Happy New Year - Looking back, and looking ahead

As we kick off a new year (Happy New Year everyone), I wanted to take a few minutes to say thanks to everyone, mention some of last year's highlights, and look ahead to the year to come.

Transcript

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Hi, everyone. And welcome to episode 151 of the Climate Confident podcast. This is a special episode going out on the 3rd of January 2024. So happy new year to everyone. This is a short episode by definition because I'm on a break. So I took a couple of weeks off for the Christmas and New Year period. So I'm taking a quick break from my break to record a quick short episode. Just to let you know that there will be an episode next week. Again, we'll be coming back with a bang. I have several episodes recorded to go out And the first episode of those will go out on next Wednesday, the 10th of January. So back to a normal cadence on the 10th of January. I just wanted to, I just wanted to record this quick short episode to go back over how the podcast did last year. So bear with me while I go through some numbers on last year and point out some episodes that if you haven't heard them already, you know, between now and. The next episode next week, you might want to go back and listen to these. Take them in in case you did miss them. So last year I published 48 episodes of the podcast. So there was 48 episodes went live between January and December of 2023, which You know, I think it's pretty impressive, not 52 episodes, which would be one a week, but it's close enough. I did take a couple of weeks off in August and again, I took a couple of weeks off December and now. So 48 episodes in the year, I'm quite, quite impressed with that. The most popular city for the podcast. Interestingly, was London. Not sure why that was, but there were more episodes downloaded in London than any other city, followed by Amsterdam, Dublin, New York, and somewhere called Boardman in Oregon. Bit random, but there you go. The countries where the podcast had the most downloads were the US, UK, Germany, Canada, and the Netherlands. The top episodes, in terms of downloads, were The Future of Sustainability in Business with Bhushan Nigale from SAP. That's the number one had the highest number of downloads last year. Then, decarbonizing electricity grid with Veckta's Gareth Evans was number two, followed by Tackling Climate Change with Entrepreneurship: a Planet Positive Lab story. That was a nice one out of Oxford University. number four was sweet proteins, which was an interesting one, talking to a company called Oobly, the CEO of Oobly about using a protein as a replacement for sugar, a game changer for climate and health, and the fifth most positive one, uh, sorry, the fifth most positive one. Downloaded episode was called the path to a net zero future insights from Wartsila Energy's COO Anja Frada. So those are the most downloaded episodes of last year. There were some great episodes apart from those. The first episode I published last year came from a company called Tradewater. And what Tradewater does is it destroys greenhouse gases. It captures greenhouse gases like methane, for example, and CFCs, and it destroys them completely. And that was a fascinating episode. Another really interesting one was where I talked on the 15th of March last year with Michael Barnard and one of the interesting aspects of that podcast was, apart from the whole, it was a discussion about hydrogen and transportation, and we discussed hydrogen's role in road, rail, maritime, and aviation, and the episode is one hour and nine minutes, 45 seconds. So nearly one hour and 10 minutes. It's the longest podcast It's the longest episode of the podcast I've ever published. I've never gone that long on any other episode before. It's been very popular. It's one of the most popular episodes. Didn't hit the top five from last year, but it would be probably number six. So I looked through the numbers completely. Michael is an expert in hydrogen and massively, massively knowledgeable. And it really makes for an interesting episode. If you haven't come across that one, if you haven't heard that one, I would go back March 15th of last year. It's called Climate Realities, The Surprising Truth About Hydrogen's Role in the Clean Energy Future. Some other good ones. The Clean Energy and Tackling Plastic Waste, Asia's Pursuit of a Greener Future. That was a great episode. I had another interesting episode on talking circular economy with my former colleague Stephen Jamieson from SAP and we had a bit of a joke on that because Stephen's accent sounds remarkably like a very famous actor and so we posed the question at the start. Would anyone recognize which actor he sounded like? And then we had the big reveal at the end. But of course, if you've listened to that and you're familiar with the actor, you would have guessed long before the end of the episode. Then, you know, with some great episodes going on from there. As we get towards the end of the year, the number of downloads per episode falls because they haven't been, the episodes haven't been published as long, but still there are some excellent episodes there as well. So I talked to Jeremy Bentham, for example, he's co chair of the World Energy Council. That was a fascinating episode. I had a great episode with InVinity talking about vanadium flow batteries. I had a really interesting one with Sabine Erlinghagen, who is the global CEO of Siemens grid software. And we talked about the, the role of the. electricity grid in the energy transition and the fact that the energy grid is over engineered is probably the way to put it. So in other words, there's a lot of capacity still available in the grids we have today, which isn't being fully utilized. And when we have to double the amount of renewables on our grid in the next six, seven years. The fact that the current grid is underutilized means we can increase the amount of renewables on the grid without having to build out more infrastructure. So this can accelerate our path towards decarbonization. That was the conversation we had there with Sabine from Siemens. If you've missed any of those, or any of the other 48 that I published last year, or any of the other 150 that I've published, because as I said at the start, this is episode 151. There are 150 episodes in the back catalogue. Feel free to go back over them and listen in some really, really, really, really interesting episodes there, as I've said. And there are more to come, as I also said. So I'll be starting again next week, January 10th. So watch out for that. And every Wednesday. thereafter. So great. That's it for this episode. Thank you for listening in. Thank you for continuing to support the podcast and have a great 2024 and I'll talk to you next week.