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Inevitable

an MCJ podcast

Join Cody Simms each week as he engages with experts across disciplines to explore innovations driving the transition of energy and industry. Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. This show was formerly known as 'My Climate Journey.'

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24 episodes
weekly
Avg 45 min
English

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Wednesday · 58 min
Michael Thomas: Inside America's Off-Grid Data Center Boom
Michael Thomas is the founder and CEO of Cleanview, a data and research platform tracking more than 10,000 clean energy projects and thousands of data center projects across the country. Back for his third appearance on Inevitable, Thomas has spent the past year investigating the explosive growth of AI infrastructure and the increasingly extreme measures companies are taking to get power online. In this episode of Inevitable, Thomas explains how the AI boom has transformed the data center marke
September 8 · 43 min
Turning Data Centers Into Grid Assets with ON.energy
Alan Cooper is co-founder and CEO of ON.energy, a Miami-based company building battery-backed power systems for AI data centers. Its flagship product, AI UPS, sits between the grid and a data center, creating a buffer that isolates the grid from the massive volatility of AI workloads while providing uninterrupted power to the entire campus. In this episode of Inevitable, Cooper explains how a career spanning oil and gas, geothermal, battery storage, and grid services ultimately led to ON.energy
September 1 · 36 min
Fourier Is Solving Long-Duration Storage with On-Site Hydrogen
Siva Yellamraju is the co-founder and CEO of Fourier, a company building modular, on-site hydrogen systems for long-duration energy storage and distributed hydrogen production. Fourier’s approach combines lithium-ion batteries for short-duration needs with hydrogen storage for longer durations, packaged into a single system designed to operate like a microgrid. In this episode of Inevitable, Yellamraju explains why hydrogen has long been considered promising for multi-day, seasonal, and even mu
August 25 · 48 min
Willie Phillips, Former FERC Chairman: The Grid Is America's Economic Nervous System
Willie Phillips is the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and now a partner at Holland & Knight. During his time at FERC, Phillips helped lead major reforms to transmission planning and the electric grid’s interconnection process. He now advises the companies and utilities he once regulated, giving him a unique perspective on how developers can navigate the regulatory system. In this episode of Inevitable, Phillips explains how FERC works, what companies routinel
August 18 · 45 min
Aalo Atomics on Beating the Odds to Reach Criticality
Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics, a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers. Before founding Aalo, Yasir led the MARVEL microreactor program at Idaho National Laboratory. In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S. nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline. He breaks down what criticality means, why the milestone matters, and how the team went from a small
August 11 · 45 min
How Overstory Cuts Outages and Wildfire Risk for Utilities
Fiona Spruill is CEO of Overstory, a company helping electric utilities reduce power outages and wildfire risk using satellite imagery, aerial data, and AI-powered vegetation intelligence. Since joining as employee number 10 and later stepping into the CEO role, Spruill has helped Overstory evolve from a vegetation mapping startup into a resilience platform serving many of North America's largest utilities. In this episode of Inevitable, Spruill explains why vegetation management is one of the
August 4 · 37 min
Turning Unused Home Power into a Controllable Resource with SPAN
Arch Rao is Founder and CEO of SPAN, the company behind the smart electrical panel that has expanded into utility grid management with SPAN Edge and distributed AI infrastructure with XFRA. What began as a smarter way to manage home electricity has evolved into a platform designed to digitize the electric grid, enable mass electrification, and unlock new AI compute capacity using existing residential infrastructure. In this episode of Inevitable, Rao explains why SPAN's vision has grown beyond
July 28 · 44 min
Faster, Safer, Cheaper: How TerraFirma Is Rebuilding Construction
Noah Schochet is the co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma, a construction technology company rethinking how infrastructure gets built. Founded by two former SpaceX engineers, TerraFirma combines robotics, remote operations, and software into a construction business that performs projects directly rather than selling technology. By vertically integrating its tools with field operations, the company aims to make construction dramatically faster, safer, and more affordable while addressing labor shorta
July 21 · 50 min
Prefabricated Nuclear Power Plants with Blue Energy
Jake Jurewicz is the Co-founder and CEO of Blue Energy, a nuclear power plant developer. Blue Energy starts with proven, light water reactors and builds everything around them — prefabricating standardized nuclear plants as massive modules in shipyards and fab yards, then barging them to site. It pairs that with a patented gas-to-nuclear approach that energizes the plant on gas turbines first and converts to nuclear later. The goal is to make nuclear cheap enough and fast enough to build that p
July 14 · 48 min
Koloma's Bet on Buried Hydrogen for Farmers
Pete Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Koloma, joins Inevitable to break down geologic hydrogen — naturally occurring hydrogen found deep underground — and why he believes it could be the first new primary energy source since nuclear power in the 1950s. Koloma has raised more than $400 million from Khosla Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund, Osaka Gas, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and holds roughly 20 million acres of exploration rights across the U.S. Midcontin
