Staying on top of the latest technical and economic decarbonization developments is challenging, given the multiplicity and complexity of emission-reduction solutions. Luckily for all of us, there is a plethora of amazing podcast hosts to understand the latest decarbonization research.
Here is the Clean Energy Transition Institute team’s round-up of some of the best podcasts we listened to during 2022 related to our program areas.
We closely track the rapidly evolving research and technology solutions to drive emissions reductions in the building sector, which is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in Washington state.
The podcast selection below includes a unique way to finance whole-home retrofits; replacing gas appliances with lower-carbon heat pumps and induction stoves; and installing residential solar. Another podcast also talks about energy justice as a way of addressing both energy insecurity and building decarbonization at the same time.
Industry, especially “heavy” industry that produces basic materials like metals, chemicals, and cement, tends to be highly carbon intensive. Emissions are typically associated with both fossil fuel combustion and the chemical processes inherent in production.
Decarbonizing these industries, therefore, is a technical and transformational challenge that involves changing production systems, developing new infrastructure, and deploying new technologies to avoid or capture emissions in ways that are economically sustainable.
We found the following podcast episodes helpful as we dug into research for our Clean Materials Manufacturing project and Summit last year.
Industrial decarbonization in general:
Decarbonizing specific industries:
As the electric vehicle market grows, so will demand for the batteries that power them. The following podcast episodes helped us grapple with important questions surrounding developments in the battery industry, including procuring the necessary critical minerals and the increasing importance of battery recycling.
Critical Minerals:
Battery Recycling:
On August 16, 2022 President Biden signed the historic Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law, which provides approximately $369 billion in clean energy and climate investment. This massive investment has the potential to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy in the United States, but it isn’t easy to understand how the funds will flow.
The following episodes were a helpful starting place as we tried to understand all the moving parts. (For a more comprehensive list of IRA-related resources, see Making Sense of the Inflation Reduction Act).
Last year, Princeton University’s REPEAT Project released a report on the importance of expanding transmission, finding that the annual pace of transmission expansion must more than double in order to unlock the full emissions reduction potential in the IRA.
Other research has also pointed to the immense transmission challenge and how the lack of expansion is currently a bottleneck for the clean energy transition:
One of the most important challenges to solve for is the mid-transition, which is the period we are in now when both fossil fuels and clean energy infrastructure are necessary. There are many obstacles in the way of a smooth energy transition: siting challenges and NIMBYism, the spread of misinformation, and the difficulty of phasing out fossil fuel while simultaneously creating clean, zero-carbon energy. The following conversations helped us understand these complexities and more:
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