Interview With Dandelion (Geothermal) Co-Founder Kathy Hannun

Published

4 years ago

June 17, 2021

admin

Could you quickly explain how geothermal energy works, and where it is particularly useful?

Geothermal heating and cooling is done by using a heat pump to move heat between the ground and a home or building. The term ‘heat pump’ may be unfamiliar, but heat pumps are actually ubiquitous in modern life: refrigerators are heat pumps, as are air conditioners. Both refrigerators and air conditioners use electricity to move heat from one place to another: in this case, from the inside (of the fridge or building) to the outside.

Geothermal heat pumps are similar, but instead of only moving heat in one direction, they are bidirectional. This allows them to both heat buildings and cool them. And instead of moving heat from the building to the outside air, like an air conditioner does, they move heat between the building and the ground.

This matters because heating your home is most urgent and essential when it’s very cold out, which is precisely when there is the least amount of heat in the outside air. And cooling your home is most urgent and essential when it’s very hot out, exactly when it would be most difficult to reject heat from your home into the outside air. This is why air conditioners are so difficult for the electricity grid: they operate least efficiently exactly when everyone uses them most, on the hottest days of the year.

Geothermal heat pumps sidestep this problem by exchanging heat with the ground instead of the outside air. The ground maintains a mild temperature year round (which is the average air temperature over the course of the year in that location). Because of this, even on the hottest or coldest days, geothermal is still extremely efficient and effective.

Geothermal heating and cooling tends to work best in places where it gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer. This is because these climates require a lot of heating and cooling, and it’s in these places that geothermal has the most advantage over air source heat pumps, which exchange heat with the air outside (air source heat pumps are essentially air conditioners that can run in reverse to do both heating and cooling.)

You have a cost example between oil, natural gas, and propane on your page, s0 how do you think these costs are going to develop the next 5 years?

In the Wall Street Journal last week there was an article about options traders betting on a return to $100 oil. I can’t predict oil prices over the next five years, but oil prices have been relatively low since I co-founded Dandelion in 2017, so I bet oil prices are more likely to rise over the next five years than they are to fall. In terms of how geothermal costs are going to develop in the next 5 years, I think 10% lower YOY is a good estimate.

What different forms of geothermal are there, since we see geothermal in the context of residential housing as well as in big commercial plants?

Geothermal can refer to harnessing energy from the earth’s core, the type Iceland is famous for, but this is not what Dandelion’s geothermal heat pumps do. The heat that geothermal heat pumps collect from the relatively shallow surface is actually stored sunlight, not energy from the earth’s core, so despite the name ‘geothermal,’ geothermal heat pumps are actually using stored solar energy.

How did you learn about the potential of geothermal, and what convinced you to co-found the company?

I learned about the potential of geothermal heating and cooling from a colleague at Google, Bob Wyman (I started Dandelion as a project at Alphabet’s X before spinning it out as a startup). He made a compelling case that widespread geothermal heating and cooling was the most important climate intervention we could take in the US, but that, despite that, geothermal heat pumps were getting approximately no attention.

It was an audacious claim, but he had detailed data and logic backing it up, so his argument captivated me and motivated me to learn more.

That interest developed into co-founding Dandelion when I became convinced that, 1) Geothermal heat pumps have a critical role to play in offsetting carbon emissions from buildings; 2) They align the customer’s financial interests with society’s best interests; 3) The market potential is gigantic; and 4) The barriers that have prevented geothermal heating and cooling from scaling in the past are addressable.

Is there a certain story behind the name Dandelion?

Dandelions have a taproot that can grow as deep as ten feet into the ground. Even if you cut the flower off at the surface, the taproot can regenerate a new one. Similarly, geothermal ground loops extend far into the ground and they last for as long as the home itself. So after 20 years, when it’s time for the homeowner to replace their heat pump, they can just swap it out with another one and connect it with those same ground loops.

There is something very satisfying about the fact that each time we install ground loops in a yard, that home will have access to geothermal heating and cooling forever. Or at least, as long as that home exists.

