GreenTech

Hello, climate tech readers! Even without a milestone fusion announcement this week, plenty happened in the climate tech world that’s worth catching up on. From massive solar investments to plant-based steaks and small, modular batteries to back up your home, there’s something for everyone. Let’s dive in. Image Credits: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg / Getty Images Last

Sealed built a business around predicting energy use and getting homeowners to ditch fossil fuels. So, naturally, the company’s first acquisition is a startup that tracks energy on a granular level. Sealed did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said in a statement that scooping up Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense would help it “cut

The Inflation Reduction Act has clearly kickstarted investment in U.S. clean energy manufacturing. Last year, automakers and battery manufacturers announced that they’d spend tens of billions of dollars to ramp up EV production in the U.S. Now it’s solar’s turn. Today, Korean solar manufacturer Hanwha Qcells announced that it’ll spend $2.5 billion to build a

I can’t get it out of my head: A honkingly big Caterpillar sign that read, “JOIN US AS WE BUILD A BETTER WORLD.” The digital recruitment billboard at CES 2023 followed promos for an autonomous compactor and excavator, and proceeded another callout: “CHECK OUT OUR BIG AUTONOMOUS TRUCK ⬇.” I did, and boy was it

Gas stoves might be on the chopping block soon. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering banning the appliances in an effort to reduce harmful indoor air pollution, according to a tweet by commissioner Rich Trumka Jr. and comments he gave to Bloomberg. “This is a hidden hazard,” Trumka told the news organization. “Any

If you’ve been seeing a slew of new alternative meat and animal products popping up in your grocery store, Lisa Feria is at least partially to thank. Feria has spent the last seven years investing in startups in the sector. She and her partners at Stray Dog Capital have invested in over 40 companies, from

As we were roaming the halls of CES in Las Vegas, one product category stood out across the board; there’s a lot of focus on portable (and less portable) power storage. These are more than your average charge-your-phone-once-or-twice battery packs, ranging from simple small power packs, to sophisticated power stations that can connect to portable

Toyota has been taking a beating in the press these days. The new Prius, arguably the company’s standard bearer, has been damned with faint praise. One review called it “the best CD player in a download world.” Beyond that, the company has been called out for lobbying against California’s right to set emissions standards and

Today at CES 2023, a great-big tech conference in Vegas, Mercedes-Benz announced its answer to range anxiety and the great electric-vehicle charger shortage. Following the likes of Tesla and GM, the German automaker shared a plan to develop a 10,000-charger network by 2030, starting with the U.S. and Canada, and later expanding into China, Europe

Unless you live in a natural fibers-only household, your laundry is likely exacerbating an environmental crisis with each wash. The terrible microplastics mess we’re making — thanks in great part to the rise of synthetic clothing — apparently inspired Samsung to develop some new washing machine tech, which it called a “breakthrough in the fight

Food waste and food packaging take up a significant portion of the world’s landfills. AlterPacks is tackling both issues with technology that turns food waste into takeout boxes and other containers. The Singapore-based startup has raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by Plug and Play APAC and Seed Capital, with participation from Earth Venture

Downturn be damned — last month, Union Square Ventures announced that it had raised a $200 million climate fund less than two years after raising its first climate fund. The new fund is certain to add fuel to climate tech as 2023 kicks off after a banner 2022. Nine months ago, it seemed unlikely that

Shared electric scooters came onto the scene five years ago with a promising vision of getting people out of cars and onto greener modes of transportation. Yet despite billions in VC money and plenty of hype, the future that micromobility companies promised still hasn’t quite arrived. In cities like Paris, most people aren’t replacing car

The biggest news last week wasn’t another of Elon Musk’s Twitter tantrums, but the announcement that scientists had finally cracked one of fusion power’s biggest challenges — successfully getting more energy out of a controlled fusion reaction than they had put in. Fusion power, which has always seemed like science fiction and just about as

The conversation around widespread electric vehicle adoption has been inherently linked with charging: Are the chargers plentiful? Will they charge my car fast enough? Are they plugged into a grid that’s not entirely run by coal? Billions of dollars have gone into developing batteries that can handle fast charges as well as chargers that can

