Everybody in the Pool

There’s no shortage of stats to demonstrate the sheer magnitude of our food waste problem: A whopping 40% of food grown for human consumption goes to waste; $400 billion worth of food gets thrown away every year in the U.S — roughly 1.5% of GDP; Food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Must we go on?That’s why, after building the Nest Thermostat, Harry Tannenbaum and Matt Rogers turned their attention to our kitchens. They created Mill, a sleek appliance that quietly turns your food scraps into an odorless, coffee-ground-like material, and in the process, began changing the way people think about what they buy and throw away.And Mill isn’t stopping at our kitchen counters. This week on Everybody in the Pool, Harry returns to the show to talk about how Mill is turning their attention to the places where food waste really piles up: grocery stores, restaurants, stadiums, and beyond.We talk about:Why food waste is a $400 billion problem hiding in plain sight, and why nobody’s actually measuring itHow the data Mill collects is already changing consumer behavior, and what that means at commercial scaleWhat Mill Commercial looks like: a modular, dishwasher-sized unit that processes hundreds of pounds of food per dayThe Whole Foods partnership: deploying Mill infrastructure across all locations by 2027, backed by Amazon's Climate Pledge fundWhy dehydrated food waste going directly to chickens is a tighter, more valuable loop than compostingThe vision for residential distribution: bundled with waste services or utilities, the way Nest thermostats scaled through utilitiesLinks:Mill: https://mill.com/All episodes: https://everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The grid is getting smarter, cleaner, and infinitely more complicated all at once. Enter Gridmatic, a company using artificial intelligence to do what old-school grid modeling can’t: predict when the wind will blow, when prices will spike, and exactly when to charge or discharge a battery.This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly is joined by David Miller, Chief Commercial Officer at Gridmatic, to nerd out about why managing a grid full of renewables is so much harder than managing one full of coal and gas, and what it actually takes to make renewable energy reliable at scale.We talk about:Why forecasting renewable output is so much harder than forecasting demandHow Gridmatic uses AI to predict real-time price spikes a full day ahead and position batteries accordinglyWhy Texas's grid interconnection queue has ballooned to 230 gigawatts when the state only uses 90 on its hottest dayWhat "Controllable Load Resources" are, and why they might be the key to unlocking faster grid interconnection for data centersThe crucial missing link between the vision of virtual power plants and actual grid reliability, and how software finally closes that loopLinks:Gridmatic: https://www.gridmatic.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/2EsDhwQC2zSubscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's be honest: the climate conversation is having a bit of a PR crisis. The word ‘climate’ itself has become politically charged, federal funding is under threat, and media coverage has gone quiet. But the technologies are still working, the solutions are still scaling, and the people building them haven't gone anywhere. So how do you keep telling that story?This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Josh Garrett, CEO and co-founder of Redwood Climate Communications, a specialty PR and strategic communications firm that works exclusively with climate tech companies and climate-focused nonprofits. Josh has been communicating about climate for 14 years, and right now, his expertise has never been more needed.We talk about:How to craft compelling stories about climate tech and policyWhy silence is not a strategy — and how to keep talking about climate even when the political winds have shiftedSimple word swaps that works across the aisle, like saying "pollution" instead of "greenhouse gases"How the fossil fuel industry built a century-long messaging machine — including the origin story of "now we're cooking with gas"Why climate advocates over-explain when they should be keeping it simple and repeatableThe power of leading with co-benefits: affordability, public health, energy freedomHow to be a “Climate YIMBY,” and why showing up to your local zoning meeting might be the highest-impact thing you can do right nowBalancing fear and hope: why disasters are our current reality, yet progress is inevitableLinks:Redwood Climate Communications: https://www.redwoodclimatecomms.com/Yale Center for Climate Change Communication: https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/Potential Energy Coalition: https://potentialenergycoalition.org/Emily Atkin’s Heated Newsletter: https://heated.world/Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/merchants-of-doubt-9781608193943/Greenlight America: https://www.greenlightamerica.org/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What if solar panels on your roof, a home battery in your garage, and the EV in your driveway could together make you money — while simultaneously solving the grid capacity crisis?This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Marco Krapels, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Enphase Energy, to discuss what surging data center energy demand means for the future of residential clean energy — and why Enphase thinks the answer is turning millions of American homes into a distributed, AI-optimized virtual power plant.We talk about:Why the AI energy crisis might be the thing that finally scales residential solar and batteriesHow Enphase's software turns rooftop solar, home batteries, and EV chargers into smart, dispatchable grid assetsThe virtual power plant model, and why utilities are finally on boardHow Green Mountain Power in Vermont and Octopus Energy in the UK have already proven this works at scaleWhy adding solar and a 10 kWh battery to less than 10 million homes could solve the U.S. capacity crunchThe bi-directional EV charger that's coming later this year and why it's a 7x multiplier on home battery capacityWhat a future where homeowners get paid by hyperscalers and utilities — instead of paying for their electricity — could actually look likeWhy clean, distributed energy is the fastest path to winning the AI raceLinks:Enphase: https://enphase.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

American businesses waste 25-35% of the energy they use. So why aren’t more business owners doing something about it? For most, the problem is too complex and too expensive — there’s no single fix, there are 30 or 40, and calculating the ROI on all of them is no easy task.That’s where Budderfly comes in. Budderfly is an energy-as-a-service company with a beautifully simple premise: they take over a business’s energy bill entirely — funding all the upgrades at their own risk, and pocketing a margin on the savings. It’s a win-win-win situation for the company, the grid, and the planet.On this episode of Everybody in the Pool, Molly sits down with Budderfly’s founder and CEO Al Subbloie to get a behind-the-scenes look into this unique business model.We talk about:Why Budderfly targets franchise businesses, and how their "copy-paste" model unlocks financing and scaleThe four pillars of commercial energy waste: HVAC, lighting, refrigeration, and intelligent energy managementHow Budderfly can lower a companies’ utility bill and upgrade their equipment with zero upfront cost to the customerWhy Al intentionally aligned cost savings with carbon reduction — so customers get climate impact whether it's their priority or notWhat a virtual power plant actually is, and why focusing on small “behind-the-meter” energy adjustments actually matters for the gridHow Budderfly is building one of the largest distributed demand-response networks in the US — and why that's increasingly valuable in an era of AI data center demandTheir vision for working directly with hyperscalers and utilities as grid pressure intensifiesLinks:Budderfly: https://www.budderfly.com/All episodes: https://www.everybodyinthepool.com/Subscribe to the Everybody in the Pool newsletter: https://www.mollywood.co/Become a member for the ad-free version of the show: https://everybodyinthepool.supercast.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.