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One way to know where a field is going? Take a look at what the sharpest new innovators are working on.

Good news for all of us: MIT Technology Review’s list of 35 Innovators Under 35 just dropped. And a decent number of the people who made the list are working in fields that touch climate and energy in one way or another.

Looking through, I noticed a few trends that might provide some hints about the future of climate tech. Let’s dig into this year’s list and consider what these innovators’ work might mean for efforts to combat climate change.

Power to the people

Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few innovators on this list are working on energy—and many of them have an interest in making energy consistently available where and when it’s needed. Wind and solar are getting cheap, but we need solutions for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

Tim Latimer cofounded Fervo Energy, a geothermal company hoping to provide consistently available, carbon-free energy using Earth’s heat. You may be familiar with his work, since Fervo was on our list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023.

Another energy-focused innovator on the list is Andrew Ponec of Antora Energy, a company working to build thermal energy storage systems. Basically, the company’s technology heats up blocks when cheap renewables are available, and then stores that heat and delivers it to industrial processes that need constant power. (You, the readers, named thermal energy storage the readers’ choice on this year’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies list.)

Rock stars

While new ways of generating electricity and storing energy can help cut our emissions in the future, other people are focused on how to clean up the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. At this point, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is basically required for any scenario where we limit warming to 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels. A few of the new class of innovators are turning to rocks for help soaking up and locking away atmospheric carbon. 

Noah McQueen cofounded Heirloom Carbon Technologies, a carbon removal company. The technology works by tweaking the way minerals soak up carbon dioxide from the air (before releasing it under controlled conditions, so they can do it all again). The company has plans for facilities that could remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide each year. 

Another major area of research focuses on how we might store captured carbon dioxide. Claire Nelson is the cofounder of Cella Mineral Storage, a company working on storage methods to better trap carbon dioxide underground once it’s been mopped up.  

Material world

Finally, some of the most interesting work on our new list of innovators is in materials. Some people are finding new ones that could help us address our toughest problems, and others are trying to reinvent old ones to clean up their climate impacts.

Julia Carpenter found a way to make a foam-like material from metal. Its high surface area makes it a stellar heat sink, meaning it can help cool things down efficiently. It could be a huge help in data centers, where 40% of energy demand goes to cooling.

And I spoke with Cody Finke, cofounder and CEO of Brimstone, a company working on cleaner ways of making cement. Cement alone is responsible for nearly 7% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, and about half of those come from chemical reactions necessary to make it. Finke and Brimstone are working to wipe out the need for these reactions by using different starting materials to make this crucial infrastructural glue.

Addressing climate change is a sprawling challenge, but the researchers and founders on this list are tackling a few of the biggest issues I think about every day. 

Ensuring that we can power our grid, and all the industrial processes that we rely on for the stuff in our daily lives, is one of the most substantial remaining challenges. Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an efficient, cheap process could help limit future warming and buy us time to clean up the toughest sectors. And finding new materials, and new methods of producing old ones, could be a major key to unlocking new climate solutions. 

To read more about the folks I mentioned here and other innovators working in climate change and beyond, check out the full list.

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Related reading

Fervo Energy (cofounded by 2024 innovator Tim Latimer) showed last year that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery.

A growing number of companies—including Antora Energy, whose CEO Andrew Ponec is a 2024 innovator—are working to bring thermal energy storage systems to heavy industry.

Cement is one of our toughest challenges, as Brimstone CEO and 2024 innovator Cody Finke will tell you. I wrote about Brimstone and other efforts to reinvent cement earlier this year.

Another thing

We need a whole lot of metals to address climate change, from the copper in transmission lines to the nickel in lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles. Some researchers think plants might be able to help. 

Roughly 750 species of plants are so-called hyperaccumulators, meaning they naturally soak up and tolerate relatively high concentrations of metal. A new program is funding research into how we might use this trait to help source nickel, and potentially other metals, in the future. Read the full story here.

Keeping up with climate  

A hurricane that recently formed in the Gulf of Mexico is headed for Louisiana, ending an eerily quiet few weeks of the season. (Scientific American)

→ After forecasters predicted a particularly active season, the lull in hurricane activity was surprising. (New Scientist)

Rising sea levels are one of the symptoms of a changing climate, but nailing down exactly what “sea level” means is more complicated than you might think. We’ve gotten better at measuring sea level over the past few centuries, though. (New Yorker)

The US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has nearly $400 million in lending authority. This year’s election could shift the focus of that office drastically, making it a bellwether of how the results could affect energy priorities. (Bloomberg)

What if fusion power ends up working, but it’s too expensive to play a significant role on the grid? Some modelers think the technology will remain expensive and could come too late to make a dent in emissions. (Heatmap)

Electric-vehicle sales are up overall, but some major automakers are backing away from goals on zero-emissions vehicles. Even though sales are increasing, uptake is slower than many thought it would be, contributing to the nervous energy in the industry. (Canary Media)

It’s a tough time to be in the business of next-generation batteries. The woes of three startups reveal that difficult times are here, likely for a while. (The Information)

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

On a sunny morning in late spring, I found myself carefully examining an array of somewhat unassuming-looking rocks at the American Museum of Natural History. 

I’ve gotten to see some cutting-edge technologies as a reporter, from high-tech water treatment plants to test nuclear reactors. Peering at samples of dusty reddish monazite and speckled bastnäsite, I saw the potential for innovation there, too. That’s because all the minerals spread out across the desk contain neodymium, a rare earth metal that’s used today in all sorts of devices, from speakers to wind turbines. And it’s likely going to become even more crucial in the future. 

By the time I came to the museum to see some neodymium for myself, I’d been thinking (or perhaps obsessing) about the metal for months—basically since I’d started reporting a story for our upcoming print issue that is finally out online. The story takes a look at what challenges we’ll face with materials for the next century, and neodymium is center stage. Let’s take a look at why I spent so long thinking about this obscure metal, and why I think it reveals so much about the future of technology. 

In the new issue of our print magazine, MIT Technology Review is celebrating its 125th anniversary. But rather than look back to our 1899 founding, the team decided to look forward to the next 125 years. 

I’ve been fascinated with topics like mining, recycling, and alternative technologies since I’ve been reporting on climate. So when I started thinking about the distant future, my mind immediately went to materials. What kind of stuff will we need? Will there be enough of it? How does tech advancement change the picture?

Zooming out to the 2100s and beyond changed the stakes and altered how I thought about some of the familiar topics I’ve been reporting on for years. 

For example, we have enough of the stuff we need to power our world with renewables. But in theory, there is some future point at which we could burn through our existing resources. What happens then? As it turns out, there’s more uncertainty about the amount of resources available than you might imagine. And we can learn a lot from previous efforts to project when the supply of fossil fuels will begin to run out, a concept known as peak oil. 

We can set up systems to reuse and recycle the metals that are most important for our future. These facilities could eventually help us mine less and make material supply steadier and even cheaper. But what happens when the technology these facilities are designed to recycle inevitably changes, possibly rendering old setups obsolete? Predicting what materials will be important, and adjusting efforts to make and reuse them, is complicated to say the least. 

To try to answer these massive questions, I took a careful look at one particular metal: neodymium. It’s a silvery-white rare earth metal, central to powerful magnets that are at the heart of many different technologies, both in the energy sector and beyond. 

Neodymium can stand in for many of the challenges and opportunities we face with materials in the coming century. We’re going to need a lot more of it in the near future, and we could run into some supply constraints as we race to mine enough to meet our needs. It’s possible to recycle the metal to cut down on the extraction needed in the future, and some companies are already trying to set up the infrastructure to do so. 

The world is well on its way to adapting to conditions that are a lot more neodymium-centric. But at the same time, efforts are already underway to build technologies that wouldn’t need neodymium at all. If companies are able to work out an alternative, it could totally flip all our problems, as well as efforts to solve them, upside down. 

Advances in technology can shift the materials we need, and our material demands can push technology to develop in turn. It’s a loop, one that we need to attempt to understand and untangle as we move forward. I hope you’ll read my attempt to start doing that in my feature story here. 

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For a more immediate look at the race to produce rare earth metals, check out this feature story by Mureji Fatunde from January. 

I started thinking more deeply about material demand when I was reporting stories about recycling, including this 2023 feature on the battery recycling company Redwood Materials. 

For one example of how companies are trying to develop new technologies that’ll change the materials we need in the future, check out this story about rare-earth-free magnets from earlier this year. 

Another thing

“If we rely on hope, we give up agency. And that may be seductive, but it’s also surrender.”

