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Watt It Takes: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Emily Kirsch
Our monthly podcast tells the stories of founders who are building our clean energy abundant future—their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple to stay up to date with the latest episodes.
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- 3 weeks ago1h 15m
Deep Fission Co-Founder & CEO Liz Muller
All the nuclear fuel it would take to power your entire life would fit inside a soda can.So why does a nuclear power plant cost billions of dollars and take a decade or more to build?It isn’t the reactor core. The core is small, compact, and relatively simple to build. It’s everything built around it: the containment dome, the pressurizer, the thick reactor vessel, and the safety systems designed to make sure nothing ever goes wrong.Nuclear power should be a no-brainer. It's clean, it's reliable, and unlike solar or wind, it runs twenty-four hours a day. It also might be the only energy source in America that both political parties actually agree on. Together, Republicans and Democrats have produced a rare run of bipartisan legislation, executive orders, and federal programs all pushing in the same direction to actually build more nuclear power.Despite recent bipartisan support, the cost of building nuclear reactors has kept nuclear power on the sidelines for decades.But what if you didn’t need the concrete containment dome, the steel pressure vessel, or the cooling systems built to contain an accident? What if, instead of building a billion dollars of concrete and steel to create the conditions a reactor needs, you simply put the reactor somewhere those conditions already exist?Our guest today is a three-time founder who built a company based on that bet. Liz Muller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Deep Fission, a company building an underground nuclear energy system designed to dramatically cut the cost and time it takes to build nuclear power. Liz grew up in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a nuclear physics professor, in a city that declared itself a “nuclear-free zone.” She found her way back to nuclear power after building a nonprofit to bring transparent data to the climate debate, then a nuclear waste disposal company, before landing on the idea that would become Deep Fission.Deep Fission places the most common type of nuclear reactor at the bottom of a borehole a mile underground, where the rock and the weight of the water in the borehole replace much of the above-ground concrete and steel that nuclear plants usually require for containment and pressure.In our conversation, Liz walks me through her path and what it takes to bring nuclear power to market faster and cheaper.Today, Deep Fission is a public company, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker FISN, with a market cap of about $250M as of this episode’s release. The company is part of the Department of Energy’s Reactor Pilot Program, broke ground on its first reactor site in Parsons, Kansas, in 2025, has signed letters of intent for 18.5 gigawatts of future power, and has more than 75 employees.SponsorsAbout Everyday Electric Watt It Takes is brought to you by Everyday Electric, formerly Renew Home.Everyday Electric, the operator of the largest residential VPP in the U.S., provides energy solutions that simplify savings at home and support a stronger, more resilient grid.To learn more, visit everydayelectric.comAbout Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data, and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- Aug 25, 20261h 12m
Crux Co-Founder & CEO Alfred Johnson
For more than a decade, the federal government's biggest tool for accelerating clean energy hasn't been a grant or a loan. It's been the tax code. Tax credits have driven the buildout of wind, solar, and now a much wider range of technologies, like storage, nuclear, and advanced manufacturing. But there's a catch: most of the companies earning those credits don't have enough tax liability to actually use them themselves. A clean energy developer can be sitting on tens of millions of dollars in value that's slowly losing worth simply because they can't cash it in. In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act tried to fix that by making these credits transferable for the first time ever — sellable directly, for cash, to a company that can use them. It created a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar market overnight, with no playbook and no established way for buyers and sellers to even find each other. Our guest today set out to build the infrastructure this new market needed. Alfred Johnson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Crux, an AI-native capital platform for clean energy and manufacturing infrastructure. Crux got its start in transferable tax credits, and has since expanded into tax equity investment and debt origination, leveraging software, data, and AI to cover the full capital stack for energy and manufacturing infrastructure. Alfred grew up around politics in Washington, DC, and spent nearly two decades moving between government, finance, and technology before his wife, Emily, pushed him to build something in clean energy. In our conversation, Alfred walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build the capital markets infrastructure this country needs to power its clean energy future. Today, Crux has raised more than $77 million, grown to more than 120 employees, and facilitated nearly $10 billion in transactions across the clean energy economy. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- Jul 16, 202659 min
Fervo Energy Co-Founder & CEO Tim Latimer (Re-Release)
