Catalyst with Shayle Kann

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 by companies like battery integrator FlexGen, which has seen its order book suddenly filled with data center customers. 

In this Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey talks w...

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-powered data centers, and considers why the actual warming impact of behind-the-meter gas may be double current estimates. Olya says practical, relatively low-cost strategies could cut those emissions in half. Shayle and Olya also discuss:

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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 the midst of a capacity crunch of its own. Shayle and Eric consider how data center demand has collided with massive LNG exports in the United States, why...

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 Insights and an expert in data center thermal management. They unpack the history and evolution of data center cooling and consider how high-density chip racks have developers ditching air c...

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%, far below the threshold needed for fleet operators to stay in the black.

The future of the battery market in Texas remains murky. Will the...

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 solutions like fuel cells much more attractive.

This shift within the data center industry is starting to shape energy decisions in the broader...

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 with the challenges presented by the sea in order to complete surveillance and reconnaissance-related missions, as well as direct attacks. Saltwater corrodes hardware, and vehicles at great depths must...

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 why it has become more bipartisan than he expected

- The impacts of the war in Iran on global EV adoption, and how the...

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 unpack the nuances. They crunch the numbers behind utility rate structures, consider the "denominator effect" that can lower customers’ rates, and dig into the supply chain crunches pushing global...

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 the problem differently.

Shayle and Brian dive into specifics like:

- Communities’ shift from “red carpets to pitchforks” on data center development

- How misleading informa...

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-founder and CEO of Voya Energy, about the company's effort to replace diesel generators with generators powered by aluminum.

Richard explains why diesel has been so difficult to displace, why natural gas and batteries fall short for some...

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 utility planning and operations. They break down how utility studies get built today, the data cleanup headaches, the silos between teams, and the “worst case” mentality that drives an overbuild of infrastructure. 

Shayle an...

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. In short, the market didn’t need them yet.

Fast forward 10 years, and things have changed. Load growth is increasing while major grid bottlenecks — like in transmission, inte...

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 build durable, bipartisan policy that survives changes in political leadership. 

Drawing on more than a decade in the Senate, Tillis argues for an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that embr...

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 industry is responding. 

Hawkins explains that labor shortages aren't preventing new data centers from being built, but they are driving up costs, extending project timelines, and forcing developers to compete aggressively for ex...

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 C&I storage has historically struggled, why the economics are shifting dramatically, and why the next wave of distributed energy could be driven by commercial customers rather than utilities.

The...

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 pilot programs for decades. But with advanced tech hitting the market, that could soon change.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Steve Letendre, senior advisor at the Vehicle-Grid Integration Coun...

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, quantum remains a nascent technology that hasn’t seen any use in the real world. Among other applications, it offers enormous potential to revo...

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 wall: a power grid that can’t move fast enough to support them. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, who leads coverage of infrastructure and power at SemiAnaly...

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 hyperscale data center. 

Despite concerns about such an endeavor, the company is building a proprietary particle injection system with the goal of being deployment-ready this decade. While Stardust says they won’t deploy witho...

Electric transmission development is notoriously difficult, and these days, NIMBYism gets the brunt of the blame. But as data center loads surge and electricity prices climb, there’s a new roadblock –  the messy world of multi-state cost allocation.

The Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link (MARL) — a planned 100-mile, $960 million transmission line stretching across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia — was approved by PJM in 2022 under standard rules that spread costs across the entire region. But that plan was made before ChatGPT took off and data center forecasts shot upwards. 

Fast forward four years, and now state consumer advocates...

While many energy insiders remain focused on the staggering demand coming from AI and data centers, a much larger and far-reaching shift is happening. We are entering what Energy Impact Partners’ head of research Andy Lubershane calls the "electric supercycle" — a series of interlocking technological flywheels that are accelerating the clean energy transition faster than many may realize.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Andy to map out the interconnected nature of the "electric stack.” They unpack how early investments in solar and EVs are scaling up technologies that are now feeding back into grid infrastructure, and lo...

