Supercool

Supercool
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Climate companies are winning. Trillions in capital are shifting to solutions that cut carbon, grow profits, and redefine modern life. At the center are CEOs, founders, and operators turning climate innovation into market momentum. Hosted by climate-tech founder and author Josh Dorfman, Supercool goes inside their strategies, execution, and business models to reveal how value is created in the race to decarbonize—and how the future is being built.

  1. 5D AGO

    320 Boreholes Below Brooklyn: How Geothermal Replaces Fossil Fuels in Cities

    * Sign-up for Johnson Controls Webinar: Evolving Building Codes * The largest geothermal residential building in New York City just opened in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. 834 apartments. 320 boreholes drilled hundreds of feet underground — enough to heat and cool every unit in the building. Even the rooftop pool. Geosource Energy drilled it. This conversation is about how they did it, and what it takes to build geoexchange systems at scale in dense cities, where there's already a city's worth of infrastructure below: water, gas, electric, telecom, subways, and foundations. Geoexchange is simple to explain and hard to execute. No combustion. No fuel. Fully electric. The physics are straightforward. The delivery is not. Building owners choose geoexchange for the operating savings. And for every dollar saved at the building level, the grid saves eight or nine — because geoexchange cuts peak demand when electricity is most expensive and most scarce. That's a true decarbonization driver. And why cities from Toronto to Boston to New York are leaning in with more to follow.Geosource has completed more than 400 projects. The infrastructure they install is designed to outlast the buildings it serves. Stan calls it 500-year pipe. He's seen a building come down and the borefield stay put, ready for the next one. Show Notes:Guest: Stanley Reitsma, CEO Company: Geosource Energy For 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

    36 min

  2. FEB 25

    20 Million Acres Later: Regenerative Ag Has Its Business Model

    People assume farmers are conservative by nature. Cautious. Set in their ways. Ryan Jones, VP of Sustainability at Indigo Ag, has a different read: farmers aren’t risk-averse. They’re risk-saturated. Consider factors like weather, debt, input costs, labor, and fluctuating commodity prices. One bad season can set a farmer back years. So when someone shows up and says, “Change how you farm,” the first question any farmer asks is: who’s carrying the risk? That’s the problem Indigo was built to solve. Pay farmers to adopt regenerative practices. Quantify the outcomes. Connect them to buyers through carbon markets or corporate supply chains. Today, Indigo operates in 15 countries and manages a portfolio spanning 20 million acres, delivering over a megaton of greenhouse gas reductions/removals and conserving nearly 100 billion gallons of water—and it recently announced a 12-year offtake agreement with Microsoft for 2.85 million tons of carbon removal credits. But this conversation is about more than keeping carbon in the soil. It’s also about water. In the Mid-South rice belt, companies face an existential sourcing risk and farmers face an existential livelihood risk. And with a shared aquifer, one farmer conserving water doesn’t move the needle if everyone else keeps pumping. The only way through is everyone moving together. And Indigo’s bet is that you get there by making the most practical thing the most profitable thing—fast enough to matter. Show Notes Guest: Ryan Jones, Vice President of Sustainability Company: Indigo Ag For 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

    42 min

  3. FEB 18

    Solar for 45 Million Renters: How Shine Gets Building Owners to Say "Yes"

    Forty-five million Americans live in apartments. Almost none have solar—not because the technology doesn't work, but because building owners pay for installation while tenants get the savings. It's the split incentive conundrum holding the sector back. Owen Barrett saw this problem when he started investing in apartment buildings. Nobody in multifamily was thinking about energy—just paint colors and new countertops. He tried consulting. Nobody listened. So he raised capital, bought buildings, and installed solar himself. The breakthrough: software that tracks each tenant's solar usage and bills them for it. Owners earn revenue. Tenants save money. That became Shine, a company that installs solar on apartment buildings and handles everything from design to maintenance. Shine went from 100 units in 2024 to 3,000 in 2025, projecting 20,000 in 2026. They're working with two of the five largest apartment owners in America. Owen and Josh discuss why execution beats innovation, how rising electricity prices make subsidies irrelevant, and why doing what you promise became a competitive advantage. Show NotesGuest: Owen Barrett, CEO Company: Shine For 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

    47 min

  4. FEB 11

    Cash Beats Climate: Crowdfunding Millions for Clean Energy

    In 2019, Will Wiseman watched 100,000 people march through Barcelona for the global climate strikes. He felt hope. Then the obvious truth: everyone was going home, and nothing would change. So, he built Climatize, an SEC-registered investment platform that allows anyone to invest as little as $10 in clean energy projects across the United States. Climatize specializes in projects ranging from $250,000 to $5 million, which are traditionally too small for institutional lenders to fund. The company's proprietary AI tools compress due diligence from weeks to minutes. Some projects raise hundreds of thousands of dollars within 24 hours. The crowdfunding platform's progress to date: $14 million deployed across 33 clean energy projects—solar, battery storage, EV charging, and energy efficiency—in 14 states. Will and Josh discuss why finance-first messaging outperforms climate-first messaging, how AI has made small deals viable, and why speed to finance has become Climatize's competitive moat. Show Notes Guest: Will Wiseman, Co-Founder & CEO Company: Climatize For 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

    46 min

  5. FEB 4

    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 & CEO Company: Lunar Energy For 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

    48 min

  6. JAN 28

    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 Notes Guest: Jasper de Vries Company: Lucend For 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

    40 min

  7. JAN 21

    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 Notes Guest: Albert Douer, CEO Company: UBQ Materials For 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

    39 min

  8. JAN 14

    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 Notes Guests: Jim Simonelli, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Secure Power and Vincent Petit, Senior Vice President, Climate & Energy Transition Research Company: Schneider Electric For 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

    46 min
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About

Climate companies are winning. Trillions in capital are shifting to solutions that cut carbon, grow profits, and redefine modern life. At the center are CEOs, founders, and operators turning climate innovation into market momentum. Hosted by climate-tech founder and author Josh Dorfman, Supercool goes inside their strategies, execution, and business models to reveal how value is created in the race to decarbonize—and how the future is being built.

Information

  • Creator
    Supercool
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    85
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Supercool
  • Show Website
    Supercool

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