In the middle of an especially warm July in 2021, a wildfire ignited in a thick forest of black spruce and peeling paper birch trees on the northern campus of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. 

The blaze, possibly sparked by lightning, burned across the dry carpet of feather mosses and lichen before climbing into the crowns. By the time fire agencies responded, flames had reached 12 feet in length and sent up a 500-foot column of smoke. 

A few days shy of the five-year anniversary of the Yankovich Road Fire, I followed three members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium into the boreal forest, walking along cross-country ski trails lined by feathery field horsetail.

In 2024, the organization, which hosts presentations to keep wildfire managers abreast of new developments in fire science, helped turn the area into an educational walking trail, with interpretive signs posted along the route. About a half-mile in, the horizon opened up as we reached a sparse stand of naked, blackened tree trunks, stripped of needles and neighbors. 

Hilary Shook, the coordinator of the consortium, stepped off the trail with her thaw probe, a T-shaped pointed metal rod used to detect the upper boundary of the permafrost, the ancient layer of frozen soil that underlies 15% of the land around the Northern Hemisphere and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere.

A test of the ground just outside the burn scar hit the concrete-like layer about a foot below the surface. But as Shook applied pressure here, where the fire had burned away the moss and organic-rich topsoil that insulates the permafrost, the probe plunged at least three times deeper into the ground.

“That was an immediate effect of the fire,” said Alison York, the outgoing coordinator of the organization, who was standing nearby. “When we monitored right after, it had already thawed quite a bit.”

This rudimentary tool, offering a measure of depth from a single point in the earth, reveals an escalating problem across the far north. As climate change fuels increasingly frequent and severe fires in the planet’s northern latitudes, they’re accelerating the thawing of more and more permafrost. This allows the organic matter to break down and release powerful greenhouse gases that contribute to a spiraling climate feedback effect, propelling more warming, more fires, and the loss of still more permafrost. 

Most dramatically, intensifying wildfires in Canada released more carbon than the nation’s combined fossil fuel emissions in 2023. As in Alaska, many of these megafires occur in vast remote areas where the policy is to let them burn so long as they don’t threaten human habitats. Yet if intensifying fires and warming are left unchecked, the world’s boreal forests and permafrost could increasingly transition from giant carbon sinks into massive sources of atmospheric carbon. 

Now, international teams of researchers across the US, Canada, and elsewhere are scrambling to understand what’s at stake, financially as well as ecologically. They’re looking at preventive measures, like controlled burns, and studying the potential to rapidly detect and extinguish wildfires before they grow out of control. They’re even exploring what was once unthinkable: sending in human firefighters not to save lives or structures, but to protect one of our planet’s great stores of carbon.

“We need to figure out a better way to live with wildfire,” says Brendan Rogers, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, one of the main organizations driving the loosely collaborative research effort. “I do think that it can make a meaningful difference.”

Woodwell, the University of Victoria’s Polis Institute for Ecological Governance, and the nonprofit Alaska Venture Fund are now partnering on a multimillion-dollar initiative known as North Fire to study and raise public awareness about the potential benefits of these interventions, MIT Technology Review can report. 

The idea is complicated and controversial for a number of reasons. Wildfire is a natural and necessary component of healthy forest ecosystems. Preventing or suppressing fires across huge stretches of largely unmanaged Arctic-boreal forests and tundra would take vast resources. And it’s not yet clear how much of a difference such interventions would make in emissions.

Ultimately, the mere fact that researchers are considering such extreme interventions into natural systems is a grim reflection of the dangers we’ve placed ourselves in by continuing to generate more and more greenhouse-gas emissions each year. Those threats are forcing us to grapple with increasingly difficult questions that involve ever steeper trade-offs: What’s the best way to spend our finite resources and dwindling time to avoid the worst dangers of climate change? And when, if ever, is it okay to put people in possible danger to reduce broader risks to the world?

‘A massive blind spot’

Emissions from forest fires have risen 60% around the world since 2001—but they’ve nearly tripled across the boreal forests in the far north.  

This stretch of the globe is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the planet, drying out the landscape. In addition, lightning strikes that set off fires have ticked up sharply as warmer air increases the convective energy in the atmosphere, driving the updrafts that trigger thunderstorms.

In that sense, humans have already interceded in these otherwise natural ecosystems by producing the greenhouse-gas emissions that are increasing temperatures, subjecting forests to fire patterns well outside healthy historic norms.

“To me, that outweighs the existential dread of ‘Should we or should we not intervene?” says Kate Hayes, an assistant professor at Western Washington University, who is working with Woodwell to study the emissions benefits of fire interventions. “We’ve already intervened, arguably. And so from here, it’s a little bit of a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

The permafrost that encircles the northern latitudes, underlying large stretches of Canada, Greenland, Siberia, Scandinavia, and other Arctic nations, stores around 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, much of which froze in place millennia ago. The steady global rise in temperature, however, has already shrunk the footprint of Arctic permafrost by about 12 % since 1850, with that loss rapidly accelerating during the last 50 years.

By 2100, fire-driven thawing of permafrost could release about the equivalent of nearly 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide, under high warming scenarios. That’s more than half the emissions that fires will release from the direct combustion of vegetation, according to a January study. And it would be on top of more than 400 billion additional tons that could be released through thawing from general warming over that period.

Despite its growing contributions to climate change, only a minority of the models that have informed the UN’s major climate reports to date include the gradual loss of permafrost through warming temperatures, and none incorporate the abrupt collapse and accelerated thaw that can often occur after fires and heat waves. In light of those phenomena and other powerful and undercounted climate feedback effects, we’re almost certainly underestimating how rapidly the planet will warm up, as scientists warned in a paper earlier this year.

These warming-driven emissions are a “massive blind spot,” says Brian Buma, a senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund and a coauthor of the paper, who is working to develop tools that could help fire agencies decide which fires to prioritize.   

As escalating fire and permafrost emissions become significant additional contributors to climate change, some researchers have begun to explore what it might cost to take on the responsibility of preventing them, in much the way we’ve sought to cut the pollution from power plants, vehicles, and factories.

A 2022 paper in Science Advances, led by researchers at Woodwell and the Union of Concerned Scientists, found that making greater efforts to put out boreal fires could be a cost-effective climate solution—comparable to, or even cheaper than, addressing emissions by building wind turbines, solar farms, or carbon-sucking factories.

The Yukon Flats pilot

Those economic findings were instrumental in getting more researchers to take the idea of tackling fire emissions seriously, says Peter Frumhoff, a coauthor of the 2022 paper and now a senior science policy advisor at Woodwell.

For several years now, Woodwell researchers have been in discussions with forest managers, fire agencies, Indigenous communities, and other groups across Alaska to communicate the potential of this approach. 

It hasn’t been an easy sell, given the constrained resources and tightly defined mission of the federal and state agencies responsible for combating fires in Alaska. The general policy there is to allow fires in remote territories to burn unless they present a direct danger to communities. 

“Those agencies are tasked with protecting life and property now, and to a lesser extent natural resources,” says Randi Jandt, a fire ecologist at the Alaska Fire Science Consortium. “But they’re not tasked to save the world.”

There was one notable early success, however. 

The Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge is an 11-million-acre patchwork of wetlands, forests, and bogs. The foothills sit above a particular type of frozen soil known as yedoma. It’s an especially deep, ice-rich, and carbon-dense form of permafrost, composed of massive wedges of silty, wind-blown sediments frozen during the late Pleistocene, which ended about 11,700 years ago. (It also presented ideal conditions for preserving mummified remains of woolly mammoths.)

“It took kind of the last ice age to accumulate,” Hayes says. “So there’s no rapid way to re-accumulate it. We can’t really put it back.”

Members of the Alaska Fire Science Consortium hike into areas affected by fire to measure the layers of ash left in the soil on the forest floor.

In 2019, the region suffered a series of devastating fires that burned some 750,000 acres. After an Alaska Fire Science Consortium meeting at which Woodwell scientists highlighted the possible climate benefits of more aggressive fire suppression, the refuge’s then manager, Jimmy Fox, began exploring the possibility of putting out blazes when they threatened that permafrost, whether or not they threatened human habitations.

The early reaction was not encouraging. 

“You’re going to have people jumping out of airplanes with parachutes to save frozen woolly mammoths—and maybe dying from that?” he recalls being asked.

But eventually, he persuaded managers at the US Bureau of Land Management’s Alaska Fire Service to carry out a pilot project on a 1.6-million-acre section of the Yukon Flats. They agreed to try to put out fires there if they had the resources available and believed they could contain a blaze within 72 hours.

Woodwell and its partners agreed to study how that change affected permafrost loss and fire emissions, in the hope of making the case for similar programs elsewhere. 

It wasn’t clear the pilot program would survive after Donald Trump was reelected, particularly once the DOGE initiative retroactively cut the public funding for that research collaboration.  

But in February, the federal government formally preserved the program and broadened its rationale to include goals like protecting habitat diversity, water quality, and air quality.

Mapping and modeling

One of Woodwell’s main tasks now is determining when and where fire agencies should step in. Crucially, excessive efforts to stamp out fires in the past have allowed the buildup of dry plant material that fuels more severe fires later.

“We’re not going after all fires all the time,” says Rogers over lunch in a sunny courtyard on the Stanford University campus, where Woodwell and EDF hosted a workshop on potential fire interventions in January. “We can’t do that. We don’t want to do that. We shouldn’t do that. So how do we prioritize our resources?” 

Woodwell and its collaborators are working to answer that question by developing a map of burn risk and carbon vulnerability across interior Alaska. The plan is to eventually expand it across much of Canada as well.

These maps will highlight the locations of rich reserves of yedoma and other forms of permafrost, forecast where fires are most likely to break out in the next 10 to 15 years, and predict how they’re likely to behave and spread. 

