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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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🌊 Riding the Next Energy Wave

Why wave energy might become the missing piece of the 24/7 clean power puzzle.

We’re joined by CorPower Ocean co-founder & CEO Patrick Müller, an engineer and deeptech entrepreneur building one of the world’s most advanced wave energy companies.

In this episode, we dive into the future of wave energy, and unpack what it really takes to turn one of the ocean’s harshest environments into a scalable source of clean electricity. Patrick explains why wave energy has historically failed, what changed technically over the last decade, and why CorPower believes it can finally make ocean power commercially viable.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why wave energy could become a multi-terawatt global opportunity

→ The brutal engineering challenge of surviving 18-meter ocean waves

→ How CorPower’s “phase control” technology boosts energy capture 3x

→ Why wave energy complements solar and wind instead of competing with them

→ The economics behind 24/7 clean power systems

→ Why modular “Lego-style” deployment matters more than giant machines

→ The role of grants, public support, and first commercial projects

→ Why data centers may become one of wave energy’s biggest customers

→ How CorPower spent nearly 14 years de-risking the technology before scaling

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was Patrick’s framing of the ocean as a giant natural battery. Instead of generating power only when the wind blows or the sun shines, wave energy captures energy already “stored” in ocean swells, creating a much smoother and more predictable production profile.

And that changes the economics of clean energy systems entirely.

According to CorPower, adding wave energy into a renewable mix can significantly reduce the amount of storage and grid infrastructure required to reach near-constant clean electricity.

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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🌊 Can Capitalism Survive the Planetary Boundaries?

We’re joined by Timothée Parrique (website), researcher in ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and one of the leading voices challenging the idea that endless economic growth can coexist with a finite planet.

In this episode, we dive into the uncomfortable tension between capitalism, climate innovation, and ecological limits, and unpack what it would actually take to build an economy that operates within planetary boundaries.

From venture capital and climate tech to sufficiency, cooperation, and post-capitalist systems, this conversation pushes far beyond the usual climate debate.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why climate change may be the easiest ecological crisis to solve

→ The difference between innovation… and “exnovation”

→ Why green growth hasn’t reduced ecological overshoot fast enough

→ Why capitalism structurally depends on expansion and growth

→ The limits of venture-backed climate solutions

→ Why policy alone won’t solve the transition

→ The role of NGOs, cooperatives, and non-profit models in a post-growth economy

→ Why degrowth is not collapse, but a planned downscaling of production and consumption

→ The hidden contradiction between finance and nature

→ Why cooperation, not competition, may define the next economic system

✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.

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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack

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🌊 When AI hits the atom

Why the future of materials discovery won’t be built on simulations alone.

We’re joined by Ahmed Ismail, Co-founder & COO of Dunia, a Berlin-based deeptech company building AI- and robotics-powered systems to accelerate the discovery and scale-up of industrial breakthrough materials.

In this episode, we dive into one of the biggest bottlenecks in climate and industrial innovation: materials discovery, and unpack why the real opportunity is not just asking AI to invent new formulas, but building the physical infrastructure to test, validate, and scale them.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why so many scientific breakthroughs still depend on serendipity — and how AI might increase the frequency of those “lucky” moments.

→ The difference between AI-generated materials, simulation-first approaches, and autonomous industrial labs.

→ Why the sim-to-real gap is the central challenge in AI for materials: what looks perfect on a computer often fails in a reactor.

→ How Dunia built IRIS, an autonomous industrial lab designed to generate high-quality, device-level data for real-world applications.

→ Why the future may belong to vertical, industry-specific AI systems — not one general “ChatGPT for materials.”

AI for good. 🔥