Climate Tech
Form Energy CEO on the Potential for a 100-Hour Battery
Co-founder Mateo Jaramillo described how the startup’s iron-air battery could help address the data center boom — and the energy transition
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:
Co-founder Mateo Jaramillo described how the startup’s iron-air battery could help address the data center boom — and the energy transition
On Chinese solar exports, Blue Energy’s nuclear reactors, and GE Vernova stock
The companies are offering Texas ratepayers a three-year fixed-price contract that comes with participation in a virtual power plant.
On Trump’s renewables embargo, Project Vault, and perovskite solar
On China’s H2 breakthrough, vehicle-to-grid charging, and USA Rare Earth goes to Brazil
Investor and philanthropist John Doerr shares a refresh to his Speed & Scale climate action tracker.
John Doerr thinks it’s time to refresh his grand plan for decarbonization. The Kleiner Perkins chairman and climate-focused philanthropist published his book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now five years ago; then a year later, he introduced an online tracker to measure global progress across the book’s core objectives, which includes sectoral targets such as electrifying transport as well as execution-related goals that cut across all sectors such as winning on politics and policy and increasing investment investing.
But in the time since, both the world and the climate outlook have shifted significantly. So Doerr, alongside his co-author and advisor Ryan Panchadsaram, concluded that both the action plan and the metrics used to assess progress were due for a major revamp.
Heatmap got an exclusive look at the updated Speed & Scale tracker ahead of San Francisco Climate Week, where Doerr and Panchadsaram will unveil the new data and analytical framework underpinning this iteration. Designed to give budding entrepreneurs, business leaders, and policymakers a comprehensive view of where the world stands and how far it has to go in its fight against climate change, the tracker aims to help these stakeholders decide where to deploy their attention and capital.
Doerr told me the original plan has been a success in this regard. “We became convinced by the number of entrepreneurs, founders, technology experts and policy people who said, you know, that Speed & Scale plan influenced my decision about what to do — not how to do it, but what ought to really be done,” he said.
But Doerr is also well aware that we’re living in a different world now. “We had AI arrive and change the demand for electrical power, we have geopolitical forces that we’re trying to understand and cope with,” he told me. “And finally, there’s just the indomitable power of markets and price. All of which is to say, we can’t stick with a plan that’s five years old. It’s time to revise it.”
The updated plan preserves the six main objectives — electrify transportation, decarbonize the grid, fix food, protect nature, clean up industry, and remove carbon from the atmosphere — while including interim 2035 targets as well as 2050 targets aligned with a global net zero pathway. It also retains four other objectives on how to accelerate progress — that is, through politics and policy, turning movements into action, innovation, and investment. The team then breaks these 10 overarching priorities into subtargets called “key results,” in accordance with the goal-setting framework that Doerr famously introduced to Google in the late 1990s that has since become widely adopted across the tech industry.
While the key results in the original plan framed targets in percentage terms — for example, “increase EV sales to 50% of all new car sales by 2030” — the updated version uses absolute figures instead, such as “Increase the number of electric cars to over 600 million by 2035.” The idea, Panchadsaram told me, is to make the targets more tangible and thus easier to understand and act upon.
Another major change is the data that Speed & Scale uses to measure progress, which has altered the emissions picture significantly. Previously, the tracker relied on emissions estimates from the United Nations Environment Programme, but it’s since switched to data from the independent organization Climate TRACE, which combines satellite imagery, remote-sensing, and artificial intelligence to produce a more granular, point-source view of global emissions. The new data illuminated sources that have historically been undercounted, such as wildfire activity and methane leaks. This updated methodology indicates that annual emissions are about 74 gigatons a year, not the 59 gigatons that the old tracker had estimated using the UN’s numbers.
It was a shock for the team to see how drastically the topline figure changed with this new data, Panchadsaram told me, though it reinforced their notion that key results should usually represent gigaton-level opportunities for emissions abatement. But given that the world is still lagging across so many of these metrics, the Speed & Scale team no longer thinks it’s possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, although they say staying under 2 degrees remains viable with increased ambition.
But it’s not all bad news. The updated tracker highlights six key results — out of 52 total — that the world is on track to meet. These include electric vehicle adoption and achieving cost parity with combustion cars, continued scaling of solar and wind generation, cost reductions for zero-emissions firm and variable power, and reducing operational emissions among Fortune Global 500 companies. There’s even one milestone that has already been reached — clean energy jobs now outnumber fossil fuel jobs, according to data from the International Energy Agency.
