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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.
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On China’s carbon goal, a U.S. uranium ramp up, and Microsoft’s green steel deal
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Humberto formed in the Atlantic and is expected to strengthen into a hurricane this weekend, bringing rip currents to Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the U.S. East Coast • Severe storms could bring winds of up to 75 miles per hours throughout the Mid-Atlantic region • As its death toll climbs to 25 in Taiwan and the Philippines, Typhoon Ragasa is weakening as it moves toward Southeast Asia.
The Trump administration is stepping up its efforts to crack down on states’ policies to curb climate-changing pollution, asking the public to submit examples of laws with “significant adverse effects” on the economy. So far, E&E News reported Thursday, 251 respondents have given the Justice Department potential targets, including bans on fossil fuel appliances in new buildings and policies to bar the use of so-called forever chemicals in states such as Maine, New Mexico, and Minnesota.
The Department of Justice first posted a call for comments in the Federal Register in August to find state climate policies that are “burdening” energy development. Already, the administration has filed lawsuits against Vermont and New York to challenge their climate Superfund laws, and sued Hawaii and Michigan to thwart those states’ plans to sue fossil fuel companies over the effects of global warming. This month, the administration urged the Supreme Court to side with industry and transfer climate lawsuits from state to federal courts.
Chinese President Xi Jinping. Suo Takekuma - Pool/Getty Images
When President Donald Trump shredded the United States’ climate goals and started the process to withdraw from the Paris climate accords on his first day in office, campaigners hoped China and the European Union would pursue more ambitious carbon-cutting targets to make up the difference. But that’s not what’s happening. On Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced plans to cut emissions by just 7% to 10% by 2035. The European Union complained that Beijing’s new goal “falls well short.” But, as I reported in this newsletter, the EU failed to muster support across the bloc for its own new binding carbon targets ahead of the United Nations General Assembly this week.
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Centrus, the American uranium enrichment giant spun out from the federal government in 1998, announced on Thursday an expansion of its Piketon, Ohio, nuclear fuel facility. The new production line is expected to add 300 jobs at the plant and bolster output of both the low-enriched uranium used in traditional reactors and the High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, or HALEU, needed for many of the new next-generation small modular reactors under development. While the company said the size and scope of the expansion depend on federal funding decisions from the Department of Energy, the plans “would represent a multibillion-dollar private and public investment.” After decades of decline, the surge in electricity growth has spurred newfound interest in atomic energy. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last month, “the nuclear power dealmaking boom is real.”
“The time has come to restore America’s ability to enrich uranium at scale,” Centrus CEO Amir Vexler said in a statement. “We are planning a historic, multi-billion-dollar investment right here in Ohio — supported by a nationwide supply chain to do just that. When it comes to powering our energy future, it’s time to stop relying on foreign, state-owned corporations and start investing in American technology, built by American workers.”
Microsoft this week inked a deal to buy green steel from a first-of-a-kind facility in northern Sweden, Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci reported Thursday. While the tech giant doesn’t directly buy construction materials itself for its data centers, Microsoft agreed to work with its equipment suppliers to ensure that Stegra’s green steel is used in some of its server farms in Europe. As part of the deal, Microsoft will also buy “environmental attribute certificates” that represent the emissions reductions provided by Stegra’s steel and allow the steelmaker to sell its “near-zero emission” metal into the European market at a significant markdown, putting the more expensive green steel in line with the prices of fossil-fueled steel. Efforts to green the U.S. steel industry have stalled out since Trump returned to office. But the White House’s decision to claim a “golden share” of steelmaker U.S. Steel as part of its approval of Japanese rival Nippon Steel’s takeover earlier this year could, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote this summer, give a future administration the leverage to push greening the supply in the future.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came out against a proposal for a 4.5 million-square-foot data center campus in Bessemer, Alabama, on the grounds that the 70% Black city is already home to major emitters of greenhouse gases and an energy-hungry server farm would make that worse. In an open letter cited in Inside Climate News on Thursday, the state chapter of the NAACP said “the impacts of the data center do not justify its construction.” Residents “are fighting for cleaner air as these plants contribute significantly to the current climate crisis and health issues in the county.” It’s part of a mounting backlash to the growth of data centers. Earlier this month, a Heatmap Pro survey found that only 44% of Americans would welcome a data center in their neighborhood, making them significantly less popular than even a gas-fired power station.
