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 the world'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 Notes

Guest: Michaela Harms, Vice President of Mass Timber

Company: Sterling Solutions

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Clean power has never been cheaper. So why are electricity bills rising—and what's blocking faster deployment?

Jigar Shah joins Supercool to explain why 2025 marked a turning point: for the first time in history, essentially 100% of new electricity demand worldwide was met by solar, wind, and nuclear. It happened because the same solutions that solve climate change are winning on affordability.

But deployment could be moving much faster. The technology is proven. The finance exists. The barrier is political: governors and mayors don’t realize the leverage they have over utilities, and utility CEOs won’t act unless forced by law.

In climate circles, Jigar needs no introduction. He pioneered solar financing at SunEdison, launched the Carbon War Room with Richard Branson, and ran the DOE Loan Programs Office that deployed over $100 billion in clean energy financing during the Biden Administration.

We dig into what gives elected officials more power than they know, why some utility CEOs want to be mandated to deploy cheaper solutions, and why Jigar’s headline for 2026 isn’t more technology—it’s more workforce.

Show Notes

Guest: Jigar Shah, Co-Managing Partner

Company: Multiplier

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In 2025, the U.S. president called climate change a hoax. Meanwhile, global clean energy investment hit a record $2.2 trillion. Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter covering climate and energy for Bloomberg. His read on the past year: China is becoming the modern Standard Oil. The same way Rockefeller's empire exported petroleum infrastructure globally, China is now exporting electrification—solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, grid tech, project finance—to countries racing to modernize their economies. Pakistan imported solar equal to half its grid capacity in twelve months. And Ethiopia went from zero to 7% EV market share. Developing countries treat electricity like a growth engine. Rich countries struggle to meet 4% annual demand increases. Rathi joins Supercool to walk through Trump's rollback, the ripple effects at home and abroad, and why none of it is stopping the global transition to the low-carbon future.

Show Notes

Guest: Akshat Rathi

Recent Articles: Bloomberg

Book: Climate Capitalism

Podcast: Zero: The Climate Race

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In this end-of-year conversation, David Roberts, a renowned climate and clean energy journalist, lays out his headline for 2025: the rapid growth of AI data centers has forced long-delayed decisions about the power system. After two decades of mostly flat U.S. electricity demand, utilities are now facing sharp new load growth, tighter timelines, and major uncertainty—making grid capacity and interconnection central challenges.

Roberts, who hosts and writes the Volts podcast and newsletter, argues that long-lead solutions like new nuclear power plants are poorly matched to this moment. The fastest, lowest-cost capacity available today comes from distributed resources: solar, batteries, flexible building loads, coordinated EV charging, and virtual power plants. Because hyperscalers face real financial pressure to get data centers online, he sees a potential opportunity to redirect some of that capital toward building distributed capacity that benefits the wider grid. The conversation also touches on political volatility and why clean energy and electrification continue to advance globally on their favorable economics, even amid U.S. policy uncertainty.

Show Notes

Guest: David Roberts

Company: Volts

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Real estate companies say they want sustainability. They'll pay for it too, provided it comes with zero risk.

Brad Pilgrim is co-founder & CEO of Parity, a remote HVAC optimization service for high-rises and hotels. Its customer team can walk into a building, spend 90 minutes going from the basement to roof, and tell the owner how much energy they can save—then guarantee it. After eight years, clients like AvalonBay—one of the largest multifamily REITs in the country—are seeing 20-30% cuts in HVAC costs with payback in one to two years.

Brad joins Supercool to discuss how Parity overcomes real estate's risk aversion, why proof matters more than technology, and what happens when you can precondition a thousand-unit building before a heatwave hits. Plus: the one slide Brad had to add to his Series B funding round deck that changed everything.

Show Notes

Guest: Brad Pilgrim, co-founder & CEO

Company: Parity Inc.

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EVs for commercial fleets are increasingly attractive. Battery costs are down, range is up, and in many cases the total cost of ownership already beats gas. The problem isn’t the vehicles. It’s where they’ll charge.

Voltera takes on the part of the EV transition most people never see: procuring the right real estate, securing stadium-scale power capacity, navigating zoning codes that rarely recognize EV charging as a primary use, and getting sign-off—sometimes from more than a dozen city departments—just to get started.

Voltera CEO Brett Hauser joins Josh to show how the company has built a playbook for that messy middle, making EV charging viable for the country’s fleets. Now operating in markets from Los Angeles to Miami, Voltera does this work not so fleets don’t have to, but because fleets never will.

Show Notes

Guest: Brett Hauser, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Company: Voltera

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Something big is happening inside buildings. They’re getting brains.

Schneider Electric is a global giant in energy and building performance—nearly two centuries old, operating across 100+ countries, and already embedded in a million buildings. Manish Kumar, EVP of Digital Energy, joins me to unpack what it means when AI starts running the places we live and work.

We dig into EcoStruxure Foresight, Schneider’s new AI assistant for buildings: a layer that links critical equipment, learns the rhythms of a space, flags waste in real time, and helps facility teams interact with their buildings as performance partners.

From hospitals and data centers to hotels, airports, and offices, we explore what changes when these environments can diagnose themselves, tune performance daily, and keep improving over time—then push into the bigger horizon: what happens when that capability scales across millions of sites worldwide, how it reshapes the future of work, and the role intelligent buildings play in a modernizing grid.

Show Notes

Guest: Manish Kumar, Executive Vice President, Digital Energy

Company: Schneider Electric

Key Link: Innovation Summit

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There are trillions of dollars of clean energy projects ready to be built—and trillions more in capital waiting to fund them. But the system connecting the two is too slow, fragmented, and expensive.

That gap is what Alfred Johnson set out to close. A former Treasury official who helped steer markets through the 2008 financial crisis and later served under Janet Yellen, Johnson co-founded Crux to build the financial software layer the energy transition was missing.

Crux connects developers, manufacturers, and investors across a marketplace for clean energy finance. In just two years, it’s closed over 120 transactions worth billions—turning a bureaucratic tangle of documents into a liquid market built for speed, trust, and scale.

This conversation explores how liquidity, intelligence, and automation are accelerating capital into hard infrastructure—and how Crux is becoming the financial engine powering today’s clean energy industrial revolution.

Show Notes

Guest: Alfred Johnson, Co-Founder & CEO

Company: Crux

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