Catalyst with Shayle Kann

Catalyst with Shayle Kann

A weekly podcast featuring veteran investor Shayle Kann interviewing experts about the state of the energy sector and the technologies powering decarbonization. Shayle Kann is asking the big questions about the ways we power our world: How cheap can clean energy get? Where is the smart money going on new technologies? How will the AI boom both help and hinder us on our journey to decarbonization? Every Thursday on Catalyst, Shayle dives deep into the world of energy with prominent experts, investors, researchers, and executives to unpack both the solutions and the challenges at play in this ever-changing landscape.

Episodes

The battery boom behind the AI buildout [partner content]

October 27, 2026 • 29 mins
The AI buildout is the most capital-intensive project in history. The hunger for power has pushed companies to unconventional options, sparking demand for jet engines, mobile trailer-mounted generators, and hybrid microgrids. And now batteries are having a moment. The urgency to connect to the grid and manage volatile AI workloads is making storage a must-have piece of the energy stack for data centers. The demand is being felt b...
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BTM data centers’ looming methane surge

October 22, 2026 • 31 mins
It’s no secret that hyperscalers’ behind-the-meter gas bonanza could generate enormous CO2 emissions. But the BTM boom could become responsible for another, less-publicized emissions issue: upstream and onsite methane leaks that could derail decarbonization efforts. In this episode, Shayle Kann speaks with Olya Irzak, founder and CEO of Frost Methane Labs. Olya unpacks the full lifecycle of methane emissions in gas-pow...
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Can natural gas supply handle the AI boom?

October 15, 2026 • 35 mins
As data center-driven load growth continues to rise, hyperscalers are turning to natural gas – both in front of and behind the meter — to secure power. But whether the natural gas pipeline system has the bandwidth to support this surging demand remains far from certain. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Eric McGuire, director of natural gas and LNG trading analytics at Wood Mackenzie, to unpack whether gas is in t...
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The truth about data center water usage

October 8, 2026 • 44 mins
Of all the concerns surrounding the AI boom, data center water usage tops the list. Opponents claim that massive hyperscaler facilities threaten local drinking supplies and drain aquifers. Proponents say data centers use a negligible amount of water, at least compared to agriculture or conventional power generation sources.  So who actually has it right? In this episode, Shayle sits down with Tim Shedd, founder of Ebullient ...
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ERCOT batteries: boom, bust, or rebound?

October 1, 2026 • 37 mins
It’s been a wild few years for grid-scale batteries in Texas. At the start of the decade, the Lone Star State was home to roughly 200 megawatts of battery capacity. Today, that number has skyrocketed to seventeen gigawatts…with at least five more gigawatts expected to come online by the end of 2026. But this rapid buildout quickly led to market saturation. In the past year alone, revenues plummeted by more than 80%, f...
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The rush for clean, on-site power [partner content]

September 28, 2026 • 31 mins
This is a partner episode, brought to you by Bloom Energy. Long interconnection queues, fragile supply chains, and a lack of grid capacity are pushing a wide range of C&I customers to invest in distributed, on-site power. But as data centers and other industrial facilities build more power behind the meter, new challenges have emerged. Air quality, noise, and water use are top concerns for local communities, making cleaner so...
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Anduril's vision for powering maritime defense

September 24, 2026 • 32 mins
Dual-use technologies and the rise of defense tech are having a moment. But how does the defense sector approach innovations in energy that may be necessary to optimize its fleets? To help answer that question, Shayle turns to the maritime sector to explore how advanced batteries, nuclear propulsion, and autonomous capabilities are shaping the future of defense. Unlike conventional EVs, maritime vehicles and drones must compete w...
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AMA: Fuel cells, geopolitics, and the solar growth curve

September 17, 2026 • 23 mins
As we head into the final quarter of this pivotal and dramatic year for the energy sector, Catalyst host Shayle Kann takes stock of 2026 so far – and considers what’s to come – in this AMA-style episode. He discusses the year’s biggest stories, the trends that have surprised him the most, and his hot takes on the current energy landscape. Shayle dives into topics including: - The data center backlash and w...
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Do data centers actually increase electricity prices? No...and yes

September 10, 2026 • 42 mins
You don’t have to look far to see the vitriol and backlash ignited by the rapid expansion of hyperscaler data centers. While critics and activists tend to focus their ire on resource consumption and residents’ electricity bills, the reality of data center economics is far more complex.  In this episode of Catalyst, host Shayle Kann sits down with Andy Lubershane, head of research at Energy Impact Partners, to unpa...
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What comes after the data center backlash?

