Climate Tech
Funding Friday: Yet Another SpaceX Alum Raises $54 Million
Plus SAF, another SPAC, and more of the week’s biggest money moves.
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:
Plus SAF, another SPAC, and more of the week’s biggest money moves.
As SPCX hits the Nasdaq, here’s some more from our Musk Mafia survey.
SpaceX and Tesla have produced executives and founders across the clean energy world. Here’s what they had to say about working for their former boss.
Entech’s S2 platform debuted last year to help make century-old boilers more efficient.
Emissions from existing buildings are responsible for about 70% of New York City’s climate emissions, with space heating as the dominant source. Yet most of the city’s multifamily buildings still rely on central steam boilers that cycle on and off when the outdoor temperature drops below a certain threshold, regardless of indoor conditions. The result is a system that leaves many residents sweltering in the dead of winter, wasting fuel and money while releasing unnecessary greenhouse gases.
Completely overhauling and modernizing a central boiler system — many of which date to the early 1900s — and installing a building-scale heat pump could address many of these issues. But that’s an expensive, complex, and disruptive endeavor that many building owners either can’t afford or simply don’t want to undertake. And while heat pump startups such as Quilt and Gradient are making inroads in single-family homes and individual apartment units respectively, neither is working to optimize the operations of existing steam boilers, which remain the dominant heating source for New York’s apartment stock.
That’s where Entech, a 30-year-old building energy management company, comes in. The company’s platform has long used indoor sensors to monitor the performance of central boilers and help them run more efficiently. Last year, however, the company revamped its software to incorporate artificial intelligence. The new system, called S2, autonomously monitors 20-plus sensors installed throughout the buildings where it operates, adjusting heating cycles with greater precision while continuously tracking the overall health and performance of boiler room operations.
On Wednesday, the company announced the results from the S2’s first year of operations: Across 401 New York City apartment buildings, the platform slashed emissions by nearly 25%, avoiding more than 16,000 metric tons of carbon pollution and generating over $5 million in savings for property owners.
Previous iterations of the company’s tech relied on preset rules such as, “When it’s 55 degrees [Fahrenheit], you need a shorter cycle, and when it’s 20 degrees, you need a longer cycle,” Heather Zoberman, Entech’s director of product development, explained to me. Those settings dictated how long a boiler turned on and how long it stayed off. With AI, however, the company can measure how quickly individual units are actually heating up and adjust performance in real-time.
For a company that spent decades focused on incremental improvements to boiler operations, it’s a meaningful shift. “Now we have the ability to do flame modulation — so a higher flame, a lower flame— based on the load, based on the building temperatures,” Zoberman told me. The same level of granular control applies to the fans and pumps that move heat through the building, too. “A little bit slower fan, a little bit lower flame is really where you get those savings that add up,” she said. According to Entech, those savings are typically passed onto the residents, with the average tenant saving roughly $200 on heating costs last year.
While building owners are happy to see these savings too, many are turning to Entech primarily to comply with the New York City Council’s Local Law 97, which requires buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to cut emissions 40% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels, and reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The nonprofit housing developer and operator Breaking Ground, for example, builds supportive housing for low-income and formerly homeless New Yorkers, and has been doing so for decades. It adopted Entech’s new boiler control system just six months ago to comply with the emissions law. While Breaking Ground’s deputy VP of facility operations, Lorenzo Torres, didn’t have exact savings figures on hand, he said the system has saved the organization “a lot of money,” largely by enabling staff to remotely identify equipment issues such as leaks and temperature fluctuations without having to send anyone to the building and before they develop into expensive headaches.
“We do have a work order system, but data is only as true as the person that’s entering the data,” Torres explained. Thus if a tenant misidentifies an issue or fails to file a work order in the first place, Breaking Ground might assume everything is running efficiently. By contrast, “the S2 controller actually is able to, with conviction, let us know that there is an issue with the boiler,” he said.
What Entech’s system still can’t do is solve the problem of unit-level temperature variation. Factors such as floor level, window exposure, and radiator placement mean some apartments will naturally run hotter or colder than others. But because Entech primarily operates in apartment complexes with central boilers, it can still only make adjustments at the building level Because of this, its system could be a complement to something like a smart radiator, which can control how much heat each apartment receives.
Now, Entech is looking to expand beyond New York. Boston is a natural next market, Zoberman told me, given its stringent building emissions requirements. Chicago is also on the company’s radar, thanks in part to incentives from the natural gas utility People’s Gas, which can help offset the cost of energy efficiency upgrades. The company’s ambitions extend beyond just geographic expansion, however — it’s also broadening its platform to monitor and optimize central cooling systems and other electrified technologies such as heat pumps and mini splits.
It looks like it should have plenty of room to run. Additional jurisdictions from Washington D.C. to St. Louis are increasingly adopting hard caps on building emissions, while dozens more now require annual energy-use reporting — often a first step towards more stringent regulation.
