Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The news quiz episode!

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

This week, we have something a little different: a news quiz.  We recently took the stage with four investors at the Prelude Climate Summit — armed with a bell, a buzzer, and four different categories of questions. We tested two teams of venture investors on their knowledge of the most recent industry news. Shayle Kann and Cassie Bowe, partners at venture firm Energy Impact Partners, are team High Voltage.  Dr. Carley Anderson, principal at venture firm Prelude Ventures, and Matt Eggers, Prelude’s manager director, are team Shayle Gassed. (Prelude led fundraising for Latitude Media.) Stephen Lacey, executive editor of this show and host of The Carbon Copy, quizzes the teams on the latest in climate tech news. Which team will come out on top? Catalyst is supported by Origami Solar. Join Latitude Media’s Stephen Lacey and Origami’s CEO Gregg Patterson for a live Frontier Forum on May 30th at 1 pm Eastern to discuss Origami’s new research on how recycled steel can help reinvigorate the U.S. solar industry. Register for free on Latitude’s events page.

Latitude Media, podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst. High voltage. In this job, you're running among an exceedingly rare group of people who review designs and proposals for novel technologies. You worry a lot about safety. Some have even said too much. The National Regulatory Commission. Oh, my gosh. Whoa, whoa, the National Regulatory Commission? The U.S. nuclear regulatory

He said national. No, I'm not. He's not. Audience. Are we going to give it to him or not? No. No. That hurts.

That hurts. You guys are rough. Well, if you've never heard the term national regulatory commission, that's because it doesn't exist. But it is going to haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. You're about to find out why. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility, built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty.

Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energyhub.com. I'm Shail Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at energy impact partners. Welcome. Well, this one's a bit different from usual. Last week, I had the privilege of attending Prelude Ventures annual meeting. And at that meeting, we did a live episode that's a crossover between this podcast and the Carbon Copy, the other podcast from Latitude Media, wherein we had a live decarbonization game show. I had a teammate, Cassie Bow, who is a is my partner at EIP.

You've heard her on this show before talking about EVs and EVV charging. Cassie and I were up against two folks from Prelude Ventures. So this was their home turf, I will note. And Stephen Lacey, the host of the Carbon Copy and the executive editor of this podcast, put together a list of questions that none of us knew ahead of time, and we had to answer in real time. It was a lot of fun and at least a little bit informative. So Cassie and I against Matt Eggers and Carly Ann

from Prelude. I won't spoil you with the results, but take a listen and see how we did. Let's meet our contestants up here on the stage. So, first up next to me is Shale Khan. He's a managing partner at Energy Impact Partners and host of Catalyst with Shale Khan. Shale is very well known to the folks in this room and to our listening audience. He has a very popular show on climate tech, but here's a fun fact that many of you may not know. he was once a child circus performer. How have your juggling skills translated to being a podcaster and investor?

You can't really see juggling on a podcast, so I don't do it as much anymore. I wasn't really a circus performer specifically so much as a child professional juggler. And on Shale's team is Cassie Bo. She's a partner at Energy Impact Partners. Cassie came up in the solar industry, for becoming an investor, and she was also on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Cassie, does that honor give you any lifetime benefits? Well, I'm no longer under 30. Spoiler alert. At least a subscription to Forbes. It's just an embarrassment on panels. I'm sorry, I brought it up. We'll give you another one of those. So Shale and Cassie have formed a team. What is the name of your team?

We are team high voltage. Okay. All right, team high voltage. I love it. All right. Next up is Matt Eggers. He's a managing director at Prelude Ventures. Before becoming an investor, Matt worked in biotech, and then was an early employee at SunRun.

So, Matt, how did your parents feel about you moving from the lucrative world of biotech and drug development into a cute little solar rooftop company? They didn't think it was a good idea. How do they feel now? Still not sure it was a good idea. And his teammate is Dr. Carly Anderson, a principal at Prelude Ventures. Carly is a chemical engineer and the only one up here with a doctorate. You have developed new materials for energy applications and you hold multiple patents, or according to you, one and a half patents.

Do you put that on your business card? It wouldn't fit. I'll share the title later. It's super sexy. What is the patent? Something about quaternary a means for steam generator cleaning. It's a long title. And what is the name of your team?

The name of our team is Shale Gass. Oh. Shots fire. That hurts. That hurts. Okay. They're just Matt Eggersing us on. Okay.