Electricity demand in the U.S. is climbing faster than the grid can comfortably absorb, driven largely by AI data centers that need power 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The U.S. power system needs all the reliable clean energy it can get, and once-forgotten geothermal energy is one such resource. In the 1960s, the United States was a world leader in building large-scale geothermal power plants, but during the fracking boom of the mid-2000s, drillers turned their attention to oil and gas. As wind, solar and batteries got cheaper, bankers and developers put their money into those resources. Geothermal development around the world had flatlined, until a new generation of geothermal developers and entrepreneurs borrowed the horizontal drilling techniques that powered the fracking boom and used them to make geothermal viable in far more geographies One of those entrepreneurs is Tim Latimer, Co-Founder and CEO of Fervo Energy. Fervo Energy is a geothermal developer using advanced drilling techniques from fracking in the oil and gas industry to make it easier to find and harness heat underground. In our conversation, recorded in December 2021, Tim told me about how he combined his expertise in oil and gas drilling with a dedication to solving the climate crisis, and used his experience to break open an overlooked renewable resource. Tim predicted the 2020s would be "the geothermal decade," noting that we can't transition to a zero-carbon grid without round-the-clock clean energy resources to supplement intermittent renewables. Geothermal offers that always-on feature needed now more than ever. We're revisiting this conversation now in celebration of what Fervo has accomplished: signing hundreds of megawatts of power purchase agreements with hyperscalers and utilities alike, and recently completing the largest IPO of any clean energy company. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- Jun 30, 20261h 12m
Zūm Founder and CEO Ritu Narayan
Every morning, 26 million children in the US get on a school bus. It is the largest mass transit system in America, and it has barely changed in 80 years. There is no real-time tracking, no route optimization, and no visibility for parents. Bus drivers still rely on walkie-talkies and dispatchers still use fax machines. Nearly half a million diesel buses are moving those 26 million children, producing more than eight million tons of carbon annually. It is one of the most overlooked, high-impact decarbonization opportunities in the country. The question isn't whether this system will change. It's who is going to change it. Our guest has spent the last decade building the solution. Ritu Narayan is the Founder and CEO of Zūm, a full-service school transportation platform that is modernizing and electrifying the yellow school bus. Ritu grew up in India and was raised to value education and dream big. After graduating from the Delhi Institute of Technology (now NSUT), she moved to California where she became a product leader at Oracle, Yahoo, and eBay. She left a career at eBay to take the leap into entrepreneurship and started Zūm to solve a deeply personal problem: modernizing and electrifying student transportation. In our conversation, Ritu walks me through her journey, and what it takes to reimagine a system the whole country depends on and nobody talks about. Today, Zum serves more than 5,000 schools across 18 states and completed over 60 million student rides last year. Zum has raised $430 million from investors including Sequoia, SoftBank, GIC, and TPG, and launched the nation's first all-electric, vehicle-to-grid school bus fleet at Oakland Unified School District, returning energy to the electric grid while children are at school. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- May 28, 20261h 25m
ThinkLabs AI Founder and CEO Josh Wong
Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand. We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast, driven by electrification and data centers powering AI. At the same time, the grid is getting more complex. Distributed resources, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are making it harder to plan, predict, and operate. And the tools utilities rely on weren’t built for this kind of system. Our guest today has spent his career inside that problem, from working at a utility to building one of the early software platforms for managing distributed energy. Josh Wong is the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company. We co-led ThinkLabs’ $5 million seed round in 2024. ThinkLabs is building an AI copilot for the electric grid, helping operators understand and manage the system in real time. Using physics-informed models, the platform can compress analyses that once took weeks or months into minutes. Josh was born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto. He began his career at Toronto Hydro, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to operate the grid in practice. That experience led him to found Opus One, a company focused on helping utilities manage increasingly complex power systems, which was later acquired by GE. Josh kept coming back to the same underlying problem: utilities need to move faster, but the tools they rely on make that nearly impossible. ThinkLabs is his answer. In our conversation, Josh walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build in one of the most complex and risk-averse industries in the world. Today, ThinkLabs has raised more than $30 million from investors including NVIDIA and Energy Impact Partners, and is working with partners and customers including Southern California Edison, and other major ISOs. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- May 4, 202657 min
