You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Widespread federal layoffs bring even more uncertainty to the DAC hubs program.

Grant Faber suspected his short tenure as the program manager for the Department of Energy’s direct air capture hubs initiative was up when he saw an article circulating that the department was set to terminate up to 2,000 employees — generally those who were new to their jobs. When he hadn’t received any news by the end of the day on Thursday, February 13, he told me he felt a sense of “anticipatory survivor’s guilt.” But it wouldn’t last long.
“I woke up Friday morning and I was locked out of all my systems, and I had to get my termination letter emailed to my personal email address,” Faber told me. “It more or less just said it’s in the public interest to do away with your job.”
President Trump's campaign to fire federal workers has hollowed out the DOE's nascent Carbon Dioxide Removal team, which sits within the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. When Trump first took office there were five employees on the CDR team, which helps to oversee implementation of the $3.5 billion Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs program, Faber told me. Now, he said, there’s only one left.
Trump’s layoffs targeted probationary employees, i.e. those who had been hired, promoted, demoted, or reassigned within the past one to two years, who enjoy fewer job protections than those with longer tenures. Faber had been at his job for 11 months. His former boss, Rory Jacobson, was also terminated a few weeks ago, as he’d recently been promoted to a new role as director of carbon removal at the DOE. “To my knowledge, this was not about terminating people that were doing DAC work, or climate work, or even CDR work,” Jacobson told me. “This was just a gross termination of federal employees, career federal employees across the federal government that were on probation.”
But the cumulative effect of these layoffs certainly increases the air of uncertainty around the DAC hubs program, which thus far include two large-scale projects — the South Texas DAC Hub and Louisiana’s Project Cypress — as well as 19 smaller hubs in earlier stages of feasibility and design development.
The various hubs’ commercial partners, which include universities, oil giants, and DAC startups themselves, were already mired in the limbo created by Trump’s Day One executive order, which froze funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That order also led to an effective communications embargo, which prohibits the DOE from discussing or taking action on things such as contract negotiations or personnel decisions with its external partners. These recent terminations just add to the confusion.
“We’ve had no communications with DOE for three to four weeks now,” the lead of one DAC hub in the feasibility study stage told me. “So we’re kind of just waiting to see what they tell us to do.”
In the meantime, awardees are frustrated and unsure where to turn, Jacobson told me. “Should they reach out to their congressperson and try to get them to advocate on their behalf? Do they send a letter to the White House? What is the next step to try and make things move for their projects?” These doubts pose a big problem for startups with novel technologies trying to build out large infrastructure projects, as they generally have smaller margins, less patient investors, and thus less room for error than industrial stalwarts with proven strategies. “Especially for these first-of-a-kinds, they are working on pretty dire timelines for project finance,” Jacobson said.
The DAC hubs were already off to a slow start, according to Jacobson, who told me that the $1.2 billion from the initial funding opportunity issued at the end of 2022 took much longer to get out the door than anyone hoped for. Project Cypress didn’t see any of its initial $50 million award until March of last year, and the South Texas hub had to wait until September for the same funding. Jacobson chalked up the delays to the fact that the awardees are generally relatively early-stage startups that have yet to build significant infrastructure projects, and that the DOE is unfamiliar with negotiating such large-scale proposals.
Thankfully the DOE’s small CDR division isn’t the only government entity interfacing with the DAC hubs. The Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations is overseeing the buildout of the larger South Texas and Project Cypress hubs. And the National Energy Technology Laboratory is overseeing the implementation of the smaller DAC hubs, which are in the feasibility study and design planning stages. They’ve received a combined total of $121 million so far, though some are still negotiating the size of their awards.
OCED and NETL have also been impacted by the government-wide staffing cuts, however, potentially affecting their ability to pick up the slack from the decimated CDR team, which helped to provide top-level oversight and expertise. As Jacobson told me, his job was to “make a theory of change” that united the DOE’s various carbon removal initiatives, aligning them with the administration’s overall energy strategy, whatever it was. Absent this broader vision and explicit strategic direction, coordination among the various government agencies and implementation partners could suffer.