Okay. All right, so here's how this is going to work. We have four different games about a wide variety of topics on energy and climate tech in the news. Many of them have been covered by our team at Latitude Media, although these are not all stories from Latitude. So this is actually going to help me determine who up here is actually reading our site. We're going to keep score right here. And the members of the winning team will get a hand-painted cup from Nicole Kellner. who is a well-known climate artist.

All right, let's get into it. The first game is called, Grid, Grid, Don't Fail Me. Suddenly, the biggest story in the power sector is the rising wave of demand around the country. A trifect of forces, electrification, new industrial activity and data centers for AI, is forcing utilities to drastically revise

how much power capacity they need to build the next few years. We've been talking about this moment for a while, and it's finally here, and crypto miners everywhere are breathing aside. relief that they can continue to make useless products without so much attention on their energy waste. I'm going to present each team with three different quotes about this trend, and if they guess correctly, you get a point. They also get a chance to answer a bonus question to double up their

points. So if they get it wrong, the opposing team can answer the bonus. Are you ready? High voltage over to you. First quote, it is game over for the Biden administration's 2035 decarbonization goal. That was former developer and power systems expert Tyler Norris speaking to the New York Times about what trend that is playing out among Southeast utilities. We're going to say the utilities building new fossil assets to meet growing wood. That is correct. That is gas expansion to meet a doubling of new power demand. And here is your bonus question. How much fossil gas capacity are Duke Energy, Georgia Power, and Tennessee Valley Authority collectively proposing over the next couple of years? next two years yeah

okay we want to go with like six seven seven gigawatts 11 gigawatts oh come on

you got one point there all right you know this has sparked really real concerns about a dash to gas and some people believe that a lot of utilities

are using this as a bit of panic to build stuff that they love notably gas plants do you think that this is as Tyler Norris said, game over for decarbonization goals, if this much gas is being built to meet new demand? No, it's too early, right? Like, this is all happening in such real time.

Georgia Power is a good example of this. They file, they're on a three-year IRP cycle. They had to amend their IRP a year after they filed it to account for all this new load growth. Like, we don't know what's going to get built yet from all of it. We don't know what the next one is going to look like. I just think it's too early to call it.

Yeah, and I think it just goes to show decarbonization doesn't happen in a vacuum to hit 2035 goals. A lot of other things are going to happen in the meantime, like load growth. And so it's not to say we won't hit 2035 goals. It's just going to be a multifaceted problem for them to solve. Okay, shale gasped. You're up. All right. We still don't appreciate the energy needs of this technology.

There's no way to get there without a breakthrough. We need fusion or we need radically cheaper solar plus storage or something at massive scale. That was a warning from which AI luminary at Davos in January. We're talking about fusion. Sam Altman comes to mind. You got anything, Matt? Go for it. Going to go with Sam Altman.

Correct. According to a leaked document from Business Insider, Microsoft is expanding data center capacity dramatically. It has five gigawatts under management, and it's planning 2.5 gigawatts of expansion in the next 12 months. Bonus question for you, Shale-Gast. What energy companies has Sam Altman invested in? We could do this out loud. Yeah, yeah. All right. Matt, you named one.

Yeah, Oaklow. And I named another, which is Helion. I believe there's probably things outside the nuclear space. There's a very recent investment. Don't give them clues. Come on. It's already their home turf. Okay, time's up.

It is the solar heat company, ExoWAT. All right. Do we get two-thirds of a point? It is one-to-one. That was a very good effort, but no. Well, what do you make, as a follow-up question here, what do you make of Altman's take on the need for, like, big-tech breakthroughs versus more conventional grid upgrades

to solve this problem and unlock new capacity? Yeah, I mean, all of the above, from our investment strategy, we're trying to do both of those sorts of things, big-tech breakthroughs, fusion, deep geothermal. I love the, that, that's the, thinking very far ahead. I also think, you know, to what you are all saying, like,

plans are nothing, but planning is everything, and there needs to be a near term and a long-term thought in both of those camps. High voltage, over to you. Quote, it's the biggest wildcard you have in the project development cycle. That is what the CEO of one wind and solar developer said in April about a problematic trend in the U.S.

