Catalyst with Shayle Kann

As the nuclear renaissance comes into focus in the U.S., the sector’s true bottleneck might not be advanced reactors, but its lack of heavy-lifting project developers. These are the companies who secure and permit sites, navigate the interconnection queue, line up offtakers, and assemble a team of both savvy EPCs and experienced plant operators.

In this episode of Catalyst, Shayle Kann sits down with David Faherty, co-founder of Elementl Power, to walk through the soup-to-nuts playbook for delivering new nuclear projects in the United States. David explains everything from how his team approaches greenfield site screening, why early-stage development capital remains the hardest money to raise, and how portfolio-level structuring could unlock nuclear's elusive learning curve.

Shayle and David also discuss:

- What makes a viable nuclear site, from seismic and geotechnical screenings to community engagement and interconnection dynamics

- Why 20- to 25-year investment-grade offtakes from hyperscalers are critical for debt financing

- Why Elementl opts for GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300 SMR over Gen IV startup reactor concepts

- Lessons learned from Vogtle — from the design phase and regulatory alignment to workforce retention

- How standardizing the nuclear island can help developers cut costs

Note: EIP is an investor in Elementl, where Shayle sits on the board.

- Catalyst: The global geopolitics of nuclear fuel

- Catalyst: A blueprint for scalable fusion power

- Catalyst: Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain

- Catalyst: The path to market for new nuclear reactors

- Open Circuit: Is commercial fusion finally near?

- Latitude Media: DOE Is dedicating $17.5 billion in loans to the nuclear supply chain

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.

Catalyst is brought to you by GridBeyond. GridBeyond is the world’s leading technology platform for managing distributed and flexible energy resources. Learn more by visiting GridBeyond.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the strategic communications and marketing partner behind the biggest names in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped breakout companies amplify their stories, build reputation, differentiate from the competition, define new categories and accelerate growth. Learn more at antennagroup.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 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

This fall, uranium prices set a record high — $96.50 per pound. But even though the radioactive metal is critical to the nuclear power buildout, rising prices haven’t triggered panic among uranium buyers.

So how are buyers continuing to rely on the supply chain to keep delivering?

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Mike Alkin, founder and chief investment officer at Sachem Cove Partners, to unpack the full nuclear fuel cycle: from mining and yellowcake to conversion, enrichment, and fabrication. Mike explains why uranium mining, specifically, is the ultimate bottleneck in the supply chain. He also makes the case that murky contracting masks the market reality, and breaks down what could happen when America’s 2028 ban on Russian enriched uranium goes into full effect.

Shayle and Mike also discuss:

- Uranium’s global supply/demand mismatch

- Why buyers have been replacing fuel at just above 50% of its burn rate

- Why production costs at the world's lowest-cost producer, Kazatomprom, have skyrocketed and triggered global production curtailments.

- Why shifting toward overfeeding will create massive new demand for uranium yellowcake

- The challenges America faces finding new uranium suppliers

- Catalyst: Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain

- Catalyst: The state and future of nuclear waste

- Catalyst: The path to market for new nuclear reactors

- Open Circuit: Inside Meta’s massive nuclear push

- Latitude Media: The Department of Energy's 2026 playbook

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.

Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the strategic communications and marketing partner behind the biggest names in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped breakout companies amplify their stories, build reputation, differentiate from the competition, define new categories and accelerate growth. Learn more at antennagroup.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 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 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 GridBeyond. GridBeyond is the world’s leading technology platform for managing distributed and flexible energy resources. Learn more by visiting ⁠GridBeyond.com⁠.

Data center developers are facing unprecedented roadblocks to power new facilities. In addition to being hampered by an enormous interconnection queue backlog, the major gas turbine suppliers — GE Vernova, Mitsubishi, and Siemens — are completely sold out past 2030. As a result, developers are scrambling to find alternate behind-the-meter power solutions.

In this episode, Shayle invites Tony Brough, president of Dora Partners & Company, back on the show to examine this squeeze on gas-fired power generation. They break down the OEM backlog, examine rising equipment pricing, and take a deep dive into the emerging ecosystem of new suppliers looking to fill the void.

Shayle and Tony discuss:

- Why turbine prices have surged from $500/kW to nearly $2,500/kW

- The long-term viability of deploying reciprocating generators as bridge power

- The technical and manufacturing hurdles facing new turbine OEMs like Boom Supersonic and Parallax

- How companies like FTAI, PROENERGY, and Nova Power are repurposing jet engines into stationary power units

- The market outlook for 2030, including the role of renewables, and whether behind-the-meter gas demand will plateau

- Catalyst: Data centers' looming methane surge

- Catalyst: The rise of flexible data centers

- Catalyst: The gas turbine crunch

- Open Circuit: Data centers have a Texas-sized energy problem

- Open Circuit: Power is caught in AI's doom loop

- Latitude Media: Is the gas turbine bottleneck solving itself?

- Latitude Media: Hyperscalers say gas is a bridge — but no one says where it ends

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.

Catalyst is brought to you by GridBeyond. GridBeyond is the world’s leading technology platform for managing distributed and flexible energy resources. Learn more by visiting GridBeyond.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the strategic communications and marketing partner behind the biggest names in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped breakout companies amplify their stories, build reputation, differentiate from the competition, define new categories and accelerate growth. Learn more at antennagroup.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 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.

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 with FlexGen CEO Pegler and COO Hugh Scott about how the demand is showing up — and how data centers are reshaping the industry.

“I had thought coming from the renewable energy space, we were an impatient crew. The data center community makes us look like the most patient people around,” says Kelcy Pegler, the CEO of FlexGen.

They walk through how developers are designing and integrating batteries, how software is controlling them, and where the market is headed.

This is partner content, brought to you by FlexGen. FlexGen designs and integrates battery energy storage solutions and the software platform that is enabling today’s energy transition.

This conversation was recorded live as part of Latitude Media’s Frontier Forum series. You can access the full video here.

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:

- The big-picture data: Why tens of gigawatts of new behind-the-meter gas capacity could generate 380 megatons of CO2 and methane emissions over the next 18 months.

- How methane can leak across the value chain, from wellheads and gathering pipelines to facility leaks and engine slippage

- How methane's extreme short-term warming potency means off-grid gas emissions could dwarf coal’s impacts over the next 20 years

- Why running gas generators at partial loads increases leaks

- Why low-leak gas procurement, leak detection and repair, and catalyst additions add less than 1% to total data center build costs without causing operational delays

- How big tech's current emissions reporting relies on averages that overlook actual leaks

- Frost Methane Labs / MERIT certification

- Catalyst: The unexplored frontier of methane removal

- Catalyst: Why are we still flaring gas?

- Catalyst: Serving data center load with carbon capture

- Catalyst: Can the fossil gas supply handle the AI boom?

- Open Circuit: The off-grid data center fantasy

- Latitude Media: The problem with the US gas bonanza for data centers

- Latitude Media: Senate Democrats probe gas-powered AI data centers

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.

Catalyst is brought to you by GridBeyond. GridBeyond is the world’s leading technology platform for managing distributed and flexible energy resources. Learn more by visiting GridBeyond.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the strategic communications and marketing partner behind the biggest names in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped breakout companies amplify their stories, build reputation, differentiate from the competition, define new categories and accelerate growth. Learn more at antennagroup.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 230 utilities to coordinate over 2.6 million DERs and more than 3.6 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com.