Alex Honnold, Rock Climber & Founder, Honnold Foundation
At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access. Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population. This month’s guest, Alex Honnold, is best known for something completely different, but has spent the past decade working directly on that problem. Most people know Alex as the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing 3,000 feet of sheer granite without ropes. It’s one of the most extraordinary feats in modern sport. But over the past decade, he’s been channeling that same focus and discipline into a different kind of work: expanding access to clean energy through the Honnold Foundation. This conversation was recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, in a room full of founders, investors, and operators working to build the energy system of the future. And what stood out most to me was Alex’s clarity. He doesn’t speak in industry jargon. He doesn’t overcomplicate the problem. He keeps coming back to something simple. If people don’t have their basic needs met, nothing else works. In our conversation, we go back to Alex’s childhood in Sacramento, growing up as a shy kid climbing anything he could find, to the experiences that shaped him early on: loss, independence, and the years he spent living out of a van. We talk about what led him to free solo El Capitan, and the mindset behind it, and how those same values eventually showed up in his decision to start the Honnold Foundation. And we get into how he thinks about risk, failure, and impact today, both on the wall and in his work. Alex is funny, candid, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable. And he brings a perspective that I think is easy to overlook, but hard to ignore once you hear it. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- Apr 15, 20261h 16m
3Degrees Co-Founder and Chairman Dan Kalafatas
Here’s a question: how many corporations do you know that have made a public commitment to cut their carbon emissions? Probably a lot. About 40% of the world’s largest companies have set full net-zero targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, according to Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report, with target-setting rising for the fourth consecutive year. But how many actually know how to achieve those goals? Only about 16% are on track to reach net zero in their operations by 2050. That gap between pledge and execution is what today’s guest has spent the last twenty years working on. Dan Kalafatas grew up in a family shaped by his grandparents’ advocacy for working people and came of age questioning the role of business. That changed after a lunch talk on renewable energy at Stanford Business School. Today, Dan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of 3Degrees, a global company helping organizations deliver on their energy and emissions commitments — from sourcing clean energy and structuring power purchase agreements to navigating carbon markets. What began with renewable energy credits has grown into a platform supporting Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions work across more than 67 countries, with partners including Microsoft, Mars, Cargill, Etsy, and Rivian. The company has supported over 20,000 decarbonization projects, worked with more than 80 Fortune 500 companies, and helped bring more than 12 gigawatts of clean energy online. From wind farms in Oklahoma to forest conservation on California’s redwood coast to power purchase agreements worldwide, 3Degrees focuses on implementation. In our conversation, Dan walks through that journey — from growing up in a working-class mill town in Massachusetts to finding his direction at Stanford, to driving through California rice fields blasting Eminem to land his first customer, to surviving the 2008 financial crisis with just days of runway, and ultimately building a company that now generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
- Feb 26, 20261h 18m
Hydrostor Co-Founder and CEO Curtis VanWalleghem
On this episode of Watt It Takes, we explore another approach to long-duration energy storage: compressed air. Curtis VanWalleghem, Co-Founder and CEO of Hydrostor, started the company in 2010 after confronting surplus power challenges at Bruce Power. Without a traditional founder background, he set out to build storage systems that use compressed air and underground hard rock caverns to deliver ten-plus hours of grid-scale power. What began as experiments with underwater balloons evolved into large-scale rock cavern projects and a major business model shift. Hydrostor transitioned from a technology provider to an independent power producer, securing PPAs and financing billion-dollar infrastructure projects. In this conversation, Curtis reflects on the realities of building something capital-intensive: raising early checks from friends and family, enduring more than 200 investor rejections, mortgaging his home, pivoting both technology and strategy, and learning how to finance projects at true infrastructure scale. Today, Hydrostor has raised over $550 million in equity, secured roughly $8 billion in revenue contracts, and is advancing a multi-gigawatt pipeline across North America and Australia. About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team. Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry. To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.
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Our monthly podcast tells the stories of founders who are building our clean energy abundant future—their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world. Subscribe on Spotify or Apple to stay up to date with the latest episodes.
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