What is he referring to? Got to be interconnection. Got to be interconnection. Correct. Very good. All right, bonus question. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, there are 12,000 wind solar and battery projects

sitting in the U.S. Interconnection queue. Another capacity question. How much capacity does that represent? 12,000 projects? It's like, it's like two and a half terawatts, I think. I've seen this chart. I think it has to average, what, 100 megawatts per project? or bigger.

I refuse to do mental math. I think it's reckless, but maybe Shale could do it. I think it's in the realm of two and a half terawatts. That number sticks out in my head for some reason. I like that. I'm going to give it to you, 2.6 terawatts, double U.S. power capacity. Two points. I realize also I did not give you the opportunities to do follow-ups on the bonus questions,

so I apologize for that, but we'll keep that rolling. If the team gets the bonus question wrong, the other team will be able to answer it going forward. All right, so what do you all think? Like, what's the biggest threat? The fact that utilities are not getting creative with, like, how to meet rising demand with clean resources or the inability to get these resources on the grid in this queue?

I'd probably go inability to get them on the grid. I think utilities have been remarkable at the ability to integrate clean resources. I think, you know, we're just got to be able to get more. online and there are some fundamental constraints to that within our existing grid. I totally agree. I think you have cascading problems here, right? You've got the problem of the cues themselves and the amount of time that it takes to get

through the queue and the planning process that goes behind getting through the queue and these restudies that have to take place. So there's ways to redesign the interconnection process that can make that better. Then there's a physical constraint of delivery on the grid and the fact that we just haven't been building the amount of transmission that you would need to deliver that power anyway. And so there's like a combination of structural, regulatory, and physical problems that all, you know, compress themselves into this crazy situation to get us to 2.6 terawatts in the queue. Yeah.

I'm having, this morning, I thought it was fascinating that there's this feeling that a ton of this is going to be gas, right? And we need to build it in the next three, four, five, six years. But in Nat Bullard slides this morning, even the portion of that 2.6 terawatts, that's gas that's currently in the system was very, very small. So that's going to have to change or go much faster. We're just not going to meet that load growth. Well, the extreme regionality of the challenge is also really interesting. You know, in some places, it's very easy to get things cited and permitted.

In some places, it's very difficult. The things that are adding load to the grid vary so much across different ISOs. And, like, you know, getting things on the grid versus the utility. in some cases the utility is the problem. In other places, it's very, very clearly, you know, the challenge isn't actually connecting something. Carly and Matt, over to you. It will be a massive, massive miss

if we don't work together to break these barriers down today. We need fast action to pursue a proactive investment strategy in available technologies that are here right now that you can deploy today. That was Vanessa Chan, chief commercial officer at the Department of Energy, speaking about what set of solutions? It's wind and solar.

I think we go winded solar. Not transmission. No. You sure? All right, let's do it. Wind and solar. Wrong. It is.

Wait, you get to steal? You get the steel? Sure, we're not going to give you a point. You get to steal a bonus question. That's okay. We don't need to steal. What is the answer? I think it's grid enhancing technologies?

Correct. Okay, bonus question. Over to you, Shale Gassed. How much grid capacity could Reconductoring Dynamic Line and topology optimization unlock, according to DOE. Can we give it as a percentage? No, capacity, no.

I think I haven't read an article on this. I actually saw it in a list. I think, Stephen, you have one on your website, so I'm feeling very silly right now. 30 gigawatts. What do you think? Over under? Go over. You go over, all right?

Yeah. What do you think? I mean, we're thinking Georgia Power, that's 6.6 gigawatts right there, right? And between now and 2030. But that's not Reconductorine topology improvements and those sorts of things, right?

It's how much capacity that grid infrastructure or grid improvements would give us. Yes. 50? Let's go 50. Okay. Well, you are in luck because it is a very wide range. It is 20 to 100 gigawatts, so you are right in the middle.

Okay. Over to Shale and Cassie. Well, actually, let's just follow up on Gets for a second. This is a solution that is overlooked by a lot of utilities because they want to build out big infrastructure and earn a higher rate of return. Where do you all see Gets playing into meeting this new demand? Any thought on this particular set of technologies?

Bullish, right? I mean, I think there's a... It's always difficult to get new technologies adopted in transmission and distribution in particular, even within a broadly slow-moving sector like electricity. but clearly there's a need now that is pressing and acute in every utility that we have talked to is looking at all those options.

