Climate Tech
How Methane-Zapping Technology Could Finally Solve the Cow Burp Problem
Ambient Carbon is doing the methane equivalent of point source carbon capture in dairy barns.
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Ambient Carbon is doing the methane equivalent of point source carbon capture in dairy barns.
The Berkeley-based startup has a chemical refining method it hopes can integrate with other existing recycling operations.
On GOP lockstep on renewables, a wind win, and EPA’s battery bashing
On Interior’s birdwatching, China’s lithium slowdown, and recycling aluminum
On residential solar dims, New Jersey makes history, and Brazil’s challenge
The end of consumer electric vehicle tax credits isn’t great, but clawing back federal funding has been even worse.
On abandoning Antarctica, an EV milestone, and this week’s big earnings
Current conditions: Heavy rainfall in China has left at least 30 dead as forecasters predicts more days of downpours ahead • Severe thunderstorms are hitting the Midwest as a cold front suppresses the heat dome • The wildfires blazing across Canada are stretching into Alaska, with dozens of fires raging in the foothills of the Brooks Range.
Last year, oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil, and BP either abandoned their decarbonization goals or dialed down investments in green energy. Last week, the Financial Times also reported that the oil industry had put its effort to establish a net-zero emissions standard on pause as major companies quit the initiative. But at least one oil titan is doubling down on clean energy. On Monday, the Italian oil giant Eni said it expects its green business to rival revenues from oil and gas within a decade.
By 2035, CEO Claudio Descalzi told the FT, the operating profit “created by our new companies will balance what is coming from oil and gas, and in 2040 it will be more.” It’s a bullish bet. Earnings from Eni’s oil and gas business are still more than 10 times those from the biofuels and renewables divisions. While the company’s stock dipped by a little over 1% on Monday after the company reported its latest earnings, which beat analysts’ expectations and promised a $1.8 billion buyback, shares in Eni are up nearly 6% over the past month.
This is a big earnings week, with lots of upcoming announcements relevant for Heatmappers:
Tuesday:
Carrier
DTE Energy
Stellantis
Wednesday:
Microsoft
Meta
Rio Tinto
Hess
Entergy
Thursday:
Amazon
Shell
Southern Company
Air Products and Chemicals
TC Energy
Exelon
Xcel
Cameco
First Solar
ArcelorMittal
U.S. Steel
AES
Friday:
ExxonMobil
Chevron
Enbridge
Dominion
Brookfield Renewable Corporation
American researchers in Antarctica in 1955 set off across the ice from the icebreaker, USS Burton Island. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
In a shock to polar scientists, the National Science Foundation plans to cease operations of the United States’ only research ship capable of braving the farthest reaches of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean, the RV Nathaniel B. Palmer, Science magazine reported. Doing so would end 60 years of continuous operations of American icebreakers in Antarctica. More than 170 researchers sent a letter to the head of the NSF and Congress asking for the agency to reconsider.
The move comes amid heightened tensions on both poles as climate change brings radical changes to the planet’s ice caps. The Trump administration has taken a keen interest in the race to dominate the trade routes, military outposts, and natural resources becoming newly accessible in the Arctic, going as far as to pressure NATO ally Denmark to cede sovereignty of semi-autonomous Greenland the U.S. While the geopolitics of the uninhabited Antarctic have garnered less attention, similar dynamics are arising. China is boosting its investments in Antarctica and just opened its fifth research station. Russia has undermined attempts to inspect its bases there, which violates the Antarctica Treaty, an international agreement meant to ensure that no country can militarize the continent. China and Russia have also teamed up to tank new international protections on marine life.
The U.S. is on track to add 16,700 public fast-charging ports by the end of this year, according to InsideEVs. The effort — led by Tesla, ChargePoint, and EVgo — would represent 2.4 times the number of ports added in 2022. If the pace continues, the U.S. could have 100,000 public fast-charging ports by 2027. That’s nearing the 145,000 gas stations the U.S. operates for refueling internal combustion engine vehicles.
The milestone comes as EV sales are surging ahead of the September 30 deadline phasing out the $7,500 tax credits for electric cars Republicans set in President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill. U.S. Even though Tesla sales dropped, U.S. EV sales overall surged 10% in the last quarter, led by GM’s new offerings.
The State of New York announced its first bulk solicitation for energy storage, putting out a bid for 3 gigawatts of batteries. The projects will be “credited and compensated based on the operational availability they achieve in each month over the course of” contracts ranging from 15 to 25 years. Governor Kathy Hochul said the bid highlighted “New York’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our grid, ensuring the state continues to have a more affordable and reliable electricity system now and well into the future.”
