GreenTech

Beleaguered Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt announced on Thursday that it was filing for bankruptcy in the U.S., striking a blow to Europe’s ambitions for homegrown lithium-ion batteries. The company reportedly chose Chapter 11 in an effort to right its finances. In the wake of the filing, co-founder and CEO Peter Carlsson resigned, though he’ll remain on

It’s a truism in the climate tech world that hardware is paramount. After all, you can’t curb carbon pollution without fixing cement, steel, hydrogen, and more. But as with anything today, hardware is just part of the equation. “In almost every case, hardware is going to be developed with software in mind,” Vaughn Blake, partner

Nuclear startup Kairos Power received approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction on two test reactors in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The permit marks a significant milestone for Kairos, which in October inked a deal with Google to provide 500 megawatts of electricity for its data centers. The fluoride-salt cooled, high-temperature reactors are

Electric passenger boat startup Candela has topped off its most recent raise with another $14 million, the company announced Thursday, and has sold the first of its ferries in the U.S. — bound for Lake Tahoe. Candela makes a series of all-electric hydrofoiling watercraft, meaning the body of the boat rises above the surface of

As the world races to add more power plants to satiate AI’s thirst for electricity, investors have been plowing money into nuclear fusion, the pie-in-the-sky technology that appears to be inching its way toward commercial viability. The latest exhibit: Tokamak Energy, a U.K.-based startup that’s working to refine its squeezed-doughnut approach to fusion power. The

Billionaire Gautam Adani and several executives at his company, the Indian conglomerate Adani Group, have been indicted over an alleged scheme to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials in exchange for contracts to a 12 gigawatt solar power project. The indictment, unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn, charges Adani, his

Italian energy giant Enel is placing a bet on small modular nuclear reactors through a partnership with Ansaldo, another Italian energy company, and Leonardo, a defense contractor. The new company is expected to be announced in the coming days. Enel already has a deal with small modular reactor startup Newcleo to develop so-called fourth-generation nuclear

President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday that he would be nominating Chris Wright, CEO of oilfield services company Liberty Energy, to the post of energy secretary.  Wright has been a big booster of oil and gas. From his perch at Liberty, Wright last year denied that there’s a climate crisis or that it’ll result in

Microsoft is in a pickle: It has committed to being carbon negative by 2030, but its emissions have skyrocketed more than 40% since 2020, thanks in part to its booming AI business. The company has bought a bunch of renewable power, but some emissions, like air travel, have been impossible to eliminate. What’s a Big

AI’s insatiable thirst for electricity is expected to surge in the coming years, potentially leading to power shortages for data centers. New servers last year demanded 195 terawatt-hours of electricity, according to a new report from Gartner. That’s as much as 18 million households use in a year. But by 2027, new servers could command

For all its promise as a climate-friendly fuel, hydrogen hasn’t had much luck. It lost the battle over personal transportation to battery electric vehicles, and for industrial users, it remains far more expensive than natural gas. That’s in part because natural gas can flow through sprawling networks of pipelines. Hydrogen doesn’t, which means buyers either

Startup inspiration can strike anywhere. But for Atlas.co*, a freemium browser-based, real-time mapping tool that’s being built by an Oslo, Norway-based team of (initially student) engineers, the realization that there might be a business opportunity in competing with expensive legacy mapping software hit the founders during class. “When we took introduction class to GIS [geographic

Lyten, a Silicon Valley battery startup, announced today that it’s acquiring manufacturing assets from Northvolt, a Swedish battery manufacturer that’s facing a cash crunch. As part of the deal, Northvolt is selling manufacturing equipment the company inherited in its 2021 acquisition of Cuberg, another battery startup. Lyten will also assume the lease of Cuberg’s old

A trend has emerged among a small group of climate tech founders who start with their eyes fixed on space and soon realize their technology would do a lot more good here on Earth. Halen Mattison and Luke Neise fit the bill. Mattison spent time at SpaceX, while Neise worked at Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory

When Suzanne Zamany Andersen arranged her trip to greenhouse grower Koppert Cress in the Netherlands, she thought she would just be pitching her startup’s device, which turns electricity and air into ammonia, a widely used fertilizer.  Not only did the company agree to test the ammonia production system made by her company — Denmark-based NitroVolt

