The Green Blueprint
We already have many of the climate solutions we need. But scaling them is hard. The Green Blueprint is a show about the people who are architecting the clean economy. Every other week, host Lara Pierpoint profiles the founders, investors, and organizational leaders who are solving complex challenges in the quest to build climate technologies fast.
Episodes
May 7, 2025 • 33 mins
In 2021, Neha Palmer co-founced Terawatt Infrastructure with a bold mission: create the backbone for America's electric trucking revolution.
Within its first year, Terawatt secured a billion-dollar investment. But as the company developed plans for a nationwide charging network, it confronted the daunting challenge of building infrastructure for an electric truck market that barely existed.
High-profile bankruptcies like Nikola ...
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April 23, 2025 • 35 mins
In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla's energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla's vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages.
Customers across multiple markets were already excited about the new product, but Drew’s team struggled to keep up with demand. With Powerwall 2 already announced, pressure mounted while ...
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April 9, 2025 • 29 mins
In 2018, LineVision was a young company with revolutionary technology for electric transmission lines. Its dynamic line rating sensors and software could increase the capacity of existing power lines by up to 40% without building new infrastructure — a critical solution for integrating renewables and meeting growing electricity demand.
But to prove its tech, it needed to win over notoriously cautious utilities. When a crucial proj...
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March 26, 2025 • 32 mins
Dan Shugar has been trying to move solar panels around since the 1980s. What started with a few experiments as a young engineer has turned into one of the biggest solar tracker companies in the world.
In 2012 he founded Nextracker with a single product. Since then, Nextracker has revolutionized tracking technology through an array of innovative products.
This week, host Lara Pierpoint talks with Nextracker CEO and founder Dan Shu...
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March 12, 2025 • 35 mins
When Raffi Garabedian co-founded Electric Hydrogen in 2020, he saw existing electrolyzers as too small and expensive to make green hydrogen economically viable. Instead of building standard sub-megawatt units, his team aimed for 100-megawatt systems at half the industry cost.
Initial market enthusiasm brought millions in capacity reservations, fueling construction of a Massachusetts manufacturing plant. Then came the "trough of di...
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February 26, 2025 • 42 mins
Leila Madrone founded Sunfolding in 2012 with an innovative idea – build a solar tracker using pneumatic "airbags" instead of motors and torque tubes. By 2015, the company was deploying the technology in a field test in Davis, California.
Over the next six years, Sunfolding iterated on the technology’s design, built out the supply chain, and tried to prove bankability. Then, in 2021, the company found themselves faced with a major...
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February 19, 2025 • 51 mins
This week, we’re featuring an episode of Open Circuit, a new show from Latitude Media that reunites Jigar Shah, Katherine Hamilton, and Stephen Lacey.
Many listeners may remember them from The Energy Gang, a show they co-hosted for eight years.
They are back together, co-hosting a weekly roundtable that will cover the latest news – to explain what's really accelerating the energy transition, from technological leaps and supply chai...
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February 5, 2025 • 33 mins
In May 2024, Yanni Tsipis was watching as his team prepared to pour a low-carbon version of concrete — one that had never been used in a commercial project. As senior vice president of WS Development, he was in charge of the team building Boston’s largest net-zero office building for operating emissions (not embodied emissions), and he had spearheaded an effort to use a new type of low-carbon cement from a startup called Sublime Sy...
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January 22, 2025 • 32 mins
When Chris Taylor and his team at GridStor were building Santa Barbara county's largest battery storage project in Goleta, CA they saw an opportunity: become one of the first companies to transfer tax credits under the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act. But there was no playbook to follow.
Instead of working with smaller, specialized investors, GridStor took an unconventional approach. They went straight to JP Morgan, one of the...
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January 8, 2025 • 35 mins
On Christmas Eve 2023, Doug Chan wasn't celebrating with family. Instead, he was in Hellisheiði, Iceland with his team, preparing to commission Mammoth — what would become the world's largest operational direct air capture facility.
