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The most interesting things I haven’t written about yet.
My inbox and calendar have been filled all year with press releases and requests to chat about new carbon removal technologies, artificial intelligence and its attendant energy demand, novel battery designs, advances in fission and fusion, and investors’ ever-present concerns about how to get all of this to market in time to make a real dent in the climate crisis (and also, you know, a profit).
I wrote about a lot of it — but not all of it, and much of the stuff that got left out is no less worthy of your attention than the stuff that made it. So here I present a roundup of the climate technologies that you might not have read about in Heatmap this year, but that have investors, academics, and the climate world at large buzzing as we look toward 2025.
This fall when I spoke with Amy Duffuor, a co-founder and partner at the venture capital firm Azolla Ventures, she told me that her firm, which is focused on “overlooked and neglected” climate solutions, has been fascinated by the shipping industry. Because while aviation and shipping each account for about 3% of global emissions, decarbonizing flight seems to get the bulk of the attention. “Sometimes it’s hard for people to imagine what they don’t see or what they’re not interacting with on a day to day basis,” Duffuor told me.
This fall, the firm co-led a $4.5 million seed round of investment in clean fuels producer Oxylus Energy, which converts carbon dioxide into green methanol for use in shipping and other transportation fuels. The tech relies on renewable-powered electrolyzers similar to those used to make green hydrogen, but the company’s secret sauce is a special catalyst that can convert carbon dioxide into methanol at low temperature and pressure, making the whole process more efficient and more economical than ever before.
Duffuor told me that green methanol has a leg up on other clean fuels such as green hydrogen, which has a low energy density, or green ammonia, which is highly toxic and corrosive. While supply of all of these is still limited and costly, Duffuor said that retrofitting an engine to run on green methanol is much simpler than adapting to other alternative fuels, which is why it’s already being done on a small scale today. Indeed, shipping giant Maersk has a number of green methanol boats in its fleet, one of which completed the world’s first green methanol-powered voyage last fall.
Long considered “one of climate science’s biggest taboos,” according to Heatmap’s own Robinson Meyer, geoengineering had a big 2024, and it looks poised to be taken increasingly seriously. In fact, one investor I spoke with this month, Lee Larson of Piva Capital, which focuses on decarbonizing heavy industry, told me he foresees a splashy but undeniably controversial funding announcement coming in the near future. “I don’t think it’s going to be Piva, but someone is going to take a bet on this, and there’s going to be a big funding round for a startup in this space,” he predicted. “Because there’s enough interested people with deep pockets that have been thinking about this space for someone to raise money off of it.”
But if nothing else, this year proved that the backlash would be swift. In June, the city council in the small town of Alameda, California, shut down testing of a solar geoengineering device that could one day be used for “marine cloud brightening” — that is, spraying aerosols into the sky to enable clouds to reflect more sunlight away from Earth — and Harvard University abandoned another solar geoengineering project, which aimed to study how aerosol plumes behave in the stratosphere. At the same time, though, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund announced that it would fund research into solar geoengineering to help inform policymakers should it one day become regulated, and the UK also committed to supporting research into various solar geoengineering pathways, including conducting outdoor experiments.
“There’s a growing understanding that, on a per unit of warming avoidance basis, this is just way cheaper than carbon dioxide removal solutions,” Larson told me. From his perspective, the world needs to support this type of research lest a layperson, a billionaire, or a small nation choose to go rogue. “Just given how cheap it is, given how little we know about it, that’s a poor combination — because the chance of someone doing something with a lot of unintended consequences goes up and up.”
The idea is pretty straightforward — install solar panels that can float on the surface of reservoirs, canals, lakes, and the like — but this year it really began to pick up steam. There are myriad benefits to this solution: eliminating land use controversies, built-in temperature regulation (water keeps the panels cool, thus increasing their efficiency), and reducing evaporation from the water bodies. A paper published in Nature this June found that floating solar could meet, on average, 16% of countries’ total energy needs.
