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Brightband emerges from stealth to commercialize AI-weather forecasting.
The weather has never been hotter.
The past few years have seen a boom in the weather prediction industry, with AI-based weather models from the likes of Google DeepMind, Huawei, and Nvidia consistently outperforming traditional models. Most of that work has been research-oriented, but today the startup Brightband emerged from stealth with $10 million in Series A funding and a unique plan to commercialize generative AI weather modeling. Instead of trying to go up against Weather.com, Brightband is tailoring models to specific industries such as insurance, finance, agriculture, energy, and transportation. The round was led by Prelude Ventures.
Weather forecasting has traditionally been the domain of the public sector, with the most widely used models coming from the U.S. National Weather Service and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Brightband’s CEO Julian Green told me that private companies haven’t been able to break in “because it has cost so much to have billion dollar supercomputers,” which are required to run today’s so-called “numerical” weather models.
These models rely on complex atmospheric equations based on the laws of physics to predict future weather patterns, and because of their computational intensity, are usually only updated four times daily. It’s possible then that AI-based weather prediction could thus actually reduce energy demand — because while it takes a lot of energy to train an AI model, after that’s done, generating forecasts is simple. “So instead of six hours to have a forecast, it takes under a second. Instead of using a billion dollar supercomputer, you’re using a laptop,” Green told me.
AI models like Brightband’s are trained on decades worth of past weather data, and when fed a snapshot of current conditions, can predict what will come next, much like ChatGPT does with text. “Think about the weather AI prediction problem as predicting the next frame in a radar sequence,” Green told me.
He said that customizing forecasts for particular industries will also be as simple as querying a large language model. A wind farm operator could, for example, “just take an attached file of historical wind energy production, and throw it in there and say, hey, tell me what the wind energy is going to be like next week.” Likewise folks in the aviation industry could have the model tell them if their plane’s wings are likely to ice up, utilities could get detailed insight into expected energy demand and generation, and finance companies could get up-to-the-minute information about weather-sensitive commodities. Previously, companies would’ve had to build their own forecasting teams or hire third-party advisors to get such specific predictions.
Brightband wants to further differentiate itself from the types of models that tech companies have already built by using only raw data inputs to generate its forecasts, from sources such as satellites, weather balloons, and radar systems. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not the way that most models currently work. Because there are data gaps, such as over oceans and in the developing world, the datasets used to train today’s AI weather models, Green explained, “smear the available data over a three-dimensional grid of the globe,” diluting the accuracy of both the real-time weather and presumably the resulting forecasts.
It’s hard to say how much more accurate using only raw data inputs will be, because “that’s what nobody has done yet,” Green told me. Data gaps are still an issue of course, but Green told me that Brightband’s approach will also allow the company to better analyze when and where filling these gaps would add the most value.
Brightband says it hopes to publish a paper by year’s end with an open-source version of its forecast model, alongside evaluation tools to assess its performance.
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Two former Microsoft employees have turned their frustration into an awareness campaign to hold tech companies accountable.
When the clean energy world considers the consequences of the artificial intelligence boom, rising data center electricity demand and the strain it’s putting on the grid is typically top of mind — even if that’s weighed against the litany of potential positive impacts, which includes improved weather forecasting, grid optimization, wildfire risk mitigation, critical minerals discovery, and geothermal development.
I’ve written about a bunch of it. But the not-so-secret flip side is that naturally, any AI-fueled improvements in efficiency, data analytics, and predictive capabilities will benefit well-capitalized fossil fuel giants just as much — if not significantly more — than plucky climate tech startups or cash-strapped utilities.
“The narrative is a net impact equation that only includes the positive use cases of AI as compared to the operational impacts, which we believe is apples to oranges,” Holly Alpine, co-founder of the Enabled Emissions Campaign, told me. “We need to expand that conversation and include the negative applications in that scoreboard.”
Alpine founded the campaign alongside her partner, Will Alpine, in February of last year, with the goal of holding tech giants accountable for the ways users leverage their products to accelerate fossil fuel production. Both formerly worked for Microsoft on sustainability initiatives related to data centers and AI, but quit after what they told me amounted to a string of unfulfilled promises by the company and a realization that internal pressure alone couldn’t move the needle as far as they’d hoped.