None of them are the slam dunk that the news makes you think they are. There's challenges with all of them. Like dynamic line ratings are awesome, but they carry their own challenges. So I think we're going to see a bunch of the stuff getting adopted, re-conductoring and dynamic line ratings in particular, but it is important to be really. realistic about the pace of adoption of basically anything in transmission, especially, it's

measured in years or decades. It's not faster than that. Didn't either FERC or the administration just say they are or trying to avoid any permit, a new permit required to do reconducturing? Yeah, you don't need to go through a full NEPA review anymore. You used to do a full NEPA review for any reconductoring over 20 miles, I believe, and now it is any reconductoring of any length. So that should speed up the process, for sure. All right. So, high voltage. This quote comes from Microsoft's Hannah Green, speaking at our Transition AI conference last fall.

It's an unlock. If their kids are showing them on their phones, it's an aha moment. That's her talking about a technology that many utility executives are trying to figure out sometimes from their kids at home. Social meaning? No, it's got to be like chat GPT, LLMs. Oh, I see. This was a year ago. When was this?

Can you say a quote again? Yeah, last fall. Last fall. It's got to be LLMs. Yeah. Social media has been around for a little while. What unlock is TikTok? Says from someone who doesn't have TikTok. I assume it's... I feel very unlocked and I don't know if I need TikTok.

I think it's LLMs. I agree. Okay, we say LLMs. Yes. Correct. What is a softball question? 20 to 100. I think they lose a point for having to talk about that one.

Somewhere between... Audience. Grid. All right, quiet down, shale gas. You'll get a good one next. Okay, bonus question. Our research team, Latitude Intelligence, just released a report on AI in the power sector.

Named three current use cases for utilities in practice today. Three current use cases of AI in the power sector today. Yeah, I'm going to be pretty flexible in your answer here. There's lots of different ways to answer it. It could be for utilities. Yeah, specifically utility deployments. Okay. I would say, I mean, citing.

and permitting in general. Very broad. That's one good one. Sure. Load forecasting. I think there's a good one. Yeah. Dispatching of assets. It's like trading optimization. You could say more broadly. Yeah, I'm going to give it to you.

Those are all, yeah, good. I'm going to give shale gas a chance to add some more. If you want to add a few more, I'll give you a bonus point. Yeah, we didn't hear what they said, but we came up with. You're too busy scheming over here. Capacity planning, grid technology mapping. Well, I've seen a lot of cool applications for, honestly, plugging into LLMs, apps for helping maintenance for Quest go in more smoothly,

ordering replacement parts, all kinds of just operational streamlining products coming out, which is pretty interesting. That's a good one. Maybe a dynamic line right in. Yeah. Yep. All the customers facing things. Yep.

Regulatory filings, document management, that kind of thing. Utility quid shows. Smart meters, grid virtualization. There's a ton. What do you all think about AI as an investment category? I know you're all kind of evaluating it. Do you see it as a sole investment category or just an extension of what companies are already doing that you're evaluating and working with?

I think we see it in a number of ways, but not in its own category largely. So we see our existing companies leveraging it to make their businesses more efficient. We see new companies who it's a fundamental of their product. And then, you know, we obviously see huge implications to the grid for the build out of power to service it. So I don't see it being in a market map in a column for ourselves for our EIP portfolio. Couldn't agree more. I mean, I think it's a research on lock. It's a productivity add-on.

you could also do some very interesting things when you take it to the infrastructure level that's something we're thinking about a lot and I think everyone in this room has heard a lot about load growth and how much of that could come from basically the infrastructure running AI. So agree, all over the place. Yeah, I would say I agree with that

and I don't think it would ever be a column or a category of look at our 20 AI investments, but I'd be surprised if we and EIP and others like us don't have in two or three years at least a couple of companies who have an AI co-pilot or something where AI is the core offering of what they're doing. I mean, I would look looking around the room, like we've got many of our portfolio companies here who use AI or have built products based on AI. And I know you guys are in the same vote.

All right. This is the last question. Over to you, Carly and Matt. Calm the heck down. That's what one expert told Latitude Media after an international. Energy Agency report was released showing what? I believe I saw something related to load growth and data centers, but that could just be the vibe that I'm feeling this week.

Let's go AI load growth, something like that, or data center load growth. Let's do that. Correct. Specifically, that global data center energy use will double in two years. Bonus question. Can you name an example of... a data center design for flexibility, for grid flexibility. What do you mean by design?

