This Week in Cleantech podcast: LIVE from DISTRIBUTECH International
(The “This Week in Cleantech” podcast was recorded live from DISTRIBUTECH International, North America’s largest distribution and transmission utility event. )
This Week in Cleantech is a new, weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in cleantech and climate in 15 minutes or less. Produced by Renewable Energy World and Tigercomm, This Week in Cleantech will air every Friday in the Factor This! podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts.
This week’s episode features Latitude Media co-founder Stephen Lacey, whose podcast Carbon Copy, broke down the latest data on clean energy investment and whether it’s enough to achieve climate goals.
This week’s “Cleantecher of the Week” is Jon Pevitali from VDE Americas.
Utilities make more money building power plants than transmission lines, and adding interregional transmission means they have to compete with power plants in other areas. Building more interregional transmission goes against utility incentives, which are moving slowly on transmission, sometimes impeding projects. Four proposed high-voltage lines in the Midwest could connect at least 28 gigawatts of wind and solar, but utilities have not moved them forward.
Utilities are currently lobbying against the BIG WIRES Act, a bill to force utilities or competing developers to build more interregional links.
BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy have a new factbook that shows that U.S. coal-fired power plants are shutting down faster than expected. By 2030, 43 more gigawatts of coal-fired capacity is set to retire.
In 2018, the EIA predicted 37 gigawatts of coal would retire by December 2023. But 37 gigawatts did not retire; 81 gigawatts did.
According to a study by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, stock-price indexes without the fossil fuel industry slightly outperformed those that included it. Also, a 2023 Columbia University report shows that oil and gas companies have underperformed compared to the S&P 500, a key investor benchmark.
Some analysts foresee a continuous decline of the fossil fuel industry. Others see a more complex picture, where changing energy policies and other factors such as the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine make fossil fuel demand unpredictable.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Last month Chinese EV and battery giants BYD and CATL partnered up with government and academia to form a group called CASIP, focused on building a supply chain for solid state batteries. Nio, an EV manufacturer in CASIP, has a car with a solid-state battery that runs 648 miles off a single charge, which could be a long-term threat to companies like Toyota and Tesla.
Over the last few years, Toyota has made several promises that they will deliver a solid-state battery, but we haven’t seen one. And although Tesla is CATL’s biggest customer, they are ending their future business relationship, moving in a different direction.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s annual Energy Transition Trends report just recently came out. Host Stephen Lacey calls it a “mixed bag.” When Stephen interviewed Michael Liebrich in 2007, there was $100 billion going into clean energy globally, now it’s $1.8 trillion. According to BNEF, we need to be at 4.8 trillion every year between now and 2030.
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Join us every Friday for new episodes of This Week in Cleantech in the Factor This! podcast feed, and tune into new episodes of Factor This! every Monday.
This Week in Cleantech is hosted by Renewable Energy World senior content director John Engel and Tigercomm president Mike Casey. The show is produced by Brian Mendes with research support from Alex Petersen and Clare Quirin.