While at Microsoft, they were dismayed to learn that the company had contracts for its cloud services and suite of AI tools with some of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world — including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell — and that the partnerships were formed with the explicit intent to expand oil and gas production. Other hyperscalers such as Google and Amazon have also formed similar cloud and AI service partnerships with oil and gas giants, though Google burnished its sustainability bona fides in 2020 by announcing that it would no longer build custom AI tools for the fossil fuel industry. (In response to my request for comment, Microsoft directed me to its energy principles, which were written in 2022, while the Alpines were still with the company, and to its 2025 sustainability report. Neither addresses the Alpines’ concerns directly, which is perhaps telling in its own right.)
AI can help fossil fuel companies accelerate and expand fossil fuel production throughout all stages of the process, from exploration and reservoir modeling to predictive maintenance, transport and logistics optimization, demand forecasting, and revenue modeling. And while partnerships with AI hyperscalers can be extremely beneficial, oil and gas companies are also building out their own AI-focused teams and capabilities in-house.
“As a lot of the low-hanging fruit in the oil reserve space has been plucked, companies have been increasingly relying on things like fracking and offshore drilling to stay competitive,” Will told me. “So using AI is now allowing those operations to continue in a way that they previously could not.”
Exxon, for example, boasts on its website that it’s “the first in our industry to leverage autonomous drilling in deep water,” thanks to its AI-powered systems that can determine drilling parameters and control the whole process sans human intervention. Likewise, BP notes that its "Optimization Genie” AI tool has helped it increase production by about 2,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day in the Gulf of Mexico, and that between 2022 and 2024, AI and advanced analytics allowed the company to increase production by 4% overall.
In general, however, the degree to which AI-enabled systems help expand production is not something companies speak about publicly. For instance, when Microsoft inked a contract with Exxon six years ago, it predicted that its suite of digital products would enable the oil giant to grow production in the Permian Basin by up to 50,000 barrels by 2025. And while output in the Permian has boomed, it’s unclear how much Microsoft is to thank for that as neither company has released any figures.
Either way, many of the climate impacts of using AI for oil and gas production are likely to go unquantified. That’s because the so-called “enabled emissions” from the tech sector are not captured by the standard emissions accounting framework, which categorizes direct emissions from a company’s operations as scope 1, indirect emissions from the generation of purchased energy as scope 2, and all other emissions across the value chain as scope 3. So while tailpipe emissions, for example, would fall into Exxon’s scope 3 bucket — thus requiring disclosure — they’re outside Microsoft’s reporting boundaries.
According to the Alpines’ calculations, though, Microsoft’s deal with Exxon plus another contract with Chevron totalled “over 300% of Microsoft’s entire carbon footprint, including data centers.” So it’s really no surprise that hyperscalers have largely fallen silent when it comes to citing specific numbers, given the history of employee blowback and media furor over the friction between tech companies’ sustainability targets and their fossil fuel contracts.
As such, the tech industry often ends up wrapping these deals in broad language highlighting operational efficiency, digital transformation, and even sustainability benefits —- think waste reduction and decreasing methane leakage rates — while glossing over the fact that at their core, these partnerships are primarily designed to increase oil and gas output.
While none of the fossil fuel companies I contacted —- Chevron, Exxon, Shell, and BP — replied to my inquiries about the ways they’re leveraging AI, earnings calls and published corporate materials make it clear that the industry is ready to utilize the technology to its fullest extent.
“We’re looking to leverage knowledge in a different way than we have in the past,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan said on the company’s Q2 earnings call last year, citing AI as one of the tools that he sees as integral to “transform the culture of the company to one that is able to outcompete in the coming years.”
Shell has partnered since 2018 with the enterprise software company C3.ai on AI applications such as predictive maintenance, equipment monitoring, and asset optimization, the latter of which has helped the company increase liquid natural gas production by 1% to 2%. C3.ai CEO Tom Siebel was vague on the company’s 2025 Q1 earnings call, but said that Shell estimates that the partnership has “generated annual benefit to Shell of $2 billion.”