So writes Lydia Millet, author of over a dozen books, in a new essay about the emotions behind fighting for a future beyond climate change. It was just published online this week. It’s also featured in our upcoming print issue, and I’d highly recommend it. 

Keeping up with climate  

For a look inside what it’s really like to drive a hydrogen car, this reporter rented one and took it on a road trip, speaking to drivers along the way. (The Verge)

→ Here’s why electric vehicles are beating out hydrogen-powered ones in the race to clean up transportation. (MIT Technology Review)

As temperatures climb, we’ve got a hot steel problem on our hands. Heat can cause steel, as well as other materials like concrete, to expand or warp, which can cause problems from slowing down trains to reducing the amount of electricity that power lines can carry. (The Atlantic)

Oakland is the first city in the US running all-electric school buses. And the vehicles aren’t only ferrying kids around; they’re also able to use their batteries to help the grid when it’s needed. (Electrek)

Form Energy plans to build the largest battery installation in the world in Maine. The system, which will use the company’s novel iron-air chemistry, will be capable of storing 8,500 megawatt-hours’ worth of energy. (Canary Media)

→ We named Form one of our 15 Climate Tech companies to watch in 2023. (MIT Technology Review)

In one of the more interesting uses I’ve seen for electric vehicles, Brussels has replaced horse-drawn carriages with battery-powered ones. They look a little like old-timey cars, and operators say business hasn’t slowed down since the switch. (New York Times)

Homeowners are cashing in on billions of dollars in tax credits in the US. The money, which rewards use of technologies that help make homes more energy efficient and cut emissions, is disproportionately going to wealthier households. (E&E News)

Airlines are making big promises about using new jet fuels that can help cut emissions. Much of the industry aims to reach 10% alternative fuel use by the end of the decade. Actual rates hit 0.17% in 2023. (Bloomberg)

Solar farms can’t get enough sheep—they’re great landscaping partners. Soon, 6,000 sheep will be helping keep the grass in check between panels in what will be the largest solar grazing project in the US. (Canary Media)

Leaving aside meteorites that strike Earth’s surface and spacecraft that get flung out of its orbit, the quantity of materials available on this planet isn’t really changing all that much.

That simple fact of our finite resources becomes clearer and more daunting as the pace of technological change advances and our society requires an ever wider array of material inputs to sustain it. So for nearly as long as we’ve systematically extracted these substances, we’ve been trying to predict how long they will be able to meet our demand. How much can we pump from a well, or wrest from a mine, before we need to reconsider what we’re building and how? 

We’re in the middle of a potentially transformative moment. The materials we need to power our world are beginning to shift from fossil fuels to energy sources that don’t produce the greenhouse-gas emissions changing our climate. Metals discovered barely more than a century ago now underpin the technologies we’re relying on for cleaner energy, and not having enough of them could slow progress. 

Take neodymium, one of the rare earth metals. While far from a household name, it’s a metal that humans have relied on for generations. Since the early 20th century, neodymium has been used to give decorative glass a purplish hue. Today, it’s used in cryogenic coolers to reach ultra-low temperatures needed for devices like superconductors and in high-powered magnets that power everything from smartphones to wind turbines. 

Demand for neodymium-based magnets could outstrip supply in the coming decade. The longer-term prospects for the metal’s supply aren’t as dire, but a careful look at neodymium’s potential future reveals many of the challenges we’ll likely face across the supply chain for materials in the coming century and beyond. 

Peak panic

Before we get into our material future, it’s important to point out just how hard it’s always been to make accurate predictions of this kind. Just look at our continuous theorizing about the supply of fossil fuels. 

One version of the story, told frequently in economics classes, goes something like this: Given that there’s a limited supply of oil, at some point the world will run out of it. Before then, we should reach some maximum amount of oil extraction, and then production will start an irreversible decline. That high point is known as “peak oil.”

This idea has been traced back as far as the early 1900s, but one of the most famous analyses came from M. King Hubbert, who was a geologist at Shell. In a 1956 paper, Hubbert considered the total amount of oil (and other fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas) that geologists had identified on the planet. From the estimated supply and the amount the world had burned through, he predicted that oil production in the US would peak and begin declining between 1965 and 1970. The peak of world oil production, he predicted, would come a bit later, in 2000. 

For a while, it looked as if Hubbert was right. US oil production increased until 1970, when it reached a dramatic peak. It then declined for decades afterward, until about 2010. But then advances in drilling and fracking techniques unlocked hard-to-reach reserves. Oil production skyrocketed in the US through the 2010s, and as of 2023, the country was producing more oil than ever before. 

Peak-oil panic has long outlived Hubbert, but every time economists and geologists have predicted that we’ve reached, or are about to reach, the peak of oil production, they’ve missed the mark (so far).

Now there’s a new reason we might see fossil-fuel production actually peak and eventually fall off: the energy transition. That’s shorthand for the grand effort to shift away from energy sources that produce greenhouse gases and toward renewables and other low-carbon options. 

If we extract, process, use, and discard these metals, conceptually there must be some point in the future when we run out of them. And as the energy transition has gotten underway, plenty of forecasts have attempted to understand which metals we should worry about and when they might start to be depleted. But experts say that understanding the availability of resources in this sector is much more complicated than picking out a single future peak. 

“The peak modeling thing is something that doesn’t really apply to metals,” says Simon Jowitt, director of the Center for Research in Economic Geology at the University of Nevada, Reno. It’s nearly impossible to understand whether we’ve reached a peak in production for any given material, or even whether those peaks can be predicted, as Jowitt said in a 2020 paper. 

Let’s take a closer look at neodymium. Reserves of the metal—the amount we know about that’s economically feasible to extract—have been estimated at 12.8 million tons. To keep the world from warming more than 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels, we might need as much as 121,000 tons every year just for wind turbines, according to a 2023 study on the material demands of the energy transition. Depending on how much material we assume makes it from the mine into final products, we could burn through those reserves in roughly a century.

If we extract, process, use, and discard these metals, conceptually there must be some point in the future when we run out of them.

The problem with this thinking, though, is that reserves and resources are far from fixed. Geologists discover new deposits all the time, for one thing. And what was considered too expensive and difficult to mine a few decades ago might be possible to extract with today’s technology. So instead of being slowly depleted, those material supplies have roughly kept up with production. 

Big digs

Demand for rare earths is expected to explode in the coming decades, driven largely by the increased need for neodymium-based magnets. These magnets, commonly made from a mixture of neodymium, iron, and boron with other elements sprinkled in, produce a stronger magnetic field with less material than other magnets available today. 

While demand for neo magnets will likely triple in the coming decade, global production of neodymium will only double, according to Adamas Intelligence, a consulting firm specializing in strategic metals and minerals. It can take close to a decade to build new mines, and those long lead times could contribute to a supply crunch, says Seaver Wang, climate co-­director at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank.

Short periods when demand outstrips supply can lead to volatility, high prices, and slower deployment of new technologies. In a time as fast-moving as our current energy transition, those challenging economic conditions could have far-reaching effects, potentially entrenching old technologies and stalling progress. 

But despite these expected challenges and the resulting potential for volatility, there is, in theory, plenty of neodymium to go around. Despite their name, most rare earth metals aren’t terribly rare. Many are about as abundant in Earth’s crust as copper, and neodymium is roughly 1,000 times more common in the crust than platinum or gold.

However, unlike those metals, rare earths aren’t often found in concentrated deposits. Getting one ton of metal concentrate can require moving a thousand tons of rocks.   

This mining and refining process can be technically complicated and environmentally damaging, in part because rare earth metals are chemically similar to each other and difficult to separate without using harsh chemicals, says Julie Klinger, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who studies the global market for these materials.

Extraction often relies on dissolving crushed-up ore in strong acid. Mines that don’t carefully contain the waste material and the used chemicals risk polluting local waterways. Rare earth mines also often need to handle radioactive waste, since elements like thorium and uranium are common in and around the minerals that are mined to extract rare earths.

Around and around

Follow the path of many commonly used metals, and you’ll likely trace a straight line that leads from the mine to a product and, eventually, to some version of a trash can. In an effort to ease supply concerns and environmental damage, some experts are calling for a new way of using materials, one that focuses on reducing waste or eliminating it altogether. 

Such a system would bend the line that goes from mine to trash into a new shape, so extracted materials are in use for as long as possible—maybe even forever. A whole host of strategies can extend the lifetime of materials, from repairing and refurbishing products to disassembling them and recycling the metals in them once the products are beyond repair.

