost improvement could move the entire EV market from early adopters to the mainstream — especially for the 40 percent of Americans who don’t have home charging.

In our conversation, Will and I also get into what the next few years might look like: pilot-scale production, test vehicles by 2027, and the possibility of commercial models on the road before the end of the decade.

If you’ve ever wondered when EVs would stop feeling like the future and start feeling normal — this episode is for you.

Listen to Episode 109 here → Episode 109

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Adam Root, founder and CEO of Matter, shares how he built a regenerative filtration system that captures and recycles microfibers before they pollute rivers and oceans. His journey starts with quitting a corporate job, running a Japanese street food business, and building his first prototype with less than $300.

Highlights

“I read a report about microfiber pollution and realized—this is one of the biggest invisible problems of our time. Somebody needed to fix it.”

“The oceans are the lungs of our planet. They sequester more carbon than all the plants and trees on Earth—and we’re choking them with plastic.”

“Our filter has no disposable parts. It regenerates itself. We can scale from washing machines to factories filtering millions of liters a day.”

“Phase one: stop the bleeding. Phase two: circular materials. Phase three: figure out what to do with all that recovered fiber—and make something amazing.”

Takeaway

Microfiber pollution is massive, invisible, and solvable.

Matter’s regenerative filter design could transform industrial water systems, reduce energy use, and keep plastics out of the ocean—while saving companies money. Climate tech doesn’t always start in a lab; sometimes it starts in a borrowed kitchen with a great idea and a lot of hustle.

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