If you look back to the investment the company received, did the investment landscape and interest in geothermal change visibly in the last few years?

The investment landscape for clean tech has changed dramatically since I co-founded Dandelion in 2017. In 2017, very few investors and even fewer mainstream VC investors were interested in clean tech. Now it seems like there is widespread interest. This makes sense to me because investors have seen that clean tech companies like Tesla can offer massive returns, and the political and business trends suggest clean tech will be a huge part of the future.

Could our readers get out and buy geothermal right away, and in which states (if we’re talking about the US) would it make the most sense (on average)?

Geothermal makes the most financial sense for homeowners who are paying a lot for heating and cooling today. Typically, these are homeowners in cold climate states, especially those using heating fuels like fuel oil or propane.

Some states and utilities also offer generous incentives for geothermal heating, such as NY, CT, MA, SC, and VT, among others.

Most readers will likely be able to find a company that can install geothermal heating and cooling in their area, but the cost may be high. Dandelion exists because we see a need to make geothermal heat pumps more affordable and the process of getting them easier for homeowners, and we look forward to being able to extend that work to more and more places over time (today Dandelion works in NY, CT, and VT).

What is your main competition, and how is Dandelion different?

Our primary competition today is inertia, which is to say conventional heating and cooling options. When it’s time for homeowners to replace their furnace or boiler, many homeowners seek the recommendation of their contractor, who is likely going to recommend the products and brands he or she is most familiar with (typically furnaces and boilers).

Our challenge is to raise awareness of geothermal heating and cooling. We’re different from other geothermal heating and cooling providers because we do residential retrofit at scale. This has let us leverage the fact that we’re serving hundreds of homeowners in a given area to get all of our homeowners better pricing on their equipment and the installation. We’ve also focused on streamlining the customer experience to make the experience of getting geothermal simple and straightforward.

If you could found the company over again, what things would you do differently today?

So many things! Hard to overstate how many things! But here are a few:

I would have looked for mentorship even earlier. I was incredibly fortunate to get connected with Dan Yates, the cofounder and CEO of Opower, about a year into the company, and he had a transformative impact on Dandelion and on me as a leader. If I could have learned even a fraction of what he taught me sooner, I would have saved myself and others a lot of stress during those early years!
I wouldn’t have assumed partners, subcontractors, or anyone else except Dandelion would solve the problems we needed to solve to make the business work. When I started the company, we had a model that assumed local HVAC contractors would sell and install geothermal for customers on behalf of Dandelion. It didn’t take us very long to realize that given these activities were so central to our mission of making geothermal heating simple and affordable, we couldn’t outsource them to others.
I would have been less tolerant of underperformers. I think this is a hard lesson for many new managers, but at the beginning of Dandelion when I was still relatively new to managing a team, I spent an outsized portion of my time and energy dealing with the most difficult employees. With many hard lessons behind me now, I invest the bulk of my time with the highest performing employees, because they are the ones that will build the business and carry us furthest toward our mission.

What other cleantech and general development do you find particularly interesting or fascinating? What would you love to get involved in more but don’t have the time?

I’m an advisor to a startup called Noon that’s inventing a way to use cheap, abundant materials to store a lot of energy at a very low cost. While clean tech history is littered with battery failures, I find Noon exceptionally compelling because it’s one of those bets that could change everything if it works.

If you could suggest a particular law (cleantech or otherwise), what would you suggest?

An extension of the Investment Tax Credit for at least a decade at 30%. This would go such a long way in allowing critical clean technologies like geothermal heat pumps to scale.

Are there some companies you’d really like to work with, but haven’t quite gotten through to yet? Maybe some employees or shareholders are reading this and can reach out! 🙂

We are working with quite a few utility companies across NY, CT, and now VT to offer geothermal incentives for homeowners to transition from furnaces and boilers to heat pumps. These programs have been very successful: they’re good for utility companies because homeowners who use geothermal will typically use more electricity, especially on off-peak times, like night and winter. Geothermal heat pumps also dramatically reduce summer peaks. It’s good for homeowners because it makes geothermal heating and cooling more affordable. We are always looking for additional utility companies to work with, to make geothermal heating and cooling available in more states.