Day-to-day organizational details also stand to falter, Faber told me. In his role, he primarily provided oversight for the 19 smaller, earlier stage DAC hubs. “A lot of times, progress can come down to literally just things like getting signatures, getting approvals, communicating things to leadership back and forth,” he said. “If you don’t have a team in place coordinating those things at headquarters, everything’s just going to be more difficult.”
All that’s to say that further hold-ups could hit the hubs hard, especially the two large projects, which could eventually receive federal funding of up to $500 million to $600 million, provided the hubs can match that with funding from other sources. “If the DOE tries to back out or withholds funding and there’s uncertainty, then yes, it could severely delay or even kill some of those projects, or just result in massive reductions in their scope,” Faber told me. Perhaps other investors, such as climate tech VCs, would be willing to step in if this were to happen, he added.
Faber noted that one proof point that could give investors and other industry leaders confidence in this tech is the forthcoming large-scale DAC facility called Stratos from developer 1PointFive, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum, which is designed to remove up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and set to come online later this year. While Stratos is not a part of the hubs program, Occidental is using the same technology for its South Texas hub — tech that the oil giant brought in-house when it acquired DAC startup Carbon Engineering in 2023. And Heirloom, a DAC company that’s helping to lead Project Cypress, also recently raised a huge $150 million Series B round, showing continued investor confidence in this technology.
The DAC hubs program also still has billions of dollars yet to be awarded. A few months ago, the DOE announced a new $1.8 billion funding opportunity for mid- and large-scale DAC projects. Interested parties have already submitted their required concept papers and pre-applications, with full applications due at the end of July. But the current chaos puts applicants in a tricky spot, as the new administration’s commitment to the program overall is now somewhat of a question mark.
That being said, Jacobson told me there’s no indication that either Trump or Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is necessarily opposed to DAC, or carbon dioxide removal overall. “I still don’t think that we’ve seen a clear signal that this administration is not excited about CDR,” Jacobson said. “I have not heard Secretary Wright say — or other leadership at DOE say — that we are not still very enthusiastic about DAC hubs.”
DAC buildout also has an array of bipartisan benefits, both Jacobson and Faber noted, and hasn’t been a target of right-wing ire in the way that electric vehicles and offshore wind have. On the contrary, Republicans (and oil and gas companies) often argue for it as a way to continue fossil fuel production in a world that’s moving towards lower-emissions sources of energy. Not to mention the fact that these DAC facilities are mainly being built in red states, thus adding jobs and GDP in these regions.
“I thought these kinds of projects would get to keep going,” the DAC hub leader, whose project has had elements halted, told me. “They’re creating jobs, they’re investing in technology. I think they could be well aligned with unleashing America’s energy dominance.”
But these days, few Biden-era initiatives are safe. As Faber told me, if the Trump administration chooses to take a hard line stance against “any and all government funding and regulation, and anything that even has a tinge of being associated with climate,” then DAC is going to have a target on its back, even if some congressional Republicans have previously expressed support for it.
The budget reconciliation process will give us more insight into the specific IRA and BIL funding provisions Trump and other Republicans are looking to axe. That same process will also determine the fate of tax credits such as 45Q, which encourages carbon capture and sequestration. In the near term, Democrats are pushing to get language into the government funding bill (which is separate from the reconciliation bill and must pass in some form by mid-March) that would require Trump to deliver congressionally appropriated money. If that happens, funds would start flowing to the DAC hubs — but don’t bet on it. Republicans are adamant that they won’t stand for such limitations on presidential authority.