Getting there wasn't easy. After building two successful smaller plants, Climeworks faced its biggest challenge yet in attempting a 10x scale-up of its Orca plant. When the team broke ground, they disco...
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December 11, 2024 • 34 mins
In 2022, John O’Donnell and Peter von Behrens figured out how to design a heat battery that would deliver heat at very high, constant temperatures. The breakthrough came on the heels of two years of research and development, some of which took place in Peter’s garage.
Now, John and Peter were ready to prove their technology at commercial scale. So they approached a long-time innovation partner, Calgren Renewable Fuels, about deplo...
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December 4, 2024 • 35 mins
In the aftermath of the presidential election, the clean energy industry is scrambling to figure out what a second Trump administration would mean for their companies and projects.
But Tom Burton isn't just looking at the next four years. After 25 years serving the industry with the law firm Mintz, he's thinking about the growth of the industry over another couple of decades.
“Back in 2000, many pundits said the internet was dead –...
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November 27, 2024 • 29 mins
In 2022, Via Separations was getting ready to build its commercial-scale filtration system, a technology that could help cut emissions and costs for a wide range of industries like paper, chemicals, and food processing.
And when the company faced two paths — scale up 10x or 100x — CEO and co-founder Shreya Dave decided to scale faster by building a commercial project at a paper mill in Alberta, Canada. It was a choice that put Via...
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November 13, 2024 • 33 mins
In 2009, John Woolard’s team flipped the switch on a first-of-a-kind concentrated solar power project. The pilot paved the way for BrightSource Energy, where John was CEO, to build its first commercial CSP plant, a 440-megawatt project in the Mojave Desert called Ivanpah.
John and his team believed they were far ahead of the competition, including photovoltaics. And they were on the verge of building several large, concentrated so...
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October 30, 2024 • 2 mins
We’ve already invented many of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But a big chunk of emission reductions will come from technologies that are not yet commercial.
We don’t have decades to get these commercialized – we have years.
So what can we learn from the people who are bringing new technologies from the lab to the market, constructing first-of-a-kind projects, building companies, challenging and transformin...
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October 2, 2024 • 3 mins
Since we stopped The Carbon Copy, some listeners had questions about what’s next.
Here's a preview of our new podcast, the Transition-AI event in December, and a new newsletter called the AI-Energy Nexus.
Stay tuned to the feed for our new show, dropping later this fall!
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September 4, 2024 • 49 mins
Dynamic pricing is everywhere – and impacts all of us.
Whether it's the time of day, your location, or the amount of demand, so many of our decisions are driven by real-time pricing changes.
But it's still a relatively new concept in electricity.
This week, we're featuring a conversation with Scott Engstrom of GridX and Economist Ahmad Faruqui on the imperative for good rate design – and the consequences of getting it wrong.
How do...
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July 16, 2024 • 62 mins
Some news: this will be our final installment of The Carbon Copy. But don’t go anywhere!
Later this fall, the feed will be transformed into a new show that will profile the people architecting the clean energy economy. We promise it will be a valuable part of your media diet.
For our last episode, we brought back some old friends: Jigar Shah, director of the DOE’s loan programs office, and Katherine Hamilton, chair of 38 North.
Ji...
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June 25, 2024 • 25 mins
When millions of smart meters rolled out across the country at the turn of the last decade, many people hoped it would create the backbone of a digital grid.
Today, you’ll find few who think meters lived up to expectations. One survey found only 3% of advanced meters supported by the 2009 stimulus bill brought customer savings.
Mike Phillips, the CEO of Sense, is still bullish on the role of advanced meters for grid intelligence an...
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June 13, 2024 • 44 mins
Solar is the fastest growing electricity-generating technology in history. That rapid scaling was a result of squeezing cost reductions out of every step of production. But there's one critical piece that hasn't changed much: frames.
Aluminum frames now make up one-quarter of the cost of a PV module. And that metal mostly comes from China, a country that controls nearly 60% of the world’s smelting.
Since passage of the Inflation Re...
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