Company: Dandelion Energy
Title:Â Co-founder & President
Industry: Energy
Hometown:Â Los Altos, California
Notable in 2023: Drove adoption of geothermal heat pumps and influencing state and federal energy policy.
Kathy Hannun wants to revolutionize how you heat and cool your home.
Hannun became interested in geothermal energy while scouting for new energy technologies as product manager at Alphabet's innovation lab X. She went on to co-found Dandelion Energy, which was incubated within Alphabet and spun out into an independent company in 2017.
Dandelion uses heat pumps connected to buried water pipes to capture the constant heat stored below ground during the winter and circulate it throughout your home. During the summer, the system captures heat from the air in your home and circulates it below ground. It is a renewable way to heat and cool your home without generating carbon emissions, replacing systems that run on fossil fuels.
This geothermal technology is already widely used in nations such as Sweden, but no one has found a way to scale it up in the U.S. and make it affordable, Hannun told the ARK Invest podcast.
I convinced myself to leave and start the company that would become Dandelion because I wanted to be the type of person who would take a career risk to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity I strongly believed in. By leaving, I became that type of person.Kathy HannunCo-founder & President, Dandelion Energy
The geothermal industry was given a financial boost with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which provides financial incentives including tax credits for heat pump technology.
"The challenge is not to invent a breakthrough moonshot new technology that's never existed," Hannun told the podcast, produced by Cathie Wood's investment management company, which has a focus on innovation investing, in 2022. "The challenge is take something that's actually existed for a long time and just figure out how to productize it and make it affordable and practical."
Dandelion has grown into the largest home geothermal company in the U.S. The company is currently helping customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York replace their traditional furnaces.
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