And countries big and small are taking note. While there aren’t a lot of specialized floating solar startups seeking VC funding, governments as well as traditional solar manufacturers and project developers are stepping up. The U.S. Department of the Interior announced in April that it’s investing $19 million to install panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon, and Utah. Zimbabwe recently secured $250 million from the African Export-Import Bank to install floating solar on the world’s largest man-made lake, while China turned on the largest offshore solar farm in the world in November. Taiwan and India have also already deployed large installations, and have plans for more.
I spoke with the lead author of the Nature paper, Dr. Iestyn Woolway of the UK-based Bangor University, way back in June about floating solar’s decarbonization potential. Even he was “quite surprised with the number of countries that could meet a sizable fraction of the energy demands by [floating photovoltaics],” he told me. His modeling shows that Bolivia, for example, could meet about 80% of its energy demand with floating solar, while Ethiopia could meet 100% of its demand, with extra energy to spare.
The next step, he said, is gaining a deeper understanding of the ecological impacts of this technology. “Even if you do cover a water body by something small, like 10%, we don’t know what knock-on effect that would have,” he said.
Soils are some of the world’s most effective carbon sinks, and sustainable farming techniques can enhance soil’s natural carbon sequestration potential. Thus, soil carbon sequestration plays at the intersection of the fuzzy and buzzy regenerative agriculture space and the increasingly scientifically rigorous carbon dioxide removal sector, with its carbon crediting schemes and verification requirements. One investor I spoke with, Amy Francetic of Buoyant Ventures, is eager to find and back a company that can merge these two worlds. “If you could figure out how to sink carbon in a farm and do that in a way that is easy to measure and validate, we don’t have a good solution for that today,” she told me.
As of now, Francetic said, startups are going about this problem by doing labor intensive and expensive soil sampling and “marrying that with geospatial data to try to measure what climate benefits there are of changing certain agricultural practices, doing different row crops, changing the crop rotation, the amount of inputs you put into the crops.” Many have pitched Buoyant on their methodologies for bridging satellite data with soil sampling data, but thus far she’s passed. “None of them have, I think, met the standard of reliability that the financial industry would back from a carbon credit standpoint,” she explained. “That might be one of these holy grail things. If somebody could really do that, it could be very impactful.”
I’ll be honest, before this year I didn’t know what parametric insurance was. But since it came up time and again in conversations with investors about extreme weather and the necessity of climate resilience and adaptation measures, I decided to dig in. Here’s what parametric insurance is: an insurance product that automatically provides rapid payouts to customers in the case of natural disasters or weather events, assuming these events exceed a predefined limit. For example, a policyholder might be paid if the rainfall, wind speed, or temperature of a particular weather event is above or below a certain threshold, with the amount tied to how much the measurement deviates from the limit, not the damages incurred.
With extreme weather events getting more frequent and more intense due to climate change, this has given rise to a crop of startups that can leverage sensors, satellites, and artificial intelligence to quickly and accurately measure the extent of these events, thus enabling parametric insurance for a host of new customers. To name a few companies that have taken advantage: There’s Floodbase and FloodFlash (both focusing on flood insurance, naturally), which have each raised over $10 million in Series A financing; FloodFlash made a series of rapid payouts this year following storms in the UK, getting policyholders their money in as little as 10 hours after the water level exceeded its threshold. There’s Arbol, which protects against a host of weather events from drought to heat waves and cold snaps, and raised a $40 million Series B round this year. And there’s Pula, which helps provide parametric insurance to small-holder farmers in emerging markets, and raised a $20 million Series B round this year.
“This is affecting everybody,” Clea Kolster of Lowercarbon Capital, which led Floodbase’s Series A round, told me when we met at this year’s San Francisco Climate Week. “So how do you actually make sure that people have coverage for it and can continue to have as close to livable lives as possible, even when they’re subject to more frequent extreme weather events?” Investors know the storms are going to keep coming, so this category of adaptation tech is only set to grow.
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How the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could become the administration’s ultimate weapon against wind farms.
The Trump administration has quietly opened the door to strictly enforcing a migratory bird protection law in a way that could cast a legal cloud over wind farms across the country.
