TRANSCRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
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Hey everybody and welcome to another edition of this week in Clean Tech.
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We're giggling at the 0001 mark, so it's a good start to the show.
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We try to do the program in 15 minutes or so.
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It's about the biggest stories in climbing and clean energy each week.
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No, we do.
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We put a line in the sand at the beginning, and then we fail to meet it by the time we get to the end.
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We we limp across the finish line with a few extra minutes saddled to our backs.
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Anyway, we're recording the show for Friday, October 9th, 2026.
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We've got a first-time guest on the horn.
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Benton Graham from Grist is waiting in our lobby.
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He'll be joining us shortly.
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I am Factor this content director, Paul Gurky, joined once again by Cleantech commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom, and my dog Theo, who is waiting patiently next to me at my desk for me to finish this podcast so we can go on a walk.
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It's a lovely day out here, Mike.
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Hope it's nice where you are.
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It is, man.
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It really is.
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Hey, a listener shout out to Zachas, I think that's how I pronounce his name.
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Don't shout that out loud for in front of anybody.
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Zach is with Tesla Energy.
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He's got a good podcast summary service, which he is already summarizing our show.
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He describes it as follows the energy conversation is scattered across dozens of podcasts.
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Each week, energypod.io distills him into a short briefing, what happened and why it matters for busy energy professionals.
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But you should never be too busy to listen to us keeping under 20 minutes.
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That's the point of this show.
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So hat tip to uh Zach.
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Uh wait, so what is the is he's telling us, is he telling people to listen to us or don't listen to us?
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Because he's just gonna tell us what we talked about in two sentences.
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Do we like Zach or is he an enemy?
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I think he suckered me.
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I think he got me to to to uh promote his You read an ad that we didn't get paid for.
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And we're gonna go we're gonna go from 25 listeners down to 22 because of this.
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Hey, if you're listening to this and you want an ad on the show, you gotta pay us for it.
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Don't trick us like Zach did.
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And if you want to get your opinions on the show, we always have uh an open line for that too.
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Uh the viewers and listeners help make the program.
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You could just email us, whether it's a story suggestion or two cents you want to share, twic twick at tigercom with twoms.us.
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All right, Mike, let's do this story for our new rival, Zach.
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Uh, first one of the week.
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What's on tap?
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Gavin McGuire, Reuters, the energy transition is starting to feed itself.
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This is a cool story.
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Ooh, I like it.
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Cool headline.
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EV, solar batteries, uh, and the grid.
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We all need a lot of stuff from the ground to make those things real.
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Copper, rare earth, silver, other minerals.
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Um, fossil fuel energy doesn't necessarily need all that stuff, but uh new mines and refineries take years to come online to support the clean energy ambitions we talk about on this show.
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And one of the most promising new sources of supply is the energy transitions owned hardware.
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We're talking about old batteries, retired solar panels, decommissioned wind turbines, aging grid equipment.
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For example, Redwood Material says it recovers more than 95% of the lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper from spent batteries and factory scrap, producing more than 60,000 metric tons of critical materials each year.
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The first wave of big EV batteries is now starting to age out, and that pile is only going to grow.
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The IEA says recycling could cover 20 to 30% of global lithium, nickel, and cobalt demand by 2050.
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And we're catching up on solar too.
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Despite some recent research that you may have seen that says a lot of solar recycling is a scam, uh, Dutch researchers recovered silicon at up to a 99.99% purity, so it can be done.
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A team in Australia got nearly 100% silver recovery.
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So we've seen some progress there.
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Mike, your thoughts on this?
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My thought is that cleantech hating is among the biggest scams on earth because these guys are always um uh huffing glue and then saying silly things.
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But there we go.
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Rystat Energy, it thinks the value of recyclable materials and solar panels could jump from about 2 billion today to roughly 80 billion by 2050.
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Load full transcript
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By 2035, panels installed back in 2020 could supply as much as 21% of the silver needed to build new ones.
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So wind blades, they've been a problem because they're made of composites that are hard to break down.
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Um this country now, uh sorry, Viola now shreds them into pellets that can put replace coal, silica, and limestone in cement kilns.
