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The company has a new CEO and a new strategy — to refocus on its “core business.”
Ecolectro, a maker of electrolyzers, has a new manufacturing deal with Re:Build.
Not even the companies that — on the surface, at least — seem most likely to benefit from them.
A report from Heatmap’s San Francisco Climate Week event with Tom Steyer.
Biden’s Secretary of Energy argues that if Trump wants to achieve his goals, preserving his predecessor’s manufacturing incentives is the only way.
The AI-powered startup aims to provide home-level monitoring and data to utilities.
At San Francisco Climate Week, everything is normal — until it very much isn’t.
San Francisco Climate Week started off on Monday with an existential bang. Addressing an invite-only crowd at the Exploratorium, a science museum on the city’s waterfront, former vice president and long-time climate advocate Al Gore put the significance and threat of this political moment — and what it means for the climate — in the most extreme terms possible. That is to say, he compared the current administration under President Trump to Nazi Germany.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil,” Gore conceded before going on: “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” Just as German philosophers in the aftermath of World War II found that the Nazis “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,” Gore said, so too is Trump’s administration “trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” in which we can keep burning fossil fuels forever. With his voice rising and gestures increasing in vigor, Gore ended his speech on a crescendo. “We have to protect our future. And if you doubt for one moment, ever, that we as human beings have that capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.”
The crowd went wild. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the stage and reminded the crowd that Gore has been telling us this for decades — maybe it’s time we listen. But I missed all that. Because just a few miles away, things were getting a little more in the weeds at the somewhat less exclusive venture capital-led panel entitled “The Economics of Climate Tech: Building Resilient, Scalable, and Sustainable Startups.” Here, I learned about a new iron-sodium battery chemistry and innovations in transformers for data centers, microgrids, and EV charging infrastructure.
I heard Tom Chi, founding partner of At One Ventures, utter sentences such as “parity dies because of capex inertia,” referring to the need to make clean tech not only equivalent to but cheaper than fossil-fuels on a unit economics basis. Such is the duality of climate week during the Trump administration — occasionally lofty in both its alarm and its excitement, but more often than not simply business-as-usual, interrupted by bouts of heady doom or motivational proclamations.
Some panels, like the one I moderated on the future of weather forecasting using artificial intelligence, made it a full hour without discussing Trump, tariffs, or tax credits at all. So far, that’s held true for a number of talks on how AI can be a boon to climate tech. It makes sense — the administration is excited about AI, and there’s really no indication that Trump has given any thought to either the positive or negative climate externalities of it.
But rapid data center buildout and the attendant renewables boom that it may (or may not) bring will certainly be influenced by the administration’s fluctuating policies, an issue that was briefly discussed during another panel: “AI x Energy: Gridlocked or Grid Unlocked?” Here, representatives from Softbank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the data center builder and operator Switch touched on how market uncertainty is making it difficult to procure energy for data centers — and to figure out the cost of building a data center, period.
“There is a lot of refiguring and rereading contracts and looking at the potential exposure to things like the escalation in the cost of steel for construction projects,” Skyler Holloway of Switch said. Pinning down a price on the energy required to power data centers is also a bottleneck, Gillian Clegg, vice president of energy policy and procurement at PG&E explained. “For projects that want to connect between now and 2030, any kind of uncertainty or delay means that the generation doesn't get to the market,” Clegg said. “Maybe the load gets there first, and you have an out of balance situation.”
Everyone acknowledges that uncertainty is bad for business, and that delays related to funding, contracts, and construction can kill otherwise viable companies. But unsurprisingly, nobody here has admitted that said uncertainty might put them out of business, or even deeply in the red.Every panel I attend, I find myself wondering whether a founder or investor is finally going to raise their voice, à la Al Gore, and tell the audience that while their company’s business model is well and good, the Trump administration’s illogical antipathy towards green-coded tech and ill-conceived trade war is throwing the underlying logic — sound as it may have been just a year ago — into disarray.
None of the seven energy, food, and agricultural startups that presented at the nonprofit climate investor Elemental Impact’s main show, for instance, discussed the impacts of the administration’s policies on their businesses. Rather, they maintained a consistently upbeat tone as they described the promise of their concepts — which ranged from harnessing ocean energy to developing plant-based fertilizers to using robotics for electronics recycling — and the momentum building behind them. Nuclear and geothermal companies, seemingly poised to be the clean tech winners of Chris Wright’s Department of Energy, have been especially optimistic this week.
But really, what else can climate tech companies and investors be expected to do right now besides, well, rise and grind? It’s not like anybody has answers as to what’s coming down the policy pike. In a number of more casual conversations this week, a common sentiment I heard was that it’s not necessarily a bad time to be an early-stage startup — keep your head down, focus on research and prototyping, and reassess the political environment when you’re ready to build a pilot or demonstration plant. As for later-stage companies and venture capital firms, they’re likely working to ensure that their business models and portfolios really aren’t dependent on government subsidies, grants, or policies — as they keep assuring me is the case.
Even that might not be enough these days though. Chi said he’s always tailored his investments with At One Ventures towards companies that are viable based on unit economics alone, no subsidies and no green premium. So he wasn’t initially worried about his portfolio when Trump was elected. “None of our business models were invalidated by the election,” he said. “The only way that we could be in trouble is if they mess it up so bad that it ruins all of business, not just climate …”
Oops.