It’s just the latest big energy announcement from the state. Last month, Hochul ordered the New York Power Authority — the nation’s second-biggest government-owned utility after the federal Tennessee Valley Authority — to build the state’s first new nuclear power station since the 1980s. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin pointed out, the project mirrors the atomic ambitions of other government-owned utilities. Ontario plans to build what could be the nation’s first small modular reactors, using GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy’s design. The TVA is slated to build the second set of those same reactors. But as I reported over the weekend for New York Focus, one of the state’s biggest utilities is lobbying Albany to consider the same kind of large-scale reactors that were just completed in Georgia, the Westinghouse AP1000.
Last month, solar panels delivered the largest share of the European Union’s electricity for the first time, narrowly eclipsing nuclear power, according to data from Ember. Yet this month, industry projections put the bloc on track for the first decline in solar growth since 2015. The EU is set to deploy 64.2 gigawatts this year, down from 65.1 gigawatts in 2024. The installations are set to help the bloc exceed the European Commission’s 2025 solar target of 400 gigawatts, bringing the total to 402 gigawatts by the end of the year.
But if the trend continues, Europe may fall roughly 4% short of its 2030 goal of 750 gigawatts of solar, installing just 723 gigawatts. That may not sound like a lot, but Dries Acke, the deputy chief executive of SolarPower Europe, said “the symbolism is big. Market decline, right when solar is meant to be accelerating, deserves EU leaders’ attention.” The industry group blamed the downturn on declines in residential solar as feed-in tariff schemes waned in Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Hungary, Italy, and the Netherlands. But corporate deals for solar power also dropped 41% between the first and second quarters of this year. Over the weekend, meanwhile, the EU signed a major trade deal with the Trump administration, promising to ramp up purchases of liquified natural gas and oil.
Scientists at the University of California at Davis used artificial intelligence to engineer proteins to boost the immune systems of plants, helping the flora fight off bacterial threats. The research, published Monday in the journal Nature Plants, opens the door to new ways of protecting crops such as tomatoes and potatoes from disease. “Bacteria are in an arms race with their plant hosts,” Gitta Coaker, the study’s lead author and a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, said in a press release.
Artificial intelligence wants the energy and has the money, and climate tech companies need buyers.
Their founders wanted to make transmission lines, powertrains, and electrical switches more efficient. Or maybe they wanted to unlock the potential of geothermal energy or low-carbon cement. Wherever they began, a bevy of deep tech climate startups, clean energy producers, and sustainable materials companies have found their way to the same destination: Building and powering data centers in the most energy efficient way possible.
“They might not have started out as data center companies, but they’ve been pulled — because of this huge market movement towards data centers — into being that,” Lee Larson, an investor at the venture firm Piva Capital, told me.
With power demand from artificial intelligence on track to grow as much as 30x from 2024 to 2035, and the Trump administration seeking to fast track data center buildout, there’s a wealth of opportunity — and literal cash — for startups that can help hyperscalers meet their clean energy targets while cramming as many high-powered computing chips into a data center as physically possible.
“I think the proportion of pitches that we see that reflects some kind of data center messaging has gone from maybe one out of 20 to one out of five,” Matthew Nordan, co-founder and general partner at Azolla Ventures told me. “It’s a lot.”
Perhaps the most obvious data center pitch is for companies offering clean, firm power or energy storage. In Azolla Ventures’ portfolio, that includes the geothermal exploration and development company Zanskar and the underground pumped hydro storage company Quidnet. While neither has announced any data center tie ups to date, both are having conversations with all the usual suspects — a group that includes Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. “Virtually any reasonably mature, ready to deploy clean, firm power technology company is talking to the same people,” Nordan told me.
Some big deals have already made headlines, especially in the nuclear and geothermal sectors. There’s Microsoft’s plan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and Google’s deal with the small modular reactor startup Kairos, plus Fervo’s partnership with Google and Sage Geosystems’ partnership with Meta on the geothermal side. But fusion companies also see data centers as a viable option. Google already has an offtake agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, while Microsoft has a deal with Helion Energy.
But it’s not just the big name cleantech companies that are turning into data center service providers. The AI boom also presents a major opportunity for deep tech startups working on electrical infrastructure. While companies in this sector might not scream “climate tech,” behind the curtain they’re driving significant gains in energy efficiency that data center operators are eager to tap into.
In Azolla’s portfolio, these include Scalvy, founded to build modular powertrain electronics for electric vehicles. The company’s small, distributed units connect directly to EV battery cells, converting DC power from the batteries into AC power for the motor. “The hyperscalers started coming to the company saying, can you do what you’ve done in reverse?” Nordan told me. “Can you take the AC coming in off the grid and then convert that to DC, and then interface with the load and energy storage systems?”
