Clean tech, green finance and energy innovation are the three lanes on the road to a successful global energy transition. At the intersection of these lanes is a place where ideas on finance, technology and policy are shared and debated. That intersection is Interchange Recharged.
Sylvia Leyva Martinez, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie, invites visionaries, entrepreneurs, policy-makers and energy analysts to explore the newest developments in renewable technology, explain the ideas on global energy policy that could accelerate the energy transition, and identify new funding and financial models that could solve the biggest challenges we face on the way to net zero.
Sylvia and her guests bring you data and forecasts on clean technology, climate science, and offer predictions on the build out of utility-scale projects and the future of green finance.
What impacts do the annual UN Conference of the Parties have on decarbonisation goals and climate change? What will COP30 bring? What’s happening in global EV adoption and development? What’s the forecast for solar energy, one of the major success stories of renewable energy in the last ten years? What does the data tell us about the future of hydrogen, of nuclear, or of low-carbon power? These are examples of the insights and detailed analyses you can expect bi-weekly on Tuesdays at 7am ET.
If you like The Energy Transition Show, Catalyst with Shayle Kann, The Big Switch from Columbia University, Open Circuit with Jigar Shah or The Green Blueprint, you’ll enjoy Interchange Recharged.
Want to get involved with the show? Reach out to podcasts@woodmac.com to:
Bring Sylvia and Interchange Recharged to your event
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Ask a question to Sylvia or one of our guests
Check out another leading clean tech global podcast by Wood Mackenzie, Energy Gang, at woodmac.com/podcasts/the-energy-gang
Wood Mackenzie is the leading global data and analytics solutions provider for renewables, energy and natural resources. Learn more about Wood Mackenzie on the official website: https://www.woodmac.com/
We are going to build a lot more wind and solar over the coming decades. It will inevitably lead to oversupply of these resources on the grid. But is that a good thing?
That’s the focus of this week’s show, featuring a conversation between Shayle Kann and Columbia University's Melissa Lott.
The stars have aligned for a rare win-win-win situation: Solar and wind are popular with politicians; they’re popular with customers; and they’re often the lowest-cost resource, making them an attractive bet for investors.
As we build more solar and wind, many regions will start to look like California does on a sunny spring day, or like West Texas does on a windy night: power prices drop to zero or below, producers curtail excess electricity, creating the dreaded "overproduction” of renewables.
So what do we do with all this carbon-free power?
We asked Melissa Lott and it turns out quite a lot! She argues that renewable oversupply can actually be a feature of the grid, not a bug (even if it causes some minor pests along the way). There are all kinds of new resources we can harness with excess wind and solar.
Melissa is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy and she and her colleague, Julio Friedman, wrote a paper laying out the case for intentionally overbuilding capacity — and thus intentionally creating oversupply. They lay out a framework for figuring out what to do with intermittent excess energy and zoom in on a case study in New Zealand.
What happens when an aluminum smelter — one that uses a whopping 12% of the county’s annual demand and is powered largely by hydroelectric power — closes down? It was one decarbonization modeler’s dream.
The Interchange is brought to you by the Yale Program in Financing and Deploying Clean Energy. Through this online program, Yale University is training working professionals in clean energy policy, finance, and technology, accelerating the deployment of clean energy worldwide, and mitigating climate change. To connect with Yale expertise, grow your professional network, and deepen your impact, apply before March 14, 2021.
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