As I’ve chronicled for Heatmap, the Interior Department over the past month expanded its ongoing investigation of the wind industry’s wildlife impacts to go after turbines for killing imperiled bald and golden eagles, sending voluminous records requests to developers. We’ve discussed here how avian conservation activists and even some former government wildlife staff are reporting spikes in golden eagle mortality in areas with operating wind projects. Whether these eagle deaths were allowable under the law – the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act – is going to wind up being a question for regulators and courts if Interior progresses further against specific facilities. Irrespective of what one thinks about the merits of wind energy, it’s extremely likely that a federal government already hostile to wind power will use the law to apply even more pressure on developers.
What’s received less attention than the eagles is that Trump’s team signaled it could go even further by using the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, a separate statute intended to support bird species flying south through the U.S. from Canada during typical seasonal migration periods. At the bottom of an Interior press release published in late July, the department admitted it was beginning a “careful review of avian mortality rates associated with the development of wind energy projects located in migratory flight paths,” and would determine whether migratory birds dying because of wind farms qualified as “‘incidental’ takings” – harm or death – under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
While not stated explicitly, what this means is that the department appears to be considering whether to redefine these deaths as intentional under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to Ben Cowan, a lawyer with the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
I reached out to Cowan after the eagle investigation began because his law firm posted a bulletin warning that developers “holding active eagle permits” might want to prepare for “subpoenas that may be forthcoming.” During our chat earlier this month, he told me that the eagle probe is likely going to strain financing for projects even on private lands that wouldn’t require any other forms of federal sign-off: “Folks don’t want to operate if they feel there’s a significant risk they might take an eagle without authorization.”
Cowan then voiced increasing concern about the migratory bird effort, however, because the law on this matter could be a quite powerful – if legally questionable – weapon against wind development.
Unlike the Endangered Species Act or the eagle protection law, there is currently no program on the books for a wind project developer to even obtain a permit for incidental impacts to a migratory bird. Part of the reason for the absence of such a program is the usual federal bureaucratic struggle that comes with implementing a complex statute, with the added effect of the ping-pong of federal control; the Biden administration started a process for permitting “incidental” impacts, but it was scrapped in April by the Trump team. Most protection of migratory birds under the law today comes from voluntary measures conducted by private companies and nonprofits in consultation with the federal government.
Hypothetically, hurting a migratory bird should be legally permissible to the federal government. That’s because the administration loosened implementation of the law earlier this year with an Interior Department legal opinion that stated the agency would only go after harm that was “intentional” – a term of art under the statute.
This is precisely why Cowan is fretting about migratory birds, however. Asked why the wind industry hasn’t publicly voiced more anxiety about this potential move, he said industry insiders genuinely hope this is “bluster” because such a selective use of this law “would be so beyond the pale.”
“It’s basically saying the purpose of a wind farm is to kill migratory birds, which is very clearly not the case – it’s to generate renewable electricity,” Cowan told me, adding that any effort by the Interior Department would inevitably result in lawsuits. “I mean, look at what this interpretation would mean: To classify it as intentional take would say the purpose of operating a wind farm would be to kill a bird. It’s obviously not. But this seems to be a way this administration is contemplating using the MBTA to block the operation of wind farms.”
It’s worth acknowledging just how bonkers this notion is on first blush. Is the federal government actually going to decide that any operating wind farm could be illegal? That would put entire states’ power supplies – including GOP-heavy states like Iowa – in total jeopardy. Not to mention it would be harmful overall to take operating capacity offline in any fashion at a moment when energy demand is spiking because of data centers and artificial intelligence. Even I, someone who has broken quite a few eye-popping stories about Trump’s war on renewables, struggle to process the idea of the government truly going there on the MBTA.
And yet, a door to this activity is now open, like a cleaver hanging over the industry’s head.
I asked the Interior Department to clarify its timeline for the MBTA review. It declined to comment on the matter. I would note that in mid-August, the Trump administration began maintenance on a federal dashboard for tracking regulations such as these and hasn’t updated it since. So we’ll have to wait for nothing less than their word to know what direction this is going in.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Santa Fe County, New Mexico – County commissioners approved the controversial AES Rancho Viejo solar project after months of local debate, which was rendered more intense by battery fire concerns.