Are you hopeful for humanity, and what would need to happen to make you more hopeful?

I am very hopeful. We have very real challenges to solve, but for the average person, life on this planet has never been better than it is right now. Life expectancy has increased more since 1900 than it had in the preceding 8000 years, and the quality of our lives has astronomically improved with electricity, refrigeration, antibiotics, sanitation, genetically modified crops, the internet, and so many other world-changing innovations that are only a hundred or so years old.

I think it’s likely humanity will continue its pattern of successfully innovating our way out of our biggest challenges.

All images courtesy Dandelion

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Environment

The UK wants to unlock a ‘golden age of nuclear’ but faces key challenges in reviving historic lead

Published

6 hours ago

December 6, 2025

admin

The UK wants to unlock a 'golden age of nuclear' but faces key challenges in reviving historic lead

The Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations, operated by Electricite de France SA (EDF), in Sizewell, UK, on Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The U.K. was the birthplace of commercial nuclear energy, but now generates just a fraction of its power from it — big investments are underway to change that.

The country once had more nuclear power stations than the U.S., USSR and France — combined. It was a global producer until 1970 but hasn’t completed a new reactor since Sizewell B in 1995.

Today, the country takes the crown not for being a leader in atomic energy, but for being the most expensive place in the world to build nuclear projects.

Nuclear energy accounted for just 14% of the U.K.’s power supply in 2023, according to the most recent data from the International Energy Agency, trailing its European peers and well behind frontrunner France at 65%.

There is ambition to change that and have a quarter of the U.K.’s power come from nuclear by 2050. Nuclear is considered an attractive bet gas it’s a low-carbon, constant energy source that can act as a baseload to complement intermittent sources like renewables.

“There’s a very clear momentum that has been observed,” Doreen Abeysundra, founder of consultancy Fresco Cleantech, told CNBC. It’s in part due to geopolitical tensions, which pushed energy security and independence onto public agendas.

However, the U.K.’s Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce called for urgent reforms after identifying “systemic failures” in the country’s nuclear framework. It found that fragmented regulation, flawed legislation and weak incentives led the U.K. to fall behind as a nuclear powerhouse. The government committed to implementing the taskforce’s guidance and is expected to present a plan to do so within three months.

Going big – or small

The U.K. is spreading its bets across tried-and-tested large nuclear projects and smaller, next-generation reactors known as small module reactors (SMRs).

British company Rolls-Royce has been selected as the country’s preferred partner for SMRs, which are effectively containerized nuclear reactors designed to be manufactured in a factory. Many include passive cooling techniques, which supporters argue makes them safer and cheaper.

Nuclear has long come under fire by environmentalists due to radioactive waste and disasters like Chernobyl. Indeed, the U.K.’s first commercial plant Windscale became its worst nuclear accident in history when it melted down in 1957.

On October 10, 1957, Windscale became the site of the worst nuclear accident in British history, and the worst in the world until Three Mile Island 22 years later. A facility had been built there to produce plutonium, but when the US successfully designed a nuclear bomb that used tritium, the facility was used to produce it for the UK. However, this required running the reactor at a higher temperature than its design could sustain, and it eventually caught fire. Operators at first worried that e

Photo: George Freston | Hulton Archive | Getty Images

Most SMRs use light water reactor technology – think of the planned large-scale nuclear plant Sizewell C, just “shrunk down,” said Abeysundra – which is tried and tested.

Other designs, known as “advanced” reactors, are more experimental. For example, those that change the cooling solution or solvent, which is typically used in the process of separating and purifying nuclear materials.

The U.K.’s first SMR will be at Wylfa, in Wales, though no timeline has been given for its completion. The site will house three SMRs and grow over time.

In September, the country signed a deal with the U.S. to enable stronger commercial ties on nuclear power and streamline licensing for firms that want to build on the opposite side of the Atlantic.

