GreenTech

Few fusion startups have been as closely watched as Helion. The 12-year-old company is backed by Sam Altman, rumored to be in talks with OpenAI, and has a deal to supply Microsoft with electricity by 2028 — years earlier than its competitors.  The company’s unorthodox approach to fusion power and relative secrecy has earned it

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek stunned the world with the release of its R1 model, which appears to perform nearly as well as leading models from Google and OpenAI, despite the company’s claim that it used a relatively modest number of GPUs to train it. DeepSeek’s relative efficiency has experts and investors questioning whether AI really

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The massive $100 billion Stargate joint venture will reportedly be powered, at least in part, by solar and batteries. The renewable power installations will be built by SoftBank-backed SB Energy, according to a report from Bloomberg, though they’re unlikely to be the venture’s sole source of energy. Stargate is a partnership between OpenAI, Oracle, and

Oil and gas isn’t the only source of energy lurking under our feet. Drill deep enough and the Earth’s temperature stays consistent enough that it can be a source of heating and cooling for homes, offices, and data centers. But in many regions, geothermal wells today bottom out at around 500 feet, a limitation that

A South Carolina utility wants to restart construction on a power plant that was mothballed eight years ago after running over budget and pushing an iconic American company into bankruptcy.  Hoping to capitalize on the data center power boom, state-owned utility Santee Cooper is looking for partners to help finance and complete the two reactors

One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was an executive order that could kill the nascent offshore wind industry in the United States. Trump’s order, signed Monday, halted federal leases for offshore wind development on the outer continental shelf — a location far enough from shore that wind speeds are consistently higher, but near

With data centers expected to consume as much as 12% of electricity in the U.S. by 2028, it’s no surprise that tech companies are looking for power no matter the source, whether it be nuclear, renewables, or something else entirely. But solar produces a very different type of electric current from a nuclear plant, and

Surprise! Donald Trump’s big, audacious ambition to buy Greenland from Denmark has a tech angle. Ken Howery, named as U.S. President-elect Trump’s pick to be the next ambassador to the country (and thus chief broker of any deal), is one more part of the rich seam of tech people running through Trump’s upcoming administration.  Part

Amazon bought renewable power at a rapid clip last year, adding around 100 new projects and bumping its portfolio to over 33 gigawatts of generating capacity. That’s over 10 gigawatts more than its nearest competitor, Apple. The additions made Amazon the largest corporate purchaser of renewable power, according to BloombergNEF. The company’s total portfolio is

Climate tech may have had a down year in 2024, but new data also shows a maturing sector with larger deal sizes. Venture investment in the climate tech sector was down 7% to $12.9 billion, $1 billion shy of 2023’s tally, according to data in a new PitchBook report. The report found that round size

Critical minerals are the new oil: Everyone needs them, but not every country has them. That’s led some to search for them in some pretty wild places. And few places are as outlandish as the ocean deep. But deep-sea mining appears poised to get a boost from the incoming Trump administration, according to The Wall

Google has agreed to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits from Indian startup Varaha, its first such deal with a carbon project in India and the largest involving biomass-produced biochar (also called horticultural charcoal or “black gold” for soils). The offtake agreement credits will be delivered to Google by 2030 from Varaha’s industrial

Meta this week announced that it was buying 200 megawatts of solar energy from multinational electric utility Engie, adding to the tech firm’s considerable 12-plus gigawatts renewable power portfolio. The news comes as tech companies ramp up their AI ambitions, adding data centers at a breakneck pace and boosting demand for power to the point

Data centers are expected to continue growing at a breakneck pace, doubling their power demand by 2029, according to a new report from JLL. The industry’s expansion, fueled by the rapid growth of AI alongside the continued expansion of cloud-based services, is testing the limits of the energy sector. Some experts think that half of

Xocean, an Irish marine robotics startup that provides ocean data to the energy and hydrography industries using uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), has raised €115 million ($119 million) as it looks to expand coverage to additional sectors. Founded in 2017, Xocean has built a fleet of remotely-controlled USVs that can remain offshore for long periods of

