Catalyst with Shayle Kann

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 lin...

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.

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 bottlen...

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...

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) technol...