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It’s useful for more than just decarbonization.

Now that President Donald Trump has been officially inaugurated and issued his barrage of executive orders celebrating fossil fuels and shelving climate technologies such as wind energy and electric vehicles, climate tech startups are in a pickle. Federal funding can play a critical role in helping companies scale up and build out first-of-a-kind projects and facilities. So how to work with a government hostile to one of these startups’ core value propositions: aiding in the energy transition?
Talk of clean tech and electrification may be out of vogue, but its utility is not. The potential of many of these companies goes beyond mitigating climate change and into the realm of energy security and resilience — something the Department of Defense is well aware of.
The White House’s climate webpage has gone dark; the Department of Defense’s climate resilience portal lasted a little longer, but that’s now down, too. Once upon a time, though, the site read, “The changing climate is one of many threat multipliers to National Security, which adds complexity to Department of Defense decisions.” That’s a major reason why this agency can’t stop, won’t stop funding climate technologies. Another reason is that many technologies that happen to be good for the planet might also simply be the best tool for the job, meaning the DOD need not utter the word “climate” at all when justifying its decision to deploy new solutions.
“The Defense Department, so far in our experience, has framed things largely in terms of alternative benefits that our technology can have, such as fuel supply chain redundancy and reliability,” Ted McKlveen, co-founder and CEO of the hydrogen storage company Verne, told me. Verne received a $250,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant from the Army last May to work on the development of hydrogen vehicles.
Cindy Taff, CEO of the next-generation geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, told me something similar. “What the military likes to talk about is energy resilience,” she said, though she has heard the DOD tout the climate benefits of her company’s tech, too. Sage currently has multiple DOD engagements, including feasibility studies with both the Army and Navy and a $1.9 million grant to build a demonstration project for the Air Force.
That’s not to say it’s clear what the Department of Defense’s funding priorities under Trump will be. When I contacted the DOD in mid-December to request an interview for this story, a spokesperson initially told me they would help connect me to the right person. But as Trump’s inauguration drew nearer, I got a message saying the agency would have to hold off until it got more guidance, as “it remains to be seen in the next few weeks what direction the new administration is going.”
Regardless of how the priorities shake out, practically every climate-focused company and venture capitalist I talk to emphasizes that their companies will only succeed if they can make or invest in products that can compete on economics and/or quality alone, sans government support. That was true even before a second Trump turn in the White House started to look like an inevitability, and this new administration will at least partially reveal which companies can do that. But while everybody aims to be independent of federal support, they might not actually need to say goodbye to that funding stream, so long as they can tout their economic and performance benefits to the right customers.
Take Pyka, for example. When Michael Norcia co-founded the autonomous electric aircraft company in 2017, the ultimate goal was to design a passenger plane. “We want that to be our legacy, but we were also very, very realistic about the challenges associated with actually doing that,” he told me. So when the DOD took an interest in the company’s commercial cargo planes and their potential ability to deliver supplies in contested environments, the startup jumped at the opportunity, delivering its first aircraft to AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, early last year. Interest from such a lucrative government customer helped the company to close its $40 million Series B round in September.
Of course, the decarbonization benefits of electrifying military cargo delivery would be huge. But unsurprisingly, Norcia told me that the DOD primarily frames the opportunity in terms of the capabilities of all-electric or hybrid-electric planes, which could take a variety of fuels, operate quietly, and give off minimal heat, making them more difficult to detect via thermal imaging. Plus, the more equipment is electrified the better, “in terms of having them be able to operate in a highly contested environment, where moving fuel around maybe is not feasible,” Norcia explained. Not to mention the fact that if a manned aircraft is shot down, people die, meaning that in a counterfactual sense, Pyka’s tech is saving lives.
Verne’s North Star is also decarbonization. And given that the military is the world’s largest oil consumer, McKlveen was excited to partner with the Army to put its hydrogen storage tech to use in medium and heavy-duty vehicles. The company stores hydrogen (ideally green hydrogen, produced via renewables-powered electrolysis) at high density as a cold, compressed gas, making it possible to build hydrogen vehicles with greater range and lower cost than has traditionally been done. Similar to Pyka, the Army is enthused that these vehicles would be difficult for adversaries to detect, as they’re quiet and give off little heat. Likewise, McKlveen told me that hydrogen power could replace the Army’s notoriously noisy generators.