“Our ultimate goal is to get a layer that can tell us, if a fire were to occur, what areas are most vulnerable to high carbon emissions, permafrost thaw, permafrost degradation,” Rogers says.

In response to a question about potentially putting firefighters at risk, Rogers stressed in an email that it’s “a very serious issue that needs careful consideration.”

He added that early fire detection technologies, preventative fire stewardship practices, improved fire suppression planning and other measures can all help to reduce dangers to firefighters as well as communities.

‘Mild fire’

Once areas of particular risk are identified, the first option is to take measures to prevent fires there, or at least to reduce the odds that they’ll become major ones. That generally entails using heavy equipment or intentional, controlled fires to clear away vegetation that could fuel new fires, or to create fire breaks that might check their spread.

Indigenous tribes carried out what’s known as cultural burning for thousands of years to reduce fire dangers, clear land for crops, and more. The practice was widely outlawed across North America beginning in the 1800s, though those rules have loosened in recent years.

Both cultural and prescribed fires, however, remain controversial because they can burn out of control. And even if they remain contained, the fires can still produce smoke that wafts into towns. 

But rushing around to put out blazes after they’ve started will never get Alaska ahead of its surging wildfire problem, says Edward Alexander, cochair of the Gwich’in Council International, which represents the Indigenous Gwich’in peoples of the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Alaska. 

“There’s not enough money in the world for this to be a chainsaw-and-ax problem,” he says. “This country is too big up here.” 

Alexander, who also serves as senior Arctic lead at Woodwell, argues that Alaska should encourage much greater use of cultural burning to reduce the risk of conflagrations and the emissions that come with them.

“We need mild fire, not wildfire,” he says.

New pilot projects

The North Fire initiative will include several additional pilot research projects, including an effort to study the potential for cultural burning to reduce climate and fire dangers near Fort Yukon, Alaska. 

The plan is for a wildland firefighting crew operated by the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments, a consortium in the Yukon Flats region, to carry out cultural burns there next spring, Rogers says. 

Researchers at Woodwell and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, will then collect and analyze data flammability, carbon levels, and permafrost over several years, in the hopes of learning more about what such interventions do. 

Similarly, the Polis researchers at the University of Victoria plan to study how adding fuel breaks, by logging or switching to less flammable trees, alters fire risks in British Columbia. 

The broad aim of the North Fire initiative is to accelerate research and expand community involvement “in a way that helps us scale this as a meaningful global natural climate solution on a rapid timeline,” says Erin Harrington, a partner at the Alaska Venture Fund, a philanthropy focused on environmental, economic development, and Indigenous issues. 

Detecting fires from space

Other observers, including Jandt, believe the bigger opportunity to reduce fire emissions and preserve permafrost may lie in the “initial attack.” That means marshalling planes, tankers, and firefighters to stamp fires out at the first sign of them, before they’ve had the chance to turn into conflagrations.

Once fires reach a certain size, it takes much more time to contain them—and the job becomes far more dangerous.

Accelerating response times is one of the chief promises of the FireSat satellite constellation, which is expected to begin delivering fire data at least twice daily from around the world to Woodwell, a handful of fire agencies, and other early adopters by the end of this year. The system will eventually include more than 50 satellites circling the globe, equipped with high-resolution cameras and thermal sensors that can detect smaller, lower-temperature fires than existing satellite systems, down to as little as five by five meters (16 by 16 feet).

Currently, it can take days to spot fires. But once the full constellation is in place, likely in the early 2030s, FireSat should be capable of detecting and providing updated images of fires anywhere in the world every 20 minutes or less. 

The first prototype satellite launched in 2025, and three operational ones went into orbit in July. The Earth Fire Alliance, the nonprofit that manages the constellation, expects to launch four more by the end of next year. 

A number of similar systems are also coming online. German-based OroraTech has launched 18 of its fire-detecting satellites in the last year and a half. Similarly, Canadian agencies are planning to launch their own satellite constellation, dubbed WildFireSat, beginning in 2029. 

But as these systems produce more and more detections across the globe, it’ll become increasingly essential to build tools that can filter through that information. 

EDF is supporting and collaborating on several projects that could potentially help with that, and it ultimately intends to develop an AI-powered triage tool that could help fire agencies prioritize responses as FireSat and other fire-spotting tools come online.

“All of this is kind of like building the data ecosystem around FireSat, so that when they start popping out “fire start here, there, fire start here, fire start there,” we won’t be like, ‘Oh shit, there’s fires everywhere,’” Buma says. “We’ll have a framework. It won’t be perfect, obviously. We’ll have to improve it, but we’ll have the machinery to incorporate those data.”

Rapid response

But faster detections and decisions do only so much. Regions would still need to get firefighting personnel and resources to those fires fast enough to prevent them from burning out of control.

“Say we have the full FireSat constellation up and running, and it spots a fire that just broke out in one of these sort of high-priority, highly vulnerable areas,” I said to Rogers and Frumhoff during our conversation in that Stanford courtyard. “How might we deploy firefighting resources to a remote area fast enough for it to matter in that scenario?”

“I think the answer, unfortunately, is that it depends,” Rogers responded. 

Ideally, he said, we would have fire management policies in place that allow for putting out fires with a high risk of producing climate-warming emissions. In addition, regions could install more firefighting personnel and resources across more operational centers, strategically placed in locations that allow them to get to those blazes fast.

Frumhoff stresses that Woodwell isn’t promoting any particular companies but says there are additional technologies “in the mix of conversations” that might help to prevent or rapidly put out fires as well.

Those possible approaches include seeding clouds to suppress lightning strikes and pre-positioning autonomous firefighting helicopters to respond rapidly to high-emissions-risk fires.

Sikorsky, a Lockheed Martin company, is developing and testing autonomous versions of the Black Hawk helicopter, equipped with thermal sensors and water tanks. It is collaborating with Rain Industries, a startup based in Alameda, California, that has developed software to track shifting conditions and steer unpiloted aircraft through the process of putting out wildfires. 

The company says it has talked to fire agencies and the “broader Alaska fire community” about the potential use of its technology but declined to name any specific entities it has interacted with.

“The twin climate tipping points of the yedoma permafrost and the boreal forest, and the fact that it’s completely underresourced at the moment, from my perspective does make it an ideal use case for autonomous aircraft,” says Max Brodie, chief executive officer of Rain.  

Defending carbon

Advancing technologies can only do so much if governments’ fire prevention and suppression policies don’t prioritize preserving carbon. 

And that will remain a hard sell given the costs of managing extensive areas of land that nations have historically left largely alone.

The 2022 Science Advances paper estimated that additional fire suppression efforts would cost about $12.63 per metric ton of prevented carbon dioxide emissions—a number that drops when the carbon in permafrost is taken into account, according to upcoming research.

But that would still add up to about $7 billion in additional spending this decade to keep Alaska’s fire emissions at their historical levels, and another $7 billion to $50 billion over the subsequent 30 years as fire severity continues to rise.

Frumoff stresses that those figures just reflect what the researchers found it would cost to preserve the status quo, which is not necessarily what the policy goal would be. 

But widening the scope of where we put out fires will inevitably create a big added cost for fire agencies that are already notoriously underfunded in the US. While Alaska produces about half the nation’s wildfire emissions, it receives around 4% of federal firefighting funds. 

The US Wildland Fire Service provided a prepared statement in response to an MIT Technology Review inquiry asking whether preserving carbon could or should become a priority in certain fire management decisions. The roundabout reply suggests that this isn’t the agency’s prime concern: “Firefighter and public safety are the top priorities for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service.”

Frumhoff says it’s possible that landowners or government agencies could eventually use carbon markets to defray some of the additional costs. Woodwell has also had multiple conversations with Alaska’s federal legislators about the value of preventing catastrophic wildfires and the need to increase the “total pot” of public funding, he says.

Kicking the fire can

A few days after walking through the fire scar in Fairbanks, I drove slowly along a crumpled stretch of Stampede Road, just north of Denali National Park, where the underlying permafrost had melted without the aid of fire.

I arrived at a cramped wooden cabin to meet with Michelle Mack, a regents professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern Arizona University. 

Mack studies how fire is altering ecosystems in the high northern latitudes as the region grows warmer and drier, and she sometimes collaborates with Rogers and other scientists working on the push to protect permafrost in other areas of research. But she’s unsure how much these interventions will accomplish as climate change continues.

“I’m an empiricist, and at this point, it’s not clear to me that the empirical evidence suggests that we can actually have any impact on these fires,” she says. 

She expects there will be clear cases where we could and should act fast to put out fires and “keep carbon in the ground.” She points to the example of the 2007 Anaktuvuk River Fire, a massive tundra fire on Alaska’s North Slope that might have been extinguished with relative ease in its early days but was instead allowed to burn until the winter snows put it out nearly three months later. Over that time, it ripped across 400 square miles and, Mack’s research showed, released more than 2 million tons of carbon into the air.

“I feel like that’s the low-hanging fruit, something that doesn’t cost much—and that’s where the technology for detection I think is really important,” she says.

But she adds that fires in boreal forests can rapidly spread in unpredictable ways, frustrating efforts to quickly extinguish them even when they are spotted right away.

In addition, rapidly putting out a fire one season doesn’t necessarily reduce the fire risk for a given forest, so suppression may simply kick the “fire can” down the road—delaying but not preventing an inevitable loss of carbon, Mack says.

Her thinking more recently shifted “a little” after she came across an earlier modeling paper that showed some encouraging findings on the potential of early suppression to reduce the footprint of boreal fires. But she says that prevention through forest thinning, prescribed burns, and the introduction of less flammable deciduous trees to create “living fire breaks” is probably a more promising path than technology-augmented suppression.