When I asked the duo whether they were surprised at where we’d managed to eke out climate wins, Panchadsaram told me, “I think we were right directionally on the technologies. Who ended up scaling them was probably the radical change.” For instance, Speed & Scale spent a lot of words on the electric bus manufacturer Proterra, a Kleiner Perkins-backed startup that filed for bankruptcy in 2023. At the same time, the book devoted just a few paragraphs to the Chinese automaker BYD, which surpassed Tesla in global sales last year.
Yet unfortunately and predictably, there is a lot of bad news to be found in this latest update, too. Seven key results are labeled “code red,” indicating focus areas individually responsible for over 3 gigatons of annual emissions where there’s been little to no progress. These include methane leaks, heating and cooling of buildings, livestock management, and the manufacture of steel and other industrial materials. Beyond this, the tracker is filled with categories where we’re making either “insufficient” progress or “failing,” with the latter indicating stagnation in areas where the impact is less than 3 gigatons per year.
Many of the “code red” results represent hard-to-abate sectors where decarbonization technologies don’t exist at scale, command a high green premium, or frequently both. This is a reality that Doerr and Panchadsaram are well aware of. “Our friend Al Gore always says, ‘We have all the technologies we need to get to where we need to go. All we need is more political will,’” Doerr told me. He thinks Gore is correct — to an extent. “We’ve got all the technologies we need to get us to 2030 or 2035. We don’t have all the innovation we need to get us to 2050.”
To get even more granular on the innovation imperatives most critical to the energy transition, the Speed & Scale team partnered with organizations including Breakthrough Energy, McKinsey, Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and Elemental Impact to develop the Climate Tech Map, which I covered last year. In combination with the updated Speed & Scale plan, the map is designed to direct innovators toward key technological frontiers while also giving them a foundational grounding in the structure and challenges of these sectors.
Other updates to the tracker also reflect our changing political and market realities, with certain targets now recalibrated to align with current conditions. For instance, while the old tracker aimed to make climate a top-three voter issue, “we failed in achieving that objective,” Doerr told me. Climate messaging hasn’t proven to be a particularly salient issue for voters on either side of the aisle, and the updated tracker now sets what the team thinks is a more attainable benchmark — making climate a top-five issue.
Of course, even that is still quite a bold goal, as are most of the key results that Speed & Scale hope to achieve. But that’s the way it should be, Doerr said. “What was an opportunity has become an imperative, and so we have really got to step up our game and do it fast.”
On Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ quantum computing investment, plus more of the week’s biggest money moves.
It’s been a busy week for funding, with several of the most high-profile deals featured in our daily AM newsletter, including Slate Auto’s $650 million fundraise for its stripped-down electric truck and Rivian’s partnership with Redwood Materials to repurpose the electric automaker’s battery packs for grid-scale storage.
These are clearly companies with direct decarbonization implications, but one of the week’s other biggest announcements raises the question: Is this really climate tech? That would be quantum computing startup Sygaldry, which recently nabbed $139 million in a round led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build quantum AI infrastructure. Huh.
Elsewhere in the ecosystem, the climate connection is a little more straightforward, with new funding for advanced surface materials designed to improve insulation and fire-protection, capital for microgrids that can integrate a diverse mix of generation and storage assets, and federal support for next-generation geothermal tech.
Quantum computing offers a futuristic paradigm for high-powered information processing and problem solving. By leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics, these systems operate in fundamentally different ways than even today’s most advanced supercomputers, encoding information not as ones and zeros, but as quantum units called “qubits.” Naturally, there is significant interest in applying this novel tech — which today remains error-prone and not ready for prime time — to artificial intelligence, with the aim of exponentially accelerating certain training and inference workloads.
Perhaps less intuitively, however, these next-generation computers are now viewed, at least by one prominent venture capital firm, as a key climate technology.
This week, quantum computing startup Sygaldry raised a $139 million Series A round led by Bill Gates’ climate tech VC firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures to build “quantum-acclerated AI servers” for data centers, which could reduce the cost and power required to train and operate large models. “The AI industry is advancing faster than ever and needs a breakthrough in performance per watt,” Carmichael Roberts, Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ chief investment officer said in the press release. “Sygaldry’s vision for bringing quantum directly to the AI data center has the potential to deliver exactly that, bending the cost and energy curve at the moment it matters most."
Certainly Sygaldry’s ultra-high-powered computers could help lower the energy intensity of AI workloads, but that is no guarantee that it will reduce AI and data center emissions overall. As was widely discussed when the Chinese AI firm DeepSeek released its cheaper, more energy-efficient model early last year, efficiency gains could reduce emissions in the sector at large, but they are perhaps just as likely — or some argue even more likely — to drive greater proliferation of AI across a wide array of industries. This unfettered growth could offset efficiency gains entirely, leading to a net increase in AI power demand.
