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All the nuclear fuel it would take to power your entire life would fit inside a soda can. So why does a nuclear power plant cost billions of dollars and take a decade or more to build? It isn’t the reactor core. The core is small, compact, and relatively simple to build. It’s everything built around it: the containment dome, the pressurizer, the thick reactor vessel, and the safety systems designed to make sure nothing ever goes wrong. Nuclear power should be a no-brainer. It's clean, it's reliable, and unlike solar or wind, it runs twenty-four hours a day. It also might be the only energy source in America that both political parties actually agree on. Together, Republicans and Democrats have produced a rare run of bipartisan legislation, executive orders, and federal programs all pushing in the same direction to actually build more nuclear power. Despite recent bipartisan support, the cost of building nuclear reactors has kept nuclear power on the sidelines for decades. But what if you didn’t need the concrete containment dome, the steel pressure vessel, or the cooling systems built to contain an accident? What if, instead of building a billion dollars of concrete and steel to create the conditions a reactor needs, you simply put the reactor somewhere those conditions already exist? Our guest today is a three-time founder who built a company based on that bet.  Liz Muller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deep Fission, a company building an underground nuclear energy system designed to dramatically cut the cost and time it takes to build nuclear power.  Liz grew up in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a nuclear physics professor, in a city that declared itself a “nuclear-free zone.” She found her way back to nuclear power after building a nonprofit to bring transparent data to the climate debate, then a nuclear waste disposal company, before landing on the idea that would become Deep Fission. Deep Fission places the most common type of nuclear reactor at the bottom of a borehole a mile underground, where the rock and the weight of the water in the borehole replace much of the above-ground concrete and steel that nuclear plants usually require for containment and pressure. In our conversation, Liz walks me through her path and what it takes to bring nuclear power to market faster and cheaper. Today, Deep Fission is a public company, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker FISN, with a market cap of about $250M as of this episode’s release. The company is part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, broke ground on its first reactor site in Parsons, Kansas, in 2025, has signed letters of intent for 18.5 gigawatts of future power, and has more than 75 employees. Sponsors About Everyday Electric  Watt It Takes is brought to you by Everyday Electric, formerly Renew Home. Everyday Electric, the operator of the largest residential VPP in the U.S., provides energy solutions that simplify savings at home and support a stronger, more resilient grid. To learn more, visit everydayelectric.com About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data, and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

For more than a decade, the federal government's biggest tool for accelerating clean energy hasn't been a grant or a loan. It's been the tax code. Tax credits have driven the buildout of wind, solar, and now a much wider range of technologies, like storage, nuclear, and advanced manufacturing. But there's a catch: most of the companies earning those credits don't have enough tax liability to actually use them themselves. A clean energy developer can be sitting on tens of millions of dollars in value that's slowly losing worth simply because they can't cash it in. In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act tried to fix that by making these credits transferable for the first time ever — sellable directly, for cash, to a company that can use them. It created a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar market overnight, with no playbook and no established way for buyers and sellers to even find each other. Our guest today set out to build the infrastructure this new market needed. Alfred Johnson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Crux, an AI-native capital platform for clean energy and manufacturing infrastructure. Crux got its start in transferable tax credits, and has since expanded into tax equity investment and debt origination, leveraging software, data, and AI to cover the full capital stack for energy and manufacturing infrastructure. Alfred grew up around politics in Washington, DC, and spent nearly two decades moving between government, finance, and technology before his wife, Emily, pushed him to build something in clean energy. In our conversation, Alfred walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build the capital markets infrastructure this country needs to power its clean energy future. Today, Crux has raised more than $77 million, grown to more than 120 employees, and facilitated nearly $10 billion in transactions across the clean energy economy. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Electricity demand in the U.S. is climbing faster than the grid can comfortably absorb, driven largely by AI data centers that need power 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The U.S. power system needs all the reliable clean energy it can get, and once-forgotten geothermal energy is one such resource. In the 1960s, the United States was a world leader in building large-scale geothermal power plants, but during the fracking boom of the mid-2000s, drillers turned their attention to oil and gas. As wind, solar and batteries got cheaper, bankers and developers put their money into those resources. Geothermal development around the world had flatlined, until a new generation of geothermal developers and entrepreneurs borrowed the horizontal drilling techniques that powered the fracking boom and used them to make geothermal viable in far more geographies One of those entrepreneurs is Tim Latimer, Co-Founder and CEO of Fervo Energy. Fervo Energy is a geothermal developer using advanced drilling techniques from fracking in the oil and gas industry to make it easier to find and harness heat underground. In our conversation, recorded in December 2021, Tim told me about how he combined his expertise in oil and gas drilling with a dedication to solving the climate crisis, and used his experience to break open an overlooked renewable resource. Tim predicted the 2020s would be "the geothermal decade," noting that we can't transition to a zero-carbon grid without round-the-clock clean energy resources to supplement intermittent renewables. Geothermal offers that always-on feature needed now more than ever. We're revisiting this conversation now in celebration of what Fervo has accomplished: signing hundreds of megawatts of power purchase agreements with hyperscalers and utilities alike, and recently completing the largest IPO of any clean energy company. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Every morning, 26 million children in the US get on a school bus. It is the largest mass transit system in America, and it has barely changed in 80 years. There is no real-time tracking, no route optimization, and no visibility for parents. Bus drivers still rely on walkie-talkies and dispatchers still use fax machines. Nearly half a million diesel buses are moving those 26 million children, producing more than eight million tons of carbon annually. It is one of the most overlooked, high-impact decarbonization opportunities in the country. The question isn't whether this system will change. It's who is going to change it. Our guest has spent the last decade building the solution. Ritu Narayan is the Founder and CEO of Zūm, a full-service school transportation platform that is modernizing and electrifying the yellow school bus. Ritu grew up in India and was raised to value education and dream big. After graduating from the Delhi Institute of Technology (now NSUT), she moved to California where she became a product leader at Oracle, Yahoo, and eBay. She left a career at eBay to take the leap into entrepreneurship and started Zūm to solve a deeply personal problem: modernizing and electrifying student transportation. In our conversation, Ritu walks me through her journey, and what it takes to reimagine a system the whole country depends on and nobody talks about. Today, Zum serves more than 5,000 schools across 18 states and completed over 60 million student rides last year. Zum has raised $430 million from investors including Sequoia, SoftBank, GIC, and TPG, and launched the nation's first all-electric, vehicle-to-grid school bus fleet at Oakland Unified School District, returning energy to the electric grid while children are at school. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand. We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast, driven by electrification and data centers powering AI. At the same time, the grid is getting more complex. Distributed resources, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are making it harder to plan, predict, and operate. And the tools utilities rely on weren’t built for this kind of system. Our guest today has spent his career inside that problem, from working at a utility to building one of the early software platforms for managing distributed energy. Josh Wong is the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company. We co-led ThinkLabs’ $5 million seed round in 2024. ThinkLabs is building an AI copilot for the electric grid, helping operators understand and manage the system in real time. Using physics-informed models, the platform can compress analyses that once took weeks or months into minutes. Josh was born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto. He began his career at Toronto Hydro, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to operate the grid in practice. That experience led him to found Opus One, a company focused on helping utilities manage increasingly complex power systems, which was later acquired by GE. Josh kept coming back to the same underlying problem: utilities need to move faster, but the tools they rely on make that nearly impossible. ThinkLabs is his answer. In our conversation, Josh walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build in one of the most complex and risk-averse industries in the world. Today, ThinkLabs has raised more than $30 million from investors including NVIDIA and Energy Impact Partners, and is working with partners and customers including Southern California Edison, and other major ISOs. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access. Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population. This month’s guest, Alex Honnold, is best known for something completely different, but has spent the past decade working directly on that problem. Most people know Alex as the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing 3,000 feet of sheer granite without ropes. It’s one of the most extraordinary feats in modern sport. But over the past decade, he’s been channeling that same focus and discipline into a different kind of work: expanding access to clean energy through the Honnold Foundation. This conversation was recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, in a room full of founders, investors, and operators working to build the energy system of the future. And what stood out most to me was Alex’s clarity. He doesn’t speak in industry jargon. He doesn’t overcomplicate the problem. He keeps coming back to something simple. If people don’t have their basic needs met, nothing else works. In our conversation, we go back to Alex’s childhood in Sacramento, growing up as a shy kid climbing anything he could find, to the experiences that shaped him early on: loss, independence, and the years he spent living out of a van. We talk about what led him to free solo El Capitan, and the mindset behind it, and how those same values eventually showed up in his decision to start the Honnold Foundation. And we get into how he thinks about risk, failure, and impact today, both on the wall and in his work. Alex is funny, candid, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable. And he brings a perspective that I think is easy to overlook, but hard to ignore once you hear it. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Here’s a question: how many corporations do you know that have made a public commitment to cut their carbon emissions? Probably a lot. About 40% of the world’s largest companies have set full net-zero targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, according to Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report, with target-setting rising for the fourth consecutive year. But how many actually know how to achieve those goals? Only about 16% are on track to reach net zero in their operations by 2050. That gap between pledge and execution is what today’s guest has spent the last twenty years working on. Dan Kalafatas grew up in a family shaped by his grandparents’ advocacy for working people and came of age questioning the role of business. That changed after a lunch talk on renewable energy at Stanford Business School. Today, Dan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of 3Degrees, a global company helping organizations deliver on their energy and emissions commitments — from sourcing clean energy and structuring power purchase agreements to navigating carbon markets. What began with renewable energy credits has grown into a platform supporting Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions work across more than 67 countries, with partners including Microsoft, Mars, Cargill, Etsy, and Rivian. The company has supported over 20,000 decarbonization projects, worked with more than 80 Fortune 500 companies, and helped bring more than 12 gigawatts of clean energy online. From wind farms in Oklahoma to forest conservation on California’s redwood coast to power purchase agreements worldwide, 3Degrees focuses on implementation. In our conversation, Dan walks through that journey — from growing up in a working-class mill town in Massachusetts to finding his direction at Stanford, to driving through California rice fields blasting Eminem to land his first customer, to surviving the 2008 financial crisis with just days of runway, and ultimately building a company that now generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

On this episode of Watt It Takes, we explore another approach to long-duration energy storage: compressed air. Curtis VanWalleghem, Co-Founder and CEO of Hydrostor, started the company in 2010 after confronting surplus power challenges at Bruce Power. Without a traditional founder background, he set out to build storage systems that use compressed air and underground hard rock caverns to deliver ten-plus hours of grid-scale power. What began as experiments with underwater balloons evolved into large-scale rock cavern projects and a major business model shift. Hydrostor transitioned from a technology provider to an independent power producer, securing PPAs and financing billion-dollar infrastructure projects. In this conversation, Curtis reflects on the realities of building something capital-intensive: raising early checks from friends and family, enduring more than 200 investor rejections, mortgaging his home, pivoting both technology and strategy, and learning how to finance projects at true infrastructure scale. Today, Hydrostor has raised over $550 million in equity, secured roughly $8 billion in revenue contracts, and is advancing a multi-gigawatt pipeline across North America and Australia. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