In 2020, China exported about a million cars a year. Now, it’s tracking somewhere around twelve million — surpassing the historic peaks of giants like Japan and Germany. 

Yet this massive global shift feels nearly invisible in the U.S. A 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles, combined with strict rules keeping Chinese hardware and software off American roads, has effectively built a regulatory wall around the domestic market. But in virtually every other corner of the globe, Chinese automakers are dramatically reshaping markets — from Europe and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Canada.

In this episode, Shayle sits do...

While global electricity demand is unquestionably rising, we may nonetheless be underestimating the scale of necessary future generation.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Nic Fulghum, senior energy and climate data analyst at Ember. Nic is the co-author of Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. This year’s installment, released in April, demonstrates that renewable sources – and solar in particular – are continuing to grow exponentially, even as those markets mature. In 2025, solar generation grew by a remarkable 30% year-over-year globally; its highest rate in eight years.

At the same time, global fossil generation declined in 2025, driven by drops...

Amidst the increasing urgency of powering data centers, a new solution has entered the mix: send them out to sea.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa. The company is building 85-meter steel "nodes" – taller than Big Ben – that it deploys into the deep ocean. These untethered, self-propelled nodes harness wave energy to power AI clusters, then beam their data back to land via satellite. The technology isn’t without its fair share of logistic complications, but it nonetheless offers a pathway to powering the AI boom that’s largely independent from gri...

For years, the prospect of commercial nuclear fusion felt a long way off. But recent breakthroughs—like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s historic 2022 net energy gain—have marked a new chapter in the quest for fusion. Proving the physics in a lab, however, is a lot different than building a power plant that can compete on the open grid. Massive hurdles remain across physics, financing, and scaling.

In this episode, host Shayle Kann sits down with Carrie von Muench, COO of Pacific Fusion and a former venture capitalist. Carrie brings a unique, investor-minded perspective to this singular challe...

While much of the world has been focused on the war in Iran’s impact on the energy sector, another arguably more impactful market has been largely overlooked: fertilizer.

The global fertilizer market is in a precarious spot. Roughly a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer trade goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the war in Iran began, China, the world’s top phosphate producer, halted exports of the crucial compound. As a result, the longer the strait remains closed, the more the threat to our global food supply escalates.

In this episode, Shay...

Even though autonomous passenger vehicles have entered the mainstream in cities across the country, autonomous trucks still lag behind. But Humble Robotics thinks it has cracked the code with a new design that completely does away with the tractor-trailer model we see on the highway every day.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Eyal Cohen, founder and CEO of Humble. The company built its electric trucks from the ground up. Fully cabless, they combine the tractor and trailer into a single platform designed to optimize energy efficiency, unit economics, and roadway safety.

Shayle and Eyal...

As the utility-scale solar market collides with an era defined by massive load growth, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) firms are rethinking their strategy to meet the moment.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar and storage construction firms in the US. George offers a unique perspective into the state of the market as well as the logistics of building gigawatt-scale projects and insights into how automation is changing the EPC game.

Shayle and George discuss:

As the race to build out artificial intelligence accelerates, the infrastructure required to support it is undergoing a remarkable transformation. In February, Google announced a plan to spend $175 billion to $185 billion in CapEx for 2026— a figure roughly equivalent to the GDP of Hungary.

In this special live episode, recorded at Transition-AI 2026 in San Francisco, Shayle sits down with Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI infrastructure. Amin pulls back the curtain on how the hyperscaler is rethinking everything from data center reliability and behind-the-meter power generation to real-time inference.

Shayle and Amin discuss:

[This episode is a re-run from October 2025. Look out for a new episode of Catalyst on Thursday, April 23.]

Yesterday, Base Power announced a ⁠$1 billion series C⁠, giving the residential battery company an eye-popping $4 billion post-money valuation. Base manufactures, installs, owns, and operates residential batteries — a vertical integration strategy that CEO ⁠Zach Dell⁠ says is the “magic” to beating utility-scale batteries on CapEx. The company also acts as an electricity retailer and sells generation capacity.

So how does Base’s business model work? And what will it do with its new fundraise? 