An application that allows you to flex compute or interact with the grid. I mean, someone pitched me last week on integrating carbon capture and data centers with the airflow. I don't know if that counts, Matt. Yeah, dare we say crypto mining? Do you all want to take a stab at it? first of all not to credit my opponent but like crypto mining is a good answer actually

yeah turning it off sorry I didn't have it on my list those like crypto mines have been the most flexible data center assets that we have seen for better or for worse a bunch of them are participating in demand response in ERCOT today don't give them the point anyway

but but I give us that point there's also the sidewalk infrastructure partners just rolled as this is what you're referring to Yeah, they've rolled out a new platform called Inveris, I think. It's correct. Designing data centers that are basically trying to co-locate both training and inference, but be able to separate the two from each other because one can be more flexible than the other.

And so they're trying to figure out how to optimize within a given data center so that as a whole, the load looks more flexible. That is correct. Yep, I had that on my list. Also, Saluna's batchable computing using excess renewables and Google's carbon-aware computing, specifically for demand response, which they have dispatched in Europe and in the Midwest. It must be hard for you guys not to have ShellCon on your team. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched

and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture. from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver?

Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust. That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at Energyhub.com.

Okay. This next game is called Bluff the Investor. Members of our Latitude Media team have presented two fake stories and one real one, and each team will have to guess the real story. So, Shale Gast, you are up. This is story number one. I'm going to play you three different stories, and you have to guess the real story. In early April, residents of San Francisco's Mission District experienced what can only be described

as a bizarre auditory phenomenon. Around midnight, as electric vehicles are, across the area simultaneously began their scheduled overnight charging, the city's aging electric grid responded in an unexpected way. It started to hum, quite literally. The strange occurrence, dubbed the midnight melody, lasted approximately seven minutes and varied in pitch, along with fluctuations in electrical load.

This peculiar event seems to have been caused by a perfect storm of high EV charging demand and specific atmospheric conditions, which amplified the electrical transmission sounds to audible levels. It was surreal. It started as a low drone and then turned into what sounded like an orchestra tuning up,

said Mariah Gomez, a local resident. At first, I thought it was coming from someone's sound system, but then I realized it was all around us, like the air itself was vibrating. Engineers of Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E, the city's utility provider, are scratching their heads over the incident.

That was read by our staff reporter, Maeve Alsup. Here is story number two read by Catalyst producer, Daniel Woll. While exploring potential lithium deposits near Reno, Nevada, Dr. Elena Ramirez, a seasoned geologist, made an astonishing discovery that seems straight out of a pirate legend, a cache of centuries-old pirate treasure buried deep underground. During routine subsurface scans for lithium, a mineral that is crucial for battery technology, Dr. Ramirez noticed anomalies in the magnetic readings that hinted at the presence of metal buried at unusual. dual depths. Suspecting an equipment error at first,

further excavation revealed a buried wooden chest, encrusted with rusted iron and filled with gold coins, jewelry, and gem encrusted doblets. I was looking for lithium, but I found gold, Dr. Ramirez joked. It's not every day that you uncover

a pirate chest in the middle of the desert. We were stunned, how it got there hundreds of miles from any ancient trade routes or known pirate activity. It's a mystery we're eager to Okay. That sounds more plausible to me than being able to hear anything in the mission at midnight. Like, okay, and here's...

It was actually just a car alarm, I think, in the mission going off, like 24 of the minute's time. And story number three read by our senior editor in Bailey. In April, Patty Gonia had an epic day of meetings with White House officials and members of Congress, and she did it all in platform heels. I stumped around in these six-inch heels all through the bowels. of our government, the climate drag queen and queer activist said Tuesday during an interview at Earth Justice's office

in downtown Washington. She was dressed as a tree with branches and leaves shooting out of her arms, sparkling green fingernails, and a pair of knee-high Arboreal platform boots. She was in town urging Biden administration officials and members of Congress to protect

old growth forests. Patty Gonia highlighted the need for scientifically backed forest management practices such as prescribed burns, a method long advocated by indigenous groups and ecological scientists. Addressing former President Donald Trump's famously misguided suggestion on forest management, Paddy Gonia remarked, we don't need to sweep the floors.

