Episodes

Around the world, factories making food, drink, pharmaceuticals and other everyday products rely on steam, often produced by fossil-fuel boilers. James Macnaghten, founder and CEO of Caldera, is betting that thermal batteries can provide a cheaper and more flexible alternative that stores electricity as heat, and delivers steam on demand. This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington visits Caldera's factory to see how it makes its heat batteries: combining recycled aluminium and iron ore pell...

Will AI break the grid? As hyperscalers race to build ever-larger data centres, electricity demand is soaring. The question is no longer whether power demand will grow, but by how much, how quickly, and whether the grid can deliver. This week, Michael Liebreich is joined by Arshad Mansoor, President & CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), one of the world's leading energy research organisations. Together, they tackle one of the biggest questions facing the global energy system:...

Microbes rarely feature in discussions about climate change, yet they play a central role in regulating greenhouse gases through the Earth's carbon, methane and nitrogen cycles. As the climate changes, understanding these natural processes is becoming increasingly important to develop new approaches to clean energy, agriculture and emissions reduction. This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington speaks with Professor Emeritus David Kirchman of the University of Delaware, one of the world's l...

The UK is heavily exposed to global energy markets and has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. At the same time, vast amounts of heat generated across industry and infrastructure go unused. Whether it should be called "waste" is a matter of debate, but could making better use of the energy we already produce be one of the biggest untapped opportunities in the energy transition? This week, Michael Liebreich is joined by Jonathan Maxwell, founder and CEO of SDCL, a specialist inve...

At the beginning of 2022, Europe was sourcing around 40% of its gas from Russia. By the end of this year, no more gas should be flowing from Russia into Europe. Much of that shortfall has been replaced by production from the vast oil and gas fields of Norway's North Sea continental shelf. And this year, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz again highlighted the importance of Norway to Europe's resilience. But how does one of the world's largest oil and gas producers balance energy security wit...

China transformed solar from one of the world's most expensive energy technologies into the cheapest source of electricity in just a couple of decades. And now it’s doing the same with batteries, with prices plummeting around the world. This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington is joined by Alex Shoer, Managing Director of GridVest, who spent almost a decade building renewable energy businesses in China before bringing those lessons back to the United States. They discuss the lessons be...

South and Southeast Asia face a different challenge to many developed economies. As the regions continue to grow, so too does demand for energy, transport and industry. The question is whether that growth can be powered by cleaner technologies from the start. In the second of our episodes recorded from Singapore, Michael meets Marie Cheong, founding partner at 100x100, a climate tech venture builder and VC for South and Southeast Asia. Previously, Marie co-founded WaveMaker Impact, where she ...

Singapore is one of the smallest countries in the world, yet plays a unique role as one of Asia’s main financial and oil refining hubs. So how is it using its influence to help or hinder the transition? Ravi Menon has spent his career at the heart of Singapore’s economic and financial strategy, serving as Managing Director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (the country’s central bank) before becoming the country’s Ambassador for Climate Action. In this conversation with Michael Liebre...

Since Donald Trump returned to the Presidency in 2025, the US has become increasingly isolationist. It has pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and the IPCC, left the World Health Organisation, as well as a whole host of other international organisations and agencies. So, when President Trump leaves the White House, will the US be able to rebuild trust on the international stage? This week on Cleaning Up, former US Secretary of State and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry ...

Professor Ning Li has spent decades at the intersection of energy, technology and industrial strategy. A nuclear engineer, complexity scientist and founding Dean of the School of Energy at Xiamen University, he is also credited with coining the term "Small Modular Reactor" nearly 20 years ago. In this wide-ranging conversation with Bryony Worthington, Ning Li explains why China has weathered recent global energy shocks better than many expected, how electrification is transforming economic re...

Today, wind power accounts for just under 10% of all electricity globally, around the same as solar, recently overtaking nuclear power. 20 years ago, the figure was under 1%. In that time, the sector’s leadership has moved around from Europe to the US to Asia, but one specialist European manufacturer has stayed in the leading group throughout: Vestas — a member of the global wind energy aristocracy. This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich is joined by Henrik Andersen, CEO of Vestas, to...

For more than 15 years, the RCP8.5 climate scenario has shaped headlines, policy decisions, financial stress tests and public understanding of climate risk. Now, the scientific community has declared it implausible. So what comes next? This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich welcomes Professor Roger Pielke Jr. back to explore why RCP 8.5 became the dominant "business as usual" climate scenario, and what its demise means for climate research, policymaking and public debate. They discuss...

As electricity demand rises and renewable generation continues to expand, the same question keeps arising: how do we keep power systems reliable, affordable and resilient? This week, Michael Liebreich is joined by Håkan Agnevall, CEO of Wärtsilä, to discuss the changing role of flexible generation in modern electricity systems, the growing importance of grid stability, and why balancing technologies will be critical as renewables become an ever-larger share of the global energy mix. They e...

In this special episode of Cleaning Up from San Francisco Climate Week, Michael Liebreich and Bryony Worthington unpack the geopolitical shocks reshaping the global energy transition. From escalating tensions in the Gulf and their impact on oil and LNG markets, to China’s accelerating electrification revolution, the conversation explores how energy security, industrial strategy and climate ambition are colliding in real time. Bryony and Michael debate whether the West can realistically com...

The energy system is not about supply and exports and generation and distribution. It's about how we use energy in our daily lives and workplaces. The so-called energy trilemma, affordability versus reliability versus environmental performance looks very theoretical in the boardrooms of an NGO or a consulting company. But it's not theoretical at all for someone struggling to run their life, do their job and pay their bills. What we need is a system focused on usage, not on supply. Joining ...

Every single scenario for the future that looks at a cleaner energy system has electrification growing to 60, 70, 80% or more, and yet we don't make rapid progress. Why? One of the reasons we don't make progress lies in narratives and culture wars. We hear about heat pumps that don't work, we hear about electric vehicles that don't work, we hear that electrification can't work for high temperature heat and so on, and then we hear a narrative that there is a false solution that will work much ...

This week Cleaning Up is back in Brussels, with a deep dive into European energy policy as the continent grapples with the reality of ambitious climate targets, very high energy prices and the vulnerabilities of first Russia's attack on Ukraine, and Israel and the US's recent attack on Iran. Michael Liebreich sits down with a rising star of the European Parliament, Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, for a timely conversation at the intersection of energy, geopolitics, and climate strategy. What begins a...

What happens when global energy supply chains can no longer be trusted? Has the U.S. given up its edge in the clean energy race to China? And can politics keep up with the speed of the energy transition and the rise of AI? This week on Cleaning Up, Michael Liebreich sits down with former U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for a wide-ranging conversation on the future of global energy, politics, and clean technology. They explore how geopolitical tensions, from disruptions in the Strai...