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One seven-ton blade cuts about five tons of coal.
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I love that.
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And then there's what you could call grid mining.
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Utilities are swapping out old transformers, substations, and transmission gear packed with high-quality copper, aluminum, and steel.
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Nucore runs facilities that recover those metals and feed them into new transmission components.
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Paul, story number two.
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I know some folks that have done some grid mining back when I used to live in Michigan, ripping copper out of buildings and stuff.
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The public can do grid mining too.
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Uh we just don't encourage it.
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Dangerous, dangerous tough.
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Anyway, story number two.
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Second story this week: Rachel Millard, Ian Bott, Adidi Bandari, Clara Murray, and Richard Topping, all writing for the Financial Times.
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A piece titled How to Keep the Lights On in an Electrified World.
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Tell me about it, Casey.
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Yeah, balancing the grid used to mean dispatching new fossil fuel plants.
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Now operators are managing hundreds of wind and solar farms plus a flood of rooftop solar that's tough to forecast with powers flowing both ways between customers and the grid at the same time.
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Demand is climbing as people switch to EVs and heat pumps.
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Britain's grid operator thinks the country's total generating capacity might need to grow by 206% to 245% from 2024 to 2050, just to keep up.
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And just under a third of that increase has to be storage or dispatchable power, meaning something you can turn up and down on command.
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So, Britain, they built a much bigger grid and a much more flexible one at that.
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It's leaning heavily on EVs.
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Octopus Energy is uh the country's largest household supplier.
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So smart charging, where cars charge automatically when power is cheap and plentiful, is going mainstream fast.
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Paul, your thoughts.
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Uh, batteries are a big deal, and they're only going to get bigger.
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They're right now the fastest growing electricity technology in the world because of their versatility.
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Britain's got about eight gigawatts of batteries, most of those two-hour systems.
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Aurora Energy Research expects that to more than double in five years, and we've seen a lot of that here in the States.
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Uh, for longer stretches of time, uh, outside of that, what batteries can provide, regulators are backing SSE's Quar Glass project in Scotland.
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It's a new hydro project, the first in a generation.
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It would pump water uphill when power's cheap and then release it when prices rise, supplying 1.4 gigawatts for 32 hours straight.
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Uh, regulators are looking into compressed air storage in salt caverns, uh, things like uh storing air as a chilled liquid, uh, also an option.
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There are interconnectors, big undersea cables linking Britain to Europe.
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Net imports covered just over 9% of UK demand last year, but neighbors often have the same weather.
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This summer the grid operator had to abruptly cut exports to the Netherlands during a windless hot night.
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Uh, even so, the grid operator expects Britain to uh be a next port net exporter of electricity by the year 2030.
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Mike, get us to story three.
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Zeke Housefather from The Climate Brink.
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He wrote, What if the world hadn't built wind and solar?
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Um, I could summarize the story by saying we'd be effed, but that would not be good for our show.
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I don't know what we'd be doing the show about.
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Yeah, it's something else, probably.
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Uh, common argument online is renewables aren't replacing fossil fuels at all.
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They're just sort of an and proposition.
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If you look at only the numbers on paper, it's hard to argue with that.
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Coal power hit a record in 2024, gas hit a record in 2025, global fossil fuel generation is about 50% higher than it was just 20-some years ago.
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Zeke argues this is the wrong comparison, though.
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Global electricity demand grew 75% over those 20 years because of industry, EVs, air conditioning, data centers, on down the line.
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Did you catch it there?
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I said data centers.
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That demand was coming whether we built a single wind turbine or not.
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I like to just mix it up, keep you guessing, Casey.
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Since 2015, wind and solar met 57% of new demand.
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That's way less than fossil fuels did at only 29%.
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Last year they covered 99% of it.
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Mike, what would you do if we didn't have wind and solar to talk about?
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So Zeke, in his analysis, went back to 20 uh uh 2005, and he froze wind and solar levels at that year's uh output in every country and filled the gap with that country's own fossil fuel mix, traditional fossil fuel mix, coal in places like China and India, mostly gas in places like Texas or the UK.
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Without that growth, the global power selector pollution would have been 28% higher last year.
