The Volts/Catalyst pod crossover you didn't know you were waiting for

In this episode, Shayle Kann, cleantech investor and host of the podcast Catalyst, shares his educated opinion on the most overhyped and underhyped technologies and trends in clean energy.

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Text transcript:

David Roberts

If you listen to Volts, you probably also listen to — or at the very least, should also be listening to — Catalyst, the Canary Media podcast hosted by veteran cleantech investor Shayle Kann.

Like Volts, it features fairly nerdy deep-dive interviews, though they are mercifully shorter, and they’re more focused on cleantech, less likely to drift into politics and activism. (Shayle is a partner at Energy Impact Partners, where he assesses and funds cleantech companies for a living, so unlike me he brings some expertise to the table!)

Anyway, our pods have been mutual admirers for a while now and we thought it would be fun to do something together. So the following episode features Shayle and I discussing a few technologies and trends we think are overhyped, and a few we think are underhyped.

We get into electric stoves, interest rates, thermal batteries, and much more. It was just as fun and enlightening as I expected — especially where we disagreed — so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

All right, here we are. I'm here with Shayle Kann, the host of Catalyst. Shayle, welcome to the greatest crossover event in podcast history.

Shayle Kann

Man, I had already written down that joke. I had written down that literal joke for my monologue. I got to come up with something else.

David Roberts

It's the Infinity War of podcasts for nerds. You know, Shayle, I have been listening to Catalyst for a long time, a big fan, and we've been talking for a long time now about how we ought to do something, do some sort of crossover, have some sort of chat, especially since we're both quasi under Canary now. So what we decided on was to chat a little bit about the clean energy landscape via the lens of a couple of what we feel are overhyped trends or technologies and a couple that we think are underhyped. And so we're just going to walk through things that way and have a little chat along the way about what we're seeing and doing. So, Shayle, are you ready to go?

Shayle Kann

I am. But before we start, can I ask you a question?

David Roberts

Yeah, please.

Shayle Kann

So when I was trying to come up with my overhyped and underhyped things, I was having, like, a surprisingly difficult time determining what I think is overhyped or underhyped relative to whom? You know, I kept coming up with things where I was like things that are overhyped to the people who care about energy on Twitter, which is not representative of anything important. So I was trying to figure out overhyped or underhyped by whom and to whom. And I don't know if you struggled with the same thing?

David Roberts

I did struggle with that. We do live in a weird, tiny, little insular world in which many things are overhyped that normal people have never heard of. And vice versa. So I think I did a mix. So you'll just have to explain the context of your answer while you're answering. You have to explain underhyped or overhyped to whom while you're answering. Some of mine are definitely overhyped or underhyped to our audience.

Shayle Kann

Right? Yeah, exactly.

David Roberts

Which, as you say, does not mean much to the wider world, since we both have audiences of energy nerds, handsome, viril, unusually intelligent energy nerds —

Shayle Kann

Of course.

David Roberts

in our audiences.

Shayle Kann

Yeah, I also struggled a little bit with, like, there's some things that I think might be overhyped because I overhyped them. Just a bit circular.

David Roberts

I know one of my underhyped is something that I have been relentlessly trying to hype for years, but I just don't think I have the hype power to bring it up to the hype level, where it would be sufficiently hyped. So we'll discuss those along the way. So we starting then with your first underhyped trend. So tell us what it is and perhaps to whom it is underhyped.

Shayle Kann

Okay, so I think this is underhyped by almost everybody outside of a relatively small corner of the clean energy world that's like trying to pound the drum as loud as possible about this, which is the trend of onshoring of manufacturing in clean energy supply chains. Onshoring, and I guess I would add near shoring or friend shoring, but predominantly onshoring. So let me contextualize a little bit, which is I know you were around for the whole solar story as solar was just starting to mature, but the short version of that story in my mind, if you go way back in solar history, was Japan was really the first market that both installed any meaningful amount of solar and produced it.

Right. You had these companies like Sharp and others, way back in the '90s. And Japan had this feed-in tariff for residential solar, and that was small and steady for a long time, and not a whole lot happened. And then what really kickstarted the solar market was demand in Germany, first because of their feed-in tariff, and then in the US. Predominantly in California, thanks to the California Solar Initiative and the renewable portfolio standards here. And then it spread through other parts of Western Europe, as other countries like Spain and the Czech Republic and Italy and others started introducing their own policies.

But demand was clearly coming from Western Europe. Manufacturing followed briefly. Right. In Germany in particular, you had some of the big early solar manufacturers were German companies, and the US looked like it might be on the verge of a domestic manufacturing renaissance, largely of the next generation of technologies thin film solar. And then, of course, everybody knows how the story ended up playing out, which is that basically all of that manufacturing moved to China and then kind of spread into Southeast Asia as trade barriers started to get enacted and has stayed there. Right. And the thing that I think is underhyped that people don't appreciate starts with solar but doesn't end with solar, which is that thanks predominantly to the Inflation Reduction Act, but not exclusively, we are seeing a crazy renaissance in domestic manufacturing of clean energy components.

I woke up this morning to another announcement. This is Canadian Solar, which, despite the name, is really a Chinese solar manufacturer, setting up a five-gigawatt cell manufacturing facility in Indiana.

David Roberts

Yeah, it's crazy. They're one after the other these days. I've almost become numb to them already, and it's only like a year. A year? But it's just one after the other.

Shayle Kann

That's the key point. Right. We're barely over a year since the IRA. And yeah, it's solar cells and modules, but obviously the battery and EV supply chain is the other places is playing out in a huge way and it's an enormous amount. And we've never seen anything like this in the history of cl