While Verne has also partnered with the Department of Energy and its R&D arm, ARPA-E, McKlveen said that working with the DOD has been unique in a few ways. “The key difference is the DOD is a customer and a grant provider. So they can say both what their needs are as a potential customer and represent a potential customer,” he explained. This, along with the agency’s clear, phased approach that it puts companies through, helps bring a level of transparency to the whole process, from pilot to full-fledged military implementation, that McKlveen appreciates.
And lest we forget, “they also have a very large budget,” he told me. For fiscal year 2025, the DOD has requested $849.8 billion, while the DOE, by comparison, has requested a mere $51.4 billion.
“I find military people to be get-it-done type of people,” Taff of Sage Geosystems told me. “So I think that helps to create a sense of urgency and also push things along a lot faster than you would see with maybe other organizations.” Sage uses drilling technologies adopted from the oil and gas industry to access heat for clean electricity production across a wide variety of geographies. This is an especially attractive option for the DOD as the majority of geothermal infrastructure is underground, and thus well protected from attack. And unlike other renewables, this tech can provide 24/7 energy no matter the weather conditions. So it’s no surprise that the military is pouring money into this sector, pursuing partnerships with other big names in the geothermal space such as Fervo Energy and Eavor.
Electric planes, hydrogen, and geothermal all felt intuitively justifiable to me from a defense standpoint, but I was more surprised to learn that the DOD has gotten into the alternative proteins, a.k.a. “fake meat”, industry. Though meat substitutes won’t power tankers or keep the lights on, the Defense Department’s $1.4 million grant to The Better Meat Co. is intended to strengthen the American supply chain. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs views lab-grown meat as critical to its five-year agricultural plan. “So we don’t want to have the United States be importing clean protein in the way that we’re currently dependent on Asia for our semiconductors and photovoltaics,” Paul Shapiro, the company’s CEO, told me.
The Better Meat Co. produces a protein called Rhiza that’s derived from microscopic fungi, which it then sells as an ingredient to other companies to make either 100% animal-free meat or a meat blend. “This isn’t an alternative protein program. It’s a domestic biomanufacturing program,” Shapiro told me when I asked if military funding for meat substitutes could be at risk under Trump. Looking at some of the other companies that got grants through the same program, he said, “it’s literally like bio manufacturing things for military planes and jet lubricants and chemical catalysts for bullets.” That is, probably not Republican targets for defunding. “It’s clearly solely about wanting the U.S. to be a leader in biomanufacturing for the products that the world is going to depend on in the future.”
The DOD also sees promise in numerous other clean energy technologies, including nuclear microreactors for their portability and ability to provide off-grid energy in remote locations and alternate battery chemistries that could help the U.S. move away from a dependence on Chinese-produced lithium-ion batteries.
But despite the deep well of funding and pragmatic approach to deployment that the Department of Defense offers, agreeing to work with the DOD isn’t always an obvious choice. Many fear their company’s tech could be used in ways and in wars that they oppose. In 2018, for example, thousands of Google employees signed a letter opposing the company’s participation in Project Maven, a partnership with the Pentagon that uses artificial intelligence to improve the accuracy of drone strikes. Supporters of the project said it would lead to fewer civilian deaths, while protestors argued that Google “should not be in the business of war.” Google did not renew the contract. More recently, employees at Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have signed petitions opposing their company’s provision of cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government.
Norcia noted that most, but not all of his employees were neutral to positive when it came to working with the Air Force, while “for a small minority of the company, it unfortunately was not something that they really wanted to devote their life to.” While he understands that perspective, Norcia does believe that Pyka’s work with the DOD is a net positive for the world. “If you assume wars are going to keep happening — which, unfortunately, I think is the reality — I’d rather have it be the case that they’re more of a robot war than a human war,” he told me. And at the end of the day, passenger planes are still the goal.