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That's 3.7 billion tons of carbon pollution avoided in 2025 alone, by three-quarters of uh total US carbon pollution.
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Over the full 20 years, it's roughly 23 billion tons.
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So in places where demand grew s demand grew slowly, clean energy actually pushed fossil generation down.
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The EU power pollution fell 55% since 20 uh 2005.
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Without wind and solar, that would have been about 16 percent.
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In the US, it would have been about 17% instead of 37.
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So 60% of this avoided pollution came in just the last five years.
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Paul, four story.
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Story four, one of your favorite authors, Ivan Penn, over at the New York Times, titled A New Crop of Solar Panels is the U.S.'s best hope of catching China.
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Tell me about it.
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You know, Ivan is so much better a reporter than David Wallace Walls because Ivan chose to come on the show.
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And I think that's that's qualification.
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That's all it takes.
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Yeah.
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For sure, right?
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Okay.
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So this is actually really cool.
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U.S.
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solar manufacturers say they're close to a breakthrough with tandem solar panels, which stack extra layers of material on top of each other, kind of like a layer cake.
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So the panel can turn more sunlight into electricity.
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The goal is about 25% more energy than most panels on the market today.
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Tandem PV, first solar, and Q cells all say they're getting ready to sell them commercially soon.
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Q cells, which we covered back in June when it started making solar cells at its Cartersville, Georgia plant, is now the first company to get a tandem panel independently certified.
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And this matters because China, as listeners to this show well know, controls 80% of the solar panel market in the world.
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Getting tandems right first could give the U.S.
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and its allies a shot at winning back a big piece of this industry, which I'm sure the current clown show running federal policy will rush to give away to China since that's what they love to do.
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Paul.
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I've got to be the naysayer here and say, hold on, Mike Casey, because there are some hurdles to clear here.
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Um, you've got to convince not only the developers, but the people uh signing the checks at the banks that these things are gonna last 20 to 30 years.
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QCells right now is is shooting golf ball-sized chunks of ice at its panels to prove that they're they're durable.
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These things are also expensive.
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Uh, a lot of estimates put tandems at three to three and a half times the cost of a regular panel.
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The upside, hard to deny though, that extra 24% capacity.
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Your solar farms in the U.S.
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run at a 24% capacity factor, meaning how much power they actually produce compared to their max.
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Tandems could get above 31%, according to some research.
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So the same power, uh, fewer materials, same site.
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Scott Warden at Tandem PV says his panels are degrading less than 1% per year, and tandems will dominate the industry by the mid-2030s.
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Scott, we'll have to get you on the show to talk about that if that's the case, because of course the show will last forever.
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That's that's the way we've set it up.
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It will last longer than time.
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It feels like this episode's headed that direction.
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Let's bring our guest in, Mike.
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Story five.
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We're cruising to a very prompt ending, Paul Gherky.
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And I have enough time to tell you one uh listeners should turn on the YouTube channel and see Paul Gurkey trying to catch up to Brian Mendez, who he secretly uh admires for they're in the beard race, so that's good.
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Yeah, it's a it was a silent uh arms race, Mike.
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I hadn't actually talked about the beard growth to Mendez at all.
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I just showed up with it to intimidate him.
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It worked.
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It worked as a sign of force.
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Did are you gonna join me in being a bundler for Jeff Bezos' presidential
campaign that his wife wants him to run?
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What are you talking about?
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Jeff Bezos is gonna run for president.
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That's awesome, man.
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But it's not what we're talking about today.
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I just gotta guess Benton is now in the show and he's just like, what the hell is this?
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I'm good.
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I'm just wanted to tell you, I thought you and I showed up at the Bezos fundraiser.
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I thought it was cool to bump into you there.
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But anyway, hey, Casey saw 10 minutes into the show and he's like, I'm just gonna pontificate for the next two and put us behind the eight ball.
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Fantastic.
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Yeah, we uh we welcome you, Benton.
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You've got a piece.
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The future of commuter rail could be taking shape in Boston.
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Tell us about the story.
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What's the big takeaway?
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Yeah, thanks for having me.
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Um yeah, so uh rail electrifications uh it's nothing new, right?
