Supercool

Beauty and Brains: Lunar Batteries Save Money and Look Good Doing It

Kunal Girotra was Head of Tesla Energy before leaving in 2020 to found Lunar Energy. Then he went silent. Over two years, he raised $300 million, built a 250-person team, and developed home battery systems that blend sleek design with state-of-the-art technology. Lunar emerged from stealth in 2022 with a mission to deliver endless, affordable clean energy.What differentiates Lunar: it's both a hardware and software company. The battery and AI are designed and integrated as a single system. The software learns each home's unique energy fingerprint, deciding when to charge from the grid at low rates, when to run on battery, and when to sell power back at premium prices.The results: customers earn an average of $464 annually through Virtual Power Plant programs and $338 through optimization—over $800 in total, with seamless backup power.Lunar's GridShare platform now manages 650 megawatts of distributed energy for utilities across multiple continents. This morning, the company announced $232 million in new funding to expand nationwide.Show Notes:Guest: Kunal Girotra, Founder & CEOCompany: Lunar EnergyFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Can AI Save AI Infrastructure? Cutting Energy, Water, and Wear in Data Centers

Data centers have always pursued energy efficiency through better hardware—smarter chillers, advanced cooling systems. But there's a ceiling. You can only make hardware so efficient.Seven years ago, Jasper de Vries discovered the butterfly effect in data centers—something on a roof rippling through 300 billion sensor readings down to valves in server rooms. His company, Lucend, ingests that sensor data to generate operator recommendations. One facility cut power usage by 40% in a year, saving $4.3 million.Yet here's what most of us miss about AI's big energy problem: we focus on operational energy use while Scope 3 emissions—the embodied carbon from manufacturing hardware—creates massive impact, so much so that Microsoft won't hit its 2030 climate targets because of its data center growth plans. With JP Morgan projecting $5 trillion in AI infrastructure buildouts by 2030, the need to bring embodied carbon under control is urgent.Lucend's software addresses both challenges: it slashes operational energy while extending hardware life through predictive maintenance, reducing the physical wear that forces early replacement. Its technology is now deployed across over 50 facilities globally.Show NotesGuest: Jasper de Vries Company: LucendFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Stop Sorting: How UBQ Materials Uses 100% Of Your Trash

What if we stopped trying to recycle and just used all our trash instead?UBQ Materials makes bio-plastics from entire trash bags—dirty diapers, greasy pizza boxes, chicken bones, mixed plastics. Everything. 100% utilization. Nothing returns to landfills.The material works in existing manufacturing equipment, costs the same as virgin plastic, and can be recycled 10+ times. It's already in Mercedes interiors and McDonald's products.CEO Albert Douer spent eight years in stealth mode perfecting the technology before selling a pound. The original plan: three years. Reality: ten. Most VCs would've killed it. He kept going.Now UBQ operates an 80,000-ton facility in the Netherlands proving the technology works at scale. The implications for waste, plastics, and the circular economy are staggering—and Albert's journey reveals what it actually takes to bring impossible-sounding innovation into the real world.Show NotesGuest: Albert Douer, CEOCompany: UBQ MaterialsFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Modernization Is Electrification: How Schneider Electric Builds at Gigawatt Scale

When any part of the economy modernizes, it electrifies. New HVAC systems? Electric heat pumps. Autonomous vehicles? Battery-powered electric cars. Next-generation factories? Not a smoke stack in sight. Which means the US needs to build as much grid infrastructure in the next decade as we built in the last 50 years.Schneider Electric is a 189-year-old infrastructure company that makes everything from the cooling systems in AI factories to the switchgear moving power across the grid. Jim Simonelli, their SVP of data centers, joins Supercool to explain why efficiency is now a core business necessity, not just an environmental virtue. Every watt that doesn't reach compute is lost revenue, which changes everything about how you design and operate at gigawatt scale.Vincent Petit, who runs Schneider's research institute, breaks down why 15 years of flat electricity demand means we've lost the muscle to build infrastructure. And why the answer isn't just more generation—it's rethinking the entire system.Show NotesGuests: Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Secure Power and Vincent Petit, Senior Vice President, Climate & Energy Transition ResearchCompany: Schneider ElectricFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Mass Timber For The Masses: How Sterling Mainstreamed CLT

Mass Timber is growing fast—expanding from a handful of commercial wood buildings in the U.S. just over a decade ago to more than 2,000 today, with 24,000 projected by 2034. Once considered niche, mass timber is moving mainstream—competing on price, speed, and domestic supply chains, not sustainability alone.Sterling Structural is leading that shift. As America's largest CLT manufacturer, the company produces one cross-laminated timber panel every 65 seconds, sourcing 100% of its wood from domestic sawmills. Sterling has recently produced its one millionth panel.This is mass timber for the masses—standardized, modular systems that contractors already understand.Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber at Sterling, joins Josh Dorfman to share how mass timber went from alternative to mainstream in a decade. She discusses how Sterling supplied 1,100 prefabricated CLT panels for Amazon’s new facility in Elkhart, Indiana, and why the industry is scaling by competing directly on price, speed, and practicality—with the carbon and forestry benefits included.Show NotesGuest: Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass TimberCompany: Sterling StructuralFor more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our:* Weekly Newsletter* Climate Adoption Playbook* Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn