Clean power has never been cheaper. So why are electricity bills rising—and what's blocking faster deployment?
Jigar Shah joins Supercool to explain why 2025 marked a turning point: for the first time in history, essentially 100% of new electricity demand worldwide was met by solar, wind, and nuclear. It happened because the same solutions that solve climate change are winning on affordability.
But deployment could be moving much faster. The technology is proven. The finance exists. The barrier is political: governors and mayors don’t realize the leverage they have over utilities, and utility CEOs won’t act unless forced by law.
In climate circles, Jigar needs no introduction. He pioneered solar financing at SunEdison, launched the Carbon War Room with Richard Branson, and ran the DOE Loan Programs Office that deployed over $100 billion in clean energy financing during the Biden Administration.
We dig into what gives elected officials more power than they know, why some utility CEOs want to be mandated to deploy cheaper solutions, and why Jigar’s headline for 2026 isn’t more technology—it’s more workforce.
Show Notes
Guest: Jigar Shah, Co-Managing Partner
Company: Multiplier
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In 2025, the U.S. president called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, global clean energy investment hit a record $2.2 trillion. Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter covering climate and energy for Bloomberg. His read on the past year: China is becoming the modern Standard Oil. The same way Rockefeller's empire exported petroleum infrastructure globally, China is now exporting electrification—solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, grid tech, project finance—to countries racing to modernize their economies. Pakistan imported solar equal to half its grid capacity in twelve months. And Ethiopia went from zero to 7% EV market share. Developing countries treat electricity like a growth engine. Rich countries struggle to meet 4% annual demand increases. Rathi joins Supercool to walk through Trump's rollback, the ripple effects at home and abroad, and why none of it is stopping the global transition to the low-carbon future.
Show Notes
Guest: Akshat Rathi
Recent Articles: Bloomberg
Book: Climate Capitalism
Podcast: Zero: The Climate Race
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In this end-of-year conversation, David Roberts, a renowned climate and clean energy journalist, lays out his headline for 2025: the rapid growth of AI data centers has forced long-delayed decisions about the power system. After two decades of mostly flat U.S. electricity demand, utilities are now facing sharp new load growth, tighter timelines, and major uncertainty—making grid capacity and interconnection central challenges. Roberts, who hosts and writes the Volts podcast and newsletter, argues that long-lead solutions like new nuclear power plants are poorly matched to this moment. The fastest, lowest-cost capacity available today comes from distributed resources: solar, batteries, flexible building loads, coordinated EV charging, and virtual power plants. Because hyperscalers face real financial pressure to get data centers online, he sees a potential opportunity to redirect some of that capital toward building distributed capacity that benefits the wider grid. The conversation also touches on political volatility and why clean energy and electrification continue to advance globally on their favorable economics, even amid U.S. policy uncertainty.
Show Notes
Guest: David Roberts
Company: Volts
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Real estate companies say they want sustainability. They'll pay for it too, provided it comes with zero risk.
Brad Pilgrim is co-founder & CEO of Parity, a remote HVAC optimization service for high-rises and hotels. Its customer team can walk into a building, spend 90 minutes going from the basement to roof, and tell the owner how much energy they can save—then guarantee it. After eight years, clients like AvalonBay—one of the largest multifamily REITs in the country—are seeing 20-30% cuts in HVAC costs with payback in one to two years.
Brad joins Supercool to discuss how Parity overcomes real estate's risk aversion, why proof matters more than technology, and what happens when you can precondition a thousand-unit building before a heatwave hits. Plus: the one slide Brad had to add to his Series B funding round deck that changed everything.
Show Notes
Guest: Brad Pilgrim, co-founder & CEO
Company: Parity Inc.
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EVs for commercial fleets are increasingly attractive. Battery costs are down, range is up, and in many cases the total cost of ownership already beats gas. The problem isn’t the vehicles. It’s where they’ll charge.
Voltera takes on the part of the EV transition most people never see: procuring the right real estate, securing stadium-scale power capacity, navigating zoning codes that rarely recognize EV charging as a primary use, and getting sign-off—sometimes from more than a dozen city departments—just to get started.
Voltera CEO Brett Hauser joins Josh to show how the company has built a playbook for that messy middle, making EV charging viable for the country’s fleets. Now operating in markets from Los Angeles to Miami, Voltera does this work not so fleets don’t have to, but because fleets never will.
Show Notes
Guest: Brett Hauser, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Company: Voltera
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Something big is happening inside buildings. They’re getting brains.
