The Energy Gang

The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has a grandstand view of the energy transition. Where is it going next?Jigar Shah, one of the originators of the Energy Gang, now runs the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, playing a key role in advancing clean energy projects. By helping to bridge the gap between R&D and large-scale deployment, it encourages private sector investment and supports the administration’s work to achieve its net zero goals.Jigar was appointed Director of the LPO in March 2021 with a brief to “to rev those engines back up” after a quiet period under the Trump administration. He returns to the Energy Gang to discuss the progress he has made so far, and the goals he is working towards in the future. In particular, he talks about the hot topic of the moment in energy: how to meet increased demand for electricity driven by data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles.Much of the new load being added to the electricity system will not be flexible. Data centers

Fossil fuels still dominate the world’s energy supplies. Do we need different terminology to talk about what’s happening?We talk about “the energy transition” all the time. But is that language misleading? 20 years ago fossil fuels were 85% of the world’s energy, today they’re just a few percentage points less. If there is a transition to low-carbon energy, it is happening only slowly, and it needs to move much faster to achieve the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. The world has made huge strides in both the cost and deployment of renewable energy, but can we really say that we are in a transition away from fossil fuels?Host Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, a professor at Columbia University’s Climate School, and Amy Myers Jaffe, director of NYU’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, to discuss the way the language we use shapes our ideas about energy policy. Amy quotes her Tufts University colleague (and previous guest on the show) Kelly Sims Gallagher: “climate doom and gloom really dis

Conversations from the Gulf Coast Power Association conference. This bonus episode of the Energy Gang was recorded live during the spring meeting of the Gulf Coast Power Association in Houston, Texas. Host Ed Crooks is joined by Beth Garza, President of the Gulf Coast Power Association, Frank O'Sullivan, Managing Director for Clean Energy at S2G Ventures, and Ken Medlock, Senior Director at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University. The GCPA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a strong energy industry in the Texas and Gulf Coast region.First up Ed speaks with Beth about the increase in electricity demand in the region. Unlike most of the US, the Gulf of Mexico coastal region has already been seeing growth in demand for electricity over past couple of decades. But now there are signs that this growth is being kicked into a higher gear as a result of a wave of new data centers, manufacturing facilities and LNG plants. We discuss the challenges and opportunities in this new era.Increas

As half the world heads to the polls, how important will the results be for efforts to cut emissions?Over half the world lives in a country that will be holding an election this year. The votes come at a time when resistance to the energy transition is building in many parts of the world, as concerns around energy security grow and some of the challenges of decarbonization come into focus. In the US, a finely-balanced election offers voters two sharply differing visions of the energy future. But there are other places around the world where elections could also shape the direction of energy policy, including the EU, where parties that are skeptical of climate action are on course to win an increased number of seats in the European Parliament.To explore the ramifications of these key elections around the world, host Ed Crooks is joined by Energy Gang regular Amy Myers Jaffe, director of New York University’s Energy, Climate Justice, and Sustainability Lab, and by Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global energy & climat

Big power users are getting together to accelerate the development of advanced clean energy technologies.The hottest topic in energy right now is the expected surge in demand for electricity. Data centers for AI, new factories, and electric vehicles are driving power consumption higher in the US, after about 15 years of stagnation. Solar and wind power can meet some of that increased demand, but many users, including data centers, want clean electricity round the clock. So there is a new urgency in the need for new clean energy technologies, including advanced nuclear, next-generation geothermal, low-carbon hydrogen, and long duration storage.Unlike wind and solar, these emerging technologies have not yet been deployed at scale, and they are generally have much higher costs. There is a chicken-and-egg problem: costs will only come down as these technologies scale up, but companies are reluctant to deploy them because they are too expensive.Now Google, Microsoft and Nucor have come up with an idea that could b

AI isn’t just threatening to take our jobs, it’s also draining our electricity.Data centres centers used to have power demand measured in the tens of megawatts. Now they are in the hundreds of megawatts, and the new ones that are being proposed have demand in the thousands of megawatts: gigawatts. At the Distributech conference in Feburary, Harry Sideris of Duke Energy said it used to be a big deal when they had a customer wanting to add 10MW or 20MW of load. Now they have several planned data centers for AI needing 1000MW each. How is this additional demand being met?  The good news, from a climate point of view, is that part of the answer is going to be a lot more solar and wind power, and energy storage. The bad news is that, according to the plans that US utilities are setting out, there are going to be more gas-fired power plants, too. US gas-fired generation capacity is on course to rise by 25% over the next 15 years, and although those plants will increasingly be used mainly to back up variab

This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our third from the Distributech conference in Orlando.Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use that technology to serve their customers.In this episode, Ed is joined by Ali Ipakchi, Executive VP of Smart Grids and Green Power at OATI, a grid technology company. Ali was at Dtech in 2014, and some of the issues he was talking about then seem familiar still today. So what has really changed in technology for the power industry since then? Ali talks about how ideas and technologies that were cutting-edge and radical a decade ago are now becoming mainstream.Ed also sat down with Don McPhail, who’s Business Manager for energy and decarbonisation at Uplight, a software company that serves ut

