The Latitude
A weekly News podcast featuring Michael Grunwald and Tamar Haspel
The Latitude
Episodes
Episodes of The Latitude
Mark All
In Australia, one in three homes hosts a rooftop solar system. And 20% of those systems are attached to batteries. In February, a major grid outage put those systems to the test. Extreme weather caused a series of grid failures in the state of
There are two critical ingredients fueling the AI boom: energy and chips. And NVIDIA, one of the most important companies in AI, is looking to be a power player in both.NVIDIA was founded in the early 1990s as a chip maker for gaming. It has
The US green hydrogen industry is at a critical juncture. After months of input and debate, the government put out draft rules for tax credits at the end of last year – setting firm requirements for matching new, local renewables to hydrogen p
Data center energy use is spiking around the world. The International Energy Agency says that demand could double in the next two years, as artificial intelligence workloads soar.This increase in demand is alarming environmentalists and clean
As cities around the U.S. ramp up their renewable energy goals, they’re sometimes at odds with the utilities that serve them. Some have tried to break away and form their own utilities. Others are creating community choice aggregators to negoti
We have 60 gigawatts of virtual power plant capacity in the US. But that needs to triple in the next decade to support a zero-carbon grid – while also meeting a surge in peak demand.There are lots of different models for building VPPs that lin
Wind and solar projects are relatively simple to build compared with thermal power plants. But there’s a lot of technological innovation going into how those renewable plants are designed, constructed and optimized – driven by robots, artificia
The world needs a lot of critical minerals. By the middle of the century, we could be looking at a six-fold increase in demand for lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and magnesium to make enough batteries and renewables to decarbonize the global
Elon Musk has called lithium “the new oil.” Demand for critical minerals is booming alongside the surge in global battery production. And countries are racing to control as much mining and processing of lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, and g
It’s been another tumultuous year for the clean energy sector in the stock market. Even with strong tailwinds from the Inflation Reduction Act, many public companies took a hit this year – thanks to investor concerns over high interest rates,
America’s first commercial plant for capturing CO2 directly from the air is online. It marks the start of an industrial race in direct-air capture – or DAC – an industry that needs to succeed in tandem with a tripling of clean generation to sl
The concentrating solar power industry – also known as solar thermal – has been defined by bankruptcies, failed projects, and high costs. But is it finding new life?Crystalline silicon photovoltaics won the race for solar power generation long
Transmission backlogs. Land constraints. Local pushback. They’re all causing headaches for developers of wind, solar, and battery projects.And that’s making brownfields more attractive for renewables – and a range of novel, industrial-scale st
The market for engineered carbon removal is starting to resemble, well, a real market. Tax credits. Billions in government support. Corporate buyers. A wide range of startups that are picking up investment and working toward commercial deploym
Green hydrogen is a critical resource for cleaning up industry and heavy trucking. With tens of billions of government and corporate dollars plowing into the space – electrolyzer companies are preparing for a ramp up in sales and project devel
Top tech companies are on a quest to run their massive data centers around the clock with clean power.It’s not an easy task, but they’ve been making progress. The energy efficiency of large data centers has radically improved over the last two
Electric grids are increasingly being saturated with weather-dependent renewables. At the same time, power systems are also getting challenged by intensifying and unpredictable extreme weather.So can weather prediction models rise to the chall
Renewables are now super cheap and abundant. We could install nearly a half terawatt of new wind and solar capacity this year – more than the entire capacity of China.But with that surge comes a set of very pointed questions: what do we do wit
Trailer
Hi Climavores listeners: we're announcing a change to this feed. Going forward, this show will be called The Latitude.Solar, wind, and batteries have all surged around the world. We’re set to install 400 gigawatts of renewables in the next fiv
In this last episode of the season, Tamar and Mike discuss what they’ve learned over the past six months and debate whether there’s hope for solving the food and climate problem (spoiler alert: they both say, “Yes, if….). They discuss techno o
Wheat feeds billions but it has some big climate problems. Wheat production degrades the soil, which releases carbon. It also requires a lot of land. That means clearing land—often forest—to make room for it, which also releases carbon. Plus, w
It’s no secret that chocolate is a sweet loved by pretty much everyone (well, everyone except Tamar). Here in the states, the average American eats about 12 pounds of chocolate a year, and worldwide we eat eight million tons of it annually. Unf
It’s a new year, and that means a new stream of voicemails filling up our listener hotline. This week Mike and Tamar kick things off by answering questions about the impact of food packaging, the scope of precision agriculture, lamb and goat me
This week on the show, internet sensation Hank Green talks with Mike and Tamar about the future of cell-based meat. Hank lives in Montana, which is hardcore ranching country. It’s a place where beef is king, cowboys are real and pickup trucks a
Mike and Tamar talk a lot about eating better for our bodies and our planet. They’ve tackled meat versus plants, processed food versus whole food, cow milk versus almond milk. They even did a whole episode about the pros and cons of local food.
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