As for his team at Verne, McKlveen told me everybody was on board. “The Defense Department has led to some of the biggest innovations of the last century, whether that’s the internet or GPS. And our team knows that.” Plus, even if the DOD doesn’t talk much about the climate benefits of sustainability-focused tech, that doesn’t negate them. A 2019 study revealed that the Pentagon purchases an average of 100 million barrels of oil per year, so from that perspective, “it’s hard to find a bigger customer that we can address,” McKlveen told me.
Norcia agreed. “I think the gains of your impact get turned way up if you’re doing work with the DOD,” he said, “as opposed to, you know, building an app that makes something incrementally more efficient or more addictive.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that DOD’s climate resilience portal has been taken down.
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That means it’s also buying natural gas — but by storing the emissions, the company says, it can still meet its climate goals.
Google is buying gas. The hyperscale tech company — which invented the power purchase agreement as a way to support renewables development in the 2010s and has been a leader in setting standards for and procuring renewable power — announced on Thursday that it is agreeing to buy the majority of the power generated by a planned natural gas-fired plant in Decatur, Illinois. Here’s the twist: The plant will also capture and store its carbon emissions, a first of its kind installation at commercial scale.
The Broadwing Energy Center will be developed by Low Carbon Infrastructure on a site owned by agribusiness giant ADM. The facility features an existing ethanol plant with carbon capture and storage nearby, including the Class VI wells necessary for carbon dioxide sequestration. The plant will provide 400 megawatts of power, as well as steam for the ADM facility.
“We’re going to work with LCI to hopefully have it all up and running by early 2030,” Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, told me.
While CCS has not yet been developed at anything like a commercial scale, it is already both a bogeyman and a panacea in the decarbonization debate — or as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has called it, “an oil exec’s fantasy, an environmentalist’s nightmare, and an energy expert’s object of fascination.”
Natural gas with CCS promises the dispatchability of natural gas — power produced exactly when and in the exact amounts the grid needs — without the greenhouse emissions of traditional gas plants. The problem is that the technology is expensive, meaning that its development has largely been seen to depend on emissions regulations that would essentially force generators to build or install CCS.
Those regulations were finalized during the final year of Biden’s presidency and, unsurprisingly, are no longer happening. That leaves the private sector to bear the cost and technological uncertainty of CCS development, with little obvious financial incentive to do so.
While this is Google’s first gas deal, it is not entirely unexpected. Google hit its initial goal of matching its worldwide energy consumption with renewable energy generation on an annual basis in 2017, upgrading that goal in 2020 to aim at generating clean power on a 24/7 basis in the same area that its energy consumption occurs by 2030.
This meant going beyond wind and solar and procuring power from generators that worked in all weather and at night.
In the same 2020 whitepaper where Google set out its hourly matching goal, it specifically mentioned CCS as one of “a number of emergent technologies” that “appear to be making good progress.”
In another 2023 whitepaper, Google affirmed its commitment to clean firm technology beyond wind and solar, adding that “we must also develop and commercialize new technologies to fully decarbonize electricity systems quickly and cost-effectively while maintaining reliability.” Once again it called out “power generation with carbon capture and storage” by name.
Since then Google has struck a number of deals to support clean firm development, including a development agreement with the advanced nuclear company Kairos and a “clean transition tariff” agreement with utility NV Energy to pay for geothermal power in Nevada produced by the enhanced geothermal company Fervo.
But carbon capture and storage remained in the picture as something that would be key for Google to meet its goals. “We set 24/7 carbon free energy as our North Star,” Terrell told me. “The other critical piece to that is CCS.”
At the same time, Google — and the rest of the technology industry — has been on a data center building spree, moving as fast as it can to put up bigger data centers that turn electricity into artificial intelligence. This has meant rising power usage and emissions. In 2024, Google reported that its emissions had gone up almost 50% over the previous five years, following a similar announcement from Microsoft.
“We’re still committed to those goals. They’re extremely ambitious, and we’ve never been shy about sharing that. 24/7 carbon free energy is a moonshot, but we are pushing very, very hard,” Terrell said.
