Catalyst with Shayle Kann

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 Council and editor of V2G News, to explore why the V2G revolution is finally moving from concept to reality. They break down the technical battle between AC and DC architectures, tackle the looming questions around battery degradation and warranties, and debate the business models that will finally convince everyday drivers to plug their cars back into the grid.

Shayle and Steve discuss topics like:

- The unused energy capacity hidden in parked EVs

- The technical debate, cost trade-offs, and hardware differences between off-board power conversion (DC architecture) and on-board power conversion (AC architecture).

- Current compatible EV options, including the Nissan Leaf, Tesla Cybertruck, Ford F-150 Lightning, and Kia EV9

- The high upfront cost of V2G systems

- Consumers' fears regarding whether discharging power to the grid will ruin their EV batteries or void manufacturer warranties.

- Streamlining the V2G enrollment process via VPP programs or at point-of-sale

- How financing can unlock mass V2G adoption

Resources

Catalyst: Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage

Catalyst: How China is reshaping the global auto market

Catalyst: Enter the electric supercycle

Latitude Media: Electric Era is turning its EV-charging tech into a data center power play

Latitude Media: The future of optimized EV charging

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at ⁠engieresources.com⁠.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at ⁠EnergyHub.com⁠.

Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting⁠ ⁠⁠BloomEnergy.com⁠.

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 revolutionize material discovery and molecular design, and to turbo charge clean energy tech. But how close we are to actually moving from isolated chips in a lab to bringing these real-world commercial applications to life remains a bit of a mystery.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Bob Sorensen, chief analyst for quantum computing at Hyperion Research. They dig past the VC hype to map out the current state of quantum hardware, look at the timeline for fault-tolerant computing, and evaluate where the true performance gains lie.

Shayle and Bob discuss:

- Why recent claims of "quantum advantage" are often based on artificial constructs without much real-world relevance

- The difference between physical and logical qubits, and why reducing the "noise" is a defining hurdle for the hardware industry

- How data-driven AI models and science-driven quantum architectures complement each other differently in materials discovery

- Why 85 independent hardware vendors are far too many for the current ecosystem, and how market consolidation might impact investor confidence

Resources

- Catalyst: Quantum computing could be a critical climate solution

- Catalyst: Can AI revolutionize materials discovery?

- Latitude Media: Can quantum computing help solve the load growth problem?

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.

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 SemiAnalysis, to lift the curtain on the hyper-competitive world of AI energy procurement.

They cover topics including:

The hyperscaler leaderboard: Why Google remains the most energy-sophisticated tech giant, as others continue to innovate

Why power has effectively become revenue for frontier labs

How Google uses its massive balance sheet to provide financial backstops for Anthropic’s data center buildouts

Why the interconnection queue is forcing AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic to bring their own generation

The sudden market frenzy over modular speed-to-power options—ranging from aeroderivative gas turbines and massive reciprocating engines to billions of dollars of fuel cells

Catalyst: How data centers are complicating transmission expansion

Catalyst: Live from Transition-AI 2026: Inside Google’s massive AI capex

Catalyst: The rise of flexible data centers

Catalyst: AI scaling pathways: On grid, on edge, off grid, off planet

Open Circuit: The new reality for data centers: No easy answers

Open Circuit: Can data centers regain their social license?

Open Circuit: Grid utilization vs expansion: The 100GW debate

Latitude Media: FERC to grid operators: Connect large loads to transmission faster

Latitude Media: The rise of the data center power exchange

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.

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 without the explicit authorization of multiple governments, questions nonetheless remain around the safety and ethics of SRM.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Yanai Yedvab, CEO and co-founder of Stardust, to unpack how the technology works, its potential risks, and when to deploy it.

Shayle and Yanai discuss topics like:

- Why Stardust is eschewing sulfur dioxide in favor of naturally occurring, biodegradable amorphous silica and calcite particles

- How Stardust’s technology incorporates real-time and holistic testing

- Stardust’s commitment to only deploying under strict international regulation

- How the company balances the risk that solar geoengineering will reduce the economic incentive to decarbonize heavy industries with the imperative of an immediate climate solution

- Why Stardust structured itself as a private company rather than an academic or non-profit lab

- Catalyst: Making sense of solar engineering

- Catalyst: Serving data center load with carbon captureCredits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. 

Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.

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 are asking why local ratepayers should foot the bill for an infrastructure project designed to feed data centers in northern Virginia.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Maeve Allsup, senior reporter at Latitude Media, to unpack her reporting on the project. They dive into how the rise of generative AI has disrupted traditional grid planning and explore why this challenge has proven to be such an impactful rate limiter for the AI boom.

[Correction: In this episode, Shayle and Maeve refer to MARL as the Mid-Atlantic Reliability Line. The correct name is the Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link. We regret the error.]

Shayle and Maeve discuss topics like:

- How a project approved in 2022 hit a vastly different policy and regulatory landscape by the time it reached state dockets

- Why data center growth breaks the historic assumption that regional transmission costs eventually "even out" between states

- How the Ratepayer Protection Pledge — a voluntary commitment signed by tech hyperscalers at the White House — is being harnessed by state advocates as a cudgel to demand data centers pay for grid upgrades

- Why the United States has gone from building thousands of miles of transmission a decade ago to just hundreds today

- How the intersection of local opposition and confusion over utility tariffs is delaying grid buildouts

Resources

- Latitude Media: How the Ratepayer Protection Pledge became a transmission hurdle in PJM

- Latitude Media: FERC to grid operators: Connect large loads to transmission faster

- Catalyst: Looking for a turnaround in transmission

- Catalyst: The rise of flexible data centers

- Catalyst: AI scaling pathways: On grid, on edge, off grid, off planet

- Open Circuit: Grid utilization vs expansion: The 100 GW debate

- Open Circuit: A five-alarm fire for the grid?

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.