This can start well before products even get to consumers, by making the most of materials as they’re taken out of the ground. Where recycling really gets difficult is the point at which the materials have left a company and gone into devices, says Ikenna Nlebedim, a research scientist at Ames National Laboratory.

Follow the path of many commonly used metals, and you’ll likely trace a straight line that leads from the mine to a product and, eventually, to some version of a trash can.

Today, a small but difficult-to-quantify fraction of rare earth elements are recycled from products that have reached the end of their useful life. (Many in the industry put the figure at roughly 1%, though there’s little data available on rare earth collection, Nlebedim says.) With the looming increase in expected demand, several companies, including Noveon, REEcycle, and Cyclic Materials, are working to increase that amount, setting up the beginning of a recycling industry.

A major challenge for rising magnet recyclers is that magnets tend to make up a tiny fraction of a product’s total weight. Picking through heaps of products to recover them is an imperfect system, and magnet recyclers are left with other valuable materials that they have no interest in—and no effective process for isolating.

In the future, economical recycling of rare earths might require a broader infrastructure for recycling the rest of a device, Nlebedim says. A centralized dismantling system would allow the recovery of materials like copper, gold, and platinum group metals that are often found in the same products as rare earths. This setup would allow more of the material in waste products to be reused than is possible now, when a company will go after the highest-­value, easiest-to-extract materials and toss the rest into a shredder. 

Casting a wider net to recover more materials could help create a more stable supply for metals. That could be a major help if the materials considered valuable in the future are different from the ones with the most value today.  

Quick shifts

In the 1960s, Mountain Pass produced the europium used in color television screens of the time. In the following decades the target was cerium, which was useful for the glass used in televisions with cathode ray tubes. Since CRTs have been replaced with new technology like LED screens, demand for cerium has decreased. Now the mine focuses on neodymium and praseodymium, another ingredient sometimes used in magnets.

Yet even as geologists are scouting new mines and companies are springing up to start building recycling systems, researchers are working to make rare earth magnets less central to our technological future, or maybe even obsolete. 

Today, neodymium is necessary in these powerful magnets to wrangle the electrons in iron so that they spin consistently in the same direction, producing a strong magnetic field. There aren’t any alternatives that can match their performance. 

However, there could be options on the way. Niron Magnetics is working to build iron nitride magnets, which produce a powerful magnetic field without the need for any rare earth metals. The company opened its first manufacturing facility in early 2024, and while its products can’t sub in for high-quality neo magnets just yet, there’s no fundamental reason they won’t be able to in the future. If Niron or other companies are able to develop new magnets, it could mean a shift in the rare earth market that quickly makes the current magnet recycling systems irrelevant. 

In a perfectly sustainable world, we would use and reuse materials dug out of the ground indefinitely. But as our technology shifts and our lives change, it can be difficult to end the loop where it began. Instead, our material economy may morph into the shape of a spiral. Resources may not end up quite where they started— rather, the system we’ve set up to extract and use them will continue to chase technological progress, maybe endlessly. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Friday marks two years since the US signed the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. Now, I’m not usually one to track legislation birthdays. But this particular law is the exception, because it was a game changer for climate technology in the country, and beyond. 

Over the past two years we’ve seen an influx of investment from the federal government, private businesses hoping to get in on the action, and other countries trying to keep up. And now we’re seeing all this money starting to make a difference in the climate tech sector.  

Before we get to the present day, let’s do a quick refresher. In late July 2022, the US Congress reached a massive deal on a tax reform and spending package. The law changed some tax rules, implemented prescription drug pricing reform, and provided some funding for health care and the agency that collects taxes. 

And then there are the climate sections, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of spending. There are tax credits for businesses that build and operate new factories to produce technologies like wind and solar. There are individual tax credits to help people buy electric vehicles, heat pumps, and solar panels. There’s funding to give loans to businesses working to bring their newer technologies into the world. 

Now to the fun part: Where is all that money going?

Some of the funding comes in the form of grants, designed to kick-start domestic manufacturing in areas like batteries for EVs and energy technologies. I wrote about several billion dollars going to companies making battery components and producing their ingredients in October 2022, for example. 

Tax credits are another huge chunk of the bill, and it’s starting to become clear just how significant they can be for businesses. First Solar, a company making thin-film solar panels in the US, revealed earlier this year that it was in the middle of a deal to receive about $700 million from tax credits. 

Then there are the provisions for individuals. As of late May, about three million households had claimed IRA tax credits for their homes in 2023. Together, they received about $8 billion for solar panels, batteries, heat pumps, and home efficiency technologies such as insulation. The credits are popular—that spending was roughly three times higher than projections had suggested. 

One area I’ve been following especially closely is funding from the Loan Programs Office of the US Department of Energy, which lends money to businesses to help them get their innovative projects built. There was a $2 billion commitment to Redwood Materials, a battery recycling company I dug into just before the announcement. You might also remember a $1.52 billion loan to reopen a nuclear power plant in Michigan and a $400 million loan to give zinc batteries a boost. 

It’s not just the federal government that’s pouring in money—businesses are following suit, announcing new factories or expanding old ones. Between the passage of the IRA in August 2022 and May 2024, companies have committed $110 billion for 159 projects from EVs and solar and wind to transmission projects, according to a tracker from Jack Conness, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, an energy and climate policy firm. 

The effects have rippled out beyond the US. Europe finalized the Net-Zero Industry Act in early 2024, partly as an answer to the IRA. It’s not quite the same spending spree, but the bill does include a goal for Europe to supply 40% of its own climate tech by 2030 and it implements some rule changes regarding how new projects get approved to help that happen. 

The Inflation Reduction Act still has a lot of time left, and some programs have a 10-year window. One of the biggest, though often overlooked, changes over the last year is that we’ve gotten clarity on how some of the major programs are actually going to work. While the large contours were laid out in the law, some of the details about implementing them were left up to agencies to nail down. And while these specifics often seem small, they can affect which sorts of projects are eligible, changing how these credits might shape the industry. 

For example, in December 2023 we learned how restrictions in the EV tax credits will affect vehicles with components made in China. As a result, starting in 2024 some vehicle models became ineligible for the credits, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E. (The company hasn’t said exactly why the model lost eligibility, but some reporting has suggested it’s likely because the lithium iron phosphate batteries used in the vehicles come from the Chinese company CATL.) 

Some of those specifics get really complicated. The hydrogen tax credits could get tangled up in legal battles. The full rules on credits for sustainable aviation fuel raised concerns that fuels that don’t help much with emissions will still get funding. The credits for critical minerals apply only to processing, not to mining efforts, as my colleague James Temple detailed in his story about a Minnesota mine earlier this year. 

Looking ahead, the fate of the IRA’s programs may depend on the outcome of the presidential election in November. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the law, and she would likely keep the programs going. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, has been openly targeting many of its provisions, and he could do some damage to many of the tax credits included, even though it would require an act of Congress to actually repeal the law. (For more on what a second Trump presidency might mean for the climate law, check out this great deep dive from James Temple.) 

The action certainly isn’t slowing down in the world of climate technology. Looking ahead, one major piece of the puzzle we’ll be watching is a potential change to how new projects get approved. There’s a permitting reform package winding its way through the government now, so stay tuned for more on that, and on everything climate tech. 

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At our ClimateTech event last year, Leah Stokes, an environmental policy professor at UC Santa Barbara who was closely involved with developing the IRA, spoke with us about the law. For more on how it came to be and what changes we’ve seen so far, check out her segment here. 

Here’s what’s most at risk in the IRA as the US faces an election in November. 

One mine in Minnesota could unlock tens of billions of dollars in tax credits, as James Temple detailed in this story from January.

Another thing

Steel production is responsible for about 7% of global emissions. A growing array of technologies can produce the metal with less climate pollution, but there’s a big catch: They’re expensive. 

But in the grand scheme of things, even steel that costs 30% more than the standard stuff would only increase the cost of the average new car by about $100, or less than 1%. That gives the auto industry a unique opportunity to help drive the world toward greener steel. Get all the details in my latest story. 