“If we could solve this with a techno fix, that’d be great,” she says. “But what if we solved it with nature?”

‘A real difference’

Rogers, in an emailed response to Mack’s concern, said that the interventions they’re exploring, which do include both prevention and suppression, “can make a real difference.”

“I certainly agree that some fires are much easier to suppress via initial attack than others,” he wrote. “That said, until I see data showing me otherwise, I believe there is strong potential to bend the curve with management.”

EDF’s Buma acknowledges there are a number of unknowns, including how quickly agencies could act on faster detections from satellites—and how big the political obstacles will be to making necessary changes to fire management policies.

“We can’t overpromise what’s possible. We don’t know what’s possible,” he says. “It’s all new. But we’re in a new climate and have to consider trying new things.”

Warm homes plan would create 50,000 jobs, compared with about 1,100 for Rosebank oilfield, thinktank finds

Insulating Britain’s homes and investing in heat pumps would do more to cut the cost of living, create jobs and boost the UK’s economy than drilling for new oil, research suggests.

The government’s £15bn warm homes plan, currently under threat of cuts as ministers seek budget savings, would slash £1bn a year from household energy bills across the UK, concentrated on those on low incomes, according to research by the thinktank E3G. It would also provide a £1.6bn yearly boost to the economy, and about 50,000 new jobs spread across thousands of small businesses.

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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

From crop failures to coral bleaching, a new tool developed by climate scientists aims to predict in detail the impacts of each megatonne of carbon emissions

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The emissions from a single coalmine expansion might not seem like a lot when compared with the scale of global emissions, which are measured in gigatonnes (that’s one thousand million tonnes).

However, scientists have been saying for years that every tonne of carbon dioxide adds to global warming, and every fraction of a degree increase matters.

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© Illustration: Guardian Design

© Illustration: Guardian Design

© Illustration: Guardian Design

Grid operator paying large sums to switch off windfarms in areas of excess electricity generation while turning on gas plants elsewhere

The cost of balancing Great Britain’s power grid has soared to near-record highs of almost £50m a day after windfarms were turned off because of bottlenecks in transmitting power around the country.

The grid operator paid £47.9m on Wednesday to turn windfarms off in areas with an oversupply of electricity and turn gas plants on in areas where supplies were tight.

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© Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy

© Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy

© Photograph: Robin Weaver/Alamy

Families in Vaca Muerta, the centre of Patagonia’s shale operation, report cancers, miscarriages and pollution

In Allen, a small town in Argentine Patagonia, many people living on the same street ended up falling ill. For some, it was severe migraines, nausea or skin irritation. For others, cancers, congenital abnormalities, miscarriages or stillbirth seemed to affect foetuses or children. People say it all started 13 years ago – when a well was drilled near their homes to extract gas and oil.

Calle Ciega 10 [Dead-end Street 10] lies on the eastern edge of Vaca Muerta, a vital area for Argentina’s economy, home to the world’s second-largest reserve of shale gas and fourth-largest reserve of shale oil. The region has more than 2,600 active wells, including one on this small street where about 20 families live, most of them seasonal workers on fruit farms.

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© Photograph: Erica Canepa/The Guardian

© Photograph: Erica Canepa/The Guardian

© Photograph: Erica Canepa/The Guardian

In this age of rising electricity demand, people are trying to squeeze every last bit of power out of every power plant possible.

Over the past few weeks, there’s been big news about nuclear power plants trying to do just that. Constellation, the largest nuclear operator in the US, announced plans to add nearly a gigawatt of new capacity across 11 existing nuclear reactors at six plants. And on October 5, the Department of Energy awarded a $4.2 billion loan to Vistra for previously announced upgrades at three plants.

Pushing existing reactors to produce more could help provide more clean power for data centers, quickly. But just how much additional power can we count on?  

Upgrading equipment at existing nuclear power plants can allow them to reach a higher capacity; the process is called a power uprate. Operators have been doing this since the 1970s in the US, but it’s been less common in recent years as demand for electricity plateaued and cheap natural gas put financial pressure on nuclear power plants. Some plants closed, and putting in more money to produce more electricity didn’t make much sense at others. Between 2001 and 2010, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved over 80 uprates. Between 2011 and 2020, the number was 33.

But with the rise of AI and the related boom in electricity demand, there’s been a shift. We’re seeing shuttered plants like Palisades and Three Mile Island race to reopen. And existing plants are looking to uprate again.

Some uprates are minor, involving changes to instrument setpoints or calculations at the plant. But more major overhauls, which can boost reactor power by as much as 20%, require replacing plant equipment.

Generally, uprates involve using fuel that’s more highly enriched, or a higher volume of fresh fuel, in the nuclear reactor. That helps produce more steam, which is used to turn a turbine and generate electricity. To handle that additional energy, the main turbines and equipment such as pumps, motors, generators, and transformers are upgraded.

The most recent major uprate approved in the US was for three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama. A $475 million project saw that plant expand its power capacity by 14% between 2018 and 2019.

Things could pick up soon, though. Constellation announced plans this week to spend more than $4.3 billion on uprates to 11 reactors. The additional electricity will be enough to power roughly 700,000 US homes.

Behind it all? Big Tech money. Google agreed to buy electricity from these plants, and the 20-year agreement was a major factor in making the uprates happen. As Joe Dominguez, Constellation’s CEO, told the New York Times: “These are capital intensive, labor intensive projects that require a different price point than the market trades at, frankly.”

Also in the last few weeks, the US Department of Energy shared that it will commit over $4 billion to help finance upgrades and modernization for Vistra nuclear power plants across Pennsylvania and Ohio. Those projects will add 433 megawatts of power capacity, and Meta has already signed on to buy electricity from the plants in a long-term deal.

A note about cost: On a per-kilowatt basis, that Constellation project is less expensive than building a new reactor, but it’s still more expensive than building a new utility-scale solar farm with energy storage or a combined-cycle natural-gas plant.

Even at this high cost, uprates are in high demand. Today, the US nuclear fleet has roughly 98 gigawatts of total power capacity. Depending on who you ask, there’s somewhere between three and eight additional gigawatts on the table from uprates. A pretty significant chunk of the potential uprates in the US are already accounted for—the NRC already expects applications to add 2.4 gigawatts of power to reactors through 2032.

It’s crucial to put these plans (and the total potential for uprates in the US) in perspective, though. PJM, the grid operator that covers much of the East Coast, expects about 30 gigawatts of additional peak demand because of AI by 2030. All the possible nationwide nuclear uprates would cover just a fraction of that.

Making the most of existing nuclear reactors is a relatively easy win at a time when we need all the zero-emissions power we can get. But there’s still a lot of demand, and if we want more nuclear power to meet it, eventually that will require actually building new reactors.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

In a research station in central Panama, you can walk through a century of forest time, watching scrubby plots of adolescent trees give way to cathedral-­like canopies of mature growth. Forest ecologist Daisy Dent, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich, oversees this sequence of plots across the Barro Colorado Nature Monument, some of which date as far back as the 19th century. Not one of the trees she surveys was planted by human hands. She maps, measures, and tracks each trunk that emerges, revealing how waves of tree life rise from bare earth. 

Tropical forests like these are our planet’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink, accounting for around 40% of carbon stored on land. As part of an international network of researchers, Dent is deciphering the networks of animal and plant interactions that enable some forests to recover after destruction. The goal is a low-cost, high-impact alternative to typical carbon-­crediting schemes, which plant huge areas with a single species of tree. For over a decade, her research has built a body of evidence that such large “monocrop” programs could be expensive mistakes—and that more resilient forests can rebound naturally in just a few decades, re-creating ecosystems that suck up vast quantities of carbon dioxide. 

Few places are better to demonstrate this than Barro Colorado, a reserve covering the forested peninsulas and islands that formed when construction of the Panama Canal flooded the area in 1914. Under the management of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, generations of ecologists have amassed more than a century of records. 

That means Dent can trace why some plots rebound after clear-cutting for farming and forestry while others falter. Fruit-eating animals—including spider monkeys, bats, and parrots—are responsible for planting more than 70% of trees in tropical forests, and Dent’s dataset can tell which built each patch of trees by depositing seeds in their nutrient-rich droppings. Many of these creatures worked together to plant a diverse 70-year-old patch whose canopy is approaching the stunning structure and richness of an ancient jungle. In contrast, a patch of similar age populated by narrow trunks of a single long-lived species, Gustavia superba, hints that tropical rodents called agoutis are more or less the sole animal architects behind this more homogeneous forest. 

The data she collects helps write a playbook for when to let ecosystems regenerate and when to give them a helping hand. One 2024 estimate in Nature found that some 215 million hectares of forest worldwide (an area larger than Mexico) could regenerate naturally. “Tropical forests are underpinned by this massive network of interactions,” Dent says—interactions between life-forms like the fungi that help trees take up nutrients, as well as pollinators and seed-distributors. Supporting those relationships is key to growing forests that lock up carbon and help sustain local communities and wildlife. 

Filling in the gaps

Just over a decade ago, as the landmark Paris Agreement was being codified in 2015, forest recovery seized global attention as a solution to the climate crisis. Global leaders rallied behind plans to regrow a trillion trees, after the ecologist Thomas Crowther highlighted their potential to capture a decade’s worth of global carbon emissions. But the biggest question has lingered: How, exactly, do you regrow two trees for every star in the Milky Way?

While startups have proposed seed-spraying drones and nutrient-coated seed bombs, Dent has spent two decades studying what happens when we let forests rebuild themselves. As a PhD student around the turn of the millennium, she researched old-growth forests in northern Borneo but felt hopeless watching entire landscapes felled for palm oil plantations. Rather than despair, she turned to restoration. Then, as a postdoc in 2005, she joined Panama’s Prorena, a joint initiative between the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, which aimed at determining how best to establish diverse native forests on clear-cut land.

