Energy vs Climate: How climate is changing our energy systems

This is a replay of our conversation with Dr. Shirley Meng from the University of Chicago on battery storage. It's one of our favourite deep dives because batteries touch everything from EV range anxiety to grid scale storage, and even the whole critical minerals conversation.

When we recorded this in May 2024, Shirley was predicting real solid state battery platforms by 2027 or 2028, and here we are getting close to that window, so it's worth listening again with that timeline in mind. 

The fights over re-shoring battery manufacturing, the US-China race, the economics of lithium versus sodium, all of it is just as live today as it was then, or maybe even more so.

Episode page and show notes.

About Our Guest:
Dr. Y. Shirley Meng is a Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She serves as the Chief Scientist of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science (ACCESS) Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Meng is the principal investigator of the research group - Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion (LESC), that was established at University of California San Diego since 2009. She held the Zable Chair Professor in Energy Technologies at University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 2017-2022.
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Decarbonization usually means addition: more wind, solar, EVs. But a real transition also means taking something away.

We talk about decarbonization like it's a shopping list: more wind, more solar, more EVs, stacked on top of whatever's already running. But a real transition means something also has to come off the list. Fossil systems have to shrink at the same time clean systems grow, and for a good stretch in the middle, both have to serve the same demand at once. Neither one can do the job alone, and each ends up constraining the other.

Civil engineer and environmental sociologist Emily Grubert (University of Notre Dame) calls this overlap the mid-transition, and it's the subject of a paper she co-wrote with Sara. Ed sits down with both of them to work through what the concept actually means once you get past the label.
Some of what's in this one:
Why refineries and coal plants can't just wind down smoothly to zero, and where the "minimum viable scale" wall actually sits
What Alberta's coal phase-out got right, what it missed, and why the coal companies got compensated a lot faster than the communities did
Whether the oil sands could shrink one asset at a time, or whether losing one piece, a pipeline, an upgrader, takes more of the system down with it
The uncomfortable question at the centre of it all: is a slow, managed phase-out actually the safer path, or just a longer runway for incumbents to extract concessions on the way out.

0:00 Intro
0:35 Cold Open
2:00 What Is the Mid-Transition?
4:36 The 80/20 Rule: Are We Already In It?
5:55 Decarbonization Means Subtraction Too
8:50 What Each System Forces on the Other
12:38 Refineries and the Limits of Ramping Down
15:46 Alberta's Coal Phase-Out, Explained
20:52 Managing Coal Decline in the US
24:11 Fast Payouts for Companies, Slow Support for Communities
27:58 Can the Oil Sands Shrink Smoothly?
35:13 Long Mid-Transition or Short? The Band-Aid Question
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Octopus Energy paid its UK customers collectively over £100,000 during a recent heat wave, not through new infrastructure, but a text message and a price signal offering demand flexibility. That caught our attention.

In this episode, Ed and Sara (David sits this one out) talk with Eric Davids, Head of Strategy for Octopus Energy's US business, about redefining utility-customer relationships, how approaches in the UK stack up against North American utilities' much blunter "please conserve" grid alerts, and what happens when consumers get real price exposure and it doesn't go well.

🎙️ TIMESTAMPS
0:50 – Episode intro
1:54 – Welcome Eric Davids
5:55 – What is demand flexibility?
7:38 – Inside Octopus's £100K UK heat wave response
9:49 – Alberta's grid alerts vs. Octopus's incentives
22:09 – Guardrails against price exposure risk (Winter Storm Uri)
28:19 – Is this just another hype cycle?
35:43 – Equity and the energy transition
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They say there's no growth without feedback. This season, you've given us plenty of it.

In this episode, David, Sara, and Ed do something most podcasters shouldn't do: they read the comments. Out loud and on purpose.

Some feedback was positive. Some was additive. Some fell into the category we're calling "strongly suggestive." 

If you've ever left a comment on an EvC clip wondering whether David, Sara and Ed actually saw it: they did. This is what they had to say back.
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Ed's new project, Critical Mass, starts with a deceptively simple question: if Canada decides it wants more nuclear power, can it actually deliver it? The answer turns out to be complicated.

As part of the project, we're hosting four live town halls across the country. The first was recorded at Toronto Climate Week on June 5, featuring Todd Smith (former Ontario Minister of Energy, now VP at Candu Energy) and Brendan Frank (VP of Policy at Clean Prosperity). Together they work through the project's core tensions - cost, democratic legitimacy, and standardization - with the kind of honest talk you've come to expect from EvC.

Thank you to Geoff Burt and The Consecon Foundation for helping make the evening possible. 
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