As wildfires rage for the third consecutive day through parts of Los Angeles, now including the Hollywood Hills, several neighborhoods have been forced to evacuate for safety purposes. But on Thursday afternoon, a wildfire evacuation alert was mistakenly sent to the smartphone of every resident in Los Angeles County, a region with more than 9

Ask any scientist that has worked with cell cultures in a lab: contamination is high on their list of fears. Even one stray bacterium or fungal spore can spoil an entire experiment. Now imagine scaling that risk up to biomanufacturing, which uses living cells to make a range of stuff, including drugs, food ingredients, and

Tim Barat loved being a lineman at an electric company in Australia, where he grew up, even in the chaos of the Black Saturday brushfires in 2009 that torched over 1 million acres and left many without power or homes. But when he moved to the U.S. in 2013, his wife was less enthusiastic about

Watch Duty, an app to track wildfires with live maps and alerts, has become the number one free app in Apple’s App Store as of Wednesday morning. The fire tracking app surpassed the ChatGPT app for the number one spot as devastating fires continue to rage across Southern California. Watch Duty has been around since

Back in the 1950s, the U.S. started detonating nuclear bombs underground to limit the fallout, both radioactive and sociopolitical, unleashed by aboveground testing. Hundreds of feet of rock formed a tidy barrier for the next 40 years as countries continued to bomb the subsurface. Now, a nuclear startup wants to bury a small reactor underground,

Rare earth metals are largely unknown to the general public, but are used in a huge variety of products. The elements, including neodymium, and praseodymium, and cerium, themselves aren’t rare. But they’re concentrated in certain parts of the globe and are very challenging to refine into anything useful. Their unique electric and magnetic properties make

Agriculture, which consumes about 70% of global freshwater, is grappling with increased water scarcity and inefficient irrigation systems. Traditional methods of irrigation not only lead to wasted water and nutrients, but also contribute to lower crop yields, food insecurity, and unnecessary carbon emissions.  Hong-Kong based agriculture technology startup Full Nature Farms thinks there’s a better

Hydrogen startups are widely seen as a promising way to eliminate fossil fuels from heavy industry and long-haul transportation. But they have been stuck in limbo for the last couple years, waiting for official guidance from the U.S. Treasury on lucrative tax credits. The wait ended today, with the Treasury announcing final rules for hydrogen

Electra has raised $76.3 million to clean up the dirty ironmaking industry, TechCrunch has learned. The startup has developed a novel method of using electricity to coax pure iron out of low-grade ores, opening the door to cleaner steel. The new funding round, which was disclosed in a regulatory filing, seeks to raise a total

KoBold Metals closed a $537 million Series C round on Wednesday to help build a multi-billion-dollar mine to exploit a copper deposit it found using AI. The new funding round, which was led by Durable Capital Partners and T. Rowe Price, will be used to expand the company’s exploration efforts on five continents and develop

A lot can change in a few months. The climate tech world hasn’t exactly been turned upside down, but it’s definitely more askew than it was in the summer. The U.S. federal election results may have imperiled the startup-friendly Inflation Reduction Act, likely throwing a wrench into many companies’ business plans.  Yet at the same

There’s a mismatch in climate tech investing: Well over half of all dollars invested since 2020 have flowed into startups working on energy and transportation, according to Sightline Climate. “It’s awesome to see those solutions doing well,” Michael Luciani, founding partner at Juniper, told TechCrunch. But as he points out, those sectors represent less than

Humans have an innate desire to name things, but to be honest, we’re not always that good at it. Take climate tech: it’s a category of companies and technologies that, broadly speaking, seek to minimize or reverse our impact on the climate while also helping us adapt to its increasing changes. As terms go, climate

For many industries, lithium batteries just don’t cut it — they’re getting increasingly expensive, require too much space, and sometimes they are just overkill for many industrial use cases. Thermal batteries, on the other hand, can store energy in the form of heat for long periods, are often cheaper to invest in and deploy, and