On this episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang: what the history of innovation in solar power and batteries can teach us about the right ways to support clean energy breakthroughs.As the world moves towards a more sustainable energy future, government support is essential for research to develop new technologies, and for investment to deploy them at scale. But policymakers often seem to be blundering in the dark, grasping for policies that they hope will have the outcomes they want. So how do we know which strategies will be most effective for encouraging the progress we need, both to bring down the costs of existing technologies such as solar and wind power, and to create new breakthroughs in areas such as long-duration battery storage and nuclear power.On today’s episode, host Ed Crooks and regular guest Melissa Lott are joined by newcomer Jessika Trancik, a professor of energy studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to discuss the progress of clean energy technologies.Jessika expla

When most people drive electric cars, what does that mean for the grid?This bonus episode of Wood Mackenzie’s The Energy Gang is our second from the Distributech conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event for the electricity transmission and distribution industry in North America. It gave our host Ed Crooks a fantastic opportunity to talk to many of the leading figures from the industry, including those who provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and those who use that technology to serve their customers.In this episode, Ed is joined by Quinn Nakayama, senior director of Grid Research Innovation and Development at Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) in California, to help us understand the transformative impact of electric vehicles on energy utilities and the grid. Quinn dives deep into the ways that the EV boom is shaking up customer relationships and forcing utility companies to take a fresh look at grid management.California is at the cutting edge of the EV revolu

What AI means for the energy transition in the electricity industryWelcome to a special episode of Wood Mackenzie's The Energy Gang, recorded at the Distributech 2024 conference in Orlando. Distributech is the leading event in North America for the electricity transmission and distribution industry. It provides a fantastic opportunity to talk to the companies that provide technology for moving and managing electricity, and to the utilities and other companies that use that technology.The impact of artificial intelligence is one of the central themes of the conference, and host Ed Crooks has been meeting industry leaders to discuss the implications of AI and other new technologies for the future of electricity. From the need for more power to supply data centers for AI applications, to the potential for AI tools for managing the grid, to the possible breakthroughs in nuclear power that could be discovered using AI, the speakers explore a vast range of possibilities. Hussein Shel, chief technologist for AW

There are no two ways around it: 2023 was a difficult year for low-carbon energy investment, and 2024 has so far carried on in very much the same vein.Rising interest rates, fears around future energy policy, cost inflation in some sectors, and perhaps a correction to some earlier over-exuberance, have meant that shares in clean energy companies have generally under-performed the market.To take a couple of high-profile examples, Tesla shares have fallen about 55% from their peak in 2021, while Ørsted shares are down about 75%.Capital flows into climate-focused funds has also fallen sharply. Morningstar data suggested that climate-focused funds attracted about $38 billion of new investor money last year, down about 75% from 2021 levels. In the private markets, on the venture capital side, the flows into clean energy also seem to have fallen, if not quite as sharply.To examine the reasons why low-carbon energy investment is having a rough time of it at the moment, and explore some of the more positive indicatio

The US is the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG), super-cooled to about -160 °C (or -260 °F) so it can be shipped in tankers. An investment boom means export capacity will soar over the next few years. But last month the Biden administration signaled it was putting the brakes on future growth, announcing a “pause” in new approvals for LNG plants to export to nations that don’t have a free trade agreement with the US.This decision is expected to stall future US LNG projects by preventing them accessing key global markets including the EU, China, Japan, and the UK. The pause could be an issue in November’s elections: former President Donald Trump has said he would immediately restart approvals if elected.On the show this week, Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott, Director of Research at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, and Emily Grubert, Associate Professor of sustainable energy policy at the University of Notre Dame, to discuss the implications of the pause for both th

The World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, last week, bringing together leaders from business, finance, politics, academia and culture. Regular Energy Gang guest Dr Melissa Lott was there, talking about one of the meeting’s central themes: long-term strategies for the climate, nature and energy. On this week’s show, she shares with host Ed Crooks and guest Julio Friedmann – who’s chief scientist at the carbon management company Carbon Direct – what she learned there. The role of artificial intelligence was, inevitably, high on the agenda there, with some people arguing that it will turn out to be one of the most transformational innovations in human history. The world of energy is already being changed by AI, and the gang discuss how wide-reaching the effects could be.Julio recently co-authored a report titled the “Artificial Intelligence for Climate Change Mitigation Roadmap”, looking at all the different ways that AI could change supply and demand for energy and so have an