If you spend any time on the water, you’ve probably heard the joke that the two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat… and the day they sell it. For today’s guest, that line isn’t just a joke. It’s a problem statement. Mitch Lee grew up around boats. He loved being on the water, but he also experienced firsthand how loud, smelly, maintenance-heavy, and frustrating boat ownership can be. And once electric vehicles started proving what was possible on land, one idea kept coming back to him: if electrification makes sense in cars on the road, it might actually make even more sense in boats on the water. Mitch is the co-founder and CEO of Arc, an electric boat company building both consumer and commercial vessels. Arc started in the premium wake sports market, selling directly to consumers and using those early boats to develop its electric propulsion technology. That platform is now being deployed in commercial applications, where electrification can improve reliability, lower costs, and support ports that want to electrify. Founded in 2021, Arc has raised over $110 million through its Series B and has scaled from delivering its first customer boat, which took two years to build, to now producing multiple boats per week, while also landing major commercial partnerships at working ports. In our conversation, Mitch walks me through his path that led to Arc, from a childhood fascination with stocks and compounding interest, to building and selling his first company in the personal finance space, to betting big on electric boats and what electrification can unlock on the water. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

As an aging grid faces rising demand, increasing complexity, and more frequent stress events, one thing has become clear: we don’t just need more power, we need power that can show up at the right time, in the right place, and at the right price. What’s far less settled is how we get there. Should large energy users build their own power? Should they treat the grid as something to work around rather than work with? Or is there a way for new load to actively strengthen the grid by contributing capacity when it’s needed most? This moment is being shaped by real market signals. Just two weeks ago, PJM, the largest power market in the U.S., cleared its latest capacity auction at the market cap yet again, underscoring how tight supply has become and how quickly affordability pressures are building. As data center demand accelerates, those pressures are no longer abstract, they’re showing up in prices, planning decisions, and who ultimately pays. These questions have been a throughline for us this year on Watt It Takes. We’ve talked with founders working across the grid, from storage and interconnection to transmission and large-scale development. Today’s conversation brings many of those threads together. Dana Guernsey and her team at Voltus are tackling that challenge at the intersection of demand and supply, turning customer-side flexibility into dependable grid capacity. Voltus sits between energy users and grid operators, aggregating flexible demand from sources like demand response, EV charging, batteries, and onsite generation, and translating it into dispatchable capacity that markets value and pay for. Voltus’s business model is a value-share: the company monetizes that flexibility in energy markets and shares the resulting value with the customers providing it. Voltus operates across all major North American power markets, even in an industry where each ISO and RTO plays by different rules. Today, the company manages more than eight gigawatts of flexible capacity and supports tens of thousands of customer sites, with resources dispatched thousands of times each year. On this last episode of the year, I spoke with Dana Guernsey, Co-Founder and CEO of Voltus. We talked about her journey, from growing up in Queens, New York and coming of age around 9/11, to discovering energy markets during her time at EnerNOC, to founding Voltus while starting a family. That path shaped how Dana thinks about complexity, customers, and reliability, and ultimately led her to build Voltus into a platform designed to help make clean, affordable, and reliable power something we don’t have to trade off against growth. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

​​As load growth pushes the grid to its limits, the energy transition increasingly depends on one technology: storage. Batteries are becoming the backbone of reliable, clean power, and according to a recent UBS analysis, AI-driven data centers are set to trigger a “boom cycle” for energy storage in the next five years. As more clean energy comes online and global energy demand surges, batteries are proving essential to a flexible and resilient grid. But operating them is complex. Unlike wind or solar projects driven by long-term contracts, storage assets must constantly make decisions about when to charge and discharge, how to capture value across multiple markets, and how to stay profitable in an increasingly volatile energy system. Michael Baker, Co-Founder and CEO of Tyba, is working at the center of this shift. His team builds the software that helps batteries make smarter decisions in real time, turning storage into a reliable and profitable part of the grid. Powerhouse Ventures is fortunate to be an early investor in Tyba, first backing them in their seed round in January 2023. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