Schneider Electric is a global giant in energy and building performance—nearly two centuries old, operating across 100+ countries, and already embedded in a million buildings. Manish Kumar, EVP of Digital Energy, joins me to unpack what it means when AI starts running the places we live and work.
We dig into EcoStruxure Foresight, Schneider’s new AI assistant for buildings: a layer that links critical equipment, learns the rhythms of a space, flags waste in real time, and helps facility teams interact with their buildings as performance partners.
From hospitals and data centers to hotels, airports, and offices, we explore what changes when these environments can diagnose themselves, tune performance daily, and keep improving over time—then push into the bigger horizon: what happens when that capability scales across millions of sites worldwide, how it reshapes the future of work, and the role intelligent buildings play in a modernizing grid.
Show Notes
Guest: Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Digital Energy
Company: Schneider Electric
Key Link: Innovation Summit
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There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive.
That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to build the financial software layer the energy transition was missing.
Crux connects developers, manufacturers, and investors across a marketplace for clean energy finance. In just two years, it’s closed over 120 transactions worth billions—turning a bureaucratic tangle of documents into a liquid market built for speed, trust, and scale.
This conversation explores how liquidity, intelligence, and automation are accelerating capital into hard infrastructure—and how Crux is becoming the financial engine powering today’s clean energy industrial revolution.
Show Notes
Guest: Alfred Johnson, Co-Founder & CEO
Company: Crux
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A few months ago, Quilt became the first company in residential HVAC history to deliver an over-the-air upgrade—making its systems 20% more powerful overnight.
Quilt is rethinking how homes heat and cool themselves. Its software-driven, ductless HVAC system combines intelligent controls, high-efficiency heat pumps, and a design language that fits seamlessly into modern architecture. By bringing the pace and polish of consumer technology to an overlooked industry, Quilt transforms comfort into a catalyst for electrification.
Founder and CEO Paul Lambert joins Josh Dorfman to share how Quilt’s approach—what he calls “technical arbitrage”—adapts proven innovations from EVs and connected devices to reimagine the American home for the electric age.
This episode explores how software, design, and emotion converge to make clean energy aspirational and why desire may be the most powerful tool in decarbonization.
Show Notes
Guest: Paul Lambert, Founder & CEO
Company: Quilt
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In an industry that moved fast and defied cities, Veo chose a different path: partnership over disruption. Co-founder and CEO Candice Xie is building one of the only profitable micromobility companies in America by leading with discipline, transparency, and respect for the people shaping urban life. While competitors flooded streets and flamed out, Veo continues to earn trust — winning 90% of city RFPs and operating in over 50 markets nationwide. Candice joins Josh Dorfman to unpack how Veo’s strategy of asking for permission, designing durable hardware, and prioritizing community needs became its true growth engine. This is a masterclass in scaling deliberately, proving that in 2025, the climate-tech companies that endure aren’t the ones that move the fastest — they’re the ones that build trust the deepest.
Show Notes
Guest: Candice Xie, CEO and co-founder
Company: Veo
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Husk Power Systems operates the largest fleet of community-level clean-energy minigrids in the world—over 400 sites across India and Nigeria. Each system combines solar, battery storage, and biomass generation into a modular platform called PRISM, engineered to deploy and power an entire village within 24 hours. Behind the technology is an AI-driven operating system that forecasts demand, manages generation in real time, and keeps every site running autonomously. Co-founder and CEO Manoj Sinha shares how Husk plans to scale to 5,000 minigrids by 2030—delivering reliable, renewable power to millions and redefining what energy access means at civilization’s edge.
Show Notes
Guest: Manoh Sinha, Co-founder and CEO
Company: Husk Power Systems
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SolarCycle is building the next supply chain that makes the clean energy transition possible. Co-founder Jesse Simons spent two decades at the Sierra Club leading national campaigns to accelerate renewable energy before seeing the constraint built into solar’s own success. There aren’t enough raw materials to keep scaling, and communities are starting to resist projects without end-of-life plans.
With a deep bench of industry founders, operators, and visionaries, SolarCycle is closing that loop. They’ve developed technology to extract glass, aluminum, copper, silicon, and silver from old panels—and the reverse logistics to move them efficiently from field to factory.
This episode explores how SolarCycle is making recycling cost-competitive with landfilling—and why that threshold could define the future of solar. As circularity becomes essential to project approvals, investor confidence, and long-term supply, renewable energy is entering its next phase—where even the panels must become renewable too.
Show Notes
Guest: Jesse Simons, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer (corrected)
Company: SOLARCYCLE
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Ken LaRoe has done what no one else in U.S. history has: founded three banks. His first two were financial successes. His third—Climate First Bank—is his answer to unfinished business. Built to align money with mission, it’s now America’s fastest-growing new bank, surpassing $1.4 billion in assets while financing the clean energy economy.