Trump can come over and sweep my heels if he wants to. Okay. Is it? Story one, a strange hum, creating an EV Midnight Melody for PG&E. Story two, a geologist's rare desert pirate treasure find, or story three, a drag activist promoting conservation on Capitol Hill. Having lived in the Mission District for 10 years,

I think these all sound like true stories about the Mission District. There's one true story, correct? There's one true story. You have to guess the true one. Yeah, yeah. We're going with Padigonia. Correct. Mission. Let's try some. Lobbyists take note that is how you get your message to lawmakers.

Okay. Now, over to high voltage. The first story, again, comes from producer Daniel Waldorf. Congress is facing a daunting to-do list that includes, fund the repair of the key bridge in Baltimore, decide what to do with a child tax credit expansion, reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, and finish work on a rail line.

safety bill. But it's against this backdrop that the GOP-led House Rules Committee unveiled its schedule for upcoming legislation in mid-April. The schedule included markup of six bills. The Stop Unaffordable Dishwashers Standards Act, the Liberty in Laundry Act, the Affordable Air Conditioning Act, the Clothes Dryer Reliability Act, the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, and the Refrigerator Freedom Act. Republican House lawmakers were planning an appliance week to champion the bills. But just like Infrastructure Week under the Trump administration, it was delayed. In response, Representative Don Beyer of Virginia wrote via social media in reference to the list of bills, quote,

this is real. This is actually what Republicans are preparing to spend next week on in the House. Really? End quote. No word yet on when Appliance Week will be rescheduled. Okay. Here's our second story, read by. May Valsop. During a seemingly ordinary review of regulatory filings at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Sarah Jennings, a sharp-eyed staffer, stumbled upon something extraordinary.

While scrutinizing proposals for a new power plant in rural Montana, Jennings discovered blueprints that revealed a long-forgotten cold-war missile silo repurposed as a clandestine bowling alley. The blueprints initially submitted as part of a standard site assessment for energy development detailed not only the missile silo's military specifications,

but also modifications that transformed it into a 10-pin bowling venue during the 1960s. I had to double check to make sure I wasn't seeing things, Jennings remarked. You expect to find underground cables in these filings, not underground bowling lanes. Historians were equally astonished by Jennings' find. The missile silo constructed in the 1950s

as part of America's strategic defenses was covertly converted into a recreational facility where military personnel could unwind. For Jennings, what started as a routine document review has rolled into an unexpected historical adventure, proving that even energy regulatory work can strike historical gold. Okay, and here is our final story from Anne Bailey. A posse of conservative leaders from ranch owners to country music icons have saddled up as geothermal gauchos to champion President Joe Biden's push for geothermal energy. Sporting cowboy hats equipped. with miniature geothermal models,

the spirited group announced their support in a ranch-style gala, advocating for tapping into the Earth's natural heat as a clean energy solution. Partner, it's time we drill down. Not just for oil, but for the heat beneath our boots, announced Hank Hot Rock Cassidy, a legendary rodeo star turned renewable energy enthusiast

and spokesperson for the gauchos. The gauchos demonstrated their commitment with a symbolic drill dance, a choreograph routine that mimics the drilling process, intended to dig deeper into public awareness about geothermal power. They promise more awareness events, aiming to keep the geothermal dialogue

as lively and enduring as a campfire sing-along. Okay, is it? Story number one, the GOPs push for liberty and laundry. Story number two, a FERC staffer's discovery of an underground Cold War era bowling alley, or story three, a unique geothermal advocacy group called the geothermal gauchos.

I love the geothermal gauchos. Yeah, we've got it. We got it. Also, I want to commend Anne Bailey on her impression of a geothermal gaucho, but it's number one. Even though it did sound

like Sarah Jennings and number two really did her research. Yes, indeed. On that bowling alley. We're going to go with one. Correct. Correct. Anybody in the audience

want to do a geothermal dance? It's called the drill. Let's see it. roll down. I think the folks at Quays are going to do that tonight at the party. You've got to get really deep in that one. Yes, exactly. Sorry, Carlos.

This next game is called Not My Green Job. We're going to present clues about different jobs in energy, climate tech, and sustainability. Each team gets three jobs to guess. If one can't guess the job and three clues, then the other team can steal. Number one, high voltage. Some of the challenges this job has to deal with include bees nests, frogs, copper thieves, and vandals armed with ground meat.

This profession is currently responsible. Do you want to try a guess, or not going to keep going? This profession is currently responsible for over 192,000 machines in the U.S. NRL estimates will need 28 million more by 2030. I was going to go with EV charger maintenance, but then the ground meat really. No, I think you're right that it's EV. I don't understand the ground meat bit. Okay, let's think it through.