July 7 · 30 min
How Mainspring Energy Turns Fuel Into Power Without Combustion
Shannon Miller is Co-founder and President of Mainspring Energy, a company developing a new category of power generation technology called the linear generator. Mainspring’s systems generate electricity through a low-temperature, flameless chemical reaction that converts fuel directly into electrical power. Shannon has been at this for about 15 years. She started the company on technology she developed while earning her PhD in mechanical engineering at Stanford, and took it from a lab experimen
June 23 · 42 min
The Electric Motorcycle That's Actually a Utility Company with Zeno
Michael Spencer is the Founder and CEO of Zeno, an electric mobility company building electric motorcycles, battery-swapping infrastructure, and distributed energy systems across East Africa. Drawing on experience from nearly a decade building businesses in East Africa and four years at Tesla during its hypergrowth era, Spencer is applying lessons from EV charging infrastructure to one of the world's largest transportation markets: two- and three-wheel vehicles. In this episode of Inevitable, S
June 16 · 51 min
Space Solar: 24/7 Clean Power with Overview Energy
Marc Berte is the Co-founder and CEO of Overview Energy, a startup developing space-based solar power systems designed to turn existing solar farms into around-the-clock power generators. By placing satellites in geosynchronous orbit, collecting near-continuous sunlight, and beaming energy back to Earth as safe near-infrared light, Overview aims to dramatically increase the utilization of solar infrastructure already deployed around the world. In this episode of Inevitable, Marc explains how s
June 10 · 36 min
The Domestic Premium: Can American Manufacturing Compete?
Edward Shenderovich is the Founder and CEO of Roebling, a software platform that helps industrial companies evaluate, design, and finance manufacturing projects before breaking ground. After initially setting out to solve bottlenecks in biomanufacturing, Shenderovich and his team uncovered a broader challenge: the economics of scaling physical infrastructure are often poorly understood until it's too late. In this episode of Inevitable, Cody and Edward explore whether the US is making the same
May 27 · 50 min
Collapsing 30 Feet of Power Infrastructure Into Four with DG Matrix
Haroon Inam is Co-founder and CEO of DG Matrix, a company that makes the world's most compact Power Router, aggregating distributed energy for GenAI datacenters, microgrids, fleet electrification, and associated systems. As AI workloads drive unprecedented electricity demand and legacy grid infrastructure struggles to keep pace, DG Matrix has commercialized the world’s first multi-port solid-state transformer to meet the energy needs. In this episode, Inam explains why transformer bottlenecks,
May 19 · 37 min
Lessons from Peter Carlsson after the Rise and Fall of Northvolt
Peter Carlsson is Co-founder and former CEO of Northvolt, the European battery manufacturing company that raised more than $13 billion to build a homegrown battery supply chain for Europe, before filing for bankruptcy at the end of 2024. Before Northvolt, Carlsson spent more than a decade at Ericsson building global supply chains and later served as VP of Supply Chain at Tesla during the launch of the Model S. In this live episode of Inevitable from the AENU Summit in Berlin, Carlsson reflects
May 13 · 55 min
New Mexico's $72B Bet on Clean Energy
Rob Black is Cabinet Secretary of the New Mexico Economic Development Department, and Bruce Brown is Head of Strategic Climate Initiatives at the New Mexico State Investment Council, the state’s $72B sovereign wealth fund. Together, they are driving one of the most ambitious state-level strategies in the U.S. to turn energy wealth into long-term climate innovation and economic growth. The conversation also features MCJ portfolio founders building in the state: Carrie von Muench, Co-founder of P
May 6 · 52 min
From Cars to Grid: Moment Energy Reinvents Energy Storage with Repurposed Batteries
Eddy Chiang is Co-founder and CEO of Moment Energy, a company building commercial-scale energy storage systems from repurposed electric vehicle batteries. By testing, certifying, and remanufacturing second-life battery modules, Moment Energy is creating lower-cost alternatives to new lithium-ion storage while extending battery lifespans by decades. In this episode of Inevitable, Chiang explains how a growing wave of retired EV batteries is reshaping the energy storage market—making recycling al
April 28 · 47 min
Why This Winter's Snowpack Collapsed with Joel Gratz of OpenSnow
Joel Gratz is Founding Meteorologist and CEO of OpenSnow, a weather platform used by hundreds of thousands of skiers, snowboarders, and outdoor enthusiasts to track snow conditions and forecast powder days. What started as a text thread among friends has grown into a profitable, bootstrapped business combining expert forecasting, data science, and increasingly AI-driven weather models. In this episode of Inevitable, Gratz breaks down one of the worst Western snowpack seasons on record and why h
April 15 · 1 hr 6 min
Turning Students into Founders at Stanford Climate Ventures
Dave McColl is Executive Director of Stanford Climate Ventures (SCV), a program designed to help students build climate companies through rigorous go-to-market strategy and hands-on company building. SCV is a project-based course at Stanford University that has helped launch dozens of startups across energy, infrastructure, and industrial decarbonization. In this episode of Inevitable, Yin Lu, General Partner at MCJ, sits down with McColl to unpack the SCV playbook—from “earned secrets” to the

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