Back then, secondary forests—ones that grow naturally after the original forest was lost—had been “a bit of a niche research area,” Dent says. But as farming and human infrastructure have driven deforestation, resurgent forests now account for some 70% of all tropical canopies. Prorena initially followed the usual playbook of transplanting nursery trees to rangelands, but Dent began to question whether planting was necessary. In 2009, she published an encouraging paper showing that animal populations rebound quickly as forests naturally regrow.

In 2010, she began working in Barro Colorado on the plots established by the pioneering American ecologist Julie Denslow. In 1994, Denslow identified plots that had been regenerating naturally for 20 to 100 years, and Dent would add younger ones to continue the sequence. 

The site provides not just general data on forest regrowth but in-depth demographic information over time, says Robin Chazdon, a professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut who collaborated with Denslow when she established the plots. “It tells you more about the actual processes that are happening in the site,” she says. 

For example, previous research had shown that fast-growing “pioneer trees,” the first to thrive in the damaged land, are eventually overtaken by larger carbon-storing trees. Dent’s research helped fill in gaps about the mechanics of how this happens—or doesn’t happen—in individual cases. In the Gustavia-dominated patch, for instance, stubborn grasses planted by cattle ranchers smothered most other trees before they could take root. These trees can hang around, crowding out the light, for 150 years, blocking the second wave of large-trunked trees. 

To plant or not to plant

Dent found herself well placed for the massive influx of interest in reforestation that began in 2015. She’d already become a principal investigator for 2ndFor, an international research network aiming to learn how best to manage secondary forests. Using data gathered from the Barro Colorado plots, the team authored a 2016 paper in Nature showing that a hectare of naturally regenerated secondary forest can capture 11 times as much carbon each year as an old-growth one, with young trees absorbing it quickly as they compete to grow toward the sun. 

Then, in a 2022 study published by the Royal Society, Dent and colleagues showed that locations such as Barro Colorado are among the best-case scenarios for what can be achieved without planting a single seed. Clearings are often surrounded by lush environments filled with birds, bats, and other animals, all of which help tree cover regain old-growth levels of richness and abundance within a few decades. Using data from Panama and Brazil, Dent published a follow-up in 2024 showing that plots with as little as 35% of tree cover can regenerate as forest. 

“Having these long-term mapped forest plots is really valuable,” says Liza Comita, a professor of tropical forest ecology at Yale University, who is collaborating with Dent on projects that translate her findings into action. “It provides this really nice research infrastructure where you can build projects on top of that.” 

In Panama, Dent works with nonprofits and carbon-crediting schemes to fast-track recovery. They’ve mapped corridors to reconnect forest fragments and made plans to reintroduce animals in “silent forests” that have lost much of their wildlife. They’re also working to replant tree species that can accelerate growth—what Comita calls assisted natural regeneration. Leaving plots alone may seem like the simpler option, but it can’t be done everywhere, says Dent. Many sites are too degraded. 

Clearings are often surrounded by lush environments filled with birds, bats, and other animals, all of which helps tree cover regain old-growth ­levels of richness.

The two are working with the London-based carbon-crediting startup Ponterra to develop solutions for a region of southern Panama where remnant forests line the edges of abandoned ranches. Such sites almost always need some intervention, Comita explains. Many demand hands-on actions, such as enrichment planting. 

Today, the questions projects like Ponterra are asking are closer to her own research, says Dent. For instance, they want to understand if solitary standing trees, often left by ranchers to shade cows, help sites regenerate faster. Those insights can help Ponterra sell high-quality credits and avoid the embarrassing pitfalls that can lead fresh plantations to literally go up in smoke. While credits can be bought for as little as $5 per metric ton, corporate giants such as Microsoft—one of Ponterra’s clients—have paid more than 10 times as much for high-quality removal.

There are plenty of places where a level of natural regeneration can work well. So far, millions of hectares of rainforest are naturally regenerating in Brazil, according to the Brazilian Restoration and Reforestation Observatory. Still, Dent is mystified as to why the people in charge of large-scale projects continue to think the best solution is the one that imposes humans’ will on the landscape. 

The conversation may be shifting. As droughts hit Latin America, policymakers and carbon creditors might be forced to face the shortcomings of cookie-cutter plantations. “You have much reduced resilience in the system when it comes to extreme events like droughts or floods or extreme heat or pathogens,” Dent says. The coming year’s “mega El Niño” could be a moment of reckoning, she says: “I think there’s an increasing recognition that we can’t just plant trees. We have to rebuild a system.” 

Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.

Exclusive: Some of £2bn savings needed from energy budget expected to come from boiler upgrade scheme, sources say

Ministers are preparing to slash the amount of money available to subsidise heat pumps as they look for ways to fund higher defence spending, sources have told the Guardian.

Miatta Fahnbulleh, the energy secretary, has been tasked with finding more than £2bn in savings from her budget to help pay for defence investment under a plan drawn up by the previous government.

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© Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures/Getty Images

© Photograph: Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures/Getty Images

Tories plan to scrap low-carbon housebuilding, Greens back new nuclear reactors, and Labour put oil-drilling decisions on hold

New homes could be built without solar panels, heat pumps and high-grade insulation, leading to higher household bills if the Conservative party wins the next general election.

Kemi Badenoch made scrapping the future homes standard (FHS) one of the central planks of her bid to become the next prime minister at the Tory party conference this week.

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© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

© Photograph: Tolga Akmen/EPA

‘The climate issue is the security issue,’ says Turkish minister at Pacific pre-Cop summit in Fiji

Wealthy countries should spend far more on dealing with the climate crisis than the 5% of GDP promised by Nato members for defence because “the climate issue is the security issue”, the host of the next UN summit has said.

But, in comments that are likely to prove contentious, the Cop31 president-designate, Murat Kurum, hedged on whether countries should try to repeat a previous agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” – the primary cause of the climate crisis – when they meet in Turkey next month.

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© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

© Photograph: Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

Complaints risks putting defence ministry on collision course with Department for Energy Security and Net Zero

The Ministry of Defence has objected to at least four planned windfarms in the past year over fears the spinning blades could cause “unacceptable interference” with radars used to detect military aircraft.

MoD officials raised concerns in late June over plans for an onshore windfarm in County Durham that could result in aircraft “not being detected” within an RAF Low Flying Area, according to a letter to Britain’s planning authority.

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© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

This week, we released our 2026 version of our Climate Tech Companies to Watch list. It’s an annual project that the MIT Technology Review team puts together. Our goal is to highlight some of the promising, interesting advances and firms we think are worth paying attention to in the world of climate and energy technology. 

The list is always a little ray of hope for me—there are some fascinating ideas out there for changing how we power our world or moving away from fossil fuels to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change. 

Our chosen companies tend to reflect several aspects of the current moment. Here are some of the companies we picked and the key themes worth highlighting. 

China is the center of the climate and energy tech world

Forgive me—I know I’ve made this point before. Feel free to call me Captain Obvious. But I think China’s dominance in energy technology is a global trend that bears repeated mentioning.  

China is home to the world’s largest grid, and renewables are coming online more quickly than I can wrap my head around. Contributing to that boom is Envision Energy, a renewables giant appearing on our list for the second time. The company has installed over 100 gigawatts of wind power worldwide, as well as over 50 gigawatt-hours of battery storage.

Like many other Chinese companies right now, Envision is looking beyond the crowded Chinese market and setting its sights abroad, with projects in Germany, Brazil, and Australia and upcoming work in Vietnam.

China is also leading innovation in key technologies. I’ve been fascinated by the potential for next-generation batteries coming out of its companies: All the big ones, along with a host of smaller ones, are racing to develop solid-state batteries. They could be both safer than existing EV batteries and longer in range.

WeLion New Energy is particularly interesting. The battery company announced a big lab result last year, achieving 824 watt-hours per kilogram—more than three times the energy density of a standard lithium-ion battery today. Lab results in battery research are notoriously difficult to scale, but WeLion is also working to deploy semi-solid-state batteries, which could come to fruition faster than purely solid-state cells while still improving on lithium-ion’s performance. 

Everybody wants a piece of the data center pie

We included just three companies from the US on the list, and two of them have received a major boost from Big Tech as companies look to power data centers. (The third, Brimstone, is leaning into another political hot topic, critical minerals.) Technologies that can provide consistent power are in high demand. 

Fervo Energy is bringing next-generation geothermal power to the grid by using horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing to make it practical in more places. The company went public in May, raising $2.2 billion in its IPO, and plans to have a gigawatt’s worth of plants operational by the end of 2030.

X-energy is building helium-cooled small modular nuclear reactors. The reactors’ small size lends flexibility, and the company is currently working on a 320-megawatt cluster of them in collaboration with Amazon in Richland, Washington. (For what it’s worth, I’m interested in what this technology could do for industrial facilities—the company has a deal with Dow that could see it deployed at one of the company’s chemical plants in the early 2030s.)

The grid needs support, and energy storage will be a key piece moving forward

I know, I know—I haven’t stopped talking about batteries since I started writing this newsletter four years ago. But the energy storage market has surpassed even my expectations over that time. And as solar and wind quickly come online, they need storage to help them meet more of the grid’s demand. 

Form Energy is on the list for a third time for its iron-air batteries, which could enable cheaper long-duration energy storage. The company has a massive project in the works, to the tune of 30 gigawatt-hours, which will be used to help power a Google data center. It could be the world’s largest battery project in terms of capacity by the time it comes online, which is expected to happen in phases between 2028 and 2031.

Taking another tack, Energy Dome is using compressed carbon dioxide to store energy on the grid. This technology is already cheaper than lithium-ion batteries for longer durations (think 10 hours or more), and the company is working to scale quickly. I covered the company in 2022, before it had its first commercial plant running. Now it has plans for over 30 gigawatt-hours’ worth of plants around the world, including one with Google in Ireland that’s slated to come online in 2028.