When you think of the biggest tech stories of the year, you probably think of something like Elon Musk buying Twitter, former crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX filing for bankruptcy, all the people who lost their life savings when UST imploded or the tens of thousands of tech workers who got laid off. It was

In horse racing, the most reliable tips about which horse will likely win often come from the stable boys, since they’re the ones closest to the source. So when we thought about the best ways to find out what’s happening in a particular sector, we figured why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth

Climate became an increasingly popular topic in 2021, perhaps best showcased in pieces like this interview with Eric Dean Wilson on why air conditioning, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, is killing the 21st, which we featured in our Best of TechCrunch 2021 list. But this year came in waves — heat

With 2022 in retreat, investors have made no secret that they’re looking for safe investments. In a challenging market with higher interest rates, that’s no surprise, but what might raise eyebrows is where investors think those quality investments lie. Increasingly, it’s in climate tech. The sector had a crazy 2021, and while 2022 may not

Aerones, a robotics startup that scrubs and inspects wind turbines so humans don’t have to, secured $38.9 million in fresh funding this month from dozens of undisclosed investors, TechCrunch has learned. Wind turbines produce clean energy, but their towers tend to leak oil, which can corrode blades, increase wind resistance and pollute the ground below.

In case anyone asks, 2022 was all about energy — natural gas, oil, renewables, all of it. Natural gas prices surged early as Vladimir Putin’s poorly thought-out decision to invade Ukraine slashed gas deliveries to Europe. That, coupled with high oil prices, substantially contributed to near-record-setting inflation that forced central bankers to raise interest rates.

Solid Power, one of the leaders in the race to commercialize all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries, has been stumbling of late. But a new deal with BMW might give it the boost it needs. After going public via SPAC in late 2021, Solid Power’s share price followed the all-too-familiar SPAC bump then bust, trading for much of

Toyota president Akio Toyoda has made it no secret that he really, really dislikes electric vehicles. This weekend, he offered this latest installment: “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority,” Toyoda told reporters in Thailand, according to The Wall Street Journal. “That silent majority is wondering whether EVs are really OK

The market for lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cell-cultured meat, is expected to reach $1.99 billion by 2035, growing at an annual rate of 21.4%. Beef is poised to be the dominant segment. The market got a boost last month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave what amounts to a safety blessing

Sun King, a provider of off-grid solar energy products in Africa and Asia, has secured a $70 million equity investment led by LeapFrog Investments. It’s an extension of the $260 million Series D round the solar company announced this April, which was led by BeyondNetZero, the climate investing venture of General Atlantic and M&G Investments’

Elon Musk’s plan to “operate as a giant distributed utility” is creeping toward reality. Tesla first piloted a “virtual power plant” in California, inviting Powerwall home battery owners to sell electricity back to the grid at peak times to mitigate brownouts. Soon after, the automaker expanded the effort into Australia and Japan, and next it’s

Agriculture produces what might be some of the hardest planet-warming carbon emissions to eliminate. People need to eat, and right now, the way we make food generates a lot of greenhouse gases — about a third of the total created by human activity. There are some simple ways to reduce it, like eating less meat,

It’s official: A U.S. Department of Energy lab produced a controlled nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed. On December 5, just after 1:03 a.m. PT, 192 lasers at the National Ignition Facility converged on a small gold cylinder that contained a tiny bead of fuel composed of two isotopes of hydrogen,

It’s commonly held that solar panels need as much sun as they can get. That’s true, but only up to a point, as heat and other hazards can become a serious problem beyond that point, and solar panels can degrade pretty quickly. SmartHelio wants to help prevent that from happening. The startup uses AI tech

It may seem like SaaS is everywhere, but there’s one sector that’s been slow to adopt it — manufacturing. By itself, manufacturing drives almost 11% of the U.S. economy, contributing $2.77 trillion to GDP as of Q2 2022. All that activity also uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of greenhouse gasses. But