However, “the first thing is, there is not, at the moment, a single SMR actively producing electricity under four revenues. They will all come at best in the 30s,” Ludovico Cappelli, portfolio manager of Listed Infrastructure at Van Lanschot Kempen, told CNBC.

While SMRs are a “game changer” thanks to their ability to power individual factories or small towns, their days of commercial operation are too far away, he said. From an investment standpoint, “that is still a bit scary,” he added.

To secure the large baseloads needed to offset the intermittency of renewables, “we’re still looking at big power stations,” added Paul Jackson, Invesco’s EMEA global market strategist.

Nuclear share of total electricity (2023)

IEA

SMRs “probably” do have a role — “they can clearly be more nimble” — but it will take time to roll them out, Jackson said, casting doubt on the U.K.’s ability to be a leader in nuclear, as France and China are already miles ahead.

The U.K. government body Great British Energy-Nuclear is set to identify sites for an additional large-scale plant, having already acquired one in Gloucestershire, in the west of England, as well as the site in Wales.

“We are reversing a legacy of no new nuclear power being delivered to unlock a golden age of nuclear, securing thousands of good, skilled jobs and billions in investment,” a spokesperson for the U.K. government’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero told CNBC.

“Sizewell C will deliver clean electricity for the equivalent of six million of today’s households for at least six decades, and the UK’s first small modular reactors at Wylfa will power the equivalent of three million homes, bringing energy security,” they added.

Innovation in funding

The U.K. has a strong legacy to build on. It pioneered fresh funding mechanisms to make large-scale nuclear projects investible so that they are less reliant on direct government funding, such as a Contract for Differences, which was used for Hinkley Point C.

The mechanism guarantees a fixed price for the electricity generated over a long period of time in order to de-risk investments in an industry that’s known for running over time and budget. Hinkley Point C was initially expected to cost £18 billion (over $24 billion) but the bill has slowly crept up.

“That fixes one part of the equation, the price risk,” Cappelli said of nuclear investments, but the second risk is construction delays.

The Regulated Asset Base (RAB), first used for nuclear at Sizewell C, attempts to reconcile this. Investors get paid from the day they cut a check for a nuclear project, rather than the day it starts operating. Sizewell C is expected to cost £38 billion to build.

Private market investors are increasingly interested in next-generation nuclear as a way to offset soaring energy demands from AI, resulting in a host of young companies trying to build out facilities. Perhaps the most famous is Oklo, a U.S. firm that was taken public by a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Rendering of a proposed Oklo commercial advanced fission power plant in the U.S.

Courtesy: Oklo Inc.

The U.K.’s advanced modular reactor hopeful Newcleo, which uses lead for cooling, moved its headquarters from London to Paris in 2024 — a strategic move to deepen its European footprint. At the time, it told World Nuclear News that it still plans to have a commercial reactor up and running in the U.K. by 2033, but the firm has since scaled back its British efforts.

Meanwhile, Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion call the U.K. home. They both focus on nuclear fusion, the process of generating power by combining atoms, though this technology is yet to get out of the lab. All of today’s nuclear power comes from fission, where atoms are spit. The U.K. announced £2.5 billion for a world-first fusion prototype in June.

The next generation of engineers

The U.K. faces challenges in access to relevant talent, which is crucial for scaling projects effectively. The country is heralded for its world-class universities and technical know-how, “but that is very much book knowledge,” said Van Lanschot Kempen’s Cappelli.

“What we need is real on-the-ground expertise, and that we are probably lacking for the simple reason that we haven’t been doing it for a very long time,” he said.

For Abeysundra, there’s one area where the U.K. stands out: its mindset. “There is so much knowledge, innovation, and that can-do attitude, which I don’t see as much in other nations,” she said, pointing to the U.K.’s trailblazing role in the Industrial Revolution and establishment of offshore wind energy.

