Blake Newcomer is the host of The Grove, the climate-tech interview podcast from Earth Onward. Each episode is a long-form conversation with a founder, investor, scientist, or operator building some part of the energy transition, recorded to turn first-hand experience into something another practitioner can act on.
The show ranges across the technologies and business models the transition actually runs on: water treatment and desalination, battery storage and grid interconnection, geothermal and advanced nuclear, recycling and critical minerals, agricultural biotech, and the venture and project finance that pays for all of it. Alongside the interviews, Earth Onward runs the Onward Exchange roundtables and publishes a newsletter for the same audience.
Newcomer's interviews stay close to practice. He tends to ask how a company found its first customers, what the financing structure actually looks like, where the regulatory friction sits, and what the guest would tell someone starting the same work today.
46:01 Sep 1, 2026
Susan Njihia shows how Hello Tractor scales tractor access across 16 African countries by treating innovation as measurable value growth.
33:52 Aug 31, 2026
Zain Ansari of Phyta Biodesign explains how repackaging species-focused habitats into human-centric building performance metrics unlocked...
47:55 Aug 28, 2026
Elizabeth Iszauk frames Montauk Capital’s electron economy thesis around geothermal, EGS, and venture studio formation.
51:34 Aug 25, 2026
Stephen Bennett explains why PJM dispatches power every 15 seconds while 67 million customers face a $28 to $333 capacity shock.
39:47 Aug 24, 2026
At the Utility Innovation Summit, Eric Rosenberger explains how PPL used dynamic line ratings on three congested lines after PJM’s 2020 s...
32:41 Aug 11, 2026
Abhi Desai explains why 2022 climate tech exuberance changed preseed and seed fundraising, and how novel IP affects investor conviction.
41:31 Aug 3, 2026
Jad Daley argues Terraformation’s 5,000 hectare Keta Blue mangrove project shows why reforestation must balance carbon, biodiversity, and...
44:00 Jul 31, 2026
Vincent Gori and Temple’s team explain cryogenic tire recycling at minus 160 Celsius, using cold, crushing, and shredding to separate tir...
44:41 Jul 22, 2026
Tristan Pollock explains why Nevada, home to the only active US lithium mine and a Tesla-scale industrial park bigger than Detroit, is qu...
35:14 Jul 15, 2026
Grant Budge says PeroCycle can decarbonize steel with no green premium and no carbon price required, just a one to three year payback.
47:09 Jul 10, 2026
Vernon LaLone spent a decade perfecting Raman spectroscopy on pharma drug accumulation before pointing it at PFAS, the chemical the EPA r...
52:48 Jul 8, 2026
Kim Klayman, who chairs Ballard Spahr's national emerging company and venture capital group, explains why founders who skip a $50 LLC fil...
44:20 Jul 1, 2026
Charney Robinson-Williams explains why a traditional pitch deck will fail you in an impact investor room, and what to bring instead.
38:16 Jun 29, 2026
Matias Figliozzi says mixing shrimp-shell powder with pesticides can cut Roundup use by half while maintaining the same killing power.
58:34 Jun 26, 2026
Celine King says 95% of U.S. trucking fleets run fewer than 20 vehicles, and that fragmentation is why emissions data barely exists.
36:39 Jun 24, 2026
Altilium co-founder Sean Joseph explains how a 40,000-pound council grant became the foundation for a Series A backed by the world's larg...
39:45 Jun 23, 2026
Aquatech CEO Devesh Sharma explains how mastering zero liquid discharge brine management accidentally positioned a 45-year-old water comp...
43:22 Jun 17, 2026
Sergio Carvalho explains how Europe's green hydrogen mandate created a market from scratch, and why that model separates investable clima...
39:10 Jun 5, 2026
Sachin Nair says every oil well produces four to five times more water than oil, and Hydron is building the technology to treat it withou...
45:10 Jun 2, 2026
Thomas Nann built Allegro Energy's flow battery platform from a microemulsion electrolyte discovery, then had to abandon their first prod...
28:39 May 21, 2026
Alon Mashkovich built enSights after watching billion-dollar renewable portfolios still run on Excel and CSVs in 2018.
50:00 May 18, 2026
Eben Meyer shows why up to 62% of B2B ad spend reaches audiences who can never buy your product.
54:40 May 11, 2026
Alex Shoer explains why the commercial and industrial battery storage market is structurally broken and what GridVest is doing to fix it.
43:44 May 4, 2026
Michael Fakukakis built a gearless solar tracker that produces 60% more power than fixed panels, and the hardest part was never the physics.
41:18 Apr 28, 2026
Eben Meyer shows how an EPA enforcement notice beats a hiring signal every time for cleantech sales teams.
37:31 Apr 27, 2026
Martin Gross turned a lost oil-industry job in 2016 into GWT, which now uses algae to replace chemicals and bacteria in wastewater treatm...
35:53 Apr 14, 2026
Eben Meyer argues CAC is structurally higher in cleantech than any other B2B category, and explains exactly why.
44:05 Apr 6, 2026
Emily Grubert argues the energy transition is not actually happening because no one has committed to making it happen.
35:55 Mar 30, 2026
Paige Perillat-Piratoine built community across army bases, COVID hackathons, and a hygroscopic electricity startup before landing at Nat...
37:58 Mar 16, 2026
Juan Pablo Rivero frames water as a service: decentralized wastewater recycling financed through performance based contracts modeled on s...
36:44 Mar 10, 2026
Arian Edalat's electrically conductive membranes can self-adjust in real time, targeting a market expansion from $3 billion to $300 billion.