Why would you have ground near an EV charger? Dog. Dog charging at the charger. Yeah, I don't know. Okay. But 190,000. Let me give you the final. There's like 28 million needed.

Yeah, we need. This job works on machines that are notoriously finicky. A 2023 survey of users found that over 20% of run into problems trying to get them to work. All right. Ev chargers for sure. TV charger technician. Correct.

Can you explain the meat thing? In Germany, Vandals went around sticking ground chicken or ground pork into the charging ports. In Germany? Why? I don't know. It is still a mystery to this day. What about the frogs? Yeah.

Probably just gets in. You just deal with frogs? You don't deal with frogs? Yeah, frogs, chargers. This is in Marin, I feel like, all the time. Probably. All right, shale gassed. By 2030, the U.S. will face a labor gap of 130,000 full-time employees in this profession.

Roughly 27% of the existing workforce in the U.S. will be retiring by 2029, and there aren't enough people to take their places. Can you keep going? This job is essential to the supply chains for transmission lines, lithium ion batteries, wind turbines, and carbon dioxide removal. A day in the life of this job involves things like sampling, permitting, and a lot of walking. Newcomers to this rather active profession would be wise to bring sun-turb. protection, bug spray, or blister pads for their boots. So now we're thinking geologists or a surveyor.

It's surveyor. I like that. Yeah, I forgot the first. What was the number? 130,000? 140, it's a lot. Yes, 130,000. I like, I like the surveyor answer, although it seems a little overly specific, but... It's a lot. That would be a lot of surveyors. Okay, time to make your guess. Yes, surveyors.

You had it right. It was geology. Oh, I forgot. You were allowed to steal. Geologist. Geologist. Okay. The geologist shortage is a major problem for all kinds of climate tech that rely on mining, of course. Batteries need critical minerals and transmission needs a lot of copper, wind turbines need rare earth elements. The IEA estimates that hitting net zero globally will require six times more critical minerals that are in use today.

And we have a massive upcoming shortage of geologists. Mystery job number three. High voltage. Some of the tools of this job are 3D modeling, heat and material balance, process flow diagrams, and piping and instrumentation diagrams. In this job, you could...

Go on. This job, you could theoretically work from anywhere in the world, but few locations you're more likely to work are Texas, Iceland, and Zurich. Geothermal. Something. It's a drilling engineer, probably.

Sadie? Okay. Well, but... Are there more? You're likely to work alongside professionals from a variety of specialized fields like chemical engineering, material science, and electrical engineers. And you'll have to work with technologies like novel sorbents, advanced membranes, and specialized catalysts. It's like a carbon capture engineer or something. In Iceland? They don't have any carbon.

They have geothermal and they have direct air capture. They do. In Iceland. And in Texas is all the point source capture. I think it's like something like a carbon capture engineer. I don't know that that's actually a job. All right. An engineer at a DAC facility.

Oh, a DAC. I could see Carly really wanted to answer that one. I was getting excited about that. I saw Carly getting animated so I knew what it was kind of. Okay. Shale Gast, this profession installed 3.6 million devices in the U.S. last year, but it has millions more to go. The EU estimates that it needs 500,000 of these skilled workers

to hit installation targets by 2030. And in this job, you might need to work alongside plumbers, pipe fitters, and electricians. 3.6. Wait, this is not for us. Oh, sorry. I thought there was a bonus. Is that it or more? That's it.

Yes, those are the three. Well, I would say heat pump installer is encompassed by HVAC. We can stop whispering, I guess. Yeah, I don't know how we keep whispering. We're between heat pump installer or HVAC technician. And Matt, I'm going to let you pull the trigger. Let's go broad. HVAC. HVAC. Correct.

We are lumping both heat pump installers and HVAC contractors together in this, so you were double right. Nice work. Double right, but one bit. Yes, exactly. One point. For the second year in a row, heat pumps outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. in 2020, by a significant margin of 21%. But the U.S. still needs to roughly triple its rate of installation in the next few years to reach all 140 million households by 2050. according to rewiring America. And of course, one of the biggest barriers is finding those contractors. High voltage, in this job,

you're running among an exceedingly rare group of people who review designs and proposals for novel technologies. You worry a lot about safety. Some have even said too much. The National Regulatory Commission. Oh, my gosh. Whoa, the National Regulatory Commission?