At a moment when our country can feel deeply divided, and when progress on clean energy can feel uncertain, this month's guest — former U.S. Secretary of Energy and two-term Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm — couldn’t be timelier. It was the perfect moment to take stock of where we are as an industry. After years of historic progress, we’re now facing growing uncertainty about what comes next. The optimism that followed the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act can feel harder to access — and yet gatherings like this live recording and New Dawn, our thousand-person sold-out annual party hosted the following evening, remind us how far we’ve come and how powerful it is when this community comes together. Special thanks to this year’s New Dawn Terawatt sponsors, Silicon Valley Bank and Wilson Sonsini, for helping make gatherings like these possible. For me, this interview was personal — and a bit of a full-circle moment. I’ve admired Governor Granholm for years. We first met over a decade ago, when she served as a judge for one of Powerhouse’s early hackathons, and even then, her conviction and optimism left a lasting impression. Her legacy in public service is one of transformation — from rebuilding Michigan’s economy to reshaping the Department of Energy’s role in accelerating the clean energy transition. At DOE, Granholm led an unprecedented expansion of clean energy deployment and manufacturing, rebuilding supply chains, creating jobs, and helping position the United States as a global leader in the energy transition. In a moment when federal leadership can feel disconnected from what our country truly needs for clean, abundant energy and lasting progress, Governor Granholm is a reminder of what grounded, forward-thinking, and empathetic leadership can achieve. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

As we’ve covered in other recent episodes, the growth of data centers and the massive amount of power they require is reshaping the energy landscape. Today, I want to zero in on a specific challenge at the heart of it all: the watt bit spread, a phrase coined by this month’s guest.  The Watt Bit Spread is the gap between the cost of electricity and the value of computing—computing meaning, the processing power behind AI, cloud services, and digital infrastructure. Bridging that gap is one of the keys to unlocking both data center growth and new power generation. Despite countless developers' promises of abundant “powered land,” very few can deliver what data centers and other energy-intensive industries actually need. It’s not just certainty of power timelines but also land, utility agreements, capital, and community support — all critical to reducing the constraints that make the watt bit spread so persistent. Too often, there’s a disconnect between real estate and utilities. Some companies know how to acquire land. Others know how to work with utilities. But rarely both. And even when those pieces come together, projects can still be stalled without community support, labor, or equipment.  That’s where Brian Janous, Co-Founder and CCO of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, comes in—working to bridge the watt bit spread by aligning land, power, and communities to meet the surging demand for computing. Put simply, Cloverleaf buys land in dollars per acre and sells it in dollars per megawatt. Sponsors Watt It Takes is brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking who is proud to bank some of the most exciting companies pioneering the technologies of tomorrow. With specialist financing support, deep understanding of the challenges, and a global network across more than 50 markets, they help clients scale breakthrough innovations and take them to the world. Infinium are a leader in ultra-low carbon synthetic eFuels and offer comprehensive energy system solutions to support the rapidly evolving energy industry. HSBC Innovation Banking have supported Infinium with project financing to scale their latest commercial-scale project, which on completion will be the largest eFuels project in the world. So, if you’re looking for early-stage funding, or well on your way to FOAK, click the link in the call notes to learn how HSBC Innovation Banking can help on the next stage of your journey. HSBC Innovation Banking is a business division with services provided in the United States by HSBC Bank USA, N.A. https://www.business.us.hsbc.com/en/innovation-banking-powerhouse-innovation About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Innovation is a leading consulting firm connecting top-tier corporations and investors, including corporate innovation teams, CVCs, and pensions with cutting-edge technologies and startups that meet their specific criteria for engagement.  Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