On Chinese nuclear, Mongolian uranium, and screwworm spreading
Current conditions: China has triggered emergency warnings across six provinces as heavy rainfall floods the countryside • A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck the Philippines, leaving at least 32 dead and more than 100 injured in building collapses • Temperatures in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are rising near 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
On Tuesday, Tennessee is set to become the first state in the nation with its own regulatory framework for nuclear fusion plants. You may be wondering, why Tennessee? The two-word answer: Oak Ridge. The Volunteer State has operated as a hub for nuclear energy research and development for more than 60 years, feeding off both the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority’s capacity to help commercialize new technologies. Now state regulators are establishing the first dedicated rulebook for building future fusion plants. “Tennessee has been named the top state in the nation for nuclear energy industry growth, and for good reason,” David Salyers, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said in a statement. “This latest step supercharges our reputation as the global hub for nuclear innovation and positions us as the most responsive state to new advanced nuclear companies clamoring to call Tennessee home.”
It’s not the only government betting that the various attempts to commercialize fusion as an energy source will pan out in the near future. On Monday, NucNet reported that the British government had drafted legislation to “create conditions” for deploying fusion technology.
Typically, the rule of thumb in journalism is that the answer to a question headline is almost always “no,” otherwise the headline would simply state the fact. But this one is a genuine open question that climate-tech investor Shanu Mathew raised Monday in a post on X: Could PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest grid operator, break apart? The speculation traces back to a Bloomberg article from last week in which unnamed federal officials suggested that the operator, which runs the grid from the Illinois prairie to the Jersey Shore, could split up as data centers put strain on the 13-state system’s electricity supplies.
The talks are happening as two of the largest utilities in PJM, NextEra and Dominion, discuss a potential $420 billion megamerger that would create, among other things, a storage giant, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported. The discussions are also occurring against the backdrop of major artificial intelligence companies going public, with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI following Claude-developer Anthropic in filing a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week.

In the United States, you can’t build a single commercial nuclear reactor in a decade. In China, you can apparently double the size of your entire fleet in that time. Between 2016 and 2024, China’s nuclear generation capacity soared by 76%, according to a new Energy Information Administration analysis. That’s equal to 24 gigawatts. In 2025, China added another 1.1 gigawatts, followed by 2.2 gigawatts more this year just through May. The country has at least 36 other reactors under construction, accounting for nearly half of the world’s ongoing nuclear projects.
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Just five years ago, the global aviation industry made a landmark pledge to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Now the head of the industry’s global body says that goal is likely already out of reach. Willie Walsh, the director of the International Air Transport Association, told The Guardian that “hope was fading fast” and a new “realistic timeline” needed to be established. More than half of the planned decarbonization of air travel relied on the development of sustainable aviation fuels that remain nascent at best. Money is pouring into the technology, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported. But uptake so far “is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told her.
One cold autumn morning three years ago, I made my way across downtown Ulaanbaatar to an American-style diner called Millie’s Espresso to meet with a Mongolian mining executive who was thrilled about Western countries’ recent investments in his industry. Landlocked between Russia and China, the geographically huge but sparsely populated democracy hoped to shore up its sovereignty by forging deals with the U.S., Europe, South Korea, and Japan to satisfy soaring demand for minerals. Already Oyu Tolgoi, one of the world’s largest copper mines, was underway in the country’s Gobi desert south, and that year the French government inked a deal to start producing lithium and uranium in Mongolia. Now the uranium part of that agreement is moving forward. On Monday, World Nuclear News reported that the French state-backed nuclear fuel producer Orano had broken ground on its first mine in the Central Asian nation. The project raised some eyebrows among Mongolians who complained that Soviet-era Russian uranium mining left behind nasty pollution, and the terms of Ulaanbaatar’s deal with Rio Tinto over the new copper mine have been politically contentious. But the sprawling, smog-choked capital city — the only major urban development in the rural nation — is in need of more power.
Russia had promised to help meet that power by building Mongolia’s first nuclear power plant. A politically well-connected businessman from Ulaanbaatar, whom I caught up with last night over text to ask about the mood in the country, said Moscow’s bid had drawn more positive attention than France’s plans to mine fuel for their own reactors. “In Ulaanbaatar, we experienced electricity shortages last winter that caused apartment heating to stop during the winter. It was crazy,” the executive told me. While he’s typically a critic of the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, which formed out of the old Communist Party apparatus following the fall of the Soviet Union, the executive told me the government’s actions were “good and brave” steps to “diversify investment in Mongolia.”
I hate to close out on a bad note, but this one felt important to include: America’s screwworm problem is getting worse. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed the first case of the flesh-eating parasite in a dog in New Mexico, in addition to four cases in total in Texas. “This situation is evolving, and we expect new information to emerge as our investigation continues,” Dudley Hoskins, USDA’s under secretary for marketing and regulatory programs, said in a statement.