GreenTech

Solar panels are just about everywhere. There’s a good chance one of your neighbors has them on their roof, as does the big box store down the street. As you drive there, you might see a field of them posted up alongside the road. With that kind of ubiquity, you’d be forgiven if you thought

Cement startup Furno will receive a $20 million grant from the Department of Energy, funds that will help the company build up to eight micro-kilns at a concrete plant in Chicago.  Chicago might not seem like the sort of place where cement is hard to come by. But with the nearest kiln 100 miles away,

As petrochemical plants and other emitters look to reduce emissions, they’re finding that sopping up and storing all the carbon dioxide they produce doesn’t come cheap. First they have to capture it, an energy-intensive process that requires specialized equipment. Then they have to transport it and stash it away, which can be tricky depending on

Phillip Man was burned out. He had founded a watch trading company with his flatmate, but the grind was wearing him down. “We did that for ten years,” Man said. “It’s very difficult to keep yourself motivated when you know the whole reason for your operation is to sell expensive stuff to wealthy people.” He

Phillip Man was burned out. He had founded a watch trading company with his flatmate, but the grind was wearing him down. “We did that for ten years,” Man said. “It’s very difficult to keep yourself motivated when you know the whole reason for your operation is to sell expensive stuff to wealthy people.” He

The U.S. is facing a shortage of electricians, with unfilled jobs in the field expected to grow by 11% per year over the next decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But because prospective electricians in the U.S. typically need to log 8,000 hours before they can get their license, the shortage won’t ease

Amazon today became the latest big tech company to throw its weight behind nuclear power, joining Microsoft and Google, which both previously announced long-term promises to buy nuclear power from startups to power their data centers. The company revealed three deals, including an investment in startup X-Energy and two development agreements that aim to add

General Motors is working with Forge Nano, a materials science startup, to find new ways to enhance the performance and lifetime of electric vehicle battery cells.  The automaker’s investment arm, GM Ventures, on Wednesday injected $10 million into Forge Nano, which is developing a thin coating the startup says will help improve safety and increase

As calls for urgent climate action persist, technologies to help remove the heat-trapping greenhouse gases from the atmosphere are also emerging globally. In Africa, Octavia Carbon, a Direct Air Capture (DAC) startup is leading the efforts. Octavia, founded in Kenya two years ago, builds DAC machines that it uses to capture carbon, a greenhouse gas

Google announced today that it has signed a deal with nuclear startup Kairos Power to build seven small reactors to supply electricity to its data centers. The agreement promises to add around 500 megawatts of carbon-free electricity at a time when energy demand for data centers and AI is surging. The new power plants are

It only took four phone calls for Sébastien Fiedorow to quit his job as a venture capitalist. The first one came from Marble, a startup studio based in Paris. They had a scientist looking for help founding a company that would remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere — what experts call direct air capture, or

The data center industry is expanding rapidly to keep up with the flywheel growth of AI. While these data centers are necessary AI infrastructure, they store an AI company’s compute, they are expensive to build, seemingly more so to run, and they are a huge energy suck. Startups are looking to make data centers more

As hurricanes batter the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, many people’s livelihoods are on hold and they’re struggling to make ends meet. The FCC just decided that anyone affected by a natural disaster can get a break on broadband and mobile service; it’s not much, but every little bit counts. The Lifeline

It was the banana that did it. Brian O’Kelley, who had recently sold his previous startup, ad platform AppNexus, to AT&T for a reported $1.6 billion, was watching a lecture through MIT during COVID as part of a yearlong course on supply chain management. “There was this one slide in a lecture about the carbon

The synthetic biology and precision fermentation space is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity these days. But it’s not every day you come across a startup that’s using genetic engineering to produce natural rubber — a substance that’s challenging to reproduce in a lab because of how long its polymer is. Paris-based baCta has a proof