Keeping up with climate  

The world’s biggest pumped hydropower project just came online in China. The $2.6 billion facility can store energy by pumping water uphill. (Bloomberg)

Scientists want to make a common chemical from wastewater. Researchers demonstrated a reactor that can produce ammonia from nitrates, a common pollutant found in municipal wastewater and agricultural runoff. (New Scientist)

→ Ammonia could be used as fuel for long-distance shipping. (MIT Technology Review)

The new movie Twisters shows a tornado ripping apart a wind turbine. Experts say we probably don’t need to worry too much about wind farms collapsing—those incidents tend to be rare, because turbines are built to withstand high wind speeds and are usually shut down and locked into a safe position in the case of extreme weather. (E&E News)

SunPower, once a dominant force in residential solar, is bankrupt. The company will sell off assets and gradually close up shop in the latest hit to a turbulent market. (Latitude Media)

More than 47,000 people in Europe died last year from heat-related causes. If it hadn’t been for adaptation measures like early warning systems and cooling technology, the toll could have been much higher. (New York Times)

Europe could be a bright spot for Beyond Meat and other companies selling plant-based products. The industry has seen sales and profits stagnate or drop recently, especially in the US, but Europe has lower levels of meat consumption, and supermarkets there have shown some support for animal-free alternatives. (Wired)

South Korea turns about 98% of its food waste into compost, animal feed, or energy. It’s one of the few countries with a comprehensive system for food waste, and it’s not an easy one to replicate. (Washington Post)

→ Here’s how companies want to use microbes to turn food scraps and agricultural waste into energy. (MIT Technology Review)

Just 12% of new low-emissions hydrogen projects have customers lined up. As a result, many proposed projects will probably never get built. (Bloomberg)

Steel scaffolds our world, undergirding buildings and machines. It also presents a major challenge for climate change, since steel production largely relies on polluting fossil fuels. The automotive industry could be a key player in turning things around.

Steel production is currently responsible for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. There’s a growing array of technologies that can produce steel with dramatically lower emissions—though some are still in development, and they often come with a higher price tag. The auto industry could be a fertile early market for these technologies, both because it’s a major player in the industry and because switching to more expensive materials would only bump costs up for new vehicles by less than 1%, according to a new report. 

Finding economical ways to produce the materials we rely on while also cutting emissions is a major challenge for the industrial sector. Vehicle manufacturers embracing greener steel could provide a blueprint for how to bring more climate-friendly materials to the market without driving customers away.

Since automakers use a lot of steel, they have an opportunity to lead the charge to decarbonize the industry, says Peter Slowik, an analyst leading research on passenger vehicles in the US for the International Council on Clean Transportation.

About 12% of global steel production goes to the auto industry, and in some regions, the percentage is significantly higher—about 60% of all primary (non-recycled) steel produced in the US goes to vehicle manufacturing. That non-recycled steel comes with higher emissions than the recycled version, so making a swap to greener steel in the automotive industry, which mostly uses non-recycled material, would have an outsized impact. 

Making steel today generally requires steelmakers to heat raw materials to high temperatures, using fossil fuels like coal to drive the chemical reactions that transform iron ore into steel. But there’s a growing array of ways to make steel with lower emissions, including efforts to add carbon capture technology to new and existing plants and implement new technologies that rely on electricity instead of fossil fuels.

One leading contender for producing low-emissions steel is a process called direct reduction, where chemical reactions can be powered by hydrogen fuel instead of coal. If that hydrogen is produced with renewable or other low-carbon energy sources, it could allow steel production with up to 95% lower emissions.

Steel is responsible for a major chunk of the climate impacts of manufacturing a vehicle—so swapping in green steel could cut the emissions associated with building a car by 27%, according to the ICCT report.

And the materials wouldn’t dramatically inflate costs, either. “Generally, we’re finding that it wouldn’t add too much to the cost of the vehicle,” Slowik says.

H2 Green Steel is currently building what could become the world’s largest low-emissions steel factory, with a capacity of 2.5 million metric tons of steel by 2026. The company has said its product will cost 20% to 30% more than conventional steel. That would add roughly $100 to $200 more to a vehicle’s cost of materials, totaling less than 1% of the average vehicle.

In another recent report examining steel in vehicle manufacturing in Europe, experts put the additional cost at just €105, or about $115, for a vehicle made entirely with steel produced using a hydrogen-powered process in 2030. And even that slight cost bump could disappear in the future as production volumes increase and costs come down.

“The relatively high value of cars, especially of premium brands, also means they can absorb the short-term green premium of greener steel,”  Alex Keynes, cars policy manager at the European Federation for Transport and Environment, said in an email.

The same principle might hold for some other common products made with steel. One estimate from Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and deputy editor at Our World In Data, put the added cost for using green steel in a house at less than 1% of its purchase price. 

There’s a complicated web of actors in construction though, from architects to builders to contractors, which could make purchasing more expensive materials that come with a climate benefit a more complex proposition. And bigger projects that require more steel could face much larger price increases that make green steel unaffordable in those contexts, at least for now. 

Automakers committing to purchasing green steel from steelmakers could help ensure they’re able to grow quickly, and some companies have already secured such commitments. As of January 2024, H2 Green Steel had binding agreements in place for more than 40% of its steel production in the initial years of its new plant.

However, there are still challenges facing the industry, including questions about the future cost and availability of green hydrogen, Keynes says. Policy measures, from subsidies to encourage the fuel’s production to regulations, could be crucial to getting greener steel into our vehicles and beyond.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

When I get home in the evening on a sweltering summer day, the first thing I do is beeline to my window air-conditioning units and crank them up.

People across the city, county, and even the state are probably doing the same thing. And like me, they might also be firing up the TV and an air fryer to start on dinner. This simple routine may not register in your mind as anything special, but it sure does register on the electrical grid.

These early evening hours in the summer are usually the time with the highest electricity demand. And a huge chunk of that power is going into cooling systems that keep us safe and comfortable. This is such a significant challenge for utilities and grid operators that some companies are trying to bring new cooling technologies to the market that can store up energy during other times to use during peak hours, as I covered in my latest story. 

Let’s dig into why that daily maximum is a crucial data point to consider as we plan to keep the lights (and AC) on while cleaning up our energy system. 

In some places where air-conditioning is common, like parts of the US, space cooling can represent more than 70% of peak residential electrical demand on hot days, according to data from the International Energy Agency. It’s no wonder that utilities sometimes send out notices begging customers to turn down their AC during heat waves. 

All that demand can add up—just look at data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), which oversees operation of electricity generation and transmission in the state. Take, for example, Monday, August 5. The minimum amount of power demand, at around four in the morning, was roughly 25,000 megawatts. The peak, at about six in the evening, was 42,000 megawatts. There’s a lot behind that huge difference between early morning and the evening peak, but a huge chunk of it comes down to air conditioners. 

These summer evenings often represent the highest loads the grid sees all year long, since cooling systems like my window air conditioners are such energy hogs. Winter days usually see less variation, and typically there are small peaks in both the morning and evening that can be attributed to heating systems. (See more about how this varies around the US in this piece from the Energy Information Agency.)

From a climate perspective, this early evening peak in the summer is inconveniently timed, since it hits right around when solar power is ramping down for the day. It’s an example of one of the perennial challenges of some renewable electricity sources: they might be available, but they’re not always available at the right times.

Grid operators often don’t have the luxury of choosing how they meet demand—they take what they can get, even if that means turning on fossil-fuel power plants to keep the lights on. So-called peaker plants are usually the ones tapped to meet the highest demand, and they’re typically more expensive and also less efficient than other power plants.  

Batteries are starting to come to the rescue, as I covered in this newsletter a few months ago. On April 16, CAISO data showed that energy storage systems were the single biggest power source on the grid starting just after 7 p.m. local time. But batteries are far from being able to solve peak demand—with higher summer grid loads, natural-gas plants are cranked up much higher in August than they were in April, so fossil fuels are powering summer evening routines in California.

We still need a whole lot more energy storage on the grid, and other sources of low-emissions electricity like geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear to help in these high-demand hours. But there’s also a growing interest in cooling systems that can act as their own batteries. 

A growing number of technologies do just this—the goal is to charge up the systems using electricity during times when demand is low, or when renewables are readily available. Then they can provide cooling during these peak-demand hours without adding stress to the grid. Check out my full story for more on how they work, and how far along they are. 

As the planet warms and more people install AC, we might be pushing the limits of what the grid can handle.  Even if generation capacity isn’t stretched thin, extreme heat and high loads can threaten transmission equipment. 

While asking people to bump up their thermostat can be a short-term fix on the hottest days, having technologies that allow us to be more flexible in how and when we use energy could be key to staying safe and comfortable even as the summer nights keep getting hotter. 

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Related reading

Air-conditioning is something of an antihero for climate action, since it helps us adapt to a warming world but also contributes to that warming with sky-high energy demand, as I wrote about in a newsletter last year. 

Batteries could be key to meeting peak electricity demand—and they’re starting to make a dent, as I covered earlier this year. 