In this episode, Ken shares what he learned across 25 years of banking—why financial performance and climate action can’t be opposites, and how being, in his words, a “rabid environmentalist and rabid capitalist” became his edge. He explains how Climate First’s fintech arm, OneEthos, built proprietary software that powers $30 million in solar loans each month across 700+ installers—without relying on tax credits or Wall Street intermediaries.
Now, as the bank prepares for an IPO, Ken is proving that mission-driven finance can outperform the market—and that the clean energy transition runs on something deeper than capital: conviction.
Show Notes
Guest: Ken LaRoe, CEO of Climate First Bancorp and Executive Chairman of Climate First Bank
Comnpany: Climate First Bank
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Cambium is building the operating system for reuse—a digital supply chain connecting the fragmented network of companies needed to turn fallen trees into finished goods.
Every year, tens of millions of urban trees come down. The scale is staggering, and most end up chipped, burned, or buried. Cambium links tree-removal crews, haulers, mills, and end customers through a unified digital platform—transforming what was once waste into market-ready material.
Today, more than 500 companies across the U.S. and Canada coordinate each tree’s journey, forming a just-in-time network for reclaimed wood.
Co-founder and CEO Ben Christensen calls it building a “tech-native forestry company”—one where reuse runs on code, data, and tight coordination. In this episode, Ben and host Josh Dorfman explore how mastering complexity becomes a competitive advantage, how data builds defensibility, and how scaling reuse could redefine how the material economy works.
Show Notes
Guest: Ben Christensen
Company: Cambium
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AI, electrification, decarbonization—they all hinge on how effectively the grid is orchestrated. Yet thousands of clean energy projects are stuck in U.S. interconnection queues. The backlog is twice the size of all the energy we use today. It’s not a cost problem. It’s the grid—the largest machine on earth—built last century for stability and missing the cloud-scale infrastructure to handle what’s ahead.
Astrid Atkinson has run a machine like this before. At Google, she spent fifteen years in site reliability engineering, keeping Search, Maps, YouTube, and Gmail online with 99.999% uptime. If google.com went down, her team got paged. Running one of the world’s largest critical infrastructure systems taught her a lesson: you don’t scale by adding infinite hardware. You scale with visibility, software, and flexibility.
Now, as co-founder and CEO of Camus Energy, she’s applying that lesson to the grid. Camus builds a real-time data layer—linking past, present, and future—and turns it into signals utilities use to coordinate assets: charge later, ramp down, discharge when needed.
With visibility and signals, utilities gain the control knobs they need—so projects connect in months instead of years and demand flexibility becomes part of the grid’s DNA.
Show Notes
Guest: Astrid Atkinson, co-founder and CEO
Company: Camus Energy
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Curbside charging sounds obvious—plug in outside your apartment, wake up to a full battery. Yet more than 40 million potential urban EV owners are still waiting for someone to figure it out.
it’s electric, co-founded by Tiya Gordon, is designing EV charging for cities—making curbside charging possible by inventing what didn’t exist: hardware powered directly by buildings, a revenue model that pays property owners, and a way to work with cities that clears the path to install. Its chargers are already operational in Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, with more cities on the way.
Tiya brings a unique background in public-facing technology and design to the challenge—she led the technology for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Now she’s assembled a team from transportation, design, and public projects—people who know how to connect landlords, planners, and engineers into the same conversation. That’s how It’s Electric moves swiftly through city permitting in days instead of years—and why the future of EV charging will feel less like bulky infrastructure, and more like disco and sunshine.
Show Notes
Guest: Tiya Gordon
Company: it's electric
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By fusing architect and developer, Alloy Development is proving that the riskiest choice in real estate isn’t electrification or Passive House — it’s clinging to the past.
CEO Jared Della Valle joins Supercool to share the company’s journey to developing The Alloy Block in downtown Brooklyn—aiming to create the most sustainable block in the city. It’s anchored by 505 State Street, New York’s first all-electric skyscraper; two Passive House–certified public schools; and soon, One Third Avenue—the tallest Passive House tower in the world.
Della Valle describes how Alloy built investor confidence project by project—staying nimble, controlling risk, and executing at a standard that pulled institutional capital toward climate performance. He explains why going all-electric lowered long-term risk, how policy and pricing dynamics shifted investor expectations, and why the most competitive real estate today is also the cleanest.
Alloy is shifting how Wall Street perceives risk and return—redefining climate performance not as the exception, but the expectation.