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It's something that we've been doing for uh 140 years, electrifying streetcars back in the late 19th century.
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Uh, but what's new here is you know, for a long time that's meant overhead wiring, uh installing third rail, very costly uh uh um infrastructure projects.
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Now, as you guys are talking about the importance of batteries, uh there's uh there's kind of an emerging technology around battery-powered trains, um, which is significant because you know, instead of retrofitting your rail radically, you can pop a battery-powered train onto tracks that are typically built for diesel.
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So uh this is kind of something that uh some public transit agencies, commuter rail lines are testing out in the US, um, Caltrain in the Bay Area, Chicago, uh Metra in Chicago in 2028, and then uh the T in Boston in uh in 2030.
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It sounds like there's a path here for broader adoption.
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Benton, the the rail that you wrote about in your piece, it's that was not a quick project.
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I think there was advocacy work for that project for something like 30 years to make that one happen.
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And you're reporting, what do you see as like the wider scale adoption play here in the United States for technology like this?
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Yeah, I think we're gonna learn a lot about that over the next five or so years.
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Um I I should say it's something that's not only happening in the US.
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There are there are uh battery-powered trains in Germany, uh, in in I believe the UK is introducing some as well.
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So this is you know something that that Europe might give us some insight into.
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But as far as adoption in the US, I think it's gonna kind of depend on how things go in Boston, Chicago, the Bay Area.
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Um and you know, a couple things to consider.
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Uh you know, is the is the rollout of these trains super bumpy?
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Like, like with any, you know, with with EVs, like the charge uh range is a question, right?
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Boston, Chicago, these are these are harsh winter climates.
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Um, is that a problem?
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Um I think that's you know one thing to to consider.
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And then there's the cost piece too.
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I mean, uh uh in reporting on the story, the T said a big reason that they pursued this technology is because uh battery powered trains were a huge cost saver compared to installing overhead wiring.
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I mean, just for one example, Cow Train in the Bay Area installed overhead wiring from San Jose to San Francisco.
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That was about$2.4 billion.
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So that was that that is super costly, but uh I think it's also important to note that that that Boston is spending six seven hundred and sixty-five million dollars over for a 15-year lease, they're not even purchasing these battery-power trains.
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So I think it's gonna kind of depend on on can that cost come down.
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Um, obviously, we've seen the cost of batteries falling for a long time now.
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So um hopefully that that'll be the case.
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But if if these uh trains uh you know can can save a lot of money on kind of those big infrastructure project investments that would be required to electrify.
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Yeah, I mean it it is something that could wind up being appealing to uh regional railroads, and who knows, maybe someday, you know, beyond that, uh Amtrak and kind of inner city rail as well.
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And are how do these batteries the trains use compare to what would go in a car?
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I know size is obviously different, but are they using different technology and are there other things that they take into account?
00:16:35.279 --> 00:16:46.639
I think, you know, that's a good question, and uh I don't know like the uh the technological intricacies of how different it is, but um I do think it it there are a lot of similarities.
00:16:46.799 --> 00:16:59.039
Um and you know, like the example I was giving someone the other day is like you know, you could think of it
like like a Tesla, or even like I think maybe a better example would be uh electric powered buses.
00:16:59.200 --> 00:17:03.440
We've seen the rollout of those struggle in some cold weather climates.
00:17:03.519 --> 00:17:11.039
I think, you know, Duluth, Minnesota, way up north, they wrote they tried to roll these buses out uh five, six years ago.
00:17:11.200 --> 00:17:18.720
Didn't work well, but now we're starting to see uh cold weather climates like Madison, Wisconsin, places like that have some success.
00:17:18.880 --> 00:17:30.720
So I think the the general tech battery technology is pretty comparable to what, yeah, in terms of what some of the uh challenges are, is it's pretty comparable.
00:17:30.960 --> 00:17:34.799
You compare like trains and and and buses and and even EVs.
00:17:35.200 --> 00:17:36.400
Oh, I think we're about out of time.
00:17:36.480 --> 00:17:38.079
We need to get to our clean tech of the week.
00:17:38.319 --> 00:17:38.799
Let's do it.