A new analysis of a million-year-old human skull discovered in China could radically upend the scientific consensus on the origins of Homo sapiens, raising the possibility that our species developed in Asia rather than Africa. “This changes a lot of thinking because it suggests that by one million years ago our ancestors had already split into distinct groups, pointing to a much earlier and more complex human evolutionary split than previously believed,” Chris Stringer, an anthropologist and research leader in human evolution at the Natural History Museum in London, told The Guardian. “It more or less doubles the time of origin of Homo sapiens.”
In a special episode of Shift Key, Rob interviews Representative Sean Casten about his new energy price bill, plus Emerald AI’s Arushi Sharma Frank.
Artificial intelligence is helping to drive up electricity demand in America. Energy costs are rising, and utilities are struggling to adjust. How should policymakers — and companies — respond to this moment?
On this special episode of Shift Key, recorded live at Heatmap House during New York Climate Week, Rob leads a conversation about some potential paths forward. He’s joined first by Representative Sean Casten, the coauthor of a new Democratic bill seeking to lower electricity costs for consumers. How should the grid change for this new moment, and what can Democrats do to become the party of cheap energy?
Then he’s joined by Arushi Sharma Frank, an adviser to Emerald AI, an Nvidia-seeded startup that helps data centers flexibly adjust their power consumption to better serve the grid. Sharma Frank has worked for utilities and tech companies — she helped stand up Tesla’s energy business in Texas — and she discusses what utilities, tech companies, and startups can learn from each other?
Congressman Casten represents Illinois’s 6th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a former clean energy entrepreneur and CEO, and he sits on the House Financial Services Committee and the Joint Economic Committee. He is also vice chair of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition.
Arushi Sharma Frank is an adviser to She has previously worked in roles at Tesla, Exelon Constellation, the Electric Power Supply Association, and the American Gas Association. She is a non-resident expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
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 off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Earlier you said something that I want to go back to, which was that our energy system doesn’t reward cheap energy, and it hasn’t been set up to reward cheap energy. What did you mean by that?
Representative Sean Casten: So at a high level, no market, left to its own devices, will reward cheap things. Because if I’m a buyer, I want to buy things for cheap. If you’re a seller, you want to sell things for a lot of money. I remember my dad, when I was a kid, had a little paperweight on his desk. It was an oil barrel, and on one side it said, “Relax, the price will go down,” and on the other side it said, “Relax, the price will go up.” And depending on which side of a negotiation you were on, that was how you pointed the oil barrel.
What’s happened in the energy sector that has made that hard is that, because it is such a highly regulated sector, we’ve vastly over-advantaged the producers in what would otherwise be an even negotiation. So, for example, if you as a consumer want to put a solar panel on the roof of your house, you have to get permission from your local utility, who’s going to lose the revenue, who can raise all sorts of technical objections and do that.
If you have a solar panel and you say, boy, there’s hours when I’m making more power than I want, or than I need, maybe my neighbor would like to have some of my excess — well, you’re not a regular utility. You’re not allowed to do that. Your neighbor can’t buy it from you. These are because of laws we’ve set up that says only that utility has the right to do it.
Outside of the electric space, there’s a law that’s been on the book since 1935, the Natural Gas Act, that says that you cannot build a gas export facilities in the United States unless it is in the national interest. Is it in the national interest to raise people’s price of gas? That was never specified in the act. And so when the Trump administration went through and approved all those assets — which by the way, the Biden administration had shut down in part because they said it’s in the national interest — they said, well, we think it’s in the national interest to look out for our gas producers.
Somewhat more recently than that, when the price of oil collapsed during COVID in April of 2020, Trump called the Saudis and said, we are going to withhold military aid from Saudi Arabia unless you raise the price of oil. The Saudis flinched and the price of oil went up, and he was praised on the cover of all the business magazines as saving our oil industry.
Why didn’t we do the same thing two years later when everybody was complaining about the price of oil being so high and we had a Democrat in the White House? We’ve always had this feeling, like, I need to look out for producers, because the producers have had more political clout. We’ve connected those things together, and you can be angry about that. You can be embarrassed about that. Or you can see it as an unbelievable opportunity to generate a tremendous amount of wealth to lower energy costs — and oh, by the way, cut a bunch of CO2 emissions.
Mentioned:
Democrats Bid to Become the Party of Cheap Energy
Heatmap’s Katie Brigham on Emerald AI, a.k.a. The Software That Could Save the Grid
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...
Salesforce, presenting sponsor of Heatmap House at New York Climate Week 2025.
The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.
When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.