The turn to CCS is not just driven by the advantages gas has over renewables — namely dispatchability — but also by the current political environment.
Google has a long track record of buying the output from renewables projects, including wind, in the broader Midcontinent Independent System Operator grid, where the Decatur project sits. But on a national basis, Terrell noted, “we’re seeing headwinds in the market due to policy changes” for renewables.
Solar and wind have now lost some of the incentives that spurred huge growth in both sectors in recent years, while projects that can pass the regulatory gauntlet have to linger in interconnection queues to get approved by electricity markets and often require transmission that can be expensive and challenging to build. The Trump administration has specifically targeted renewables — especially wind — for regulatory scrutiny, which will likely hinder renewable development in MISO, which gets 15% of its power from wind — far more than from solar, and about comparable with its nuclear generation.
“The markets are tough because of some of the changes in policy, interconnection rules, and lack of transmission,” Terrell said. “That’s certainly affecting our ability to procure with speed and scale.”
Google and LCI claim that the Broadwing plant will be able to capture and store over 90% of its carbon dioxide emissions.
The project started, LCI chief executive Jonathan Wiens told me, in 2020, primarily as an industrial decarbonization project to provide low-emissions steam to ADM for its food processing efforts, with the rest of the power going to the grid.“In the midst of this development,” Wiens said, “there were data centers that were 40 megawatts. Now they’re aspiring to be a gigawatt-plus, and it’s totally changed the power end of this.”
Of Google, he said, “they put their money where their mouth is and they’re willing to participate in a project.”
Both Terrell and Wiens confirmed that Google wanted to work with LCI beyond developing and purchasing power from the Broadwing facility. “It’s not just this one plant,” Wiens said. “It’s a much broader approach to deploying this in as many places as we can.”
Google did not disclose the terms of the PPA, but Terrell said, “We believe that CCS can be competitive at scale with other generation technologies, and certainly other low carbon or zero carbon generation technologies.”
Over time, he added, LCI and Google should be able to drive down prices as they work on more power plants. “That’s certainly something that we’re hoping to do.”
On Tesla’s profit plunge, Josh Shapiro’s battery win, and TVA staying public
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Melissa is now forecast to strengthen into a hurricane, with the potential to dump 30 inches of rain over parts of the Caribbean and blow winds of up to 50 miles per hour • Waves brought on by Tropical Storm Fengshen are big enough to rip up sidewalks in Vietnam • Myanmar broke an October heat record with temperatures of nearly 98 degrees Fahrenheit in the southeastern resort town of Kyeikkhame.

Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, threatened to withhold votes on permitting reforms he endorsed unless the Trump administration backs off what Heatmap’s Jael Holzman dubbed the “total war on wind.” At an unrelated hearing on Wednesday, Whitehouse said that “unless these illegal acts stop and unless offshore wind is included, there will be no permitting deal,” Politico reporter Josh Siegel reported on X. The remarks came two days after Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said the administration would not halt its attempts to block construction of offshore turbines in exchange for a bipartisan bill to overhaul federal permitting. “I hadn’t thought about the idea of trading something that makes sense for everybody in America for something that makes no sense — and that’s sort of how I view offshore wind,” Burgum said at an American Petroleum Institute event.
As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, US Wind warned in federal court this week that, if the administration wins its court case to revoke the project’s construction and operating permits, the Baltimore-based developer will likely go bankrupt. While Secretary of Energy Chris Wright dismissed the wind assault as a “one-off exception, or one-off complication,” the oil industry doesn’t see it that way. As I wrote earlier this month, Shell’s top U.S. executive spoke forcefully against the administration’s anti-wind crusade, warning that Democrats could use the precedents being set against oil and gas companies in the future. That isn’t slowing the administration’s plans to expand offshore oil drilling, however. A document leaked to the Houston Chronicle this week shows that the White House aims to open broad swaths of both the east and west coasts to offshore drilling, months after the administration rescinded designations for millions of acres of federal waters to serve for seaborne wind turbine development.