00:17:38.960 --> 00:17:46.799
This week's clean tech of the week is drum roll, please, Christopher Galarza, longtime chef and co-founder of Eco Chef.
00:17:46.960 --> 00:17:49.039
They certify sustainable commercial kitchens.
00:17:49.200 --> 00:17:53.200
Christopher co-authored a new peer-reviewed study, recruited most of the kitchens in it.
00:17:53.359 --> 00:17:55.839
Theo, I'm reading Clean Tecker of the Week, buddy.
00:17:56.079 --> 00:17:58.319
Theo says congratulations to Christopher.
00:17:58.480 --> 00:18:02.240
He co-authored a new peer-reviewed study, as I mentioned, recruiting most of the kitchens in it.
00:18:02.400 --> 00:18:09.119
Found that 70% of gas-fired restaurant kitchens had nitrogen dioxide levels above EPA and WHO safety limits.
00:18:09.279 --> 00:18:12.480
Uh, WHO, that's that's the WHO, not the ban, not to be confused.
00:18:12.640 --> 00:18:14.880
Uh, that's even with commercial ventilation.
00:18:15.039 --> 00:18:20.720
Uh, Chris says working in all electric kitchens was the first time in his career he could do what he loved without feeling like he was dying.
00:18:20.880 --> 00:18:23.440
Congratulations, Christopher, Clean Tecker of the Week.
00:18:23.680 --> 00:18:24.160
Outstanding.
00:18:24.319 --> 00:18:34.319
And Paul, I I want to acknowledge this is a personal growth moment for you that you said data centers, because I'll bet you if I ask Benton if it's data or data centers, he's a data guy.
00:18:34.559 --> 00:18:35.759
Benton looks like a data guy.
00:18:35.839 --> 00:18:36.400
What do you got?
00:18:36.720 --> 00:18:37.440
Data or data?
00:18:37.680 --> 00:18:38.160
Bring it.
00:18:39.599 --> 00:18:40.000
Data.
00:18:40.240 --> 00:18:41.359
I gotta say data.
00:18:41.759 --> 00:18:43.759
I'm starting to lose big time.
00:18:44.000 --> 00:18:45.440
Like you're keeping track, aren't you?
00:18:45.759 --> 00:18:47.519
Like it's like seven to two or something now.
00:18:48.000 --> 00:18:50.799
You and Claire Hudson on an island by yourselves.
00:18:51.039 --> 00:18:51.200
Okay.
00:18:52.000 --> 00:18:53.680
Is there is that a regional split?
00:18:53.839 --> 00:18:56.480
No, I th I think it's just now I'm being stubborn about it.
00:18:56.559 --> 00:18:57.599
Um, I like data.
00:18:57.759 --> 00:18:59.359
Data sounds more formal to me.
00:18:59.519 --> 00:19:02.640
Data, data sounds like you're getting on Facebook.
00:19:02.880 --> 00:19:06.319
Data sounds like you're uh researching something important.
00:19:06.640 --> 00:19:07.680
Well, you know what it sounds like?
00:19:07.839 --> 00:19:12.640
We need to thank Brian Mendez, our wonderful producer, Queer Queer, and Alex Peterson for gathering these stories.
00:19:12.880 --> 00:19:17.440
And if you guys have any strong opinions on data versus data centers, uh please, I need some support.
00:19:17.519 --> 00:19:18.559
I'm getting killed over here.
00:19:18.799 --> 00:19:21.279
Thanks for joining us for another round of this week in CleanTech.
00:19:21.519 --> 00:19:24.720
Special shout out to Ben and Graham for sticking around and laughing at our corny jokes.
00:19:24.880 --> 00:19:28.720
If you enjoyed them, please subscribe, leave a little feedback, and share a story suggestion if you like.
00:19:28.880 --> 00:19:30.640
You can read every article we talk about each week.
00:19:30.720 --> 00:19:35.200
There are links in the episode description, as well as where this thing lives on factorthhis.com.
00:19:35.359 --> 00:19:36.880
Until next time, be good, people.
00:19:37.200 --> 00:19:38.480
Under 20 minutes, baby.
00:19:38.640 --> 00:19:39.759
We're right there.