DAC grantees, government employees, and implementation partners alike will have to do the wait-and-see thing for a while longer. “I do believe that when we get out of this fog of the first 100 days of the new administration, when they’re just trying to move fast and break things and get big headlines and try to make it seem like they’re keeping campaign promises, maybe things will slow down,” Faber told me. “Maybe they’ll get distracted or just move on to a new issue other than dismantling the federal government.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Tom Ferguson, founder of Burnt Island Ventures, has bigger concerns.
Water — whether too much or too little — is one of the most visceral ways communities experience the impacts of a warming world. It’s also a $1.6 trillion global market that underpins much of the world’s economy. As climate-related risks such as droughts, floods, and contamination converge with systemic challenges like aging water infrastructure and clunky resource management, the need for innovation is becoming painfully obvious.
As Heatmap’s own polling shows, water is also becoming an increasingly large part of the data center story, with many Americans opposing these facilities in part due to concerns over their water usage. That anxiety may not be entirely rational, Tom Ferguson, founder of the water-focused investment firm Burnt Island Ventures, told me.
He’s spent the better part of his career funding water-related innovation, focusing on where new technologies stand to have the greatest impact. So I believed him when he said that while data centers don’t merit quite so much worry, water as a resource deserves a far greater role in the climate tech conversation.
“Everybody assumes that water is a dog of a market because nobody really speaks water. It’s not within their circle of competence,” Ferguson told me, explaining that many firms simply don’t have employees with industry expertise. “But it’s awfully helpful to work with people who can give you a reasonably sized check — ideally two reasonably sized checks, maybe even more — and then also be helpful on that journey to help you better diagnose reality.”
That’s the goal of Burnt Island, which just closed a $50 million fund — its second overall — dedicated to backing early-stage water innovators. Ferguson’s team may have announced the close today, but the firm has already deployed the majority of the fund’s capital into companies working on everything from advanced water treatment and filtration to infrastructure resilience and climate adaptation. At the same time, Burnt Island is also raising money for a $75 million growth fund, designed to invest in later-stage startups with more proven tech.
Ferguson is a veteran of the industry, having previously run an innovation accelerator at the water nonprofit Imagine H2O, which vets hundreds of water startups every year. He’s also solution-agnostic — Burnt Island has already backed a startup developing an underwater desalination plant, a “defrosting innovation company” pioneering a water-efficient way to thaw frozen food, and an effort to build an algae-based wastewater treatment system.
One area Ferguson is not interested in backing, however, is data center cooling systems. Most large data centers cool servers by circulating water through heat exchangers that absorb heat from the equipment. The hot water is then sent to cooling towers where a portion is evaporated. This releases heat into the air, allowing the cooled water to be recirculated. More novel and efficient — but much less proven — cooling methods include applying coolant directly to the chips themselves or submerging entire servers in a non-conductive liquid.
Those approaches are simply too risky, Ferguson told me — both for him and for the hyperscalers. Cooling, he explained, represents a relatively small fraction of a data center’s project cost, but the cost of failure is enormous. If a novel cooling system goes awry, valuable computer chips will fry and operations will grind to a halt. “Under those circumstances, why would you take that chance?” he asked. “You want to use something that has already been proven, that is totally reliable.”
Ferguson told me he’s happy to let firms with larger pocketbooks bet their money on these solutions, but he’s also assuming that hyperscalers will wind up building a lot of these systems themselves. “They’re going to develop their own stuff in house because they want to have the end-to-end control over the architecture,” he told me. “All of this adds up to a pretty tough market.”
That doesn’t mean he’s bearish on data center water efficiency in general. Many of his portfolio companies see opportunities to, say, use metering and sensing tech to track data center water use, or treat water coming into and out of the facilities. And he’s well aware of the public’s growing scrutiny of the industry’s water intensity, having followed the $3.6 billion data center project in Tucson, Arizona that was cancelled in August amidst community-led drinking water concerns.
