Watt It Takes

From induction cooktops and heat pumps to the rooftop solar needed to power it all and the batteries to store excess energy for use during blackouts, we’ve had incredible success building the tools we need to decarbonize our homes. But to the regular consumer, the universe of electrified solutions can be overwhelming. What we need is a home battery system and an integrated ecosystem of all electric products to make it easier than ever for homes to switch from gas to electricity, alongside software solutions to help manage residential energy production, storage, and usage. And that’s exactly what this month’s Watt It Takes guest, Kunal Girotra, Founder and CEO of Lunar Energy, is building.

Lunar emerged from stealth last year with $300M in funding from SK Group and Sunrun, now has 250 employees, and publicly unveiled their integrated residential energy product last week.

Emily sat down with Kunal to learn about how they're building the future of residential electrification, his journey from growing up in India to leading energy at Tesla, and the story behind the growth of Lunar Energy.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures and SPAN.

Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

SPAN are the makers of the award-winning SPAN Panel—a smart electrical panel that enhances how homeowners interact with their energy. Interested in advancing your career at one of the premier companies in Climate Technology or getting SPAN installed in your home? Visit www.span.io to learn more.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

As we speak, there are 600 million people in Africa who lack access to even basic electricity. That’s driven in part by low levels of domestic and foreign investment into electricity infrastructure across the continent: over the last decade, just 3% of capital invested into energy infrastructure worldwide went to Africa.

To enable universal energy access in Africa, we’ll need innovative climate financing solutions that get the right kind of capital to the right kind of projects at the right time.

And that’s exactly what Kate Steel, Co-Founder and CEO of Nithio, is doing. Nithio uses AI-powered analytics to help investors, local banks, and grant-makers understand payment patterns, credit risk, and portfolio quality in the distributed energy space. They also operate a financing vehicle called Nithio FI that provides loans to distributors that need capital to reach the millions of households with no or unreliable energy access.

In this episode, Emily sits down with Kate to hear about the high school ditch day that introduced her to engineering, her journey in energy access, and the work Nithio is doing financing electricity access across Africa.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures and SPAN.

Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

SPAN are the makers of the award-winning SPAN Panel—a smart electrical panel that enhances how homeowners interact with their energy. Interested in advancing your career at one of the premier companies in Climate Technology or getting SPAN installed in your home? Visit www.span.io to learn more.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Concrete is the second most-used material in the world, right behind water. It’s everywhere – in our bridges, our buildings, our homes, our roads. It’s the literal foundation for much of our lives.

And cement is a key ingredient in that foundation. It acts as the glue that binds together the water and aggregate to make concrete. Globally, we produced more than four billion tons of cement in 2021, and demand is expected to grow.

But for each ton of cement produced, a ton of carbon is emitted due to the fossil fuel-powered heat and reactions needed to produce it. Altogether, the cement industry accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions. To build our net-zero future, we'll need even more concrete for new and existing infrastructure, but we'll also need to clean up cement production to prevent ever increasing emissions.

And that's what this month's Watt it Takes guest, Sublime Systems CEO and co-founder Leah Ellis, is doing.

Leah and her colleagues at Sublime Systems are decarbonizing the cement industry by creating a process that produces cement with electricity instead of fossil fuels.

Emily spoke with Leah about developing the science behind low carbon cement. They also talked about the importance of getting experience in the industry while she was still an academic, and Sublime's ultimate goal of launching a plant capable of producing a million tons of cement a year.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

The U.S. is on track to deploy 550 gigawatts of new renewables on the grid by 2030. That's a massive amount of solar, wind, and other renewables powering buildings, EVs, appliances, and industrial processes in our increasingly electrified world.

Last year electric vehicles (EVs) hit a massive milestone by making up 5% of all new car sales in the U.S. And Bloomberg estimated that more than half of new car sales could be EVs by 2030.

That future looks bright, but to keep the headlights on and the wheels turning, the grid will have to be prepared to provide power at triple its current capacity by 2050. Fossil fuel peaker plants have been filling in the gaps left by renewables during times of peak demand. But to reach net-zero by 2050, the U.S. will need more sources of firm power that don't come from coal or natural gas.

Thomas Folker, CEO and co-founder of Leap, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company, is working to solve that problem.

Leap has built the platform needed to turn all of our various grid-connected devices into virtual power plants that can be called upon during times of high demand. Thomas and the team at Leap are helping to prevent the use of fossil fuel power plants called peaker plants, many of which only run during times of high energy and don't actually run on a daily basis.

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, aggregate the combined power of EVs, rooftop solar, residential and commercial batteries and other distributed energy resources, or DERs, and make that energy available to areas of high demand. Leap's API makes it simple for these smart, grid-connected devices to collectively act as virtual power plants, and their platform allows their customers to sell that energy to buyers.

I spoke with Thomas about leveraging software solutions to solve hard, real-world problems on the grid. We also talked about how his early roles helping build energy projects both big and small gave him a realistic view on what it takes to make lasting change.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Forests make up a third of all land on Earth, and they're one of our major defenses against a warming world. 45% of the carbon stored in land exists in forests.

Today, our forests are struggling to adapt to human activity and a rapidly changing climate. Deforestation and wildfires continue to ravage habitats like the Amazon. In the U.S.destructive wildfires have increasingly ravaged the West. To protect these valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks, we need to radically change the way we restore, conserve and expand these landscapes.

And that's exactly what Vibrant Planet CEO and co-founder Allison Wolff is doing.

Allison and the Vibrant Planet team are modernizing forest conservation and restoration with a product called Land Tender, a digital platform that leverages data to help Forest Services, municipalities and tribal lands better manage their conservation and restoration efforts. Allison describes it as the operating system for forest restoration.

By digitizing forest conservation and restoration, Land Tender makes it easy for municipal fire districts, conservations districts, nonprofits, and NGOs to coordinate and plan with each other.

Different interventions like removing vegetation and prescribed burns can be mapped over time using machine learning and AI to adjust treatments accordingly.

Emily spoke with Allison about the process of merging nature-based climate solutions with cutting edge technology, how she developed Land Tender, and Allison’s long career pushing big tech companies to make positive choices for people and the planet.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.