September 3, 2026 • 47 mins
In their early days, data centers were largely welcomed by communities who saw their arrival as an economic boost. Today as concerns around noise levels, power prices, water use, and AI grow, they face fierce opposition. In this episode, Shayle speaks to Brian Janous, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Cloverleaf Infrastructure. Together, they unpack the data center backlash and  explore how the industry can approach ...
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The rise of metal fuels

August 27, 2026 • 40 mins
Diesel generators remain ubiquitous because they offer an unusually powerful combination of low cost, high energy density, long-duration storage, and reliable off-grid power. But their pollution, noise, maintenance requirements, permitting challenges, and growing footprint are becoming increasingly problematic as data centers drive demand for backup generation. In this episode of Catalyst, Shayle Kann talks with Richard Wang, co-f...
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Can AI revolutionize grid operations?

August 20, 2026 • 39 mins
Everyone loves to talk about the “broken grid.” But if you look inside a utility’s planning and operations functions, a different picture emerges: infrastructure that is remarkably reliable, built and run by engineers solving impossibly complex problems with often outdated tools. In this episode, Shayle Kann sits down with Josh Wong, CEO and founder of ThinkLabs AI, a company building physics-informed AI for util...
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Is now the time for DERs to scale? [re-published]

August 13, 2026 • 42 mins
A decade ago, DERs were hot. The hype was that things like batteries, smart devices, and other distributed energy technologies would offset the need for expanding traditional grid infrastructure. But DERs never took off, at least not at the scale that many hoped for. They had high price tags and short track records compared to the existing substations, transmission lines, and generation options that utilities were familiar with. I...
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Critical Capital: Senator Tillis' case for "all-of-the-above" energy

August 11, 2026 • 31 mins
This week, we’re presenting an episode of Critical Capital, a new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Energy policy has become increasingly polarized just as the U.S. faces record electricity demand, a rapidly expanding AI economy, and growing competition from China.  In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis about why the country's biggest energy challenge is the inability to buil...
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The electrician shortage slowing the AI boom

August 6, 2026 • 34 mins
The race to build AI infrastructure is often framed around the availability of power, chips, and capital.  But another critical constraint is becoming impossible to ignore: skilled labor. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Raymond Hawkins, chief customer officer at Compass Datacenters, about why a shortage of qualified electricians has emerged as one of the biggest bottlenecks to data center construction, and how the indus...
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The commercial battery comeback

July 30, 2026 • 44 mins
Commercial and industrial (C&I) battery storage has long been the missing middle of the energy storage market.  It’s been too complex and expensive to scale like residential systems, but too small to compete with utility-scale projects.  That may finally be changing.  In this episode, Shayle sits down with Tim Hade, senior vice president at Voltus and founder of Brightfield Infrastructure, to discuss why ...
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The multi-billion dollar promise of vehicle-to-grid integration

July 23, 2026 • 34 mins
Most electric vehicles spend nearly all of their lives parked, doing nothing. But under the hood of those idle cars, a massive store of energy sits untapped. The Kia EV9, for instance, holds a 100-kilowatt-hour battery—which is equivalent to about seven home backup batteries—just waiting to be utilized. Yet despite this enormous potential, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) technology has remained mostly limited to small-scale pilo...
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When will quantum computing have its breakout moment?

July 16, 2026 • 40 mins
Over the course of the past decade, quantum computing (or the concept thereof) has ridden hype cycles, just like AI or the internet writ large.  In the past year, however, as governments across the globe have committed north of $50 billion to the sector, and billions more have poured into quantum startups, the technology is finding itself in the midst of a particularly dramatic hype wave.  Yet even as the money pours in...
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Inside the AI power wars

July 9, 2026 • 43 mins
For those steeped in the world of AI development, the major differences between tech giants’ chip strategies are easy enough to see: the speed of Google’s TPUs, the affordability of Amazon’s Trainium, and Nvidia’s market dominance. But those same companies’ respective energy strategies often fly under the radar. As data center buildouts surge across the U.S., the tech industry is hitting a massive wal...
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Inside the most sophisticated plan for solar geoengineering

July 1, 2026 • 37 mins
One of the biggest challenges with technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions is that they require mass adoption. Solar radiation management (SRM) has the opposite problem. By Stardust Solutions’ estimate, dispersing three million tons of reflective particles into the stratosphere could cool the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius for the relatively small price of $30 billion; that's less than the cost of a single hyperscal...
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