GreenTech

AI continues to reshuffle power and energy markets with even oil giants like Exxon Mobil getting into the mix.  Exxon announced this week that it’s planning to build a power plant for data centers, reflecting just how much electricity tech companies expect they’ll need in the coming decade. According to one estimate, nearly half of

G2 Venture Partners, the high-profile firm that spun out of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is raising a third fund with a target of $750 million, TechCrunch has learned.  The raise, which was disclosed in a regulatory filing, is a bullish vote of confidence in climate and sustainability startups, while other investors have voiced cautious

The road from scientist to founder is well trodden, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Those pitfalls are why, over the last decade, several programs have sprung up to help smooth the path for technical founders. Now, two prominent programs, Activate and The Engine Accelerator, have decided they can give founders an even bigger advantage

Big tech companies spent several months this year touting their investments in nuclear power. Now, the tide is turning to renewables. Google announced on Tuesday that it was funding $20 billion worth of renewable power projects across the U.S. On Wednesday, it was Microsoft’s turn, helping to launch the Climate and Communities Investment Coalition with

SolarSquare has raised $40 million in what is the largest venture round in India’s solar sector. The Mumbai-based startup bootstrapped and was profitable selling to corporate customers for five years before switching to residential solar in 2021. Now it has scaled to powering over 20,000 homes and 200 housing societies across India, and is India’s

Green ammonia startup Amogy has raised $11.2 million of a targeted $90 million round, an SEC filing reveals. The new round’s target is significantly smaller than its last round — a $139 million Series B-1 that was announced in March 2023 — highlighting the challenges that middle-stage climate startups face today when trying to attract

Getting rid of fossil fuels is relatively simple for some things. Housing? Replace furnaces with heat pumps. Cars and light trucks? Ditch internal combustion for batteries and electric motors. Yet for many industries like cement, steelmaking, and more, it’s hard to replace the heating power of fossil fuels. But Dan Stack thinks bricks have a

As data center power demand surges, tech companies are looking for ways to trim electricity use wherever they can. Cooling is an obvious place to start, since it can account for around 40% of a data center’s energy consumption, according to McKinsey. Most data centers are cooled by blowing chilled air through their servers. The

Nuclear power may have received the lion’s share of attention from energy hungry tech companies over the past few months, with Google among them. But it appears that those new reactors won’t be enough for their AI ambitions: Google is now working with partners to build gigawatts of renewable power, battery storage, and grid upgrades

It’s a cruel reality that only about 3% of the world’s water is fresh, and of that, only a fraction is readily available. Yet as the world’s arid regions encounter intensifying droughts, more people are eyeing the other 97% that’s sloshing around in the oceans. Islands, cities, and water districts have been using desalination to

Turning sunflower seeds into sustainable, cocoa-free chocolate has netted Munich-based B2B food tech startup Planet A Foods (formerly QOA) a $30 million Series B funding round. Now, the Y Combinator alum is gearing up for industrialization, with the funds set to be deployed to scale its production capacity by around 7.5x. The round fast follows

Recycling today kind of sucks. People are generally confused about what can be recycled and where. As a result, only about 32% of eligible waste actually gets recycled. It would be a lot easier if people could dump everything into one bin and let the waste management companies deal with it, but that’s proven to

Earlier this year, Meta tried to get its own nuclear powered data center the easy way, by building one next to an existing reactor. But after regulators threw cold water on the plan — the site was reportedly home to a rare bee species — the company is back with a new idea: find a

The globe likely breezed past 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels this year, crashing through the 2016 Paris Agreement’s aspirational target. Further warming increases the risk of catastrophic consequences, including more frequent extreme droughts, floods, and fires; stronger hurricanes; faster-spreading infectious diseases; and declining wildlife and fish populations. A host of carbon-capture startups hope to

Fighting wildfire is a lot like waging war. There are foot soldiers and paratrooper-like smokejumpers, air support from airtankers, and mobile centers that can direct firefighter movements in the field. “It’s a battlefield,” Gadi Benjamini, co-founder and CEO of FireDome, told TechCrunch. “It changes, it’s dynamic, it’s unexpected.” But what firefighters have been missing is

The Department of Energy (DOE) appears to be on a loan-approval spree in the lead-up to President-Elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, and the winners are all companies manufacturing clean energy solutions on U.S. soil. Trump has promised to cancel any unspent federal dollars under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a bipartisan climate law that allocated

AI’s surging power demand has put several big tech firms at risk of blowing through their climate commitments. But Amazon has partnered with Orbital, an AI startup, to test a new material that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — and they’re using an AWS datacenter as a first site.  One of carbon capture’s biggest

General Motors is selling its stake in the nearly completed Ultium Cells battery cell plant in Lansing, Michigan, to its joint venture partner LG Energy Solution (LGES). GM’s step back from the factory comes amid weakening electric vehicle demand and the potential rollback of Biden administration incentives to produce clean energy domestically.  GM and LGES

President-elect Donald Trump made no secret during his campaigning that he doesn’t think the U.S. should take an aggressive stance on climate change. From leading chants of “drill, baby, drill” to frequently criticizing everything from wind turbines to electric vehicles, he appears poised to cast a shadow over the climate tech sector for the next

Decarbonizing our economies in the race to fight climate change demands a wholesale overhauling of all sorts of production processes to make them as sustainable as possible. Greening chemicals, which are used as ingredients in all sorts of products, is where U.K. startup Deep Blue Biotech is putting its energies. The biotech startup founded in

Battery tech is pivotal as the world leans into electrification to power decarbonization in the race against climate change. But rising demand is putting more attention on the limits and drawbacks of current generation lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery technology. This is where Cambridge University spin-out Molyon hopes to come in: the U.K. startup is developing next-gen

Volkswagen bet big on European-made batteries a few years ago with two massive investments in Northvolt, the Swedish manufacturer. Now the automaker’s €1.4 billion stake is worth less than half that, according to Reuters. The write-downs occurred throughout the current fiscal year as the situation at Northvolt deteriorated.  It’s unclear what Volkswagen’s current stake is

Tesla and Rivian may have resolved a lawsuit in which Tesla accused Rivian of poaching employees and stealing trade secrets. Bloomberg reports that Tesla told a California judge that the companies have reached a “conditional” settlement, and that it expects to seek dismissal of the lawsuit by December 24. Tesla filed the suit, which was

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