But he thinks kerfuffles such as this are often more about perception than reality. “The water impact is slightly overblown,” he told me. Data centers “still use a lot less water than golf courses.” And while the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure will inevitably put data centers ahead of golf courses one day, Ferguson trusts that this cash-rich industry will be able to reduce water intensity on its own, as developers have a direct incentive to expand in as many geographies as possible.
Even the canceled Arizona project, he told me, had a reliable plan to replenish the local watershed. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have all pledged to be “water positive” by 2030, returning more water to data center communities than their facilities use by making their operations more efficient while also restoring local ecosystems and replenishing watersheds. But now that the water use narrative has gained steam, “it actually doesn’t matter what you do physically. It’s what people believe about the resource hungriness of these things,” Ferguson explained.
The more important question, he believes, is whether AI’s overall impact on the world will end up justifying the water it consumes. And as he told me, “the jury is really out” on that for now.
But when it comes to weighing water consumption against the pure economic value of data centers, Christopher Gasson, owner and publisher of the market intelligence firm Global Water Intelligence, has actual numbers.
As Gasson asserted in a presentation that Ferguson attended, in terms of the amount of fresh water used per dollar of revenue generated, data centers perform quite well compared to the world’s other leading industries. Their so-called “revenue intensity” is far lower than that of the semiconductor, power generation, food and beverage, and chemicals sectors, for example.
So for Ferguson, the AI-water intersection that feels most relevant is actually “vertical AI” — models trained specifically on water industry data to address targeted problems in the sector. Training these smaller, specialized models is not only far less resource-intensive, it also allows for much more accurate results than general purpose models, which often hallucinate when trying to address niche queries and concerns.
One of Burnt Island’s portfolio companies, SewerAI, trains its model on reams of sewer inspection data. Using video footage, the software can then perform automated sewer inspections to identify defects in pipes, eliminating the timely, costly, and often inaccurate process of manual video review. Another portfolio company, Daupler, uses its specialized model to automate how water utilities respond to service incidents, categorizing and prioritizing customer reports, dispatching crews, and tracking progress. Burnt Island led Daupler’s Series A round and has already supported it with additional capital through its growth fund.
“You have these really, really high quality, very compelling business models that are being built relatively quietly,” Ferguson said. But he expects these opportunities to gain more attention soon — because while the headlines and community uproar around the water intensity of AI may sometimes be hyperbolic, the necessity of water to human life is anything but.
“You can’t believe in water in the same way that people have chosen to believe in the impact of emissions,” Ferguson told me. “You don’t get to choose when it comes to water issues, because once they get real, they get really real.”
On Japan’s atomic ‘Iron Lady,’ Electra’s supercharge, and a mineral deal Down Under
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is barreling toward Haiti and Jamaica carrying a payload of as much as 16 inches of rain for certain parts of the Caribbean • A coldfront is set to drop temperatures by as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit over the Great Lakes states • Temperatures in the French overseas territory of Juan de Nova hit nearly 94 degrees Tuesday, the hottest October day in the history of the French Southern Territories.
US Wind told a federal court that it will go bankrupt if President Donald Trump succeeds in revoking its building permits. The Baltimore-based developer testified on the fate of its 2.2-gigawatt Maryland Offshore Wind project in response to a lawsuit brought by the Department of the Interior and the City Council of Ocean City, Maryland. “If the plan is lost, surrendered, forfeited, revoked or otherwise not maintained in full force and effect, US Wind’s investors have the right to declare US Wind to be in default on the repayment of the company’s debt and/or refuse to extend the additional financing needed to complete construction of the project,” the company told the court, according to an update on the energy consultancy TGS’ 4C Offshore news website. “Either of these consequences could result in US Wind’s bankruptcy.”
The Trump administration’s “total war on wind,” as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman described the multi-agency onslaught against offshore projects, has drawn a backlash in recent months. As I reported last month in this newsletter, a federal judge temporarily stayed Trump’s stop-work order on a 80% complete wind farm off Rhode Island’s coast. Even the oil industry has come out to support the wind sector, as I wrote earlier this month, with Shell’s top U.S. executive warning that the precedent the administration had set would harm fossil fuel producers once Democrats return to power. Yet the effects of the administration’s policies are starting to pinch.
