Watt It Takes

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand.

We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast, driven by electrification and data centers powering AI. At the same time, the grid is getting more complex. Distributed resources, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are making it harder to plan, predict, and operate. And the tools utilities rely on weren’t built for this kind of system.

Our guest today has spent his career inside that problem, from working at a utility to building one of the early software platforms for managing distributed energy. Josh Wong is the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company. We co-led ThinkLabs’ $5 million seed round in 2024. ThinkLabs is building an AI copilot for the electric grid, helping operators understand and manage the system in real time. Using physics-informed models, the platform can compress analyses that once took weeks or months into minutes.

Josh was born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto. He began his career at Toronto Hydro, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to operate the grid in practice. That experience led him to found Opus One, a company focused on helping utilities manage increasingly complex power systems, which was later acquired by GE. Josh kept coming back to the same underlying problem: utilities need to move faster, but the tools they rely on make that nearly impossible. ThinkLabs is his answer.

In our conversation, Josh walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build in one of the most complex and risk-averse industries in the world. Today, ThinkLabs has raised more than $30 million from investors including NVIDIA and Energy Impact Partners, and is working with partners and customers including Southern California Edison, and other major ISOs.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access.

Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population.

This month’s guest, Alex Honnold, is best known for something completely different, but has spent the past decade working directly on that problem.

Most people know Alex as the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing 3,000 feet of sheer granite without ropes. It’s one of the most extraordinary feats in modern sport. But over the past decade, he’s been channeling that same focus and discipline into a different kind of work: expanding access to clean energy through the Honnold Foundation.

This conversation was recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, in a room full of founders, investors, and operators working to build the energy system of the future. And what stood out most to me was Alex’s clarity.

He doesn’t speak in industry jargon. He doesn’t overcomplicate the problem. He keeps coming back to something simple. If people don’t have their basic needs met, nothing else works.

In our conversation, we go back to Alex’s childhood in Sacramento, growing up as a shy kid climbing anything he could find, to the experiences that shaped him early on: loss, independence, and the years he spent living out of a van. We talk about what led him to free solo El Capitan, and the mindset behind it, and how those same values eventually showed up in his decision to start the Honnold Foundation. And we get into how he thinks about risk, failure, and impact today, both on the wall and in his work.

Alex is funny, candid, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable. And he brings a perspective that I think is easy to overlook, but hard to ignore once you hear it.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Here’s a question: how many corporations do you know that have made a public commitment to cut their carbon emissions?

Probably a lot. About 40% of the world’s largest companies have set full net-zero targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3, according to Accenture’s Destination Net Zero 2025 report, with target-setting rising for the fourth consecutive year.

But how many actually know how to achieve those goals?

Only about 16% are on track to reach net zero in their operations by 2050. That gap between pledge and execution is what today’s guest has spent the last twenty years working on.

Dan Kalafatas grew up in a family shaped by his grandparents’ advocacy for working people and came of age questioning the role of business. That changed after a lunch talk on renewable energy at Stanford Business School.

Today, Dan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of 3Degrees, a global company helping organizations deliver on their energy and emissions commitments — from sourcing clean energy and structuring power purchase agreements to navigating carbon markets. What began with renewable energy credits has grown into a platform supporting Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions work across more than 67 countries, with partners including Microsoft, Mars, Cargill, Etsy, and Rivian. The company has supported over 20,000 decarbonization projects, worked with more than 80 Fortune 500 companies, and helped bring more than 12 gigawatts of clean energy online.

From wind farms in Oklahoma to forest conservation on California’s redwood coast to power purchase agreements worldwide, 3Degrees focuses on implementation.

In our conversation, Dan walks through that journey — from growing up in a working-class mill town in Massachusetts to finding his direction at Stanford, to driving through California rice fields blasting Eminem to land his first customer, to surviving the 2008 financial crisis with just days of runway, and ultimately building a company that now generates over a billion dollars in annual revenue.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

On this episode of Watt It Takes, we explore another approach to long-duration energy storage: compressed air.

Curtis VanWalleghem, Co-Founder and CEO of Hydrostor, started the company in 2010 after confronting surplus power challenges at Bruce Power. Without a traditional founder background, he set out to build storage systems that use compressed air and underground hard rock caverns to deliver ten-plus hours of grid-scale power.

What began as experiments with underwater balloons evolved into large-scale rock cavern projects and a major business model shift. Hydrostor transitioned from a technology provider to an independent power producer, securing PPAs and financing billion-dollar infrastructure projects.

In this conversation, Curtis reflects on the realities of building something capital-intensive: raising early checks from friends and family, enduring more than 200 investor rejections, mortgaging his home, pivoting both technology and strategy, and learning how to finance projects at true infrastructure scale.

Today, Hydrostor has raised over $550 million in equity, secured roughly $8 billion in revenue contracts, and is advancing a multi-gigawatt pipeline across North America and Australia.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

If you spend any time on the water, you’ve probably heard the joke that the two best days of a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat… and the day they sell it.
For today’s guest, that line isn’t just a joke. It’s a problem statement.
Mitch Lee grew up around boats. He loved being on the water, but he also experienced firsthand how loud, smelly, maintenance-heavy, and frustrating boat ownership can be. And once electric vehicles started proving what was possible on land, one idea kept coming back to him: if electrification makes sense in cars on the road, it might actually make even more sense in boats on the water.
Mitch is the co-founder and CEO of Arc, an electric boat company building both consumer and commercial vessels. Arc started in the premium wake sports market, selling directly to consumers and using those early boats to develop its electric propulsion technology. That platform is now being deployed in commercial applications, where electrification can improve reliability, lower costs, and support ports that want to electrify.
Founded in 2021, Arc has raised over $110 million through its Series B and has scaled from delivering its first customer boat, which took two years to build, to now producing multiple boats per week, while also landing major commercial partnerships at working ports.
In our conversation, Mitch walks me through his path that led to Arc, from a childhood fascination with stocks and compounding interest, to building and selling his first company in the personal finance space, to betting big on electric boats and what electrification can unlock on the water.
About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures
Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.
Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.
To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.