Another thing

A growing number of companies in China want to power fleets of bikes not with batteries, but with hydrogen. But reception has been mixed, with riders reporting trouble with range. Read more in the latest story from my colleague Zeyi Yang.

Part of the reason for the growing interest in hydrogen is concern over the safety of lithium-ion batteries. New York is trying to make e-bikes safer by deploying battery-swapping stations in the city. For all you need to know about the program, check out my May story on the topic.

Keeping up with climate  

A major renewable-energy company unveiled a first-of-its-kind robot to help install solar panels. The company claims Maximo can install panels twice as fast as humans, at half the cost. (New York Times)

The European Union got more electricity from solar and wind than fossil fuels in the first half of 2024. Reforms in permitting and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are two factors pushing the rise of renewables. (Canary Media)

Stepping into the shade can make the temperature feel dozens of degrees cooler. Cities need to look beyond trees for shade. (The Atlantic)

Check out these interactive charts detailing how each US state gets its electricity, and how it’s changed in the last two decades. Some surprises for me included South Carolina and Iowa. (New York Times)

Electric-vehicle sales in Germany are continuing their slide, dropping by 37%. The ongoing slump comes after the country ended incentives last year that supported EVs. (Bloomberg)

Wildfire smoke can have negative health effects. Protect yourself by staying indoors on days when air quality is poor, wearing a mask, and—especially—avoiding outdoor exercise. (Wired)

→ I spoke about a new study that will follow survivors of last year’s Maui fire to track their health outcomes, along with other science news of the week, on the latest episode of Science Friday. (Science Friday)

A new bill snaking its way through the US Congress could make it easier to build renewable-energy projects—and some fossil-fuel projects too. Here’s why a growing cadre of energy experts is on board with these permitting reforms despite concessions for oil and gas. (Heatmap)

Kamala Harris tapped Tim Walz as her pick for vice president. The Minnesota governor brings some climate experience to the ticket, including a law that requires utilities to reach 100% renewable energy by 2040. (Grist)

As temperatures climb on hot days, many of us are quick to crank up our fans or air conditioners. These cooling systems can be a major stress on electrical grids, which has inspired some inventors to create versions that can store energy as well as use it. 

Cooling represents 20% of global electricity demand in buildings, a share that’s expected to rise as the planet warms and more of the world turns to cooling technology. During peak demand hours, air conditioners can account for over half the total demand on the grid in some parts of the world today.

New cooling technologies that incorporate energy storage could help by charging themselves when renewable electricity is available and demand is low, and still providing cooling services when the grid is stressed.  

“We say, take the problem, and turn it into a solution,” says Yaron Ben Nun, founder and chief technology officer of Nostromo Energy.

One of Nostromo Energy’s systems, which it calls an IceBrick, is basically a massive ice cube tray. It cools down a solution made of water and glycol that’s used to freeze individual capsules filled with water. One IceBrick can be made up of thousands of these containers, which each hold about a half-gallon, or roughly two liters, of water.

Insulation keeps the capsules frozen until it’s time to use them to help cool down a building. Then the ice is used to drop the temperature of the water-glycol mixture, which in turn cools down the water that circulates in the building’s chilling system. The whole thing is designed to work as an add-on with existing equipment, Ben Nun says. 

Nostromo installed its first system in the US in 2023, at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. It has a capacity of 1.4 megawatt-hours, and it also serves the neighboring Waldorf Astoria. The installation contains 40,000 capsules, amounting to about 150,000 pounds of ice. It usually charges up for 10 to 12 hours, starting at night and finishing around midday. That leaves it ready to discharge its cooling power between the late afternoon and evening, when demand on the grid is high and solar power is dropping off as the sun sets.

Using the IceBrick increases the total electricity needed for cooling, as some energy is lost to inefficiency during the cycle. But the goal is to decrease the energy demand during peak hours, which can cut costs for building owners, Ben Nun says. The company is in the process of securing roughly $300 million in funding, in part from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to fully finance 200 of these systems in California, he adds. 

While building owners can benefit immediately from these individual energy storage solutions, the real potential to help the grid comes when systems are linked together, Ben Nun says. 

When the grid is extremely stressed, utility companies are sometimes forced to shut off electricity supply to some areas, leaving people there without power when they need it most. Technologies that can adjust to meet the grid’s needs could help reduce reliance on these rolling blackouts. 

This kind of approach isn’t new—many commercial units have large tanks that hold chilled water or another cooling fluid that can drop the temperature in a building at a moment’s notice. But Nostromo’s technology can store more energy with much less material, because it uses the freezing and melting process rather than just cooling down a liquid, Ben Nun says. 

Startup Blue Frontier has differentiated itself in this space by building cooling systems that use desiccants. These materials can suck up moisture—like the little packets of silica beads that often come with new shoes and bags. But instead of those beads, the company is using a concentrated salt solution.

Blue Frontier’s cooling units pass a stream of air over a thin layer of the desiccant, which pulls moisture out of the air. That dry air is then used in an evaporative cooling process (similar to the way sweat cools your skin).

Desiccant cooling systems can be more efficient than the traditional vapor compression air conditioners on the market today, says Daniel Betts, founder and CEO of Blue Frontier. But the system also benefits from the ability to charge up during certain times and deliver cooling at other times.

The key to the energy storage aspect of desiccant cooling is the recharging: Like sponges, desiccants can only soak up a limited amount of water before they need to be wrung out. Blue Frontier does this by causing some water in the salt solution to evaporate, typically with a heat pump, to make it more concentrated. The recharging system can run constantly, or in bursts that can be timed to match periods when electricity is cheap or when more renewable power is available.

The benefit of these energy storage technologies is that they don’t require people turn their cooling systems down or off to help relieve stress on the grid, Betts says. 

Blue Frontier is testing several systems with customers today and hopes to manufacture larger quantities soon. And while commercial buildings are getting the first installations, Betts says he’s interested in bringing the technology to homes and other buildings too.

One challenge facing the companies working on these incoming technologies is finding a way to store large amounts of energy effectively without adding too much cost, says Ankit Kalanki, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy think tank. Cooling technologies like air conditioners are already expensive, so future solutions will have to be priced competitively to make it in the market. But given the world’s growing cooling demand, there’s still a significant opportunity for new technologies to help meet those needs, he adds.

Just rethinking air conditioning won’t be enough to meet the massive increase in energy demand for cooling, which could triple between now and 2050. To both do that and cut emissions, we’ll still need significantly more renewable energy capacity as well as gigantic battery installations on the grid. But adding flexibility into air-conditioning systems could help cut the investment needed to get to a zero-carbon grid.

Cooling systems can help us cope with our warming climate, Ben Nun says, but there’s a problem with the current options: “You’ll cool yourself, but you keep on warming the globe.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Talking about money can be difficult, but it’s a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to climate tech. 

I’ve been thinking more about the financial piece of climate innovation since my colleague James Temple sat down for a chat with Mike Schroepfer, former CTO of Meta and a current climate tech investor. They talked about Schroepfer’s philanthropic work as well as his climate-tech venture firm, Gigascale Capital. (I’d highly recommend reading the full Q&A here.) 

In their conversation, Schroepfer spoke about investing in companies not solely because of their climate promises, but because they can deliver a cheaper, better product that happens to have benefits for climate action too. 

This all got me thinking about what we can expect from new technologies financially. What do they need to do to compete, and how quickly can they do so? 

Look through the portfolio of a climate-focused venture capital firm or walk around a climate-tech conference, and you’ll be struck by the creativity and straight-up brilliance of some of the proposed technologies.

But in order to survive, they need a lot more than a good idea, as my colleague David Rotman pointed out in a story from December outlining six takeaways from this century’s first boom in climate tech. Countless companies rose to stardom with shiny new ideas starting around 2006 before crashing and failing by 2013.

As David put it, there are lessons in that rise and fall for today’s boom in climate technology: “The brilliance of many new climate technologies is evident, and we desperately need them. But none of that will ensure success. Venture-backed startups will need to survive on the basis of economics and financial advantages, not good intentions.”

Often, companies looking to help address climate change with new products are competing with an established industry. These newcomers must contend with what Bill Gates has called the “green premium.”

The green premium is the cost difference between a cheaper product that increases pollution and a more expensive alternative that offers climate benefits. In order to get people on board with new technologies, we need to close that gap. 

As Gates has outlined in his writings on this topic, there are basically two ways to do this: We need to find ways to either increase the cost of polluting products or cut the cost of the version that causes little to no climate pollution.

Some policies aim to go after the first of these options—the European Union has put a price on carbon, raising the cost of fossil-fuel-based products, for example. But relying on policy can leave companies at the whims of political winds in markets like the US. 