And Moment Energy is working to use the million EV batteries that are expected to reach the end of their life by 2030. The company has a facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, that repurposes used batteries for backup power.

This year hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows for climate tech. But I’m hopeful that some of the companies on this list, and the technologies they build, will keep nudging us in the right direction. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan’s four-year fight over MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coalmine went all the way to the high court

• Sign up for climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s free Clear Air newsletter here

When Wendy Wales and Tony Lonergan and a few of their neighbours in the New South Wales Hunter region decided to take on the expansion of a local coalmine, people thought they were “crazy” to engage in the David and Goliath battle.

“When we started this, people thought we were crazy – a little community group taking on a billion-dollar coal company, arguing that the climate harm from burning this coal is our problem too,” Wales says.

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© Photograph: Climate Media Centre/ZoeLonergan

© Photograph: Climate Media Centre/ZoeLonergan

© Photograph: Climate Media Centre/ZoeLonergan

In the second article in a series on the Polish economy, we look at how the country is forging closer ties with its neighbours

Two miles off the coast of Gdańsk, the white steel piles of Poland’s first offshore gas terminal rise from the slate-grey Baltic. Installed at a height eight metres above the waves, the floating cranes and construction vessels here are on the frontline of Europe’s push for energy security.

Since the taps were turned off on Russian gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Poland has turned to the global energy market for supplies. But while conditions are far from ideal as the Middle East war drives oil and gas prices to stratospheric levels, strengthening the diversity of the country’s energy mix remains a top priority for Poland, its Baltic neighbours, and the EU at large.

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© Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian

© Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian

© Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian

It takes a long time to build new nuclear plants. So, some U.S. companies are looking to get more electricity out of reactors that already exist.

© Scott Olson/Getty Images

As the team at MIT Technology Review set out to choose companies for this year’s edition of our annual list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch, the challenge felt more daunting than any year since we started compiling the list in 2023. 

This year is shaping up to be one of the hottest ever recorded. The world must begin to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to address the climate crisis, which is already affecting communities around the globe. Wildfires, floods, and other climate-fueled disasters are killing thousands and costing billions of dollars. At the same time, political shifts and international conflict have stalled progress, particularly in the US. 

Technology alone can’t solve climate change. But we believe innovations can help us make real changes and improve lives around the world as we try to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time. 

In this project, we look for companies developing technologies that can help us face the climate crisis. Some are driving down the greenhouse-gas emissions fueling climate change; others are working to reduce the dangers that communities face from extreme heat, drought, or other shifts brought on by a warming planet. We focus on companies that have established a track record, whether through research findings, capital raised, or deployments. 

When we set out to build our list, we start by soliciting nominations from our team of reporters and editors. We ask experts for suggestions and reach out to academics, researchers, investors, and analysts. Once we have a pool of nominees, we then consider each one, digging through literature, reports, and patents to vet both the technology and the business. 

We judge each company not only on its own merits, but also on how it might fit into our list overall. We want the final slate of companies to represent a range of industries and include firms based around the globe that are at different stages of development. We also aim to strike a balance between highlighting companies previously included and introducing new names. Finally, we consider some of the most important trends and events of the year and look for nominees that reflect those developments.

The dismembering of US federal regulations and cuts to financial government incentives for innovation means that the country is no longer a leader in climate tech. Like last year, the 2026 list is largely composed of companies that are based outside the US. China is an obvious hotspot for technological innovation across energy and climate. This year’s list includes two Chinese companies: WeLion is building semi-solid-state batteries for electric vehicles, and Envision Energy is installing huge amounts of wind power and energy storage in China and around the world. 

Several sectors stood out this year as being of particular importance. One of the biggest stories of the year is the rising demand for electricity, driven in part by AI data centers. 

Energy storage is a key piece of that puzzle because it can smooth out variations in the electricity supply as grids incorporate more renewable power. We’ve included several energy storage companies on this year’s list. Energy Dome is building long-duration energy storage systems on the grid that rely on compressed carbon dioxide. Moment Energy is a Canadian company working to repurpose EV batteries for grid-scale storage. And Form Energy, which we also included in the 2024 edition of this list, is producing iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days. 

A wide range of technologies is represented here: everything from mobile flood barriers to next-generation nuclear reactors. Some of the awardees might be familiar from our past coverage; others are just emerging and may be less well known. 

We believe we’ve put together a list filled with businesses that are rising to the challenge of this moment. Political will has weakened even as the damages wrought by climate change continue to mount. By helping us make progress on tackling the climate crisis in such difficult times, these companies point to a better way forward.

WeLion New Energy is on a quest to make safer, better batteries. The company’s semi-solid-state cells could improve safety and offer greater energy density than lithium-ion batteries to power electric cars, boats, and drones.

From the EVs that carry commuters home to the ships that transport goods across countries, more and more vehicles around us are powered by batteries. 

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used to power personal devices and vehicles today. But as the need for batteries surges, there’s a growing appetite for cells that can store more energy on a single charge.

Also, in lithium-based batteries the electrolyte, which facilitates ion transfer, uses a flammable liquid that can create a fire hazard. 

Several companies, including WeLion New Energy, are working to make solid-state cells, which use a solid electrolyte instead of a liquid one. This could increase the energy density of batteries, as well as improve their safety. Fully solid-state cells are extremely difficult to manufacture, though. So WeLion currently focuses on developing and producing semi-solid-state cells, which have a part-liquid, part-solid electrolyte. 

On that front, they have made steady progress. In 2023, WeLion released a battery pack in partnership with Shanghai-based EV-maker Nio, best known for its battery-swapping technology. The pack had an energy density of 360 watt-hours per kilogram (wh/kg), significantly higher than the 200 wh/kg average for lithium-ion packs today. That translated to a range of over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles). However, only about 200 of the battery packs were manufactured due to their high production cost, but they are still being used by Nio, WeLion says. 

WeLion has also built batteries to power cargo ships and ferries through a subsidiary. And the company is developing batteries with even higher energy density too. WeLion’s engineers made a semi-solid-state battery that achieved a remarkable energy density of 824 wh/kg during testing in 2025, more than three times that of a standard lithium-ion battery available today. 

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Key indicators

• Industry: Energy storage
• Founded: 2016
• Headquarters: Beijing, China
• Notable fact: WeLion’s cofounders include Chen Liquan, a scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the development of the country’s first all-solid-state battery back in 1988.

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Potential for impact

China emits more carbon dioxide than any other country, and its transportation sector accounts for around 10% of that total. Scaling up the production of safer, higher-capacity batteries could help switch more vehicles away from fossil fuels. 

Batteries that power electric ships could be especially helpful—the carbon dioxide emissions from vessels that move goods along China’s lakes, canals, and rivers are projected to grow by around 25% in this decade alone, reaching 18.7 million metric tons by 2030. 

Caveats 

One big challenge WeLion faces is scaling up production of its semi-solid-state batteries and competing on cost in a crowded battery market. WeLion says that its semi-solid-state batteries are more expensive than conventional lithium-ion batteries made by larger Chinese battery companies such as CATL. 

And while laboratory tests showing high energy density are impressive, it can be difficult to translate laboratory results to the real world. The company declined to give more details about the experimental results from its 2025 prototype, which it says is far from commercialization. Key details remain unclear, including how many times the cell can be charged and discharged and how capacity degrades over its lifetime.  

Next steps 

WeLion plans to bring a new semi-solid-state battery for drones to market with an energy density of 410 wh/kg by the end of this year. It also intends to introduce its first all-solid-state battery for cars in 2027, which is expected to have an energy density of 400 wh/kg. 

Two inland cargo ships powered by WeLion’s batteries are expected to launch in October 2026 in Huzhou, a city in eastern China. The battery pack of each of these ships will be able to carry nearly 4,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough for them to sail for up to 250 kilometers (155 miles), the company says.

Today, WeLion has an annual manufacturing capacity of 11 gigawatt-hours (GWh) spread between four production bases in China. Two additional plants with a combined yearly capacity of 18 GWh are under construction.

Form Energy is building iron-based batteries that can store energy for multiple days. The company is ramping up supply at its factory and signing deals for commercial projects.

New solar and wind installations produce electricity more affordably than fossil fuels in most places, but their output varies based on season, time of day, and weather. To compensate, utilities are increasingly investing in battery storage systems, which can charge when power is abundant and discharge when the grid needs a boost. 

Lithium-ion batteries are the fastest-growing storage technology. Although light and energy-dense, they require pricey metals and are costly to scale, and few of the large batteries of this type used in industry are designed to store energy for longer than four to six hours.

Form Energy wants to build cheaper long-duration energy storage technology. The company has developed a new type of battery, built with a far more abundant and cheaper metal, iron, that can store energy for 100 hours. It uses a process that Form calls “reversible rusting.” During discharge, oxygen from the air converts the iron metal to rust, releasing electrons. When charging, current converts the rust back into iron metal. 

Over the past two years, Form has gained commercial traction. It began producing batteries at its West Virginia factory for its first commercial deployment, a 150 megawatt-hour system for Minnesota electricity provider Great River Energy, which is set to come online in 2027. And Form has signed several other deals with power providers. The largest is a project with another Minnesota-based utility, Xcel Energy, where wind and solar power, backed by 30 gigawatt-hours of Form’s batteries, will be used to power a new Google data center. That project is expected to come online in phases between 2028 and 2031.

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Key indicators

• Industry: Energy storage
• Founded: 2017
• Headquarters: Somerville, Massachusetts, US
• Notable fact: Once complete, Form’s proposed 30 gigawatt-hour energy storage system at a Google data center in Minnesota could be the world’s largest battery project by energy capacity.