Tesla’s profit tanked 37% to $1.4 billion from a year earlier despite a revenue hike of 12% to $28.1 billion, the company reported in its latest quarterly earnings Wednesday evening. The automaker sold more cars in the last quarter than it did in the same period a year prior but still lost money on price cuts and low-interest loans. Elon Musk’s electric automaker rolled out stripped-down versions of its Model Y sport utility vehicle and its Model 3 sedan earlier this month, effectively matching the prices that buying an entry-level Tesla came out to before Trump rescinded the $7,500 federal tax credit for battery-powered cars last month. “In other words, you can still buy a Tesla in the $35,000 to $40,000 range,” Andrew Moseman wrote in Heatmap. “It just won’t be as good a Tesla as you used to be able to get for the money.”
Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the market, Tesla rival Rivian’s micromobility spinoff, Also, debuted a product meant to capture a share of the luxury segment that wants a $4,500 electric bicycle.
Last week, the Department of Energy confirmed plans to revoke $700 million in grants to American battery manufacturers, as I reported here on Monday. This week, Pennsylvania made up for a small part of that lost funding. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro announced plans to give Eos Energy Enterprises roughly $22 million in grants and capital funding to lure the nation’s leading manufacturer of zinc-based battery storage systems to relocate its headquarters from Edison, New Jersey, to Pittsburgh, and open a new factory in Allegheny County. Combined with the money the company is spending, the total investment will come to just under $353 million and create 735 new permanent positions. “Pennsylvania is positioning itself at the forefront of America’s energy transition — enabling us to bring America’s battery to scale,” Joe Mastrangelo, the chief executive of Eos Energy, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, in another electorally crucial northern state, OpenAI announced plans for yet another data center in its Stargate network. On Wednesday, the ChatGPT maker and software giant Oracle unveiled plans for a data center campus outside Milwaukee in Port Washington, Wisconsin, to be built with hyperscale developer Vantage Data Centers.
Trump’s nominees to serve in the empty seats on the Tennessee Valley Authority’s board of directors all pledged to oppose any privatization effort of the nation’s largest government-owned utility, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported. Selling off all or portions of the TVA, a remnant of the New Deal-era electrification of the South, have come up frequently since the mid 20th century, including under former President Barack Obama. Trump revived the debate in his first administration, proposing to sell off the TVA’s transmission and distribution business, but the effort went nowhere. In July, the White House abruptly moved to fire the remaining three members of the TVA’s board that Trump hadn’t yet dismissed unless they forced out the chief executive. The move was interpreted by insiders at the TVA as the first step toward a new privatization effort. But outcry over the potential to disrupt what has been a steady source of cheap electricity for the region appears to have tempered those ambitions.
An ounce of beef requires roughly 7,600 times more energy and 1.1 million times more water than a single prompt on ChaptGPT, a University of California academic recently calculated. Yet nearly two-and-a-half times more Americans are concerned about the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence than about meat production, according to a poll released Thursday morning by the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Of the 72% of Americans who expressed concern about AI’s environmental footprint, 41% said they were “very or extremely” concerned. That exceeds how many respondents said the same thing about cryptocurrency (29%), meat production (29%), and air travel (23%.) “Looking ahead, Americans are more likely to believe AI will be harmful rather than helpful to society, the economy, and the environment in the next 10 years,” the pollsters explained in a press release, “but they are divided on its impact on them personally.”
The findings mirror Heatmap Pro’s own survey results from August, which found that just 44% of Americans would welcome a data center nearby.
Americans are kings in our own castles, while Germans bow to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy even in their own homes … right? Not when it comes to installing batteries and solar panels on our own roofs. Germans just have to fill out a simple two-page application. Americans? Depending on where we live, we have to fill out all kinds of physical paperwork, get multiple rounds of approval from zoning officials and homeowners associations, and navigate disparate systems at the neighborhood, county, and state levels. That’s according to a new analysis that the group Permit Power shared with me exclusively for Heatmap. The report proposed axing that red tape. Doing so could dramatically lower the cost of rooftop solar and batteries, and ultimately save Americans more than $1 trillion — yes, with a T — over the next quarter-century.