So that leaves the other option: New technology needs to get cheaper. 

As Schroepfer explained in his chat with James, one of the focuses at his venture firm, Gigascale Capital, is picking companies that can compete on economics or offer other benefits to customers. As he put it, a company should basically be saying: “Hey, this is a better product. [whispers] By the way, it’s better for the environment.”

It’s unrealistic to expect companies to have better, cheaper products right out of the gate, Schroepfer acknowledges. But he says that the team is looking for companies that can—over the course of a relatively short, roughly five-to-10-year period—grow to compete on cost, or even gain a cost advantage over the alternatives.

Schroepfer points to batteries and solar power as examples of technologies that are competitive today. When it’s available, electricity produced with solar panels is the cheapest on the planet. Batteries are 90% less expensive than they were just 15 years ago.

But these cases reveal the tricky thing about the green premium: Many new technologies can eventually make up the gap, but it can take much longer than businesses and investors are willing to wait. Solar panels and lithium-ion batteries were available commercially in the 1990s, but it’s taken until now to get to the point where they’re cheap and widespread.

Some technologies just getting started today could be the batteries and solar power of the 2040s, if we’re willing to invest the time and money to get them there. And I already see a few instances where people are willing to pay more for climate-friendly products today, in part because of hopes for their future.  

One example that comes to mind is low-emissions steel. H2 Green Steel, a Swedish company working to make steel without fossil fuels, says it has customers who have agreed to pay 20% to 30% more for its products than metal made with fossil fuels. But that’s just the price today: Some reports predict that these technologies will be able to compete on cost by 2040 or 2050. 

Most new technologies designed to address climate change will need to make a case for themselves in the market. The question for the rest of us: How much support and time are we willing to put in to give them the best shot of getting there?

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Related reading

For more on what the former Meta CTO has been up to in climate, read the full Q&A here. There’s a whole lot more to unpack, including work on glacier stabilization, ocean-based carbon removal, and even solar geoengineering. 

For more on the lessons that companies can take away from the first cleantech boom, give this story from my colleague David Rotman a read.

Another thing

The US Department of Energy is putting $33 million into nine concentrating solar projects, as my colleague James Temple reported exclusively last week. 

Concentrating solar power uses mirrors to direct sunlight, which heats up some target material. It’s not a new technology, and the DOE has been funding efforts to get it going since the 1970s. But it could be useful in industries from food and beverages to low-carbon fuels. Read the full story here. 

Keeping up with climate  

Western battery startups could be in big trouble. While new chemistries and alternative architectures attracted a lot of investor attention a few years ago, the companies are now facing the reality of competing with massive existing manufacturers. (The Information)

California’s largest wildfire of the year has burned well over 300,000 acres so far. Climate change has helped create the conditions that supercharge blazes. (Inside Climate News)

The UAE has been trying to juice up rainfall with high-tech cloud seeding operations. But the whole thing may be more about the show than the science—check out this great deep dive for more. (Wired)

Congestion pricing plans—like the one recently proposed and then abandoned in New York City—can be unpopular with voters. Yet people generally come around once they start to see the benefits. Here’s an in-depth look at how attitudes toward these plans change over time. (Grist)

Air New Zealand backed down from a goal to cut its emissions nearly 30% by the end of the decade. The first major airline to walk back such a promise, the company points to a lack of supply for alternative fuels, as well as delays in new aircraft deliveries. (BBC)

Global methane emissions are climbing at the quickest pace in decades. The powerful greenhouse gas is responsible for over half the warming we’ve experienced so far. (The Guardian) 

Demand for air conditioning is swelling in Africa. But the industry isn’t well regulated, and some residents are struggling to get reliable systems and keep harmful refrigerant gases from leaking. (Associated Press)

Southeast Asia is home to a fleet of relatively new coal power plants. Pulling these facilities off the grid early could be a major step to cutting emissions from global electricity production. (Cipher News)

Correction: an earlier version of this story misstated the name of Mike Schroepfer’s firm. It is Gigascale Capital.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Truckers have to transport massive loads long distances, every single day, under intense time pressure—and they rely on the semi-trucks they drive to get the job done. Their diesel engines spew not only greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, but also nitrogen oxide, which can be extremely harmful for human health.

Cleaning up trucking, especially the biggest trucks, presents a massive challenge. That’s why some companies are trying to ease the industry into change. For my most recent story, I took a look at Range Energy, a startup that’s adding batteries to the trailers of semi-trucks. If the electrified trailers are attached to diesel trucks, they can improve the fuel economy. If they’re added to zero-emissions vehicles powered by batteries or hydrogen, they could boost range and efficiency. 

During my reporting, I learned more about what’s holding back progress in trucking and how experts are thinking about a few different technologies that could help.

The entire transportation sector is slowly shifting toward electrification: EVs are hitting the road in increasing numbers, making up 18% of sales of new passenger vehicles in 2023. 

Trucks may very well follow suit—nearly 350 models of zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty trucks are already available worldwide, according to data from CALSTART. “I do see a lot of strength and demand in the battery electric space in particular,” says Stephanie Ly, senior manager for e-mobility strategy and manufacturing engagement at the World Resources Institute.

But battery-powered trucks will pose a few major challenges as they take to the roads. First, and perhaps most crucially, is their cost. Battery-powered trucks, especially big models like semi-trucks, will be significantly more expensive than diesel versions today.

There may be good news on this front: When you consider the cost of refueling and maintenance, it’s looking like electric trucks could soon compete with diesel. By 2030, the total cost of ownership of a battery electric long-haul truck will likely be lower than that of a diesel one in the US, according to a 2023 report from the International Council on Clean Transportation. The report looked at a number of states including California, Georgia, and New York, and found that the relatively high upfront cost for electric trucks are balanced out by lower operating expenses. 

Another significant challenge for battery-powered trucking is weight: The larger the vehicle, the bigger the battery. That could be a problem given current regulations, which typically limit the weight of a rig both for safety reasons and to prevent wear and tear on roads (in the US, it’s 80,000 pounds). Operators tend to want to maximize the amount of goods they can carry in each load, so the added weight of a battery might not be welcome.

Finally, there’s the question of how far trucks can go, and how often they’ll need to stop. Time is money for truck drivers and fleet operators. Batteries will need to pack more energy into a smaller space so that trucks can have a long enough range to run their routes. Charging is another huge piece here—if drivers do need to stop to charge their trucks, they’ll need much more powerful chargers to enable them to top off quickly. That could present challenges for the grid, and operators might need to upgrade infrastructure in certain places to allow the huge amounts of power that would be needed for fast charging of massive batteries. 

All these challenges for battery electric trucks add up. “What companies are really looking for is something they can swap out,” says Thomas Walker, transportation technology manager at the Clean Air Task Force. And right now, he says, we’re just not quite in a spot where batteries are a clean and obvious switch.

That’s why some experts say we should keep our options open when it comes to technologies for future heavy-duty trucks, and that includes hydrogen. 

Batteries are currently beating out hydrogen in the race to clean up transportation, as I covered in a story earlier this year. For most vehicles and most people, batteries simply make more sense than hydrogen, for reasons that include everything from available infrastructure to fueling cost. 

But heavy-duty trucks are a different beast: Heavier vehicles, bigger batteries, higher power charging, and longer distances might tip the balance in favor of hydrogen. (There are some big “ifs” here, including whether hydrogen prices will get low enough to make hydrogen-powered vehicles economical.) 

For a sector as tough to decarbonize as heavy-duty trucking, we need all the help we can get. As Walker puts it, “It’s key that you start off with a lot of options and then narrow it down, rather than trying to pick which one’s going to win, because we really don’t know.”

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Related reading

To learn more about Range Energy and how its electrified trailers could help transform trucking in the near future, check out my latest story here. 

Hydrogen is losing the race to power cleaner cars, but heavy-duty trucks might represent a glimmer of hope for the technology. Dig into why in my story from earlier this year. 

Getting the grid ready for fleets of electric trucks is going to be a big challenge. But for some short-distance vehicles in certain areas, we may actually be good to go already, as I reported in 2021. 

Two more things

Spotting wildfires early and keeping track of them can be tough. Now one company wants to monitor blazes using high-altitude balloons. Next month in Colorado, Urban Sky is deploying balloons that are about as big as vans, and they’ll be keeping watch using much finer resolution than what’s possible with satellites without a human pilot. Read more about fire-tracking balloons in this story from Sarah Scoles. 

