GreenTech

Car rental company Sixt said Tuesday it intends to purchase more than 100,000 electric vehicles from Chinese automaker BYD for its European fleet between now and 2028. Sixt has initially only committed to buying “several thousand” EVs, the first of which will be delivered this year, the company said in a statement. Sixt said it

Google is spinning up a new, online-only startup accelerator centered around the elusive circular economy. The effort is Google’s latest to help environmentally focused startups grow, while potentially hooking them on its cloud products in the process. In the broadest of strokes, the circular economy represents a colossal shift in how humanity makes and uses stuff.

For decades, the answer to when fusion power would arrive was like the punchline to an oft-repeated joke — it was always 10 or 20 years away. Now, it might actually be on the cusp of commercialization. No, really. If that refrain sounds all too familiar, it’s because, well, something like that was written 10

Virtual reality (VR) has struggled to transition too far beyond gaming circles and specific industry use cases such as medical training, but with the burgeoning metaverse movement championed by tech heavyweights such as Meta, there has been a renewed hope (and hype) around the promise that virtual worlds bring. Just yesterday, Los Angeles-based AmazeVR announced

Paul Huelskamp and Alex Meek were hiking near Mount Tamalpais in Marin County a few years ago when the peaceful quiet of the woods began to give way to the clatter of a diesel generator. When they came upon it, they saw it “spewing black smoke” into the otherwise cool, crisp air, Huelskamp recalled. The

All new passenger cars, pickup trucks and SUVs sold in New York state must be zero emissions by 2035, Governor Kathy Hochul announced Thursday. “By revving up our clean transportation transition and making major investments to make EVs more accessible, we’re supercharging our fight against climate change,” Hochul tweeted. NEW: All new vehicles sold in

Anyone who has followed global news events of late will have noticed the devastating floods that have engulfed pretty much every corner of the world, from the U.S. and Europe, to Africa, Australia, and Asia, where India and Pakistan have been hit by some of their worst floods in recent memory. By pretty much all

Google is adding several new sustainability features for Search, the company announced today at its Search On event. The search giant will start showing the annual fuel cost for cars in search results to help people who are in the market for a new car. Google will also show emissions estimates for cars, so you

Eviation’s Alice electric aircraft took off for the first time yesterday, teasing a future in which regional flights of hundreds of miles will be done with zero emissions and a lot less noise. It’s still a ways off, but today’s demonstration shows it’s at least just a matter of time and money. The Alice is

E-commerce roll-up startup Flora emerged from stealth mode with $9 million in seed funding from an investor group that included Lux Capital, Correlation Ventures, Climate Capital and Gokul Rajaram. Also known as an aggregator, the company acquires and grows brands — in Flora’s case, focused on offering sustainable products and reducing carbon emissions. Co-founders and

Now that the U.S. has finally committed to electrifying cars and trucks, there’s been a lot of handwringing over where they’ll charge. The Biden administration just approved all 50 states’ plans for where to install DC fast chargers, and while those plans will help fill massive infrastructure gaps, those chargers won’t be nearly enough to

China’s electric vehicle upstart Nio has joined Tesla in sourcing raw materials directly from mines rather than its own battery suppliers as soaring prices of lithium, a critical component of EV batteries, hurt manufacturers’ supply chain stability and bottom lines. Lithium carbonate prices in China hit a record 501,500 yuan/tonne in September, tripling the number

In a world of climate change-fueled food shortages, insect-based proteins are being viewed as an increasingly valuable potential alternative food service. Livin Farms has put insect larvae at the center of its own alternative protein play. The Vienna-based firm produces Hive Pro, a modular system designed to automate the process of rearing and processing black

With a month of hindsight, we’re getting a better picture of what the Inflation Reduction Act will mean for the American economy and the climate tech sector itself. The new law caught many by surprise, both in the climate tech space and elsewhere. Few had thought sweeping climate legislation was possible. The final bill is