Ed Crooks is joined by Amy Myers-Jaffe and Dr Melissa Lott to look ahead to 2024. They explore the people, places, and technologies that could have a big influence on energy this year. Amy kicks things off with a look ahead to the US elections in November. The results of that vote will have big impact on policy in the US, and there are several other elections coming up around the world that could also have significant consequences for energy.COP28 in Dubai may be only just behind us, but the world is already looking ahead to COP29, which will be held in Azerbaijan. With Brazil lined up for COP30 next year, that will make three consecutive UNFCCC COPs in large oil-producing countries. The gang discuss how that could shape the energy transition.Then there are the technologies to watch in 2024, including Melissa’s choice, enhanced geothermal power. Fervo Energy’s Project Red geothermal facility went online in December, marking a major milestone for an energy source with huge potential. As Melissa explains,

Further conversations from this year’s summit.COP28 was the largest climate talks to date, with global industry leaders, governments,analysts, journalists and climate activists converging on Dubai for the summit.The Energy Gang's schedule was packed, and host Ed Crooks was joined by manyinteresting and influential people from the world of energy across 6 full days. In this episode, we bring you three new conversations that we couldn’t fit into the regular schedule.Kevin Kariuki is the Vice President for power, energy, climate and green growth at the African Development Bank. Laetitia De Marez is the Senior Program Director of the Climate Finance Access Network run by the thinktank RMI. Together they discuss ways to increaseinvestment in cutting emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change.Also, Ed explores a technology for reducing emissions with Mark Davis, the Chief Executiveof Capterio, which works on solutions to stop gas being wasted by being burned off in flares.For our full COP28 covera

As 2023 comes to a close, the Energy Gang reflects on the events and trends of 2023 that provided grounds for optimism about the transition to a lower-carbon world.On this week’s show, Ed Crooks is joined by Melissa Lott and Amy Myers-Jaffe as they share their reasons to be cheerful this holiday season.  Ed chooses the precipitous drop in the cost of solar modules, making solar power ever more competitive against fossil fuels, and driving the adoption of solar energy on a global scale. Amy’s choice is the continued growth of EV sales. Despite all the negative commentary about electric vehicles in recent months, and some genuine setbacks for the industry, the long-term outlook still looks bright. Finally, Melissa chooses another important development in 2023: the start of construction for Form Energy’s new factory in West Virginia to make batteries for long-duration energy storage. The batteries use iron-air technology, an example of several advances in battery chemistry that are offering soluti

The gang assess the outcome of the climate talks in Dubai.This year’s COP went to overtime, as countries argued over the wording of the concluding statement. They had to carry on the negotiations all through the night to do it, but finally they emerged with what was described as a “historic” agreement. For the first time, the need to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels has been put on the record in a concluding statement from a COP.In our final show on COP28, the Energy Gang look back on the last two weeks of negotiations and debates, and as the dust starts to clear, they assess what it all means. Ed Crooks was present at the talks in Dubai, as were regular guests Dr Melissa Lott of Columbia University and Amy Harder of Cipher, and together they tackle one key question: can we call the conference a success? Some people have been hailing it as a triumph, others say it’s a disaster. Does the truth perhaps lie somewhere in the middle? Or is it not that simple?The Global Stocktake of climate action,

Nuclear energy has been in the headlines more in Dubai, than at any previous COP.Nuclear power has had more prominence at this year’s climate talks than at any previous COP. In fact, some people have even been calling it “the nuclear COP”.That’s partly because the hosts, the United Arab Emirates, have been a pioneer of nuclear power in the Gulf region, building four reactors to meet 25 per cent of its electricity demand. At this year’s COP, 24 governments set a goal to triple worldwide nuclear power generation capacity by 2050. To discuss the implications of this pledge, and analyse the current state of the nuclear industry globally, Ed Crooks is joined by Henri Paillere, who is head of the planning and economic studies section at the International Atomic Agency. He says there is now a much wider appreciation of the central role that nuclear power can play in tackling climate change.Nuclear technology is also seen as offering some big commercial opportunities. The EX-IM Bank, the US export – import bank, rece

On day 9 of the climate talks, what do the experts think? As Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the UNFCC, said today, it’s go-time for governments at COP28 this week. To examine the latest stories Ed Crooks has assembled a panel of energy experts: regular Energy Gang guest Melissa Lott, who is Director of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, Morgan Bazilion, Director of the Payne Institute for Public Policy and professor of public policy at the Colorado School of Mines, and Julio Friedmann, Non-Resident Fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy and CEO of Carbon Wrangler.Together they debate the efficacy of an annual climate summit, the potential impacts of next year’s US and UK elections on global climate and energy policy and the latest key takeaways from the talks.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

An interview with Kristen Siemen from General Motors On this bonus episode recorded live from COP28, Ed Crooks meets Kristen Siemen, Chief Sustainability Officer at General Motors. She sits down with Ed to discuss the current state of the EV market, GM’s plans for the industry and the key takeaways from the conversations at the summit. Subscribe to the show on your podcast platform of choice so you don’t miss any of these special episodes coming live from COP28, and join the conversation on social media: we’re @theenergygang.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.