In terms of AI’s ability to get more oil and gas out of the ground, “it’s like getting a Kuwait online,” Rakesh Jaggi, who leads the digital efforts at the oil-services giant SLB, told Barron’s magazine. Kuwait is the third largest crude oil producer in OPEC, producing about 2.9 million barrels per day.
Some oil and gas giants were initially reluctant to get fully aboard the AI hype train — even Exxon CEO Darren Woods noted on the company’s 2024 Q3 earnings call that the oil giant doesn’t “like jumping on bandwagons.” Yet he still sees “good potential” for AI to be a “part of the equation” when it comes to the company’s ambition to slash $15 billion in costs by 2027.
Chevron is similarly looking to AI to cut costs. As the company’s Chief Financial Officer Eimear Bonner explained during its 2024 Q4 earnings call, AI could help Chevron save $2 to $3 billion over the next few years as the company looks towards “using technology to do work completely differently.” Meanwhile, Saudi Aramco’s CEO Amin Nasser told Bloomberg that AI is a core reason it’s been able to keep production costs at $3 per barrel for the past 20 years, despite inflation and other headwinds in the sector.
Of course, it should come as no surprise that fossil fuel companies are taking advantage of the vast opportunities that AI provides. After all, the investors and shareholders these companies are ultimately beholden to would likely revolt if they thought their fiduciaries had failed to capitalize on such an enormous technological breakthrough.
The Alpines are well aware that this is the world we live in, and that we’re not going to overthrow capitalism anytime soon. Right now, they told me they’re primarily running a two-person “awareness campaign,” as the general public and sometimes even former colleagues are largely in the dark when it comes to how AI is being used to boost oil and gas production. While Will said they’re “staying small and lean” for now while they fundraise, the campaign has support from a number of allies including the consumer rights group Public Citizen, the tech worker group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, and the NGO Friends of the Earth.
In the medium term, they’re looking toward policy shifts that would require more disclosure and regulation around AI’s potential for harm in the energy sector. “The only way we believe to really achieve deep change is to raise the floor at an international or national policy level,” Will told me. As an example, he pointed to the EU’s comprehensive regulations that categorize AI use cases by risk level, which then determines the rules these systems are subject to. Police use of facial recognition is considered high risk, for example, while AI spam filters are low risk. Right now, energy sector applications are not categorized as risky at all.
“What we would advocate for would be that AI use in the energy sector falls under a high risk classification system due to its risk for human harm. And then it would go through a governance process, ideally that would align with climate science targets,” Will told me. “So you could use that to uplift positive applications like AI for methane leak detection, but AI for upstream scenarios should be subject to additional scrutiny.”
And realistically, there’s no chance of something like this being implemented in the U.S. under Trump, let alone somewhere like Saudi Arabia. And even if such regulations were eventually enacted in some countries, energy markets are global, meaning governments around the world would ultimately need to align on risk mitigation strategies for reigning in AI’s potential for climate harm.
As Will told me, “that would be a massive uphill battle, but we think it’s one that’s worth fighting.”
A longtime climate messaging strategist is tired of seeing the industry punch below its weight.
The saga of President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains at least one clear lesson for the clean energy industry: It must grow a political spine and act like the trillion-dollar behemoth it is. And though the logic is counterintuitive, the new law will likely provide an opportunity to build one.
The coming threat to renewable energy investment became apparent as soon as Trump won the presidency again last fall. The only questions were how much was vulnerable, and through what mechanisms.
Still, many clean energy leaders were optimistic that Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda had room for renewables. During the transition, one longtime Republican energy lobbyist told Utility Dive that Trump’s incoming cabinet had a “very aggressive approach towards renewables.” When Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper introduced would-be Secretary of Energy Chris Wright at the fracking executive’s confirmation hearing, he vouched for Wright’s clean energy cred. Even Trump touted Wright’s experience with solar.