In this episode...

As the buildout of data centers accelerates on a dramatic trajectory,its strain on the electric grid has increased in turn; forecasts suggest they could consume up to 17% of all US power by 2030. To avoid higher rates and slower AI growth, the industry has embraced a promising solution: data center flexibility.

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Varun Sivaram, the CEO of Emerald AI. Coming on the heels of a $25 million investment round led by Energy Impact Partners, Varun returns to the show to provide an update on the "wickedly complicated" challenge of aligning utilities, cloud providers...

In 2025, the clean energy market navigated a mix of shifting tariffs, evolving FEOC compliance rules, and uncertainty around tax policy. On the surface, it looked like a year defined by instability.

And yet, capital continued to move.

Total capital expenditures across the clean economy reached roughly $120 billion, with total financing activity exceeding $200 billion across the full stack of project capital. The transferable tax credit market scaled to about $42 billion, growing rapidly in just a few years.

So why are the underlying dynamics so strong?

In this episode, recorded live as part...

Even as momentum grows for U.S. nuclear, the fuel supply chain is often overlooked. This dynamic is shifting as the industry wakes up to critical choke points and a heavy reliance on countries like Russia for enrichment. As America aims to reduce geopolitical dependency in energy, fixing these domestic gaps has become a strategic priority.

In this episode — a companion to a separate episode of Catalyst focused on nuclear waste — Shayle Kann speaks with Scott Nolan, the CEO of General Matter. The company is focused on enrichment, one of the most acute risk areas in the supp...

Battery markets have a pattern: They boom, capital floods in, prices collapse, and then the cycle starts again.

So as storage becomes more important than ever, how do we maximize revenue and deliver needed flexibility?

In this episode, Stephen Lacey speaks with Sean McEvoy, chief product officer and head of commercial at GridBeyond North America, about how that cycle is playing out across global power markets — and what happens when batteries stop being scarce.

As markets saturate, the source of value begins to shift. It’s no longer just about building assets. It’s abou...

The nuclear power sector is gaining a lot of momentum. But even as SMRs continue to flourish, the Department of Energy’s reactor pilot program moves forward, and decommissioned plants come back online, the question of what to do with nuclear waste has largely stayed out of the spotlight. The U.S. currently houses 90,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel; as more plants come online, that number could rise dramatically. 

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Dr. Jen Shafer, a former ARPA-E director and current professor at the Colorado School of Mines, to learn more about waste itself, and...

Despite the dark cloud of federal policy hanging over the solar industry, skyrocketing load growth is driving demand. The question is whether supply can keep up.

In this episode, Shayle talks to Scott Moskowitz — VP of market strategy and public affairs at Qcells and board chair of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) — about the challenges of reshoring solar in the U.S.

They cover topics like:

As demand for data center power skyrockets, available options to provide that power have dwindled. And cohesive frameworks for finding sustainable generation remain few and far between.

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Jake Elder, senior vice president of research and innovation at Energy Impact Partners. The two colleagues dig into the four main generation solutions — on grid, off grid, on edge, and off planet – and consider the viability of each in the years to come.

Shayle and Jake explore topics like:

Can a grid operator tell the difference between a virtual power plant and a traditional one?

That’s the idea behind the Huels Test, a framework developed by EnergyHub to answer a simple but consequential question: when does a distributed fleet of customer devices become reliable enough to function like a power plant?

Passing the test means more than just aggregating thermostats or batteries. It means delivering predictable, repeatable performance that utility planners and operators trust enough to rely on during system peaks. And it’s no longer theoretical.

During a series of brut...

Despite its ability to deliver ample carbon-free energy, the potential of geothermal and EGS is limited by the number of drilling sites close enough to the earth’s surface.

But a few pioneering companies have landed on a potential solution: dig way deeper.

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Carlos Araque, the founder of Quaise Energy. The company has developed millimeter-wave drills to vaporize rock, allowing them to dig up to twelve miles underground in search of water around 800 degrees Fahrenheit. That super hot and "supercritical" water packs a huge punch: ten times more energy de...