If there’s one dictum that I would expect to hold, though, it’s that the startups that make it through this period will likely be around for the long haul. I’ve been hearing that sentiment since the election, and Mona ElNaggar, a partner at Valo Ventures, echoed it once again this week. “Microsoft and Apple were founded in the mid 1970s, which was a time of severe recession and stagflation. Amazon started at the tail end of a big recession in the early 1990s,” ElNaggar reminded the audience at the Economics of Climate Tech panel, which she moderated. “Companies that survive and actually thrive in such periods share a common thread of resilience.”
As that panel wrapped up, things got existential once more as Chi’s talk moved from describing his investment thesis to the moment at large. “This time period in history is going to bring us tragedy after tragedy, and it’s really that moment that we’re going to understand the deep underlying structure of half of the world that we’ve built, and also the character of who we are,” Chi told the audience. It was unclear whether we were even talking about climate tech anymore. Chi continued, “It’s in that time period that we are going to step up and become whatever we are meant to be or not at all.”
The crowd sat there, a little stunned. Were we, in this very moment, becoming who we were meant to be? I took a bite of my free sushi as the networking and hobnobbing began.
The company has developed a low-temperature refining process that’s similar to the one used for copper, nickel, and other metals.
Energy use in the iron and steel industry accounts for about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions — that’s more than it takes to power commercial buildings, more than twice the emissions of the entire cement industry, and nearly four times as much as the aviation sector. Steel-related emissions are so high primarily because melting and refining iron ore, the base metal of steel, requires extremely high temperatures, which has typically come from burning coke — derived from coal — in blast furnaces.
Electra, a Colorado-based startup, is building momentum around a low-temperature electrochemical approach to iron refining that stands to drastically reduce emissions, and on Thursday announced a $186 million Series B funding round. The company’s battery-like devices would electrify the steelmaking process while their relatively small size could move the industry towards a more modularized, “Lego block” approach, negating the need to build a huge facility all at once.
If it works, there’s a lot of money to be made. “The steel industry is so big,” Electra’s CEO, Sandeep Nijhawan, told me. “We're talking about a $1 trillion a year market, and something like $600 billion of iron-making that has to happen every year.” The company’s latest funding round was led by the Singaporean investment firm Temasek Holdings and the sustainable investment firm Capricorn Investment Group.
Electra can refine iron at just 60 degrees Celsius — cooler than your average cup of coffee and orders of magnitude cooler than the 1,600 degrees Celsius that traditional steelmaking requires. This low-temperature approach is particularly conducive to working with renewables, as the process can be easily started and stopped in tandem with the availability of wind and solar resources. That’s not the case for high-temperature systems such as the one used by green steel startup Boston Metal, which works with molten ore that must be kept extremely hot at all times, lest it harden.
First, Electra’s process involves dissolving iron ore in an acidic solution at near room temperature, which separates the iron from impurities in the ore such as alumina and silica. Then an electric current is passed through the solution, which causes a chemical reaction that deposits the pure iron onto stainless steel sheets, a much lower-temperature process than refining iron in a blast furnace. Electra’s steelmaking partners then convert the sheets of iron into steel via an electric arc furnace, which has the potential to be nearly emissions-free if powered by renewables.
The process isn’t actually so different from the way other metals such as copper, zinc, nickel, or cobalt are produced, Nijhawan told me, and it allows Electra to use contaminated or low-grade iron ores that would otherwise be ill-suited to low-carbon steel production.
The reason it’s taken so long to figure out how to refine iron ore the way we’ve been refining other metals for centuries is because iron can be particularly difficult to work with. For one, it takes a whole lot longer to dissolve in acid than other common metals; one of Electra’s breakthroughs was finding a proprietary way to pre-treat its ores so that they would dissolve more quickly. Secondly, once the iron eventually dissolves, it’s no longer stable, and tends to fall out of the solution before all the impurities are removed. Figuring out how to stabilize the ore by changing its oxidation state was another one of Electra’s breakthroughs. “Putting that system-level package together is where our innovation is,” Nijhawan told me.
This latest funding round will help finance the construction of Electra’s demonstration plant in Colorado, where it already operates two pilot plants powered with 100% clean energy, procured via a renewables program from the local utility, Xcel Energy. The company’s demo plant, which should be operational by early next year, will also run on renewable power from Xcel, while its first commercial plant, planned for the end of the decade, will either be located in an area with high renewables penetration or be powered with help from renewable energy partners, Nijhawan explained.
“Eventually when this scales, you will purpose-build the renewables infrastructure to feed the plant,” Nijhawan told me. Some of the biggest strategic investors in the space have bought into this model of steel decarbonization, including three large iron ore companies — Rio Tinto, BHP, and Roy Hill — as well as two large steel producers — Nucor and the Japanese company Yamato Kogyo. Prominent climate tech investors such as Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital also invested.
Once the process scales, Electra expects its iron to reach cost parity with traditional processes. Scaling-up, of course, is the tricky part, especially as tariffs and the generalized atmosphere of uncertainty is making infrastructure investors clam up when it comes to betting on large, first-of-a-kind projects. Nijhawan told me that so far, Electra’s scale-up strategy that he laid out last year remains unchanged.
“We are trying to replace how iron has been made for centuries with electro-iron, hopefully for decades to come”, he told me, explaining that in this moment of uncertainty, it helps to take the long-term view. “We now have this broad set of investors. Some of them have a 100 year history, they have deep manufacturing experience, and have been through administrations and policy changes. You just have to build a strategy that's built to last.”