The U.S. power sector serves more than 160 million electricity customers—across homes, businesses, and factories in all 50 states. But the grid that supplies that electricity wasn’t designed for the world we live in now, let alone the one that’s coming. Electrification is accelerating. Data centers—driven by the explosive growth of AI—are demanding more power than ever, often in places where the grid is already strained. And while decarbonization remains technically optional—for those serious about resilience, sustainability, and long term viability, it’s a necessity. These three forces—electrification, digitization, and decarbonization—are colliding, reshaping how our energy system works and who it’s built for. The challenge isn’t just technical. It’s structural. We are moving towards a world of abundant clean electricity—but too often, it’s available at the wrong time, or in the wrong place. Permitting and interconnection can add years of delays. And even when approved, major transmission projects often take decades to complete, if they manage to get built at all. And many of the rules that govern our electricity markets weren’t built for flexibility, speed, or innovation. So what if we didn’t wait for the system to catch up? What if we reimagined where clean power is built, who it serves, and how it’s delivered? What if gigawatt-scale clean energy projects were already breaking ground—designed to power data centers, industrial loads, and the digital infrastructure reshaping our world? That’s exactly what Sheldon Kimber, Co‑Founder and CEO of Intersect Power, is doing: imagining a better energy future, and then building it—faster than anyone thought possible. Sponsors Watt It Takes is brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking who is proud to bank some of the most exciting companies pioneering the technologies of tomorrow. With specialist financing support, deep understanding of the challenges, and a global network across more than 50 markets, they help clients scale breakthrough innovations and take them to the world. Infinium are a leader in ultra-low carbon synthetic eFuels and offer comprehensive energy system solutions to support the rapidly evolving energy industry. HSBC Innovation Banking have supported Infinium with project financing to scale their latest commercial-scale project, which on completion will be the largest eFuels project in the world. So, if you’re looking for early-stage funding, or well on your way to FOAK, click the link in the call notes to learn how HSBC Innovation Banking can help on the next stage of your journey. HSBC Innovation Banking is a business division with services provided in the United States by HSBC Bank USA, N.A. https://www.business.us.hsbc.com/en/innovation-banking-powerhouse-innovation About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Innovation is a leading consulting firm connecting top-tier corporations and investors, including corporate innovation teams, CVCs, and pensions with cutting-edge technologies and startups that meet their specific criteria for engagement.  Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

If cement were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, behind only China and the United States. That’s because cement production alone accounts for about five and a half percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. And while that might seem really high, it actually makes sense. Just look around you: from roads to bridges, sidewalks to buildings, cement is everywhere. It’s a critical building block of modern infrastructure. What’s striking about cement production is that most of the emissions actually come from the chemical reaction itself—not just from burning fuel to heat the kiln. Cement producers use limestone, a well-known carbon-storing rock we’ve highlighted in other episodes for its direct air capture potential. But when limestone is heated to make cement, the opposite happens: it releases carbon dioxide, accounting for about 60% of the sector’s total emissions. So even if you used 100% clean electricity to power the kilns, most of the emissions would still result from this chemical process. Limestone was originally selected as a main ingredient for cement largely because it was the cheapest option. But what if it wasn’t? What if there were other rocks we could use that didn’t emit greenhouse gases at all? Better yet, what if they could produce the ingredients for cement cleanly—and generate other products critical to industry? That’s exactly what Cody Finke, CEO and Co-Founder of Brimstone, is aiming to deliver: a way to make cement without the emissions—and create other essential industrial materials along the way. Sponsors Watt It Takes is brought to you by HSBC Innovation Banking who is proud to bank some of the most exciting companies pioneering the technologies of tomorrow. With specialist financing support, deep understanding of the challenges, and a global network across more than 50 markets, they help clients scale breakthrough innovations and take them to the world. Infinium are a leader in ultra-low carbon synthetic eFuels and offer comprehensive energy system solutions to support the rapidly evolving energy industry. HSBC Innovation Banking have supported Infinium with project financing to scale their latest commercial-scale project, which on completion will be the largest eFuels project in the world. So, if you’re looking for early-stage funding, or well on your way to FOAK, click the link in the call notes to learn how HSBC Innovation Banking can help on the next stage of your journey. HSBC Innovation Banking is a business division with services provided in the United States by HSBC Bank USA, N.A. https://www.business.us.hsbc.com/en/innovation-banking-powerhouse-innovation About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures  Powerhouse Innovation is a leading consulting firm connecting top-tier corporations and investors, including corporate innovation teams, CVCs, and pensions with cutting-edge technologies and startups that meet their specific criteria for engagement.  Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.