Electra announced a series of major deals on Tuesday as the green iron startup unveiled its debut demonstration facility in Boulder, Colorado. Just a month after Microsoft agreed to buy green steel for its data centers from Sweden’s green steelmaker Stegra, Facebook owner Meta agreed to buy environmental attribute credits linked to emissions cut from Electra’s clean iron. The startup also announced three major offtake agreements — the steelmaker Nucor, the European metal trader Edelstahl Group, and Japanese steel-trading giant Toyota Tsusho all signed deals for Electra’s iron. Meanwhile, Electra brought on new financing. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy invested $50 million in grants into the company, while Colorado Governor Jared Polis provided the five-year-old startups with an $8 million tax credit from the state’s clean industrial financing program. And all that is just what the company announced Tuesday. Earlier this year, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported, Electra closed a $186 million Series B round.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
The top U.S. solar trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, is looking for a new leader. After eight years in office, Abigail Ross Hopper, the lobby organization’s chief executive, announced her departure Tuesday amid what she called a “challenging” year for the industry in her public exit letter. When she took office in 2017, the solar industry had a total capacity of 36 gigawatts and just over 1 million residential customers. By today, the industry has grown to more than 255 gigawatts and more than 5.5 million residential customers. Despite struggles competing against China, U.S. solar manufacturing capacity vaulted from 14th globally to the world’s third-largest hub of photovoltaic factories. “The growth we’ve experienced over the years is a result of our collective grit and determination,” she wrote in the letter. “We’ve navigated fierce policy battles and market challenges, from trade cases to tax debates, and yet we’ve always emerged stronger. We fought — and won — historic policy battles, at every level of government.” While the Trump administration’s cuts to solar programs have dulled growth forecasts, she said she was “optimistic” about the future. Her last day will be January 30, 2026.

After months of negotiations, the U.S. and Australia signed onto a two-way trade deal on critical minerals worth $8.5 billion. The move comes as China ratchets up export controls on rare earths and other metals over which Beijing dominates global supplies. Australia and Canada, whose economies heavily depend on mining, are widely considered the most dependable sources of minerals for the U.S., a dynamic highlighted last week by the cancellation of an American metal project by the leaders of a coup in Madagascar, as I reported for Heatmap. For Australia, the agreement “is a really significant deal,” Hayley Channer, the director of the economic security program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, told The Guardian. “I’m surprised how good it is. The fact that any U.S. money is coming to Australian companies is huge; we really need this money. I don’t think it could have gone any better.”
Japan just elected its first female prime minister, the arch-conservative former minister of economic security Sanae Takaichi. Like Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to serve as British prime minister, Takaichi has been dubbed the Iron Lady due to her hard-line nationalistic views. But uranium may be a better metal for the nickname. Like Thatcher, Takaichi has vowed to restore Japan’s nuclear industry to its former might. Less than half of Japan’s 33 operable nuclear reactors are currently online and generating electricity, a legacy of the mass shutdown that followed the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi plant. In lieu of atomic energy, Japan — which lacks the land for vast wind and solar installations — has turned instead to costly liquified natural gas imports. To Takaichi, who wants to remilitarize Japan and take a more aggressive stance toward China, this creates a vulnerability. Without domestic gas fields, Japan relies on imports whose routes the Chinese navy could disrupt in a conflict, weaponizing blackouts in much the same way Russia has in Ukraine. Japan’s offshore wind efforts are badly delayed. And Takaichi has warned that Beijing’s grip over global manufacturing of photovoltaic panels makes solar a threat, as well.