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Potential for impact

Wind and solar power play a major role in limiting growth in global carbon dioxide emissions. Still, many grid operators depend on fossil fuel plants, especially natural gas ones, to fill gaps caused by periods of low renewable supply or high demand. Form’s batteries are designed to cover multiday supply-demand imbalances, like those that crop up during heat waves, deep freezes, or periods with little sun or wind. The company declined to share the current cost of its battery systems, but says its goal is to reach $20 per kilowatt-hour, which would make them cost-competitive with the natural gas alternative.

The company’s technology could help reduce emissions from the AI data center boom. AI’s thirst for energy has already delayed closure of aging coal plants, led to the building of new natural gas plants, and caused price hikes for consumers. Cheap energy storage could help renewables meet more of this AI-driven growth in electricity demand. 

Caveats

The long-duration storage market is still nascent. Form’s iron-air technology faces a crowded field of approaches, including pumped hydropower, compressed gas, fuel cells, gravitational devices, and flow batteries that store energy in liquids. The economics of multiday batteries, which require large capital expenditures yet frequently sit idle, remain tricky.  

While funding from data center developers could be a major boost, Form also has to prove it can deliver: Its existing production capacity, 2 gigawatt-hours of battery storage per year, is a fraction of the 80 gigawatt-hours it has promised through commercial agreements. Success will hinge on its ability to scale.

Another remaining question is the technology’s physical footprint. Form’s batteries, which are stacked together in enclosures the size of shipping containers, require an acre for every two to three megawatts. That means its Google installation would take up the equivalent of at least 75 football fields. 

Next steps

In addition to finalizing its first commercial project, Form is outfitting its factory with new equipment that will help it scale manufacturing to meet its production backlog. It will do so with the help of new financing, announced in August, that brings its total money raised, in addition to West Virginia state and US federal grants, to more than $2 billion.

X-energy is developing small modular reactors to satisfy some of the planet’s most power-hungry users: industrial manufacturers that need high temperatures to produce billions of tons of concrete, plastics, fibers, and chemicals.

Solar panels and wind turbines are great at producing electricity but what heavy industry also needs is raw heat—and lots of it. The manufacture of concrete, glass, and steel, as well as the production of many chemicals, plastics, and fertilizers, are still highly reliant on fossil fuels to produce that heat. 

Traditional nuclear reactors simply don’t get hot enough. The cooling systems they use require liquid water to work, and even applying pressure to raise the water’s boiling point leaves their maximum operating temperatures hundreds of degrees cooler than needed. 

X-energy’s proposed Xe-100 reactor will use helium gas as a coolant instead, allowing it to operate at much lower pressures and higher temperatures. The helium will heat water and create super-heated steam, which industry can use either directly or to generate 80 megawatts (MW) of electricity via a turbine, or a combination of the two. That’s about one-tenth of the capacity of most reactors operating today.

In common with other small modular reactors (SMRs), the Xe-100 will use a modern uranium-based fuel called TRISO (short for tristructural-isotropic) that is extremely resistant to corrosion and melting. Compact TRISO “pebbles” will be added continuously to the top of the reactor, then flow slowly to the bottom, where they will either be recycled or removed as waste. The company says the reactor will be intrinsically safe in the event of a loss of power—if temperatures inside rise, the nuclear reaction naturally slows and stops.

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Key indicators

• Industry: Nuclear fission
• Founded: 2009
• Headquarters: Rockville, Maryland, US
• Notable fact: The first helium-cooled reactor was proposed for the World War II Manhattan Project but was passed over in favor of a simpler and cheaper water-cooled design.

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Potential for impact

Industrial heating currently accounts for 18 percent of annual global greenhouse-gas emissions, with about half of that coming from high-temperature processes that are difficult to electrify. Co-locating small nuclear reactors at large manufacturing facilities could shrink some of the biggest carbon footprints in the world. 

The Xe-100 reactor could also be used by the fossil fuel industry, which today uses vast quantities of natural gas to generate the heat needed to recover oil from tar sands, and during oil refining. 

The flexibility of the Xe-100 means that it can be used for traditional electricity generation. By scaling down in size and power from today’s gigawatt-scale fission plants, small reactors like the Xe-100 can serve more markets—even down to individual data centers. AI and data centers now represent the single largest component of new demand for electricity in the US, and their consumption is expected to double again by 2030. X-energy says that up to 12 of its reactors could be clustered together to provide 24/7 power on site, at a lower cost than a traditional nuclear power station and without the hassle of adding transmission infrastructure.

Caveats 

The technology behind helium-cooled fission may be well understood, but the only commercial-scale power generation of this type today is in China, where two reactors have struggled to operate on a continuous basis. X-energy says that its vertically integrated fuel supply should ensure reliable operation, with reactors having a lifetime of 60 years. 

The economic case for SMRs is also largely unproven. Nuclear costs and timelines have a habit of ballooning, and the US Energy Information Administration calculates that electricity from SMRs will cost more than six times that from solar farms. While the current environment in the US for regulation and government funding favors nuclear, that could change over X-energy’s long development time frame. 

TRISO reactors appear excellent for safety and nonproliferation (the tough spheres would be difficult to turn into weapons) but are less impressive when it comes to waste. The Xe-100 might produce 10 times the volume of spent nuclear fuel per unit of energy as existing reactors, although its lower-level waste will need less sophisticated storage.

Next steps 

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued X-energy’s subsidiary with a fuel fabrication license for TRISO-X pebbles, with its first factory due for completion in 2028. An Xe-100 to supply heat and power for a large chemical facility in Texas operated by Dow has also cleared its first regulatory hurdle, and could be operational by the early 2030s.

In tandem, X-energy is working toward a 320 MW cluster of four Xe-100 reactors in Richland, Washington, in collaboration with Amazon, and a larger 6 GW fleet in the UK’s northeast. Both projects target electricity generation in the 2030s.

There’s a growing need for long-duration storage to meet energy demand and balance out renewables on the grid. Energy Dome uses compressed carbon dioxide gas in its massive grid batteries, which can deliver power for up to 24 hours. 

As the world races to meet growing electricity demand, solar and onshore wind power have become the cheapest and quickest-to-deploy sources to install on the grid. But, despite their upsides, both are subject to variations in weather patterns, which means supplies can be intermittent. Energy Dome is using stored carbon dioxide to help smooth out gaps between supply and demand.

The key component of an Energy Dome plant is a huge white dome that covers an area about the size of seven soccer fields and holds about 2,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. When energy is available—say, from a connected solar farm—compressors squeeze the gas, turning it into a liquid that’s then stored in carbon-steel tanks. That process generates heat, which the system holds in a proprietary thermal storage material. Then, when the grid needs power, the carbon dioxide is released from the tanks and warmed with the stored heat, turning it back into a gas. That gaseous carbon dioxide then passes through a turbine to generate electricity and flows back into the dome, ready to begin the cycle again.

Compressing gas to store energy isn’t new—utilities have been using compressed air in underground caverns to hang on to reserves for decades. But Energy Dome’s approach doesn’t require any specific geology to work, so it could be more easily scaled to help grids around the world.

Energy Dome turned on its first commercial plant in Sardinia, Italy, in 2025. The facility has a capacity of 200 megawatt-hours. That’s enough to power about 18,000 Italian homes for 10 hours.

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Key indicators

• Industry: Energy storage
• Founded: 2020
• Headquarters: Milan, Italy
• Notable fact: Energy Dome has plans for 30 gigawatt-hours’ worth of projects across five continents.

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Potential for impact

Cheaper energy storage could help wind and solar meet more of the world’s electricity demand.

Today, lithium-ion batteries dominate new installations for short-duration applications of up to four hours. But the economics aren’t competitive for longer durations: A lithium-ion system that provides eight hours of storage at the same power output requires doubling the number of cells. 

Energy Dome estimates that its technology is roughly 10% to 15% cheaper than lithium-ion batteries for an eight-hour system, and that the economics are even better for longer-duration systems of up to 24 hours. The company says its ability to scale bigger and faster than lithium-ion boils down to the fact that its design uses existing commercially available equipment like compressors and storage tanks. Its plants that are either operational or under contract have eight or 10 hours of capacity.

Caveats 

Energy Dome only has one commercial project that’s operational. It’ll need to build many more to provide the 30 gigawatt-hours of storage it has planned.

The technology also isn’t quite as efficient as lithium-ion. Overall, Energy Dome’s process can return about 70% of the electricity it stores to the grid (a measure known as roundtrip efficiency). Lithium-ion batteries average roughly 90%. But some other long-duration storage techniques clock in lower; some iron-air batteries, for example, are around 50%.

Energy Dome’s plants may not all be benign from a planet-warming perspective. The company offers a version of its system that pairs its carbon dioxide battery with natural gas turbines. That version replaces internal heat storage with waste heat from the gas turbines to help evaporate carbon dioxide. That helps the plant run more efficiently but ultimately results in greenhouse-gas emissions from the natural gas turbines.

Next steps 

Energy Dome has a pipeline of about 30 gigawatt-hours’ worth of plants in the works around the world, and many of these projects could come online by the end of the decade. Because the company uses off-the-shelf components, the time from a signed contract to delivered capacity is only two years. In June 2026, for example, it signed a deal with Google to build a 200 MWh plant in Ireland, which is expected to come online in 2028.

Brimstone is making strides on two industrial problems, reducing the emissions from cement and providing a way to produce more critical minerals within the US. If the company can do both, with the same rocks in the same plant, it would unlock a cleaner and more efficient process for manufacturing building materials, aluminum, steel, and more.

Brimstone is a code-switching climate tech company for these polarized political times. The US-based startup—part green cement company, part critical mineral producer—is well positioned to sustain its momentum no matter which party is in power.

