Episodes

The solar industry has experienced a meteoric rise over the past two decades, growing from a small cottage industry to one of the leading technologies in the energy transition. It’s not been a smooth ride, and there’ve been plenty of bankruptcies on the way, from Solyndra to Suntech, but more than half a terawatt of new solar is now being built each year and the industry is still growing rapidly. So how did we get here, and how far do we have to go? Michael Liebreich is joined by BloombergNEF...

Who are the merchants of doubt and how can their narrative be countered? How much money does it cost to get someone to take action on climate change? This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington is joined by John Marshall, the founder of the Potential Energy Coalition, a marketing firm that uses data-driven marketing techniques to accelerate the energy transition and climate action. They discuss: How John transitioned from a career in Madison Avenue marketing to founding a non-profit focu...

This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich sits down with mechanical engineer and YouTube creator Dr Rosemary "Rosie" Barnes to discuss the critical role of engineering in addressing climate change. Rosie shares insights from her work developing clean energy technologies and her popular channel "Engineering with Rosie," where she tackles topics like wind turbine design, the hydrogen debate, and the nuclear power discussion in Australia through the lens of engineering. Rosie and Michael dive int...

Electric vehicles are finally becoming more mainstream, but this hasn’t stopped a flood of negative stories and political attempts to scare people away from making the switch to better, more cost efficient vehicles. So is the EV revolution now inevitable? Bryony Worthington sits down with Ben Nelmes, the Chief Executive of New Automotive, a UK-based not for profit focused on the clean energy transition in road transport. Ben shares his insights on the UK and European electric vehicle (EV) market...

With the UK general election tomorrow, the Cleaning Up team sits down with Dr Simon Evans of Carbon Brief to run through each party's manifesto, and what they say about UK climate and energy policy. With Labour widely predicted to win, will the UK's become an international leader on climate once more? How will GB Energy work? And where will all the money come from to fund the investments needed to turn the UK into a clean energy power house. Dr Simon Evans is the deputy editor and senior poli...

As the world transitions away from fossil fuels, one of the biggest challenges is decarbonizing industrial processes that require consistent, reliable sources of energy to produce high-temperatures. Typically these processes run on fossil gas, but now thermal batteries offer a solution by using electricity to store renewable energy in the form of heat. Anand Gopal, Executive Director of Policy Research at Californian think tank Energy Innovation, joins Baroness Bryony Worthington to discuss h...

Depending on who you ask, methane is either a useful transition fuel to a low-carbon future, or a super polluter. The science of methane says that for natural gas to have a lower climate footprint than other fossil fuels, particularly coal, there can be leakage of no more than 3.2% from end to end. Yet studies across the US show wildly different leakage rates. One of the most influential, by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, puts it at 4.8%, making methane worse for the environment than coal...

Has science cracked the code on mass producing realistic meat substitutes? Or are lab-gown alternative proteins an impossible dream? In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, Baroness Bryony Worthington sits down with president of the Good Food Institute, Bruce Friedrich, to explore the future of food. Friedrich details his vision for a more sustainable food system through technologies like plant-based and cultivated meat and outlines the promising progress and significant challenges remaining in scaling these novel proteins. Worthington and Friedrich debate the roles of policy, public opinion, and big agriculture in determining whether alternative proteins can truly transform our food system or remain forever niche.

As everyone knows, battery prices are plummeting and manufacturing volumes are soaring, whether for EVs or for grid-connected storage. And everyone knows there's a problem: only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The rest go to landfill, right? Wrong. This week's guest on Cleaning Up is the world's preeminent expert on battery recycling. Hans Eric Melin is the Founder and Managing Director of Circular Energy Storage. Circular Energy Storage is a London-based data collection and analytics consultancy focused on the lithium-ion battery end-of-life market. They help companies and organisations in the entire battery value chain to take better decisions in everything that relates to reuse and recycling of lithium-ion batteries. They do this by continuously collecting, analysing and publishing data from all parts of the value chain worldwide and by working actively with customers in their strategy and business development.

Last week the leading lights of Europe's electricity industry gathered for the annual Eurelectric Power Summit at the Lagonissi Beach Resort just outside Athens. The conference - under the hashtag this year of #lights on - lasted two days and covered the key issues facing Europe's and the world's power sectors. Two topics in particular stood out: the need to accelerate the build out of transmission, and the pressures and opportunities offered by digitization and AI. At the event, Eurelectric published a brace of reports on these two topics. On the final day of the conference, Michael caught up with Leonhard Birnbaum, Chairman and CEO of German utility and distribution grid operator E.ON and President of Eurelectric, on a sunny and windy terrace just outside the conference centre to discuss all this and more.

China's policies that direct capital towards cleaner industries have been game changing, and this week we're continuing the China theme, sharing two conversations Bryony had earlier this month at a conference at Xiamen University in Fujian Province. China's role in the clean energy transition could not be more important. The think tank Ember's latest report on the state of the global electricity transition states: over half of the world's new wind and solar power capacity last year was added in China, and together with hydro and nuclear, clean electricity in China now meets 35% of their electricity demand. And yet, the scale and the nature of the Chinese economy is so enormous it's hard to grasp, the majority of which is still powered by roughly 1000 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations, half of the global total. The focus of the conference was on a specific lever that could help China further along its decarbonisation path: the repowering of existing coal stations with clean source…

In this week's episode of Cleaning Up, we find how much and how much more governments would have to spend for hydrogen to live up to its hype. This audio blog is adapted from a piece Michael wrote at the end of last year for BloombergNEF, entitled "Clean Hydrogen's Missing Trillions", which estimated that hitting the Hydrogen Energy Ministerial target of 90 million tonnes of clean energy by 2030 would require subsidies of at least $2.3 trillion to be on the table right now, while the actual figure at the end of last year was 1/10th of that. Although the figures have changed a bit since then, the message remains the same: the subsidy gap remains in the multiple trillions of dollars. It should not therefore be surprising that the news is full of projects being cancelled and delayed. In fact, that will be one of the main hydrogen stories through to 2030 and beyond.

Up this week is Simon Holmes à Court, the Australian investor and philanthropist with a passion for using data to change the world. In 2022, the federal elections in Australia delivered an upset, as around a third of the electorate turned their back on the established parties and voted in seven new independent MPs taking the total to 10. Simon was responsible for a crowdfunding initiative - Climate 200 - that supported 23 candidates in all, pledging to act on climate, political integrity and gender discrimination. He remains very involved in the challenge of pivoting Australia from a fossil fuel based economy to a clean energy superpower.

How can we build a more united climate movement? What should be the role of geoengineering? And how can indigenous voices be brought into the climate conversation? Bryony puts these questions to model, actor, director, ambassador and businesswoman, Lily Cole.

Welcome to Season 12 of Cleaning Up! If you want a sense of the trajectory of climate action, you have to understand China, and you have to understand finance. There is no one better to share insights on both than Dr Ma Jun, Founder and President of the Institute of Finance and Sustainability in Beijing.