Japan isn’t the only country looking to revive its past atomic ambitions. South Africa’s government approved the state-owned utility Eskom’s integrated resource plan last week, which included starting work again on the company’s abandoned pebble-bed modular reactor program. First proposed in 1999, the technology is billed as safer than light water reactors and more versatile, with the potential for use in more heavy industry settings. But South Africa canceled the program in 2010 after spending $980 million developing the reactor. The country currently depends on coal for nearly 60% of its electricity.
Scientists discovered an ancient climate archive in a remote cave in northern Greenland. In a study published in Nature Geoscience, the researchers found calcite deposits that only form when the ground is unfrozen and water flows. The findings cast new light on past warm periods in the Earth’s climate, particularly the Late Miocene, which began about 11 million years ago. “These deposits are like tiny time capsules,” Gina Moseley, a geologist with the University of Innsbruck in Austria and an author of the study, said in a press release. “They show that northern Greenland was once free of permafrost and much wetter than it is today.”
Rob and Jesse hang with Dig Energy co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden.
Simply operating America’s buildings uses more than a third of the country’s energy. A major chunk of that is temperature control — keeping the indoors cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Heating eats into families’ budgets and burns a tremendous amount of fuel oil and natural gas. But what if we could heat and cool buildings more efficiently, cleanly, and cheaply?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk to Dulcie Madden, the founder and CEO of Dig Energy, a New Hampshire-based startup that is trying to lower the cost of digging geothermal wells scaled to serve a single structure. Dig makes small rigs that can drill boreholes for ground source heat pumps — a technology that uses the bedrock’s ambient temperature to heat and cool homes and businesses while requiring unbelievably low amounts of energy. Once groundsource wells get built, they consume far less energy than gas furnaces, air conditioners, or even air-dependent heat pumps.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is an adviser to Dig Energy.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: We’ve been throwing a few different terms around here to describe this. We talked about geothermal heating and cooling, ground source heat pumps, geoexchange. There’s a little bit of ambiguity here in the language people used to talk about these things. What’s your favorite way to talk about this product and why?
Dulcie Madden: Ugh.
Jenkins: Or is this just an endless debate that is not resolved?
Madden: It is a great question. It’s a big debate. When I think of geoexchange, just so everyone knows, it’s really about, like, are you able to basically create a larger array, potentially, across buildings, more like exchanging heating and cooling, like both point source and — I think about it more in the context of Princeton, where it’s also across buildings, right? And that starts to move into what some people call a thermal energy network. And so there’s some work there.
There is a lot of back and forth between geothermal heat pump and ground source heat pump, and a lot of people will use them interchangeably. I think that there is technically a differentiation, but I don’t know if there’s a didactic, like, This is what it is. It’s just … you have to be interchangeable.
Jenkins: Yeah, I’m curious, I don’t know what the best marketing term is, what people actually resonate with beyond the technical crowd. I was describing what you guys were doing when you closed your seed series round on X or BlueSky, and somebody jumped into the replies. That’s not geothermal energy, it’s ground source heat pump. And it’s like, okay. And I guess the argument is that, because it’s basically just using it as a source for heat exchange in the heat pump operation as opposed to extracting heating out of the ground — which you can do. I mean, you can just do direct heating from geothermal.
Madden: Right.
Jenkins: Deep geothermal drilling, as well. It’s something that Eavor, which is an Alberta-based deep geothermal company that I advise, as well, is working on their first commercial project in Bavaria. That’s gonna go into a district heating system. So they’re going produce a little bit of power, but a lot of that is just direct heat. But again, they’re drilling, five, six kilometers deep and pulling out heat at high temperatures. And so it’s because it’s kind of back and forth, you’re using this kind of buffer for both heating and cooling. I think that’s why people might push back on the idea that it’s geothermal. But you’re using the heat in the ground.
Mentioned:
TechCrunch: “Geothermal is too expensive, but Dig Energy’s impossibly small drill rig might fix that”
Princeton University’s Geo-Exchange System
Jesse’s downshift; Rob’s downshift.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.