Buildings account for nearly 37% of domestic energy consumption, with heating and cooling representing the largest share of that load. But while energy efficiency strategies typically focus on upgrading insulation or adjusting the thermostat, there’s another approach — essentially painting the roof with sunlight-reflecting material — that has the potential to reduce AC demand and thus cut a building’s cooling-related energy use by up to 50%.
Just such a “paint” is one of the unique ceramic coatings developed by NanoTech Materials, which this week raised a $29.4 million Series A to scale its infrastructure materials business. Beyond roofing, the company also offers a fire-protective coating for wooden infrastructure such as utility poles, fences, highway retaining walls, and other transportation assets, as well as an insulative coating for high-heat industrial equipment such as pipes and storage tanks designed to slow heat loss and prevent burn risk.
“Today’s built environment demands materials that don’t just meet code, but can also outperform the extreme conditions we’re now facing,” said D. Kent Lance, a partner at HPI Real Estate Services & Investments, which led the Series A. Nanotech Materials currently operates a manufacturing facility in Texas and plans to use this new capital to further expand its operations as it conducts market research for its various product lines.
Interconnection delays aren’t just a data center problem. Industrial developers working on everything from real estate and electric vehicle charging to manufacturing and aviation are also struggling to get timely and reliable access to power when building or expanding their operations. Enter Critical Loop. This modular microgrid company is building battery energy storage systems that can integrate batteries of varying sizes and specifications with a variety of power sources, including onsite solar, diesel generators, and grid power.
This week, the startup announced a $26 million Series A round, bringing total funding to $49 million across all equity and debt financing. Critical Loop’s approach combines a software platform with proprietary hardware — what it calls a “combiner” — which reduces the need for the many custom components typically required to connect a diverse mix of batteries and generation sources. “There’s a lot of power problems that are not getting solved because of limitations on an understanding of how to integrate different systems at a site,” Critical Loop’s CEO Balachandar Ramamurthy, told me last month.
The company’s initial product is a modular single-megawatt battery system that can be transported in shipping containers for rapid deployment in capacity-constrained locations. To date, Critical Loop has deployed about 50 megawatt-hours of microgrid assets, with plans to scale to over 100 megawatt-hours by year’s end.
It’s been another exciting week for one of the few bipartisan bright spots in clean energy — geothermal development. My colleague Alexander C. Kaufman reported in this morning’s AM newsletter that the AI-native geothermal company Zanskar secured $40 million through one of the first development capital facilities for early-stage geothermal development, and now the technology has secured fresh capital from the fickle U.S. Department of Energy. Today, the DOE announced a $14 million grant to support an enhanced geothermal demonstration project in Pennsylvania that will convert an old shale gas well into a geothermal pilot plant.
Conventional geothermal systems depend on a highly specific set of subsurface conditions to be commercially viable, which includes naturally occurring underground reservoirs where fluid flows among hot rocks. By contrast, developers of enhanced geothermal systems effectively engineer their own reservoirs, hydraulically fracturing rock formations and then circulating water through those man-made fractures to extract heat that’s then used to generate electricity. A number of well-funded startups are advancing this approach using drilling techniques adapted from the oil and gas industry, such as Fervo Energy — which has an agreement with Google to supply electricity for its data centers — and Sage Geosystems, which has a similar tie-up with Meta.
“As the first enhanced geothermal systems demonstration site located in the eastern United States, this project offers an important opportunity to assess the ability of such systems to deliver reliable, affordable geothermal electricity to Americans nationwide,” Kyle Haustveit, the Assistant Secretary of the Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office, said in the DOE release. If successful, the Energy Department says the project could provide a replicable model for scaling the deployment of enhanced geothermal systems across a broader range of geographies.
This week, the nonprofit XPRIZE organization announced that it’s partnering with Amazon to launch a new global competition focused on critical mineral circularity — redesigning how minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel are recovered, processed, and reused. Demand for these minerals is projected to quadruple by 2040, but their supply chains remain largely concentrated in China, especially across refining, processing, and battery manufacturing.
The competition aims to catalyze breakthroughs in mineral recovery and recycling, materials solutions, and lower-impact extraction methods. It’s not yet open to submissions as organizers are still seeking philanthropic and corporate funding before entrepreneurs, startups, and research teams can submit their ideas for consideration. XPRIZE has been running challenges for three decades now, with past competitions revolving around carbon removal, adult literacy, and lunar exploration.