During the more climate-focused Biden administration, the company’s primary pitch was its ability to produce cement while generating about 60% less greenhouse-gas emissions. It achieves this by switching to silicate rocks instead of standard limestone, which releases carbon dioxide when it’s heated. The conventional process for creating cement, the binding used to produce concrete, contributes about 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide pollution.

Under the protectionist and climate-denying Trump administration, however, the company is now stressing the secondary benefits of its process: the ability to extract other valuable materials from those same silicate rocks. 

The company has said for years that its process could also generate materials that can be used to strengthen cement. But in early 2025, Brimstone highlighted that it would be able to also produce smelter-grade alumina, the raw material used in aluminum.

It then revealed it had another trick up its sleeve late last year: the ability to make steel, magnesium, titanium, and other critical minerals from the same rock in a single refinery. 

The company’s CEO, Cody Finke, said those materials represent a $2.4 trillion global market. Brimstone’s approach promises to provide a domestic path for goods mostly produced today in China, the subject of Trump’s harshest trade policies and rhetoric. 

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Key indicators

• Industry: Heavy industry 
• Founded: 2019 
• Headquarters: Oakland, California, US
• Notable fact: In 2023, the company earned third-party industry certification for its process for manufacturing Portland cement, allowing its product to qualify for standard manufacturing projects.

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Potential for impact

The company made a very big deal of its newfound ability to produce all these other goods, arguing its process would bolster national security and usher in the “next generation of industrial refining.” The basic environmental promise is that generating all these materials from the same rock and a single mining process would require dramatically less energy and produce far less waste than manufacturing them separately.

“I think that we have one of the generational companies that’s actually able to create an industrial revolution,” Finke says.

To which we would say: Well, we’ll see.

Caveats

Brimstone has yet to produce anything at a commercial scale, and it faces numerous financial and technical challenges. Some observers are dubious that the company will be able to economically extract sufficient quantities of so many materials from a single type of rock—or overcome the cost and labor issues that make mining and refining minerals a tough business in the US.

Brimstone also suffered a major stumble last year, when the Trump administration revoked a $189 million grant intended to subsidize its next plant, a planned commercial demonstration project in Reno, Nevada. 

Finke says the company continues to have fruitful conversations with the administration about restoring those funds, in which Brimstone has emphasized its potential to boost domestic production of critical minerals. He has previously said the company will be able to proceed with the development of the plant, even without that grant or other subsidies.

Next steps

The company expects to begin operating the Reno facility, which will only produce cement, supplementary materials, and alumina, in 2028. That means Brimstone will still need to finance and build its first full-scale factory to deliver the steel, titanium, and other critical materials, likely pushing the timeline for doing so into the next decade.

Based on its progress so far, though, the company has already lined up several commercial deals. That includes agreements to supply cement to retail giant Amazon and alumina to Century Aluminum, one of the US’s largest producers of its namesake metal.

Even if Brimstone doesn’t bring about another industrial revolution, the company is equipped to slash emissions from cement, which is reason enough to pay close attention. 

If Brimstone also manages to dramatically reduce the energy, pollution, and costs associated with extracting and refining rock to produce all—or any—of those other goods, that would represent a big corporate and climate win as well.

As sea levels rise and flood risks worsen due to global warming, WaveSave’s easy-to-erect portable dam offers a quick-response tool. People can use the dam to protect themselves and their property, and it can also store freshwater for later use. Communities in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia have deployed it successfully. Now, the company is expanding into other water-related services to help vulnerable places become more resilient.

One in five people globally are at high risk of being exposed to serious floods. Many live in communities without proper protection and can’t afford to evacuate during a flood or relocate permanently. Climate change-driven extreme weather and sea-level rise is only exacerbating the problem.  

WaveSave makes a portable rubber dam called SlamDam that customers can quickly install in the early hours of a flood. Anyone can unfurl it on the ground along a riverbank or shoreline and pump it full of water until it swells into place. And there it stands, up to 1.3 meters high, shielding nearby property or structures from damage as waters rise. 

Developed in 2013 in the Netherlands, SlamDam was initially tested and is still used today by regional water authorities in that country. WaveSave has since expanded into Africa and Southeast Asia, and customers have now deployed SlamDam in at least a dozen countries. 

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Key indicators

• Industry: Flood barriers
• Year the company was founded: 2017
• City and country of headquarters: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
• Notable fact: WaveSave is demoing its SlamDam product on New York City’s Governors Island as one of seven winners in a competition for urban climate adaptations. The barrier is installed at a site where high tides and waves from passing ferries often wash ashore.

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Potential for impact

Due to both climate change and population growth, nearly 2 billion people will be exposed to floods by 2100—an increase of 300 million from 2020, according to one estimate. 

A SlamDam is designed to help protect farmland and personal property as well as critical facilities like hospitals or water treatment plants. It’s cheaper in the short term than more permanent modifications like building levees or rebuilding facilities on higher ground. And its temporary nature means it can be deployed as needed, and then stored away.

To fill the SlamDam, a local installer can use any portable water pump they may have on hand. With a lifespan of more than 40 years, the flood barriers can be used again and again. 

This low-tech solution has another important benefit, at least when it comes to freshwater floods: In the weeks and months after a flood, residents can tap the water stored inside the mobile dam to irrigate crops. This is particularly helpful during the dry season or in drought-prone regions. At the rural Mpanda commune in Burundi in East Africa, where a SlamDam was deployed during the 2022 flood season, farmers with access to the water inside produced more crops that year and doubled their incomes, according to a UN report. 

Caveats

Companies like AquaFence, MegaSecur, and NOAQ Flood Protection also make mobile flood barriers. WaveSave distinguishes itself in part by focusing on rapid emergency deployment in developing countries, and by emphasizing SlamDam’s ability to store water for later use.

But one research team that analyzed SlamDam’s use in Kenya found a series of challenges to getting communities there to adopt the technology. One was figuring out who should own and deploy the dam.

Another ongoing challenge is the up-front cost. SlamDam is already on par with or more affordable than many alternatives: It costs between €1,000 and €3,000 (about $1,140 and $3,400) per five-meter section, and comes in a range of heights. Protecting a single entrance to a home or facility might require only 10 meters, while surrounding a facility (such as a hospital) or shielding a farm or neighborhood might take 200 to 300 meters. But the price is still too high for many communities or farmers. WaveSave’s managing director Omar Saleh says the company is looking into offering SlamDam as a service and deploying it on demand to make protection more affordable. 

Next steps

Right now, an external partner manufactures all SlamDams in the Netherlands; they are then shipped to customers based elsewhere. But WaveSave aims to open a local production facility for SlamDams in Southeast Asia in early 2027, followed by a similar facility in East Africa, which could help lower costs. The company recently won contracts for four new projects totaling about $5.3 million in Burundi, Djibouti, and Guinea, with a “substantial pipeline” developing in Southeast Asia and Latin America, according to Saleh.

The company is currently self-financed and only has seven employees. Saleh says he plans to grow organically by investing profits back into the firm. 

Part of that growth will involve offering new services such as advising communities on how to install and operate simple, off-the-shelf rainwater harvesting and irrigation systems, as part of a more comprehensive approach to managing water in climate-stressed regions.

It takes a long time to build new nuclear plants. So, some U.S. companies are looking to get more electricity out of reactors that already exist.

© Scott Olson/Getty Images

Exclusive: Campaign group’s analysis of North Yorkshire plans finds datacentre would have to burn 4.9m tonnes of wood a year

Drax’s planned datacentre could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year by burning 4.9m tonnes of wood annually, an analysis has shown.

Campaigners say this would make it “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.

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© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

© Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The United States wants a reactor on the moon by 2030. A Russian-Chinese alliance is working on one for 2036. Some leading scientists say the danger is great.

© NASA

Manufacturers say they are close to perfecting a new, more efficient solar panel that could help the United States reclaim ground it lost.

One argument that often comes up about climate change is that fossil fuels are good because they powered economic growth that has left most people better off overall. And, to an extent, that has been true, but it's also an extremely limited perspective.

It's pretty obvious now that the growth they powered has come with very high costs that we've only recently started to pay, in the form of damages and disruptions from extreme weather events. With things like sea level rise expected to continue for centuries even if we hit net zero, it's difficult to estimate how expensive that growth will eventually be.

But that perspective is also limited: We now have better ways to power our growth—ways that are less environmentally damaging now and won't leave our descendants with a carbon debt that will be difficult to manage.

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© Ryan J Lane

If you want to install a big battery in New York City, you have to cut through a notoriously tough tangle of regulations. That’s made it difficult to get large energy storage projects on the grid.

Faced with those obstacles, some startups are getting creative, finding ways to use relatively small batteries in unexpected places, from induction stovetops to food carts. By deploying these more consumer-focused batteries, the companies are helping people directly, cutting pollution or power bills. And these units, while small on their own, could add up to a lot of capacity.

Large, utility-scale battery installations are coming online quickly around the world. But there’s been some pushback from communities—especially population-dense ones like NYC—because of concerns about relatively rare but high-profile battery fires.

“The number-one challenge that large-scale centralized energy storage providers have is the fact that their benefits are abstract and their costs are concrete,” said David Hammer, cofounder of PopWheels, at a New York Climate Week event on September 24.

PopWheels built a battery-swapping system for delivery drivers who zip around the city on e-bikes. Drivers swap out depleted batteries for fresh ones at a cabinet, avoiding the need to stop and charge. There are about 50 cabinets across New York City, and about 2,500 batteries in circulation, Hammer says.

The company recently started providing its batteries to food cart operators, allowing them to replace the gas generators they currently rely on. About four of its batteries can supply five kilowatt-hours of electricity, enough to roughly cover a day’s operation for many carts.