41:48 Mar 10, 2026
Greg Newbloom built Membrion's ceramic desalination membrane by walking away from two failed startups first.
39:03 Mar 10, 2026
Dr. Jacqueline Kerr argues that science alone never moves policy makers, but their own constituents reliably do.
46:50 Mar 10, 2026
Gaurav and Anat Tewari claim their Zero Ox Tech gives retail-ready meat cuts a 120-day shelf life, eliminating a $3 billion annual indust...
51:41 Mar 3, 2026
Steve Kloos maps a $1.6 trillion water sector and explains why flood forecasting startup Provisico is crushing it.
38:41 Mar 2, 2026
Daniel Russek built Atarraya over 17 years to prove shrimp farming can close its nitrogen loop without poisoning the ocean.
59:21 Feb 23, 2026
Sunena Gupta explains why raw satellite data is becoming worthless without the analytics layer built on top of it.
1:05:37 Feb 23, 2026
Zainab Gilani's two-bucket framework for energy and power makes data center demand and China's battery leadership suddenly legible.
50:44 Feb 23, 2026
Serena Dao spent years at pre-seed to Series C climate hardware startups before the Engine, and argues carbon capture only survives if it...
55:49 Feb 19, 2026
Diana Rasner explains why China's dominance in mineral refining took 50 years to build and why ore grades are now the mining industry's s...
43:01 Feb 19, 2026
Nathan Silvernail left SpaceX in 2021 to invent a carbon-negative wood substitute that grows from biomass, not trees.
44:33 Feb 19, 2026
Eric Fischgrund built FischTank PR to 26 employees over 12 years by treating media relations as a craft, not a mail-merge automation.
36:09 Feb 19, 2026
Aukrit Unahalekhaka built a million-farmer AgTech platform in Thailand, then walked away to bet on biochar.
1:08:01 Feb 9, 2026
Anthony DeOrsey explains why China's EV market grew from dozens to hundreds of companies before most collapsed, and what the US misreads...
56:10 Feb 9, 2026
Majid Hajibeigy explains why every solo kelp farmer burns out and why aggregation is the only path to a real industry.
44:26 Feb 4, 2026
Vik Chaudhry beat GE and ABB in a 2021 New York Power Authority RFP by spending three years building AI models before talking revenue.
51:03 Jan 20, 2026
John Robinson, after 17 years in water and wastewater, argues the industry's biggest obstacle is that everyone already thinks they unders...
1:15:48 Jan 19, 2026
Yangbo Du traces how 48 U.S. utilities bankrupted themselves chasing bespoke reactor designs, and why that still shapes nuclear's odds to...
45:56 Jan 14, 2026
Emily Moini explains why transmission planning, one of NERC's 14 reliability categories, is the silent bottleneck for every new solar and...
1:16:00 Dec 22, 2025
Hampus Jakobsson of Pale Blue Dot argues the planet's inefficient 'operating system' is the largest investable opportunity humanity has e...
42:28 Dec 15, 2025
Russell Schindler turned a Michigan regulatory change in 2001 into a software company by listening to customers who wanted the tool, not...
35:58 Dec 15, 2025
Nili Persits shrunk a $100,000 refrigerator-sized Raman spectroscopy sensor to cell-phone scale to put real-time water monitoring within...
34:40 Dec 9, 2025
Louie Woodall argues climate adaptation is the unavoidable reality most climate media is still choosing not to look at directly.
52:15 Dec 8, 2025
Rod Adams founded a small modular reactor company in 1993, decades before the term 'SMR' entered mainstream climate discourse.
46:58 Dec 8, 2025
Dr. Liz Whitney's PhD compared carbon movement across forest, agricultural, and urban coastal sites in the mid-Atlantic, where sea level...
33:22 Dec 8, 2025
Freya Burton turned steel mill pollution into ethanol, proving a 'biologically impossible' process commercial by 2018.
40:49 Dec 4, 2025
Ben Silton built TrelliSense's laser-based methane tracking by treating every sales call and forklift shift as founder training.
39:52 Dec 4, 2025
Sophia Xu's Carbon Bridge makes microbes 500% more productive by solving a physics problem, not a biology one.
46:50 Nov 25, 2025
Celine King founded GreenIRR at 20 and argues the startup narrative hides the emotional cost that actually determines who survives.
45:01 Nov 25, 2025
Jimmy Chiu turned a $1.9M DOE grant into Loop CO2's first 20-liter CO2-to-polyester reactor, scaling chemistry that sat dormant for 40 ye...
48:37 Nov 20, 2025
Rob Avis built 5th World after teaching 10,000 people permaculture, arguing beavers increase biodiversity 28x and humans can too.
38:34 Nov 20, 2025
Ben Soltoff's MIT book on climate entrepreneurship argues startups are one route to impact, not the only one.
36:20 Nov 20, 2025
Austin Riesenberger built SWERV's first five ERV units for $2,000 total, then turned down a Hawaii relocation to keep the company.
32:14 Nov 20, 2025
Mo Balapour turned a Drexel PhD project on coal ash into SusMaX, a company recycling landfill waste into construction aggregate.
34:56 Nov 19, 2025
Agabas Agudor built AppCyclers from a 2019 hackathon with no e-waste knowledge into a nine-person AI marketplace connecting Ghana's infor...
36:17 Nov 19, 2025
Quantum Wei built Harmony Desalting's first prototype over a year of trial and error, then validated it at a 2019 conference in New Orleans.