The CETI team listens to a wide range of podcasts to stay on top of the latest decarbonization developments as they relate to our focus areas—energy equity, energy pathways, rural clean energy, building decarbonization, and clean energy workforce development.

Looking back on what we heard last year, we aggregated the most educational podcasts by topic to write a four-part series. Unpacking the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) took up a fair amount of our headspace in 2023, and this first blog highlights some podcasts that helped us understand how the legislation could impact energy pathways to net-zero.

While we listened to too many IRA-related pods to count, the following on the U.S. industrial strategy, green electrolytic hydrogen, and biofuels were the most compelling, and contributed to our work on the Net-Zero Northwest Energy Pathways analysis.

U.S. Industrial Policy

Early in the year, David Roberts of Volts spoke with Brian Deese, President Joe Biden’s top economic advisor and director of the National Economic Council, who has played a critical role in defining and implementing the Biden Administration’s approach to developing a modern American industrial strategy.

In Meet the author of Biden’s industrial strategy (Volts, 3/22/23) Roberts and Deese discussed how active government investment can address our country’s economic and national security priorities, as well as climate change.

Four months later, Ezra Klein interviewed Robinson Meyer (The Ezra Klein Show, 7/7/23), founding executive editor of Heatmap News, in an excellent deep dive on how IRA implementation was unfolding across the country, something we’re paying close attention to with our focus on implementation here in the Northwest.

Meyer also discussed IRA investments for green hydrogen and how the Department of Energy report, “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen” is the“best piece of industrial policy [he has] seen from the government at all.”

Grokking Hydrogen

On that note, with the very rich hydrogen production tax credit in the IRA, there were many pods on hydrogen to be had, which was good for us as we were working with Evolved Energy Research on a contract for the Washington Department of Commerce on developing green electrolytic hydrogen. Four pods were particularly useful to us:

• Ammonia: The beer of decarbonization (Catalyst, 1/5/23), in which Energy Impact Partner Shayle Kann of the Catalyst pod explained how low-carbon ammonia—which can be produced from nitrogen and hydrogen—could help decarbonize shipping, heavy industry, and even thermal power plants.
• What's the deal with electrolyzers? (Volts, 2/1/23) featured Raffi Garabedian, the CEO of a start-up called Electric Hydrogen, and was helpful in understanding how green electrolytic hydrogen is produced.
• What hydrogen leaks mean for the climate (Catalyst, 2/9/23) talked about how leaked hydrogen may have more atmospheric warming potential than previously understood and asked whether that should change how we deploy it in the energy transition.
• We’re about to give billions of dollars to clean hydrogen. How should we define it? (Volts, 3/29/23) was an interview with Rachel Fakhry, who runs the hydrogen and energy innovation portfolio at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Fakhry is one of the top hydrogen experts, and this pod was critically important to help us understand the ins and outs of how the federal government should go about setting parameters for receiving the rich production tax credit for hydrogen.

What Happened to Biofuels?

Biofuels have not gotten much attention of late as a tool in the decarbonization toolkit, in large part because we now have a better understanding of their carbon impact. In What’s going on with biofuels? (Volts, 4/7/23), Roberts interviewed Dan Lashof, who is now the director of the World Resources Institute and who we’ve admired from his time at NRDC and NextGEN.

Lashoff described the trajectory of biofuels from the early 2000s to the present and explained the U.S. EPA’s proposed biofuel standards, which helped bring us up-to-speed on the state of biofuels in 2023.

Next up in this series: What we learned from pods on renewable energy and distributed energy resources as these relate to our focus on rural communities.