At least initially, the argument made sense. After all, energy demand is soaring, and solar, wind, and battery storage account for 95% of new power projects awaiting grid connection in the U.S. In red states like Texas and Oklahoma, clean energy is booming because it’s cheap. Just a few months ago, the Lone Star State achieved record energy generation from solar, wind, and batteries, and consumers there are saving millions of dollars a day because of renewables. The Biden administration funneled clean energy and manufacturing investment into red districts in part to cultivate Republican support for renewables — and to protect those investments no matter who is president.
As a result, for the past six months, clean energy executives have absorbed advice telling them to fly below the radar. Stop using the word “climate” and start using words like “common sense” when you talk to lawmakers. (As a communications and policy strategist who works extensively on climate issues, I’ve given that specific piece of advice.)
But far too many companies and industry groups went much further than tweaking their messaging. They stopped publicly advocating for their interests, and as a result there has been no muscular effort to pressure elected officials where it counts: their reelection campaigns.
This is part of a broader lack of engagement with elected officials on the part of clean energy companies. The oil and gas industry has outspent clean energy on lobbying 2 to 1 this year, despite the fact that oil and gas faces a hugely favorable political environment. In the run up to the last election, the fossil fuel industry spent half a billion dollars to influence candidates; climate and clean energy advocates again spent just a fraction, despite having more on the line. My personal preference is to get money out of politics, but you have to play by the rules as they exist.
Even economically irresistible technologies can be legislated into irrelevance if they don’t have political juice. The last-minute death of the mysterious excise tax on wind and solar that was briefly part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was a glaring sign of weakness, not strength — especially given that even the watered-down provisions in the law will damage the economics of renewable energy. After the law passed, the President directed the Treasury Department to issue the strictest possible guidance for the clean energy projects that remain eligible for tax credits.
The tech industry learned this same lesson over many years. The big tech companies started hiring scores of policy and political staff in the 2010s, when they were already multi-hundred-billion dollar companies, but it wasn’t until 2017 that a tech company became the top lobbying spender. Now the tech industry has a sophisticated influence operation that includes carrots and sticks. Crypto learned this lesson even faster, emerging almost overnight as one of the most aggressive industries shaping Washington.
Clean energy needs to catch up. But lobbying spending isn’t a panacea.
Executives in the clean energy sector sometimes say they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Democrats and the segment of potentially supportive Republicans at the local and federal levels talk and think about clean energy differently. And the dissonance makes it challenging to communicate honestly with both parties, especially in public.
The clean energy industry should recognize that the safest ground is to criticize and cultivate both parties unabashedly. The American political system understands economic self interest, and there are plenty of policy changes that various segments of the clean energy world need from both Democrats and Republicans at the federal and state levels. Democrats need to make it easier to build; Republicans need to support incentives they regularly trumpet for other job-creating industries.
The quality of political engagement from clean energy companies and the growing ecosystem of advocacy groups has improved. The industry, disparate as it is, has gotten smarter. Advocates now bring district-by-district data to policymakers, organize lobby days, and frame clean energy in terms that resonate across the aisle — national security, economic opportunity in rural America, artificial intelligence, and the race with China. That’s progress.
But the tempo is still far too low, and there are too many carrots and too few sticks. The effects of President Trump’s tax law on energy prices might create some leverage. If the law damages renewable energy generation, and thereby raises energy prices as energy demand continues to rise, Americans should know who is responsible. The clean energy sector has to be the messenger, or at least orchestrate the messaging.
The campaigns write themselves: Paid media targeting members of Congress who praised clean energy job growth in their districts and then voted to gut jobs and raise prices; op-eds in local papers calling out that hypocrisy by name; energy workers showing up at town halls demanding their elected officials fight for an industry that’s investing billions in their communities; activating influencers to highlight the bright line between Trump’s law and higher electricity bills; and more.
If renewable energy is going to grow consistently in America, no matter which way the political wind blows, there must be a political cost to crossing the sector. Otherwise it will always be vulnerable to last-minute backroom deals, no matter how “win-win” its technology is.