A new forecasting model attempts to marry conventional techniques with AI to better predict the weather. The model from Google uses physics to work out larger atmospheric forces, then tags in AI for the smaller stuff. Check out the details in the latest from my colleague James O’Donnell. 

Keeping up with climate  

Small rocky nodules in the deep sea might be a previously undiscovered source of oxygen. They contain metals such as lithium and are a potential target for deep-sea mining efforts. (Nature)

→ Polymetallic nodules are roughly the size and shape of potatoes, and they may be the future of mining for renewable energy. (MIT Technology Review)

A 350-foot-long blade from a wind turbine off the coast of Massachusetts broke off last week, and hunks of fiberglass have been washing up on local beaches. The incident is a setback for a struggling offshore wind industry, and we’re still not entirely sure what happened. (Heatmap News)

A new report shows that low-emissions steel- and iron-making processes are on the rise. But coal-powered operations are still growing too, threatening progress in the industry. (Canary Media)

Sunday, July 21, was likely the world’s hottest day in recorded history (so far). It edged out a record set just last year. (The Guardian)

Plastic forks, cups, and single-use packages are sometimes stamped with nice-sounding labels like “compostable,” “biodegradable,” or just “Earth-friendly.” But that doesn’t mean you can stick the items in your backyard compost pile—these marketing terms are basically the Wild West. (Washington Post)

While EVs are indisputably better than gas-powered cars in terms of climate emissions, they are heavier, meaning they wear through tires faster. The resulting particulate pollution presents a new challenge, one a startup company is trying to address with new tires designed for electric vehicles. (Canary Media)

Public fast chargers are popping up nearly everywhere in the US—at this pace, they’ll outnumber gas stations by 2030. And deployment is only expected to speed up. (Bloomberg)

Semi-trucks move over 11 billion tons of freight in the US each year, spewing greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollutants along the highways as they go.   

Shifting these and other heavy-duty trucks to zero-emissions technologies will be a challenge—even more so than for smaller vehicles, since larger vehicles require bigger batteries and more powerful chargers. One company thinks the key to progress is hiding behind rigs inside its trailers.

Range Energy is building battery-powered trailers that can help pull their own weight. By adding batteries to trailers, the company says, it can make a sizable cut in emissions, even while using existing diesel vehicles. The trailers could also be used with zero-emissions technologies like hydrogen- or battery-powered trucks to extend their range and efficiency as they hit the roads.

While there’s a growing wave of innovation in zero-emissions trucking, few companies have considered looking at trailers, says Ali Javidan, founder and CEO of Range Energy. “Essentially, it’s still just a dumb box on wheels,” Javidan says.

Range Energy, founded in 2021, is looking to make trailers smarter, adding batteries and a motor. The newest version of the company’s product incorporates between 200 and 300 kilowatt-hours’ worth of batteries. That’s more than what might be inside a passenger electric vehicle—battery packs in SUVs and pickups can be up to 100 kWh. But it’s significantly less than the batteries needed to power an entirely electric semi-truck, currently estimated around 800 kWh or more.  

In Range’s trailers, the battery pack and the systems that manage it are connected to an e-axle at the rear, which delivers the power and helps move the trailer. The whole assembly is connected to the truck by the kingpin, or hitch, which helps sense the truck’s movement and controls how the trailer responds. The goal isn’t to drive the trailer from the back, Javidan says, but to help make the trailer feel weightless to the truck pulling it. 

Adding an electric trailer onto a diesel truck turns the rig into something of a hybrid vehicle. The result can significantly improve both greenhouse-gas emissions and other pollution, like nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, Javidan says.

The company tested out an earlier version of its trailer that included a smaller battery of 100 kWh on a route with a mix of both flat highway and stop-and-go urban conditions. The trailer was able to improve gas mileage by about 36% over the whole route. That translates to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by around a quarter.

Range’s newer trailers with larger batteries should improve gas mileage even more, and in certain conditions they could double the fuel economy, cutting emissions by up to half, Javidan says. 

While semi-trucks only make up about 5% of vehicles on the road, they’re responsible for about a quarter of greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation. Finding options to help clean up emissions from heavy-duty trucks will be a major piece of cleaning up the transportation sector while making sure we have the products we need and use every day. 

Range trailers can also significantly improve emissions of NOx pollutants, which are harmful for human health. In fact, they can have an outsize impact, since NOx emissions tend to be highest during specific operating conditions like when an engine is shifting. Range’s trailers are able to ramp their contribution up when it’s most needed, so the newest models could cut NOx emissions by up to 70%, Javidan says.

As they hit the roads, battery-powered trailers might face some of the same challenges that fully electrified rigs are running into. 

In the US, trucks can’t be heavier than 80,000 pounds (40 US tons). Zero-emissions vehicles get a small buffer of an additional 2,000-pound allowance, but battery-powered rigs can run something like 5,000 pounds heavier than their diesel counterparts. That’s a major concern for operators, since the amount they can haul can be limited by those restrictions. 

However, many loads reach the volume limits of a trailer before hitting the weight limit. This is called “cubing out” in the industry, and it’s common when hauling packages, for example. (Think of the last package you ordered from Amazon—if it was a box that had one or two items inside and a whole lot of air, you get the picture.) Those are the loads Range trailers will likely be most useful for at first, Javidan says. 

Another concern is that electric trailers will rely on the same charging infrastructure that’s in short supply for trucks today, says Stephanie Ly, a researcher at the World Resources Institute. 

Large trucks could take hours to charge even on the fastest chargers available today—a problem for drivers, who often face pressure to complete deliveries quickly. And installing more powerful chargers could require significant planning and investment from utilities. 

But trailers tend to have more downtime than tractors, because many companies own more trailers than trucks. And a 200-kWh battery would take less than an hour to charge on one of the fast chargers commonly available today, so the problem might be more surmountable than it is for fully electric trucks. 

Range Energy has one of its newest trailers running pilot tests in California and will launch several more this year, Javidan says. Then, the company plans to start building the next batch, which it will begin delivering to customers in early 2025.

Javidan declined to share how much the company charges for each of its trailers but says an up-front investment in one could pay for itself through fuel savings in just five or six years on average. And if trailers are driven for more miles, or in places where charging is cheap or fuel is particularly expensive, that payoff could be even faster, a potentially appealing prospect for companies with large fleets. 

Still, getting fleet operators on board with new technologies may be a challenge—one that will be crucial to improving the climate results from trucking, says Thomas Walker, transportation manager at the Clean Air Task Force. 

“It’s a multi-segmented problem,” Walker says. “It’s not just the vehicle. It’s not just the grid. It’s all of it.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Corporate climate claims can be confusing—and sometimes entirely unintuitive. 

Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag, but one bit of news in particular made me prick up my ears. Google’s emissions have gone up, and the company stopped claiming to be “net zero” (we’ll dig into this term more in a moment). Sounds bad, right? But in fact, one might argue that Google’s apparent backslide might actually represent progress for climate action. 

My colleague James Temple dug into this news, along with the recent Amazon announcement, for a story this week. Let’s take a sneak peek at what he found and untangle why corporate climate efforts can be so tricky to wrap your head around. 

To make sense of these recent announcements, the most important phrase to understand is “net-zero emissions.” 

Companies produce greenhouse-gas emissions by making products, transporting them around, or just using electricity. Some corporate leaders may want to reduce those emissions so they can be a smaller part of the climate-change problem (or brag about their progress). Net-zero emissions refers to the point at which the emissions a company produces are canceled out by those it eliminates. But very different paths can all lead to that point. 

One way to get rid of emissions is to take actions to reduce them in your operations. Imagine, for example, Amazon replacing its delivery trucks with EVs or building solar panels on warehouses. 

This sort of direct action tends to be hard and expensive, and it’s probably impossible for any company to totally wipe out all its emissions right now, given that so much of our economy still relies on fossil fuels. So to reach net zero, many companies choose to disappear their emissions with math instead. 

A company might buy carbon credits or renewable-energy credits, essentially paying someone to make up for its own climate impact. That might mean giving a nonprofit money to plant some trees, which suck up and store carbon, or funneling funds to developers and claiming that more renewables projects will get built as a result. 

Not all credits are all bad—but often, carbon offsets and renewable-energy credits reflect big claims with little to back them up. And if companies are going after a net-zero label for their business, they may be incentivized to buy cheap credits, even if they don’t actually deliver on claims. 

As James puts it in his story, “Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.”

This sort of issue is why I tend to be suspicious of companies that claim to have already achieved net-zero emissions or 100% renewable energy. Cleaning up emissions is hard, and if you’ve already claimed victory, I’d say the odds are good that you’re taking an easy way out. 