2. Nantucket, Massachusetts – The latest episode of the Vineyard Wind debacle has dropped, and it appears the offshore wind project’s team is now playing ball with the vacation town.
3. Klickitat County, Washington – Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is pausing permitting on Cypress Creek Renewables’ Carriger solar project despite a recommendation from his own permitting council, citing concerns from tribes that have dogged other renewables projects in the state.
4. Tippecanoe County, Indiana – The county rejected what is believed to have been its first utility-scale solar project, flying in the face of its zoning staff.
5. Morrow County, Oregon – This county is opting into a new state program that purports to allow counties more input in how they review utility-scale solar projects.
6. Ocean County, New Jersey – The Jersey shoreline might not get a wind farm any time soon, but now that angst is spreading to battery storage.
7. Fairfield County, Ohio – Hey, at least another solar farm is getting permitted in Ohio.
Talking NEPA implementation and permitting reform with Pamela Goodwin, an environmental lawyer at Saul Ewing LLP.
This week’s conversation is with Pamela Goodwin, an environmental lawyer with Saul Ewing LLP. I reached out to her to chat about permitting because, well, when is that not on all of our minds these days. I was curious, though, whether Trump’s reforms to National Environmental Policy Act regulations and recent court rulings on the law’s implementation would help renewables in any way, given how much attention has been paid to “permitting reform” over the years. To my surprise, there are some silver linings here – though you’ll have to squint to see them.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity.
So walk me through how you see the Trump administration handling renewable energy projects right now under NEPA.
In general, the federal government has been much more reluctant to the timely issue of permits in contrast to what we might be seeing on the more traditional side of things.
But that’s separate from NEPA — it relates to public notice and comments and the opportunity for third parties to get involved, ensuring any decision-making on the government side is done in a way that’s evocative of a fair system. On the NEPA side, I don’t know if they’re going to treat renewables any differently than they’re going to treat other sorts of projects. That’s different, from a policy perspective, [from] how they’re handling the permits.
If, from a policy perspective, the federal government is less inclined to make a determination about a particular project — or if it decides that it doesn’t like wind, for example, and isn’t going to issue a permit — that’s different than the procedural elements associated with a NEPA review.
The Supreme Court recently ruled in the Seven County case that agencies can be granted a lot of deference in their reviews under NEPA, seeing it more as a procedural statute than a substantive roadblock. What will this lead to?
I think that what we’re seeing – and every agency’s different – but what the court said is that lower courts should defer to the agency to establish their own protocols under NEPA. They’ve begun to streamline the process by which they issue permits, issue notices of those permits, and give people the opportunity to comment on them.
What we’re anticipating will happen if the court gets its wishes – and candidly, I think this is a good thing for developers, on both the renewables and non-renewables side – is that we’ll see more expeditious permitting from the federal government.
You may not like the determinations. There’s a possibility that certain permits are denied if the nature of the permit is in conflict with the federal government’s policy and intention. But you’ll get a quicker decision than you used to get. And if there’s a will to issue a permit, you’ll get it faster.
We’ve heard the concept of permitting reform or NEPA reform as a leveling of the playing field, but in this environment, it is not entirely clear that’ll be the case. Where does the battleground turn then for those who get, as you put it, rejections faster?
That’s a great question. Regrettably, the immediate battleground is the courts. There is certainly a right and an opportunity for anybody who feels a determination was incorrect to challenge that, and to challenge the particular agency’s implementation of NEPA.
Okay, but what’s the remedy here if renewables companies are just getting rejections faster from the Trump team?
Without a real-world example, it’s hard to give you legal theories, but they will always exist. It’ll be circumstantial, and good lawyers always come up with good arguments. I don’t think this issue is fully resolved, either. The Supreme Court has done a favor to everybody by at least defining the issue, but now we’ll have to see what happens as agencies make these kinds of determinations.