Global food production generates at least a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than 80% of which comes from agriculture. But addressing that impact is easier said than done since there are simply so many moving parts to address. “Regenerative” farming is often touted as one way to make progress towards several sustainability goals, as it offers

Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index. The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and

A trend has emerged among a small group of climate tech founders who start with their eyes fixed on space and soon realize their technology would do a lot more good here on Earth. Halen Mattison and Luke Neise fit the bill. Mattison spent time at SpaceX, while Neise worked at Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory

The results of the U.S. presidential election have left many worried about the future of climate tech, but the energy transition has enough financial momentum that experts aren’t expecting investment trends to change anytime soon. Limited partners like pension funds and endowments have committed $892 billion over the last decade to the energy transition, according

Brigid O’Brien has seen her share of pitches from founders, and she has a message for many of them: Not every investor will be impressed by your massive TAM, short for total addressable market.  “Often people are chasing big TAMs, which makes a lot of sense, because we’re investing in venture capital, so we’re looking

Solar energy is booming, which is good news for Glint Solar. The Norwegian software-as-a-service startup has built a platform that’s helping energy giants and large solar developers such as E.ON, Recurrent Energy, and Statkraft cut the time it takes to plan and pre-design solar installations to accelerate the transition to renewables. Glint’s software pulls in data

President-elect Donald Trump spent plenty of time on the campaign trail railing against key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act, from solar and wind tax credits to electric vehicles and environmental justice initiatives.  But his return to the presidency doesn’t necessarily spell the end of the landmark legislation. While Trump’s administration is unlikely to be

Transaera co-founder and CEO Sorin Grama may not have expected his startup to end up on the roof of a warehouse, but he’s happy to have landed there. Over the summer, the company installed a massive ventilation system, known as a dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS), which dehumidifies fresh air coming into the warehouse, allowing

Google might be lagging in its climate goals, but that isn’t stopping the tech giant from building a new AI-focused data center in fossil fuel-dependent Saudi Arabia. The new AI hub will support research into Arab language AI models and “Saudi-specific AI applications,” according to an announcement from the Saudi Public Investment fund and Google.

Tucked inside a 32-page earnings report, oil and gas giant BP revealed it was killing 18 early-stage hydrogen projects, a move that could have a chilling effect on the nascent hydrogen industry. The decision, along with the sale of the company’s U.S. on-shore wind power operations, will save BP $200 million annually and help boost

Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have placed big bets on nuclear power to secure electricity for their data centers as AI and cloud computing have sent power use surging.  But as Amazon and Meta discovered last week, those bets are far from a sure thing. A series of recent rulings from regulators dashed their hopes of

For startups that hope to save the world, or at least make it a better place, balancing impact with profit can be tricky. “Investor and shareholder expectations are often not aligned with how hard and intractable the problems are that we face as a society,” Allison Wolff, co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Planet, said on

Aims to reduce carbon footprints by optimizing ammonia production with zero emissions, relying solely on renewable electricity, water, and air. Subscribe for more on YouTube: https://tcrn.ch/youtube Follow TechCrunch on Instagram: http://tcrn.ch/instagram TikTok: https://tcrn.ch/tiktok X: tcrn.ch/x Threads: https://tcrn.ch/threads Facebook: https://tcrn.ch/facebook Bluesky: https://tcrn.ch/bluesky Mastodon: https://tcrn.ch/mstdn Read more: https://techcrunch.com/

A novel reactor that produces affordable e-methanol from flue gas or air and water in one step, eliminating captured CO2 and H2 feedstocks, without a catalyst. Subscribe for more on YouTube: https://tcrn.ch/youtube Follow TechCrunch on Instagram: http://tcrn.ch/instagram TikTok: https://tcrn.ch/tiktok X: tcrn.ch/x Threads: https://tcrn.ch/threads Facebook: https://tcrn.ch/facebook Bluesky: https://tcrn.ch/bluesky Mastodon: https://tcrn.ch/mstdn Read more: https://techcrunch.com/

Ammonia may conjure thoughts of off odors, but the world is entirely dependent on the smelly stuff as a fertilizer and for use in myriad other industries. Problem is, nearly all the ammonia produced today is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Making the compound releases more than 450 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every