A new analysis by Permit Power calculates the cumulative benefits of cheap rooftop solar over the lifetime of a typical rig.
Liberty-loving Americans are prone to poke fun at the bureaucratic nightmares Australians and Germans face when attempting to do just about anything. But try installing solar panels on your roof in the U.S. Americans pay a median price of $28,000 for a 7-kilowatt system. The typical Australian, meanwhile, spends just $4,000, and the German — after filling out a mere two-page application — pays $10,000 per project.
How is this possible? Blame state and local governments, and even homeowners associations, for holding back Americans from generating their own carbon-free electricity from the sun with onerous permitting regimes, inspection requirements, and interconnection processes.
It doesn’t have to be this way. A new analysis by the research group Permit Power, shared exclusively with Heatmap, outlines a path toward slashing the red tape.
The nonprofit, which advocates for fewer restrictions on renewables, proposed that states adopt several policies already popular in other countries. Those include adopting software that will allow for virtually instantaneous permitting of solar and battery projects, allowing for remote inspections verified via photos or video submitted online, and automatic grid interconnections for residential systems that use smart inverters that manage voltage and frequency to keep energy flowing safely back and forth onto power lines.
If states championed the reforms, the analysis found, more than 18 million U.S. households could afford solar that can’t today. Given rising electricity rates, the free power the panels would provide during the day would shave an average $1,600 off households’ annual utility bills, growing to $56,000 over the 25-year lifetime of a typical rooftop solar system. That would deliver cumulative savings to the U.S. of $1.2 trillion over that time period.
“It’s a number that starts with a ‘t,’” Nick Josefowitz, Permit Power’s founder and chief executive, told me. “That’s a really big number.”
Examples cited in the report highlight just how much time and effort Americans need to go through to install solar panels or batteries even if they can afford the high cost of the equipment.
Illinois requires paper submissions of permitting and inspection documents and approvals from multiple agencies with different document requirements for each local government. Minnesota mandates in-person submission of documents and monthly township meetings for zoning approvals before construction. New York sets strict limits on batteries and requires architects to review the projects in certain areas. Colorado’s bespoke file-naming conventions and mixed paper and digital formats create a bureaucratic quicksand that leads to increased corrections, resubmissions and delays.
“If you were to try and go city by city and modernize permitting in 20,000 different municipalities, that’d be an endless task,” Josefowitz said. “There’s hope we can solve these problems at the state level.” Florida, Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas have all passed legislation to streamline permitting processes in the past year, he said.
While most countries have a national system for regulating solar, “the U.S. is quite unique,” said Andrew Birch, the chief executive of Open Solar, a software company that helps solar installers navigate local rules. “It’s a problem that’s unique to the United States.”
The implications go beyond household electricity costs. The U.S. is struggling to meet surging electricity demand as the backlog of gas turbine orders mounts. Meanwhile, new nuclear reactors remain years away, and the Trump administration has cut back on federal investments in transmission lines and yanked permitting for large-scale solar and offshore wind projects.
By equipping more homes with equipment to generate and store their own electricity, households can temporarily go off-grid when demand is particularly high, freeing up far more room on the existing system for new sources of power and avoiding forced blackouts, said Jigar Shah, the former head of the Biden-era Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, who reviewed Permit Power’s findings.
While solar panels have gotten the most attention, he said, batteries are the critical equipment.
“Rooftop solar alone does very little to solve the growth issue. What really solves the growth issue is residential batteries,” Shah told me. “The reason you get solar is because charging those batteries off the grid is expensive. Solar off your roof might be 10 cents per kilowatt hour, while power from the utility is 30 cents.”
To Josefowitz, what makes his group’s findings so practical at this moment is that none of the policy proposals the report puts forward depend on the federal government.
“If we had to go through the federal government, we couldn’t because no one is working there right now — and even when they were working they struggled to come to agreement on anything,” he said. “We can solve these problems at the state level, and allow American families to have the nice things at the nice prices that families in Australia and Germany enjoy.”