Show Notes
Guest: Jared Della Valle, CEO
Company: Alloy Development
Project: The Alloy Block
Building: 505 State Street - All-Electric Skyscraper
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Mike Faherty grew up surfing the Jersey Shore, surrounded by coastal style but chasing something that felt more enduring. Even as a kid, he obsessed over fabrics—the way silk ties carried weight, how colors layered, how clothes gained character through texture. By seventeen, he had already mapped the outlines of the brand he wanted to build.
In 2012, he launched Faherty with his twin brother Alex and sister-in-law Kerry—creating a clothing company rooted in surf culture, elevated by craft, and grounded in responsibility. Today, it's grown into one of the most distinctive brands in American fashion—80+ stores, hundreds of millions in revenue, and a headquarters team of just over 100 people that still moves with the urgency of a “Day One” startup.
Faherty doesn’t market itself as a sustainability brand, but responsibility is stitched into its DNA. Seventy-two percent of fabrics already meet the company’s responsible sourcing standard, with a goal of 100% by 2030—all disclosed in its public Impact Report. Regenerative organic cotton from the Amazon. Recycled polyester engineered for softness. Supply chain partners chosen for shared values and trust.
In this conversation, Mike, the company's Chief Creative Officer, shares how a lifelong passion for materials became a strategy for innovation—why feel matters, how responsibility shows up behind the seams, and what it takes to scale a modern American fashion brand built for lasting impact.
Show Notes
Guest: Mike Faherty, Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer
Company: Faherty Brand
Resource: Faherty Brand Impact Report
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Forum Mobility is electrifying how America moves freight. Every year, more than 30,000 diesel 18-wheelers haul containers in and out of California’s ports, logging over a billion miles, generating enormous carbon emissions and polluting nearby communities.
Electric semis are powerful, quiet, and clean. But at $500,000 apiece with uncertain charging and maintenance, the math doesn’t work for the independent operators — often family-run businesses — who move most containers from port to warehouse, the first mile of logistics known as drayage. The technology is ready. The adoption is stuck.
In 2024, Forum Mobility opened the world’s largest port-based charging depot at Long Beach. But the company’s breakthrough isn’t hardware — it’s the model: EV Trucking as a Service. By bundling trucks and charging into a predictable monthly subscription, Forum Mobility makes running electric cheaper than diesel and removes the risk that has stalled adoption.
Founder and CEO Matt Leducq saw the same shift in solar, where he built his career and where financing innovation became the key to unlocking market adoption. Now he’s betting the same playbook can electrify freight.
Show Notes
Guest: Matt Leducq, Co-Founder & CEO
Company: Forum Mobility
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Most U.S. homes aren’t wired for electrified living, even though the clean energy future depends on it. Upgrading panels and wiring can cost thousands before a single new appliance is even installed.
Plus, consumers aren’t demanding electrification. They want lifestyle upgrades—faster, more precise cooking, backup power in a pinch, and appliances that cost less and perform more.
Copper has designed the solution. The company is building 21st-century appliances to work on 20th-century infrastructure, i.e., the aging grid we have today. No infrastructure upgrades necessary.
Charlie, their first electric appliance, is a sleek, modern induction range equipped with a built-in 5 kWh battery. It plugs into a standard 110-volt kitchen outlet, cooks four times faster than natural gas, charges when renewables are on the grid, and keeps going even during blackouts.
Copper’s Founder and CEO, Sam Calisch, helped shape clean energy policy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act as co-founder of Rewiring America. Now he and the team at Copper are building battery-embedded electric appliances that install easily and perform better.
The clean energy transition is cooking.
Show Notes
Guest: Sam Calisch, Founder and CEO
Company: Copper
Resource: Wall Street Journal—Maker of Battery-Powered Kitchen Stoves Raises $28 Million
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Interface is a public company proving that carbon-negative is possible at scale. The billion-dollar flooring brand has more than 400 carbon-negative products on the market today and a plan to take its entire business carbon-negative by 2040. Liz Minne, Head of Global Sustainability Strategy, shares how Interface is operationalizing that ambition through product innovation, supply chain engagement, and a culture that keeps climate goals at the center of business decisions. She discusses what it means to lead as a public company, how to translate climate targets into everyday execution, and why culture may be Interface’s most important competitive edge. Interface shows that a carbon-negative future isn’t theoretical—it’s now being built in the heart of corporate America.
Show Notes
Guest: Liz Minné, Head of Global Sustainability Strategy
Company: Interface
Resource: "All In On Carbon" Climate Commitment
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