Which brings us to Google’s news. Google has claimed that its operations have operated with net-zero emissions since 2007. Now it’s not claiming that anymore—not really because it suddenly decided to take huge steps back in how it operates, but because it’s stopped buying carbon offsets on a massive scale. Instead, it’s focusing on investing in other ways to tackle emissions.

So what’s the next step for big companies looking to have a material impact on climate action? James has us covered again: In a 2022 story, he laid out six potential ways to rethink corporate climate goals. 

Instead of buying up credits, companies can instead put that money toward investing in permanent carbon removal. Developing more reliable methods of pulling climate pollution out of the atmosphere and locking it away might be more expensive, but investing in those efforts will help the market mature and support companies that need commitments. 

Companies can also contribute money to research and development for areas that are difficult to decarbonize—think aviation, shipping, steel, and cement. Those sectors touch basically every industry, so helping them make progress could be a worthy use of dollars. 

If there’s one takeaway in this tangle of news, I’d say that we could all ask more questions and dig a little deeper into claims from big corporations. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  

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Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read more about Big Tech climate action, including why Amazon’s renewable-energy claims might be more complicated than they appear at first glance, in James’s latest story.

And here’s his piece on six ways that we can rethink net-zero climate plans. 

For more on how the climate “solution” of carbon offsets might be adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, read this 2021 deep dive.  

Another thing

A small group of K-pop fans is working to clean up music streaming. Streaming can consume a lot of computing power, and all that energy used in data centers supporting it can mean big-time emissions.

A group called Kpop4planet put pressure on a streaming service to commit to using 100% renewables for its data centers by 2030. And the fans’ organizing paid off, because the service agreed. 

Read more about the power of K-pop fans in this latest story from my colleague Zeyi Yang. 

Keeping up with climate  

It’s been mixed news this year so far for the EV market in the US. Overall sales are up, but some automakers are seeing deliveries stall. Also notable: Tesla has historically dominated, but it just dropped below 50% of the market for the first time. (Inside Climate News)

New materials that help tackle humidity could make air-conditioning a lot more efficient. Several companies are trying to bring machines based on these desiccant materials to the market. (Wired)

→ I wrote last year about how these moisture-sucking materials could help us beat the heat. (MIT Technology Review)

Electric vehicles are associated with lower emissions over their lifetimes than gas-powered cars, but they don’t start out that way, largely because of the climate cost of building their batteries. This calculator estimates how far you need to drive for EVs to break even with gas vehicles. (PNAS)

Nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems is selling its high-tech magnets now. The company is still working toward flipping on its fusion reactor. (TechCrunch)

The near-term future of EVs might include gas tanks, since some automakers are building electric vehicles that include gas-powered generators. The difference between these and plug-in hybrids is subtle, but basically these would have simpler guts inside. They could help bring more drivers onto team electric. (Heatmap News)

San Francisco launched a new ferry that runs entirely on hydrogen fuel cells. It’s the first such commercial passenger ferry in the world. One challenge could be securing a reliable source of low-emissions hydrogen. (Canary Media)

File this under weird effects of climate change: Melting ice sheets are making days longer. Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica makes the Earth wider, slowing the planet’s rotation. It’s only on the scale of about a millisecond per century, but it could be enough to throw off precise timekeeping. (The Guardian)

Rules around tax credits for hydrogen fuel were proposed to ensure that the money went to projects that help the climate. Now those rules seem to be in trouble. (Heatmap News)

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

Look on the bottom of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and you might find a logo there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop shaped like a triangle. Sometimes called the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to suggest it’s recyclable. 

Those little arrows imply a nice story, painting a picture of a world where the material will be recycled into a new bottle or some such product, maybe forming an endless loop of reuse. But the reality of plastics recycling today doesn’t match up to that idea. Only about 10% of the plastic ever made has been recycled; the vast majority winds up in landfills or in the environment. 

Researchers have been working to address the problem by coming up with new recycling methods, sometimes called advanced, or chemical, recycling. My colleague Sarah Ward recently wrote about one new study where researchers used a chemical process to recycle mixed-fiber clothing containing polyester, a common plastic. 

The story shows why these new technologies are so appealing in theory, and just how far we would need to go for them to fix the massive problem we’ve created. 

One major challenge for traditional recycling is that it requires careful sorting. That’s possible (if difficult) for some situations—humans or machines can separate milk jugs from soda bottles from takeout containers. But when it comes to other products, it becomes nearly impossible to sort out their components. 

Take clothing, for instance. Less than 1% of clothing is recycled, and part of the reason is that much of it is a mixture of different materials, often including synthetic fibers as well as natural ones. You might be wearing a shirt made of a cotton-polyester blend right now, and your swimsuit probably contains nylon and elastane. My current crochet project uses yarn that’s a blend of wool and acrylic. 

It’s impossible to manually or mechanically pick out the different materials in a fabric the way you can by sorting your kitchen recycling, so researchers are exploring new methods using chemistry. 

In the study Sarah wrote about, scientists demonstrated a process that can recycle a fabric made from a blend of cotton and polyester. It uses a solvent to break the chemical bonds in polyester in around 15 minutes, leaving other materials mostly intact. 

If this could work quickly and at large scale, it might someday allow facilities to dissolve polyester from blended textiles, separating it from other fibers and in theory allowing each component to be reused in future products. 

But there are a few challenges with this process that I see a lot in recycling methods. First, reaching a large industrial scale would be difficult—as one researcher that Sarah spoke to pointed out, the solvent used in the process is expensive and tough to recover after it’s used.  

Recycling methods also often wind up degrading the product in some way, a tricky problem to solve. This is a major drawback to traditional mechanical recycling as well—often, recycled plastic isn’t quite as strong or durable as the fresh stuff. In the case of this study, the problem isn’t actually with the plastic, but with the other materials that researchers are trying to preserve.

The beginning of the textile recycling process involves shredding the clothing into fine pieces to allow the chemicals to seep in and do their work breaking down the plastic. That chops up the cotton fibers too, rendering them too short to be spun into new yarn. So instead of a new T-shirt, the cotton from this process might be broken down and used as something else, like biofuel. 

There’s potential for future improvement—the researchers tried to change up their method to disassemble the fabrics in a way that would preserve longer cotton fibers, but the reported research suggests it doesn’t work well with the chemical process so far. 

This story got me thinking about a recent feature from ProPublica, where Lisa Song took a look at the reality of commercial advanced recycling today. She focused on pyrolysis, which uses heat to break down plastic into its building blocks. As she outlines in the story, while the industry pitches these new methods as a solution to our plastics crisis, the reality of the technology today is far from the ideal we imagine. 

Most new recycling methods are still in development, and it’s really difficult to recover useful materials at high rates in a way that makes it possible to use them again. Doing all that at a scale large enough to even make a dent in our plastics problem is a massive challenge. 

Just something to keep in mind the next time you see those little arrows. 

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Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Read Sarah’s full story on efforts to recycle mixed textiles here. 

I wrote about several other efforts to recycle mixtures of plastic using chemistry in this piece from 2022. 

For a full account on the state of the hard problem that is the plastics crisis, check out this feature story. 

Keeping up with climate  

The world has been 1.5 °C hotter than preindustrial temperatures for each of the last 12 months, according to new data. We still haven’t technically passed the 1.5 °C limit set out by international climate treaties, since those consider the average temperature over many years. (The Guardian)

Google has stopped claiming to be carbon neutral, ceasing purchases of carbon offsets to balance its emissions. The company says the plan is to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, though its emissions are actually up by nearly 50% since 2019. (Bloomberg)

→ Big tech companies are expecting emissions to tick up in part because of the explosion of AI, which is an energy hog. (MIT Technology Review)

A small school district in Nebraska got an electric bus, paid for by federal funding. The vehicle quickly became a symbol for the cultural tensions brought on by shifting technology. (New York Times)

Hurricane Beryl hit the Texas coast this week and did damage across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. While meteorologists had a good idea of where it would go, better forecasting hasn’t stopped hurricane damage from increasing. (E&E News)

→ Here’s what we know about hurricanes and climate change. (MIT Technology Review)

Earlier this year, the Indian government stopped a popular EV subsidy. Some in the industry say that short-lived subsidies can hamper the growth of electrification. (Rest of World)

The US is about to get its first solar-covered canal. Covering the Arizona waterway with solar panels will provide a new low-emissions energy source on tribal land. (Canary Media)

Electricity prices in the US are up almost 20% since early 2021. But some states that have built the most clean energy have lower rate increases overall. (Latitude Media)