That proved easy, and now Scalvy’s small, building-block style approach allows data centers to control power flow on the server rack itself, as opposed to taking up valuable space with a separate power rack. While the details haven’t yet been announced, Nordan said the startup “has recently done their first agreement for data center power, and it’s with one of the large names that you would expect.”
Piva Capital has also invested in a number of under-the-radar companies in this arena — Veir, for instance, initially proposed to build “high-temperature superconducting transmission lines” that could carry electricity with near-zero resistance, and thus very low energy loss. But after seeing some early interest from data centers, the startup learned that hyperscalers were not only struggling to build transmission lines to their substations, but were also experiencing severe bottlenecks in their low-voltage distribution networks, responsible for getting power into and around data centers.
“We realized we can apply essentially the same superconducting technology that we’re targeting for transmission and distribution applications and build a low-voltage set of products for data centers, specifically, that can allow you to shrink the size and weight of conductors and bus bars [which distribute power within data centers] by 10 times,” Veir’s CEO Tim Heidel told me. With this newly refined focus, the company raised an oversubscribed $75 million Series B round in January, which included participation from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund.
Piva is also an investor in Menlo Micro, a spinout from General Electric that uses a proprietary metal alloy to make high-performance electrical switches that are smaller, faster, and more energy efficient than the industry standard. The startup has already commercialized its tech for use in high-speed radio frequency devices, as well as for testing the performance of semiconductors.
Ultimately, the company is aiming to integrate its switches into a wide range of high-performance electrical equipment, data center power systems very much included. In this context, the startup’s switches could be embedded directly into semiconductor packages or circuit boards rather than installed on racks, leading to more compact and energy efficient data center power management. The switches’ small size and low resistance would also generate less heat than what’s used today, further increasing overall energy efficiency.
Menlo Micro’s CEO Russ Garcia told me that five years down the line, he expects a third of the company’s revenue to come from power applications such as data centers, growing to two-thirds in 10 years’ time.
Even sustainable materials companies are getting pulled in, Nordan told me. The primary example there is Sublime Systems, which inked a purchase agreement with Microsoft for up to 622,500 metric tons of low-carbon cement. The deal gives Microsoft the right to use the cement if and when it's useful, but more importantly, it entitles the tech giant to the cement's environmental attributes — that is, the carbon savings associated with producing it. The idea is that the tech giant can catalyze market demand without the emissions impact of shipping the cement to its data center sites.
Amazon has also invested in a number of companies in this sector, including Brimstone and CarbonCure, which are working to decarbonize cement and concrete, as well as Electra, which is working on green steel. The hyperscaler is also trialing products from Paebbl, which produces a carbon-negative mineral powder that can partially replace cement, on the construction of an Amazon Web Services data center in Europe.
While the current administration may not be exerting pressure on hyperscalers to reduce their emissions, Nordan told me that the tech giants are thinking about the long term. “If the tide turns and there will be real or effective costs to emissions in these data centers, they want to do everything they can to bankroll emissions reductions now. And that manifests itself in low-carbon cement, in green steel, in all sorts of technologies.”
At least some of the aforementioned investments — especially those that increase efficiency while decreasing the size of data center components — won’t necessarily lead to emissions reductions, however. Much as when the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its cheaper and more efficient AI model, the idea of Jevon’s Paradox looms large here. This is the theory that making products more efficient and cost-effective will lead to an overall increase in consumption that more than offsets the efficiency gains.
Heidel, for one, told me that Veir’s potential customers don’t see energy efficiency in itself as the startup’s main draw. “It’s actually the space savings, the real estate savings, the ability to lay out data centers and configure them in new ways,” he told me. Mainly what Heidel is focusing on with his customers-to-be is, “how much smaller can you make the building, or how many additional AI pods or servers could you fit into the same footprint, or how much higher of a server density could you achieve using our solution?”
Of course, one day Veir may fulfill its original dream of creating superior transmission infrastructure, just as Scalvy could circle back to its initial focus on EV drivetrains and Menlo Micro could wriggle its way into a whole host of electronic devices.
As Heidel told me, he sees this data center buildout as just the first push in what will be an ongoing effort to meet the world’s growing electricity demand. “If we can figure out how to serve all of this demand at the speed at which data centers are growing, and do so cost effectively, and do so in a low-carbon way, then we can take those learnings and apply them to all of the other industries that are coming in the future that'll also be facing enormous electricity demand,” he explained.
But for the time being, as Larson of Piva Capital told me, investors are simply trying to get their portfolio companies “to skate where the puck is going.” And that’s more than okay for Heidel. As he put it, there’s “so much enthusiasm for data centers today that we are having trouble just keeping up with all the interest in that market.”