The U.S. Nuclear regulatory commission. He said national. No, not. Are we going to give it to him or not? No. No. That hurts. That hurts.

You guys are rough. I don't know any national regularity. I'm sorry. Our answer is we get to steal, right? Yes. The altogether now nuclear regulatory commission. There we go. You got a point.

bad. All right. This is the last job here. Okay, Matt and Carly. This profession's been around for a while, but it had its big break in November of 2022. In this job, you're likely to work alongside researchers, data scientists, software engineers,

robotics engineers, and user experience designers. This profession requires expertise in math. In climate, it's a job that ends up dealing with problems like wildfire management, optimization, transmission, optimizing transmission and satellite imagery. AI engineer? What do you think? Correct. Yep.

All right. This is our final game. It's lightning fill in the blank. It's time for you to complete the sentence. I'm going to give you five stories or trends, and you're going to complete them as quickly as you can. Matt and Carly, over to you. In March, Georgia Power reached a preliminary agreement with state regulators to approve 1,400 megawatts of what?

Nuclear. Nuclear. There. Fossil gas capacity. Oh. What company filed comments disagreeing with Georgia Power's approach to procuring fossil generation for data centers and saying the utility was not being transparent in how it evaluated renewables? Hypersaler. Pick a hyperscaler? Yeah. Microsoft?

Correct. Last month, the federal government announced the recipients of $7 billion for over 900,000 low-income homes to get what? Energy efficiency, solar batteries, and... Good try, man. It is rooftop solar. Routhing. Climbworks recently began offering what to the corporate purchasers of carbon removal

that are tired of dealing with multiple different carbon removal sellers. Portfolio? A portfolio. A bundle of credits? I'll give you that. Yeah, carbon removal packages, PPAs for carbon. Are we giving it to them? What do you think?

Yeah. Right. Generous when they don't get. They're rooting against you out there. A national package of... A recent CBS-UGov pool found that 45% of Americans said climate change is a very important issue,

but what percentage of that group had heard nothing or not much about what the Biden administration had done to address climate change? I want to say like five, but I don't think that's the answer. I bet it's like half. 50%.

It's 40%. It's 49% I'm going to give it to you. That's alarming. I wanted to ask John Podesta about that today. I mean, this administration has a lot of work to do to continue talking about these successes that are fairly obvious to the people in this room. Okay.

The Department of Energy issued a new rule aimed to cut down the time it takes to what? This is for us now? Yep. Get interconnected. Get interconnected to the grid? Oh, I'm sorry, wait. No, no, no, it's not.

It's built new trends. Precundering. Permitted transmission line. It's reconducting. Down from an average, four years down to two years. It's unable further interconnection. Yeah.

On Tesla's Q1 disappointing earnings call, Elon Musk said the company was what or where. Oh, uh... What? What or where? He said on the last earnings call,

he said they were what. Between two waves. of demand, but that's... I'll give it to you. Between two waves of demand. Between two waves, yes. I remember because I was thinking it was like between two ferns, but for

EVs. Tesla's stock experienced a boost last week when Elon announced that the company would focus on delivering what, as soon as late this year? A cheaper EVMO. Last week, Katachi Energy announced plans to invest

$1.5 billion in increased manufacturing capacity for what? Transformers. Correct. The goal is to shrink the lead time for transformers down to two years, an average of two years. Okay, final question. After getting pushback from industry, when the Securities and Exchange Commission announced its new climate disclosure rule last month, it left out what key provision? Scope three.

Cassie agrees. Correct. Very good. That was excellent. This is emissions impossible. Let's give it up for our panelists, Shale Khan, Cassie Bow. Carly Anderson and Matt Eggers. Thanks.

So a little addendum here because of time and a little scoring error on my part in real time. We didn't actually declare a winner, but Shale and Cassie did end up squeaking by in that lightning round. As a very public podcaster who talks about all these trends, I don't think Shale would live with himself if he lost. A big thank you to Pralood Ventures for hosting us at the event. Prelude is an investor in Latitude Media.

If you found yourself not knowing the answers to these questions, or if you want to go deeper, we're covering them all at Latitude Media. A big thanks to Catalyst producer Daniel Waldorf for helping with research and questions. And I'm Stephen Lacey. Thanks so much for listening.