Starting next year, Amazon plans to pump electrofuels into some of its diesel delivery vans in a deal with Infinium. Amazon didn’t say what it’s paying, nor for how much synthetic fuel, but the conglomerate intends to cover “approximately 5 million miles of travel per year” using e-fuels, it said in a statement. It’s not

If my PR inbox is anything to go by (trust me, it is), companies, and especially stock-market listed megacorps, are scrambling to out-green each other with tales of how the planet will be taking breaths of relief because of what glorious stewardship they provide for our slowly heating planet. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals

IndieBio (part of SOSV) is a biotech investor and accelerator that has started shifting more and more toward climate tech in recent years. The current cohort is batch 13, for fall 2022, and we’ve taken a closer look at the five that stood out the most. IndieBio tells us that this batch is going big

Making sneakers is a dirty business; one that’s heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Shoe companies have experimented with various ways to reduce their footprints, from uppers made of recycled plastic to midsoles made of foam derived from sugarcane. Now, there’s a new approach — upcycling. Materials startup Novoloop and running-shoe manufacturer On will announce a

RiverSouth is called the smartest building in North America and features a wild array of technology for tenants, business owners and real estate managers. Kode OS underpins the building’s systems, a real estate platform developed by the Detroit-based startup, Kode Labs. The platform ingests data from any number of systems and provides users with a

You can’t cut what you can’t measure. For many companies, carbon emissions are something of a black box. Energy goes in, products and emissions come out. The first two are simple enough to monitor and understand, but without an expert on hand, the emissions profile is harder to pin down. “If people can’t access this

In the early hours on Monday, a Tesla Megapack battery caught fire at a key California power storage facility, the state’s largest utility said in a statement to TechCrunch. According to PG&E, the utility “became aware of a fire in one Tesla Megapack at its Elkhorn Battery Storage facility” at around 1:30 a.m. in Moss

InnovaFeed, a vertical insect farm operator that’s rearing insects for animal and plant nutrition, has raised $250 million in a series D round of funding led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. While countless companies are developing alternative and more sustainable ways for humans to get their protein fixes such as through

The world is headed for a food shortage by 2050 as its population increases, so anything to make it easier for farmers to grow food will go a long way. That’s what InnerPlant founder and CEO Shely Aronov is trying to do with her startup that uses plant physiology to gather loads of data to

Car companies and battery manufacturers have scrambled over the last few years to secure critical minerals supplies, a race that’s only gotten more intense as consumers snap up every EV that comes off the production line. Demand is so high that the International Energy Agency believes the critical minerals market will grow sevenfold by the

First Star, backer of deep tech startups like Plus One and Fyto, aims to raise as much as $40 million for its third venture fund, TechCrunch has learned. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, First Star typically backs robotics, blockchain, AI and machine learning-focused startups at the early stage. The firm has not disclosed a first close

NeoCarbon, a Berlin-based climate tech startup that’s taking a retrofitting approach to scaling direct air capture (DAC) devices for uptake of CO2 emissions has nabbed pre-seed funding. Its focus is on developing DAC kits that can be installed (retrofitted) inside working cooling towers in the industrial sector — thereby, its pitch runs, slashing the cost

EV charging company Monta has been building out EV charging solutions to make it easier to charge electric vehicles everywhere. It started in Europe, but it just raised an additional $30 million from Energize Ventures, at a $155 million valuation, to expand into the U.S. market. The company tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks to

The sneaker world has a dirty secret — the carbon footprint of just about every shoe out there weighs more than the shoe itself. Then there’s the extensive use of plastics and polyesters, foam and rubber, nearly all of which is derived from fossil fuels. Those clean kicks might not be so clean after all.

The burgeoning food tech revolution continues apace with news that French startup Standing Ovation has raised €12 million ($12 million) in a series A round of funding to develop an animal-free casein for use in cheese. Casein, for the uninitiated, is a protein found in dairy products, and which constitutes around 80% of cow milk —

President Joe Biden will attend the Detroit Auto Show Wednesday and announce the approval of the first $900 million in funding to build electric vehicle charging stations in 35 states as part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the White House said. Around $5 billion has been set aside by Congress to be doled out