Startup employees often go on to found interesting ventures, basing their new work on the experience gained from their time building a company from scratch. But not all of those experiences are positive, and sometimes, a less-than-satisfactory exit can do more to fuel a founder’s fervor than anything else. In the case of Forward Earth’s

For fusion power aficionados, hitting “breakeven” is something of a Holy Grail: the point at which a fusion reaction produces more power than was required to ignite it. Only one scientific experiment, at the National Ignition Facility, has accomplished that feat, and it took over a decade of tweaking the system to achieve the monumental

Mo Alkhadra spent years of his life figuring out how to remove troublesome materials like toxic lead and radioactive waste from water. But as he progressed along his doctorate studies at MIT, he realized that if he wanted to bring his technology to market, he’d need to do something other than build a better Brita.

Earlier this year, KoBold Metals found what might be one of the largest high-grade copper deposits of all time, with the potential to produce hundreds of thousands of metric tons per year, the company’s CEO said. Now, just eight months later, KoBold is close to raising over half a billion dollars. The funding should help

Nearly every founder has the same concern: how can they ensure their startup has enough cash to deliver on its promise. For most, that means wooing venture capitalists early and often, trading equity in the company and board seats for cash to keep the lights on. For Teague Egan, it also means courting retail investors.

Over the last several years, fusion power has gone from the butt of jokes — always a decade away! — to an increasingly tangible and tantalizing technology that has drawn investors off the sidelines. The technology may be challenging to master and expensive to build today, but fusion promises to harness the nuclear reaction that

During COVID-19, Wiley Webb embarked on a year-long trip with his wife to try to figure out the most pressing issues in the food system. He talked to people at more than 70 farms and consistently heard that they wanted more buyers. Large buyers told Webb they wanted to find these farm suppliers but couldn’t

Fusion startups have been on a fundraising tear lately, and a young startup, Acceleron Fusion, is joining the pack, having raised $15 million of a targeted $23.7 million round, according to an SEC filing. The fusion sector recently has been showered with interest from investors, who no doubt have been encouraged by the breakthrough experiment

For the past few years, direct air capture has been seen as a potential silver bullet to the climate crisis. But now a startup originally from the snowy wastes of Iceland is taking a new approach: removing carbon from seawater.  The industry standard for removing carbon with direct air capture methods costs anywhere between $230

Funding for green hydrogen startups — particularly at the growth stage — has dipped. Hydrogen plants and fueling stations across the U.S. have shut down. And automakers and governments seem to be on the battery electric vehicle (BEV) buzz. And yet, BMW recently announced plans to work with Toyota to develop a hydrogen fuel-cell consumer

The race for commercial fusion power is heating up. Investors have poured money into fusion startups over the last several years, and one of the more recent beneficiaries of their beneficence is Zap Energy, an Everett, Washington-based startup that’s pursuing a clever approach to harnessing the power of the stars. The company recently closed a

When it comes to fusion power, there are two basic approaches: One, create a small star here on Earth that’s held in place by powerful magnetic fields. Two, use intense lasers to make a succession of even smaller stars, but repeat the process several times per second. Moritz von der Linden likes his odds with

Toyota Ventures started in 2017 to help startups figure out what the future will look like, with an eye towards ensuring Toyota as an automaker and brand would stay at the forefront of innovation.  While the firm initially targeted mobility startups, the crossover into climate tech was a natural progression. Today, Toyota Ventures has over

As a fuel, hydrogen has a lot going for it. You can burn it for heat to replace coal, you can run it through an electrolyzer to generate electricity, and you can use it to refuel a vehicle as quickly as gasoline or diesel. But it’s challenging to get hydrogen to where it’s needed. As

James McGinniss has been obsessed with decarbonization and the energy grid since he was a high schooler over a decade ago. Now, his startup David Energy has a lofty goal: getting the energy grid to run entirely on clean energy in the next 10 years. Brooklyn-based David Energy is a software-enabled retail energy provider. It