On IRA funds, rescissions, and EV battery technology
Current conditions: The National Weather Service is advising Americans in 11 states affected by heat waves to avoid coffee and alcohol due to dehydration risk • There have been more wildfires in London this summer than in all of 2024 • We’re at the halfway point in climatological summer and the United States’ hottest day of the year — 124 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley, California, on Monday — may now be behind us.
It has long been a “big mystery” how much grant funding from the Inflation Reduction Act the Biden administration ultimately got out the door before leaving the White House. Previously, the administration had announced awards for about 67% of the $145.4 billion in grants. Still, it wasn’t until Republicans in Congress began their rescissions of the bill’s unobligated funds that a fuller picture began to emerge.
According to reporting by my colleague Emily Pontecorvo, the Biden administration spent or otherwise obligated about $61.7 billion before leaving office, with President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill clawing back $31.7 billion from 47 IRA programs. Programs that had the greatest proportion of their funding obligated include:
There’s a lot more in the data to dig through, too, which Emily does here.
Senate Republicans voted narrowly Tuesday evening to advance President Trump’s $9.4 billion rescissions package, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. Three Republican senators — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — joined Democrats in opposing the package. Congress must vote to approve the rescissions by Friday to meet a statutory 45-day deadline that began when President Trump sent his proposal on June 3. The vote-a-rama is set to begin Thursday afternoon.
The proposed package would eliminate $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, as well as large portions of foreign assistance programs. (A controversial plan to cut $400 million from the country’s AIDS relief program, known as PEPFAR, was ultimately removed to convince Republican holdouts.) But as I’ve written before, the package also takes aim at $1.7 billion of the $3.6 billion appropriated for the Economic Support Fund, which has historically been used to work with international partners to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as $125 million from the Clean Technology Fund, which provides financial resources for developing countries to invest in clean energy projects. The White House has said the programs do not “reflect America’s values or put the American people first.”
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China announced Tuesday that to protect the valuable breakthroughs that have allowed it to produce inexpensive electric vehicles, it will begin to restrict “eight key technologies for manufacturing [EV] batteries,” The New York Times reports. The move, which is effective immediately, will require a license from the Chinese government before any technologies can be transferred overseas “through trade, investment or technological cooperation.”
The move follows pressure by the European Union on Chinese EV and battery manufacturers to build factories within the bloc. As I covered in Heatmap AM yesterday, electric vehicle sales are booming in China in large part due to their affordability, with the nation being the “only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF has found. Though lithium-ion phosphate battery technology originated in the United States more than three decades ago, Chinese companies BYD and CATL have “figured out a way to further increase the number of recharges, making it comparable to more traditional battery chemistries,” in addition to advances in mass-production and capacity, the Times adds.
The third quarter of 2025 will “likely” see record sales of electric vehicles in the United States as would-be buyers rush to use the $7,500 tax credit before it expires on September 30, Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book reported this week. Electric vehicle sales were lower in Q2 of 2025 than in 2024 by 6.3%, with 310,839 new EVs sold, marking “only the third decline on record, and a sign of a more mature market,” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, senior analyst at Cox Automotive, said in a statement. Additionally, sales of used EVs — only a third of which had qualified for government incentives anyway before those were eliminated — are up, with 100,000 units sold in Q2. But the real story will be what happens in Q3, where there’s “about to be a fire sale” as consumers race against the clock, Andrew Moseman writes for Heatmap. If you’re among the shoppers, he’s got the scoop on EV deals here.
The United States will either “reform” the International Energy Agency or “withdraw,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg Tuesday during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University. The IEA, which was originally established to focus on oil security during the 1970s, has been characterized by Republicans as becoming a “cheerleader” for the renewable energy transition, in the recent words of Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. Wright echoed those concerns in his conversation with Bloomberg, telling the publication that the IEA’s projections that oil demand will plateau this decade are “total nonsense.” Despite the threats, Wright stressed that his “strong preference” for handling the IEA is “to reform it.”
Several major beauty brands, including L’Oréal Paris and Neutrogena, are set to include environmental impact ratings on their packaging. “The EcoBeautyScore” — which runs from A to E — “indicates the environmental footprint of beauty products based on its entire lifecycle, from ingredients to packaging and how it is disposed of,” Cosmetics Business reports.