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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The aftershocks of the Iran war are reshaping energy markets, investment decisions, and climate politics in very different ways around the world.

David, Sara, and Ed sat down with Vijay Vitheeswaran, Global Energy and Climate Innovation Editor at The Economist and 2025 Energy Writer of the Year, to discuss the shock rippling through energy markets since the war in Iran began.

On one side are forces accelerating the energy transition like electrification, EV adoption, solar deployment, and rapidly scaling clean tech. On the other are forces pushing toward deeper fossil fuel lock in: energy security fears, coal expansion, oil investment surges, and persistent fossil fuel subsidies. Which force is actually winning?

The conversation covered a lot of ground — from samosa vendors in Delhi packing up because cooking fuel tripled in price, to what a potential OPEC collapse could mean for the oil sands.

This show's a great listen, especially if you're trying to make sense of a world where the energy transition and fossil fuel lock-in are happening simultaneously.

About Our Guest:

Vijay Vaitheeswaran is the Global Energy & Climate Innovation Editor of The Economist. He has produced numerous cover stories and won awards for his reporting. He is an accomplished public speaker and his three books have created a stir, with accolades ranging from lengthy reviews in The New Yorker to shortlisting for the FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year prize. The Financial Times has declared him to be “a writer to whom it is worth paying attention.”

Vijay is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He serves as an advisor on innovation to the World Economic Forum/Davos, and has taught at NYU Stern Business School and Northwestern University. Vijay is an alumnus of Harvard Business School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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Nuclear is having a global moment. But the story in Canada is a lot more complicated.

David, Sara, and Ed sat down with Prof. Jason Donev of the University of Calgary for a full, unsparing look at where nuclear fits in a rapidly growing and electrifying Canadian grid.

Jason is one of the clearest thinkers on energy systems in the country. He's also someone who started out opposed to nuclear and changed his mind.

We set this episode up to tackle two questions. First, what is the case for new nuclear right now, given rising electricity demand from electrification, industry, and AI. And second, why Canada, despite decades of experience, has struggled to build new projects beyond Ontario and New Brunswick.

A few things you'll hear about:

• Canada had a nuclear accident in 1952. Jimmy Carter helped clean it up.
• “Small” modular reactors can be up to 300 megawatts. A CANDU is closer to 700. “Small” is a relative term.
• Darlington’s BWRX-300 is a closely watched test case for Western SMRs. Will costs fall with follow-on units, or will nuclear repeat its Achilles heel and get more expensive?

It turned into a lively and wide-ranging conversation on costs, timelines, small modular reactors, and the deeper issue that keeps coming up with nuclear. The physics may be solved, but the politics and institutions are not.

About Our Guest:
Prof. Jason Donev is a tenured professor teaching Energy Science and Physics at the University of Calgary. He leads EnergyEducation.ca, the world’s largest and most widely used energy resource for adults.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction
(02:20) Jason's journey from nuclear skeptic to advocate
(06:53) A brief history of nuclear in Canada
(12:39) Canada's nuclear accident record — what really happened
(17:56) The global nuclear resurgence: 40 countries, tripling by 2050
(20:27) SMRs: hype vs. reality
(22:58) Is nuclear being used to delay climate action?
(30:09) Why Western nuclear costs are "a joke" — and what to do about it
(31:57) Nuclear waste: real problem or political football?
(36:06) Why nuclear needs BOTH big business AND big government
(52:07) What should Canada actually do?

🔗 Related Episodes:
⚛️ The Nuclear Debate with Elizabeth May (S1, Ep. 10)
🔄 Turn the Tables
Full References & Notes

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EvC Superfan and fellow energy nerd Robert Tremblay turns the tables on Sara and Ed — asking the questions the podcast usually doesn't: how EvC started, the energy transition over the 7 seasons of the show, what's changed, and whether any of it is working.

They get into their backgrounds, the EvC origin story (are the rumours about Danielle Smith true?), how the show has evolved, and what they actually think about Canada's climate trajectory. Plus a rapid-fire round... well, at least as rapid-fire as EvC gets.

Topic Timestamps

00:00:20 — Intro and episode setup

00:01:07 — Hosts' backgrounds before the podcast

00:07:09 — Origin story: how EvC came to be

00:12:56 — How things have changed since 2020: energy data and political landscape

00:23:04 — Is the Energy vs. Climate premise still relevant?

00:30:35 — Alberta/Canada focus vs. international scope

00:34:30 — Can Alberta lead the energy transition?

00:38:48 — Climate targets: useful or counterproductive?

00:43:00 — Rapid fire questions

About Our Guest Host:
Rob Tremblay is Policy Manager at Energy Storage Canada, where he leads policy analysis and advocacy efforts across Alberta while contributing to federal and technical policy initiatives nationally. He also Co-Chairs the Board of the Calgary Climate Hub. He's passionate about advancing the energy transition and is a frequent Energy vs Climate listener and questioner.

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