Live from Climate Week: How Redwood Materials Is Turning Old EV Batteries into Speed to Power
Build, Repeat. (A Paces Podcast)Show Notes
Recorded live at the Paces office during Climate Week NYC, this episode features Claire McConnell, VP of Business Development for Energy Storage at Redwood Materials. James McWalter talks with Claire about how repurposed EV batteries are becoming one of the fastest paths to power for AI data centers. Claire has worked on batteries for more than 15 years, from cost reduction on the Model S and the early days of Tesla Energy, through electric commercial vehicles at Proterra, to leading storage ...
More from Build, Repeat. (A Paces Podcast)
Michael Grasso spent his career building some of the largest residential virtual power plants in the country — from Vistra Corp Solar to Sunrun to Sunnova — before founding GridRails, a software platform built for load-serving entities to bring distributed energy resources online, visualize them, control them, and settle the economics, all through a single system. James and Michael dig into why only about 20% of the demand-response market has been captured despite roughly 11 million Americans...
In this episode, James talks with Navya Gundeti, Director of Project Development at Engie North America, where she leads the distributed solar and storage development pipeline. Navya is operating in a market where five-year plans don't survive the year they were written. OBBBA, tariff whiplash, data center land competition, and reshuffled interconnection queues forced her team to rebuild its strategy in real time. Her case in this episode: rigorous quantification on what you can measure, hone...
In this episode, James talks with Bill Francis, Vice President of Emerging Markets at New Energy Equity — a distributed solar developer that has spent over a decade building community solar programs across the country. Bill joined NEE at the end of 2025 after seven years at Engie, arriving right as the traditional community solar model is showing real strain. Programs are saturating. Development capital is tighter. The ITC safe harbor clock is ticking. His mandate: figure out what comes next ...
In this episode, James talks with Sam McGarvey, Director of Origination at NineDot Energy — a developer, owner, and operator of front-of-meter battery storage systems across New York City's five boroughs. NineDot made a deliberate bet: ignore every other market and go all-in on the single hardest place to build energy storage in the country. That focus has taken them from 3 employees to 84, and toward 400–500 megawatts of distributed storage across New York City by the end of the decade. Sam ...
In this episode, James talks with Matt Plante, President of Voltus, about what it actually takes to build a virtual power plant that grid operators call on every single day. Voltus aggregates distributed energy resources, including industrial loads, batteries, commercial buildings, and now residential assets, into virtual power plants that participate in wholesale electricity markets. Since April 2024, Voltus has been dispatched by a grid operator every single day, a milestone that signals de...