X-Energy’s Kam Ghaffarian on Nuclear Power, AI, and the Space Tech Race

The U.K. government positioned nuclear energy as a key element of the future clean energy workforce in its Clean Energy Jobs Plan released in October, while its national roadmap for nuclear skills, set out in 2024, focuses on apprenticeships, PhDs and upskilling mid-career workers. Industry-led initiatives such as the Energy Skills Passport also support the likes of oil and gas workers to gain green skills.

Securing the supply chain

Perhaps the toughest issue, however, is the supply chain.

Uranium, the fuel used to make a nuclear reaction, is dominated by just four countries, including Russia. Global demand for uranium could rise by nearly a third by 2030 and more than double by 2040, according to the World Nuclear Association, adding further reliance on a select few countries and pressure on developers.

The U.K. government has allocated funding to build up the supply chain and has committed to preventing the import of nuclear fuel from Russia by 2028. Fuel for Sizewell C will come from European or “Western suppliers,” Cappelli noted.

However, for him, it poses the question: How secure is nuclear energy really? “We have to build nuclear power plants, but we need to build the value chain,” Cappelli added.

Workers, expertise and funding are required for nuclear energy, but the supply chain is also key, he said. Otherwise, there will be “the same issues that we had with gas,” a nod to the U.K.’s reliance on just one supplier. Instead of gas, it will be with uranium.

Environment

Tesla announces 2025 holiday update with a few cool features

Published

13 hours ago

December 6, 2025

admin

Tesla announces 2025 holiday update with a few cool features

Tesla has officially announced its 2025 Holiday Update, and this year, the automaker is not using the usually bigger update for any groundbreaking stuff, but there are a few interesting new smaller features.

You will find the release notes in this article.

It’s that time of year again. Every December, Tesla bundles a bunch of features it has been working on into a “Holiday Update” to give owners something to play with over the break.

While previous years have focused on adding major apps like Apple Podcasts or Steam integration, the holiday updates have become gradually weaker over the last few years, and they now concentrate mainly on playful features with smaller tweaks and add-ons.

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Tesla announced the rollout in a post on X today:

Environment

Kia is still offering over $10,000 off its entire EV lineup

Published

16 hours ago

December 5, 2025

admin

Kia is still offering over ,000 off its entire EV lineup

Kia is extending one of its biggest promotions yet, knocking over $10,000 off every EV in its lineup.

Kia knocks $10,000 off EV models

Who said electric vehicles would get more expensive after the $7,500 federal tax credit ended? Kia must not have gotten the memo.

Last month, Kia launched a new promotion, offering a $10,000 customer cash discount for all EVs, including the EV6, EV9, and Niro EV. The discount knocks nearly 25% off MSRP on Kia’s cheapest model, the Niro EV. On the entry-level EV6, it’s 23% off MSRP, while $10,000 off the EV9 is about an 18% discount.

The discounts ended on December 1, but Kia has extended them for at least another month. During its Season of New Tradition sales event, Kia is now offering even more savings.

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The 2025 Kia EV6 and Niro EV are now eligible for up to $11,000 in customer cash, including a $10,000 cash back offer and a $1,000 retail bonus cash discount.

If you’re looking for something a little bigger, the 2026 EV9, Kia’s three-row electric SUV, is available with up to $10,500 in bonus cash.

If you choose to finance, Kia is offering 0% APR for up to 72 months, plus $3,500 APR Bonus Cash on the EV6 and Niro EV. The larger EV9 is available with 0% APR for up to 60 months with a $3,000 APR Bonus Cash offer.

Kia-another-EV-US — The 2026 Kia EV9 (Source: Kia)

The 2025 Kia Niro EV and EV6 are available to lease, starting at $209 and $309 per month for 24 months. The 2026 EV9 is listed with monthly leases starting at $419.

The new sales event comes after Hyundai extended its EV promotions, keeping the IONIQ 5 as one of the most affordable EV leases in the US, starting at just $189 per month.

Kia’s Seasons of New Traditions sales event runs until January 2, 2026. Some deals may vary by region. You can see offers near you by using the links at the bottom.

Interested in test-driving one for yourself? We can help see what’s available in your area. Check out our links below to find Kia and Hyundai EVs near you.