Others are looking inside homes. Copper, for example, is a company building induction stoves with integrated batteries. The appliances allow residents to cook if the power goes out, and they could also help homeowners avoid expensive electrical upgrades, because the battery provides some of the power when the stove is in use. “We’re not just selling a battery for resilience—we’re selling it for cost savings,” Sam Calisch, cofounder and CEO of Copper, said at the event.  

Other companies, like Every Electric and David Energy are selling plug-in batteries for homes and businesses. Every’s battery is designed to be plugged in to an air-conditioning unit. The company provides the batteries and pays customers to reduce use during high-stress times. David Energy has a similar business model, but focuses on businesses like laundromats, parking garages, and gyms.

Because all these companies’ batteries are small or even integrated into another device, they don’t generally require grid upgrades or extensive permitting processes. Just plug them in and enjoy the benefits—similar to the growing model of balcony solar, with small modules that plug in and help offset a home’s or business’s energy demand.

The move toward more distributed batteries could be a huge change for the grid. “This is the biggest thing to happen in the power grid sector in the last 20 years,” says James McGinniss, cofounder and CEO of David Energy.

If every stove in America were shipped with a battery, it would add up to tens of gigawatts of power, Calisch said. That’s capacity that can be aggregated and tapped when the grid is stressed.

As batteries continue to get cheaper, they’ll likely find their way into more corners of our lives, bringing along many benefits. Cleaner air, cheaper power bills—there’s a lot to like. That being said, the need for large-scale energy storage isn’t going to go away—larger installations will do the crucial work of supporting intermittent renewables like wind and solar, so they can help meet more of our quickly growing electricity demand.

 But I’m interested to see how far an aggregated horde of stoves, e-bikes, and window AC units could go in helping the grid. The grid is getting more congested, especially in dense cities like New York. Anything that could help avoid summer blackouts is welcome.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

The Naylors’ four-bedroom home in Milton Keynes acts like a mini-power station after retrofitting solar panels, a battery and a heat pump

Clare Naylor paid close attention to how much energy she and her family were using last winter, filling hot-water bottles and bringing out extra blankets to ensure they didn’t go over budget. This year, she won’t have to worry as she is guaranteed not to receive a bill.

While millions of British households face the highest energy charges in three years from this week after a 4% rise in the price cap, and predictions of a 16% increase in January, upgrades to Naylor’s home mean she will not have to pay a thing.

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© Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

© Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

© Photograph: Teri Pengilley/The Guardian

It’s only the second time that American regulators have approved a next-generation commercial reactor for construction. Big hurdles remain.

© Audra Melton for The New York Times

Earlier this month, the UN announced the planet will tip past 1.5 ˚C of warming, “likely within the next few years,” squashing any lingering hope that nations would cut emissions fast enough to achieve the loftiest goal of the Paris climate agreement.

In the US, the world’s second-largest-emitting country, its leader continues to deny climate realities and unravel climate policies. Big Tech is backpedaling on its climate ambitions, as companies race to build massive AI data centers.

And all this comes amid yet another season of shattered heat records, raging wildfires, and deadly floods.

It can be tempting to give in to climate doom and defeatism. But despite the headwinds, the world has still made incredible progress. Companies are developing and deploying renewables, batteries, and EVs; inventing cleaner means of producing industrial goods; and devising ways to keep cities and people safe even in the face of more extreme weather conditions.

Those advances will only accelerate as costs decline and people demand greater climate action, as well as all the economic and health benefits that come with it.

Recognizing our ability to make such progress is why MIT Technology Review began publishing our annual list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch three years ago.

Once a year the editors and writers use their deep industry knowledge and academic sources to compile a long list of companies around the world that are transforming the way we generate energy, produce goods, move people and things, or mitigate rising climate dangers.

We then conduct several rounds of spirited newsroom debate to winnow that list down to 10 that we believe have done the most, or have the best chance, to make a real dent in emissions or improve public safety and health.

We’re happy to say we’ve finalized that list for 2026, and will publish it on October 6. You can sign up for The Download newsletter to be among the first to see it, or subscribe to receive full access to this year’s list. It features a mix of companies making strides in energy storage, nuclear power, transportation, and other areas, including ones that have figured out how to continue to make progress amid the regressive climate politics of the moment.

We hope you’ll enjoy the package and perhaps come away feeling a bit more hopeful that we can move fast enough to avoid the gravest dangers of climate change, and build a safer, healthier, and more sustainable world.

Kim Stanley Robinson won't read aloud his climate disaster scene from 'The Ministry for the Future' - "As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Robinson says he has been invoking the American Revolution in discussions about climate change. Despite declaring independence from Britain in 1776, it wasn't until 1783 — when a peace treaty was signed after years of brutal battles — that the country truly became a nation. 'The story of the American Revolution is lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win,' said Robinson. 'So where did the win come from? It came from keeping to fighting despite the losses.'" (previously)

also btw...

• Scientists hope deeper-rooted soybeans can withstand climate extremes and store more carbon - "Research scientist Ashish Rajurkar kneels in the dirt, lifting a large clod of soil tangled around a soybean plant. He knocks away pieces of earth from the plant's roots, which slope straight down instead of out to the side like typical soybean plants. Researchers hope roots like these could help crops withstand some effects of climate change while also drawing more carbon from the atmosphere and storing it underground."
• The Iran war is driving clean energy development. It's not enough to help the planet, yet - "When the U.S. and Israel launched the war in February, some backers of renewables opined it could drive a green transition as oil and gas prices spiked. So far, more than 30 governments have enacted policies to move away from fossil fuels or improve energy efficiency. Yet at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases increased slightly and investments in clean energy fell compared to the same period last year."
• Worsening El Nino threatens Asia with drought, potentially raising food prices globally - "El Nino is part of a natural climate cycle of warming ocean temperatures, but this year's is expected to reach new extremes of drought, heat waves, flooding and other climate-related disruptions in South America, Africa and Asia."
• Major gaps remain to tripling global renewable energy capacity - "The world must build more than 6 terawatts of renewable power in the next five years — more than all previous years combined — to deliver on a goal to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030, according to a new report." (China's clean tech exports prevented more than the UK's annual emissions)
• Climate finance needs an overhaul - "For developing countries, more green tech capital doesn't always translate to a cheaper and cleaner energy system." (Inside China's $7 Trillion Green Finance Market)
• Electricity could meet a third of global consumption by 2035 - "Electricity could cost-effectively meet a third of the world's energy consumption by 2035 based on existing technologies and pre-war energy prices, putting a proposed goal to boost electrification within 'striking distance,' the International Energy Agency found. High energy prices caused by the Middle East conflict could make even more of today's energy demand economical to electrify, the Paris-based agency said in a new analysis."
• Carbon Removal Falls Short as World Blows Past 1.5C Target - "Taking CO2 from the atmosphere is seen as necessary to mitigate climate change."

meanwhile...

• The Geothermal Energy Wild Card Is Getting Wilder - "Following a long term R&D program supported by the US Department of Energy, next-generation geothermal systems are forging into new territory, aided in part by methods borrowed from the oilfield services industry along with advanced exploration technologies and speedier, cost-cutting drilling systems." (DOE Selects Fervo, Zanskar and Quaise as Part of $99M Funding to Advance Next-Gen Geothermal)
• Google-backed energy outfit brings 33 MW of 4 GW geothermal potential online in Utah - "Fervo Energy aims to have 100 MW online by New Year and half a gigawatt by 2028."
• Company to drill deep beneath Newberry Caldera in search of geothermal energy - "A second company is drilling for geothermal energy south of Newberry National Volcanic Monument, south of Bend, with plans to build a 50-megawatt power plant by 2030."

Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.

© Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Next Thursday, Google is sending an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple A.I. queries from space.

© Philip Cheung for The New York Times

This week, world leaders descended on Manhattan for the UN General Assembly. It’s also New York Climate Week—investors, policymakers, advocates, and journalists are colliding at panels, talks, and fancy dinners.

With so many climate voices in one place, the discourse can feel a little louder than usual. This year, the unavoidable topic is artificial intelligence.

There’s been a growing tension bubbling up about AI’s impacts on climate and climate tech. Depending on where you stand, you might point to AI’s potential for advancing research, or to the way funding and attention from Big Tech is trickling into energy startups. Or you might focus on the emissions-heavy natural-gas buildout that’s unfolding to meet the sector’s electricity demand.

Everyone seems to agree that AI is important. The big question for those in the climate world, and the conversation I’m constantly having and hearing this week, involves how you see its influence unfolding.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted the AI and climate crossover in a speech on the first day of the assembly. “The climate crisis fuels instability and displacement,” Guterres said. “Artificial intelligence could help solve all these challenges, or it could make them worse.”

It feels relevant that this year is the first that the world has really had to grapple with the fact that climate goals are slipping out of reach. A recent report from the UN Environment Program said that the world has nearly passed the point where we could possibly keep warming to less than 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels.

Since we’ve essentially missed this target, the report lays out the need not only to quickly and drastically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but also to employ carbon removal to help suck up emissions that have already been released into the atmosphere.

The billion-dollar question is whether AI could help with any of this. 

The energy-intensive technology is certainly shining a spotlight on the need to build out electricity supplies and shore up grid reliability. The result is more attention and money for energy technologies, some of which happen to be low- or zero-emissions.

As I’ve covered before, startups across the energy and climate sectors are benefiting. Firms in nuclear, geothermal, wind, and solar power have signed deals with the likes of Google, Meta, and others looking to power their new or growing data centers.

Global climate-tech investment from venture capital hit $26 billion in the first half of 2026, according to data from Currence, a finance tracker for the industry. That’s 55% higher than last year, and products and services for data centers are getting a massive slice of that pie.

But as a Semafor piece about the report points out, some sectors are slipping through the cracks: Carbon management and low-carbon fuels saw VC investment plummet this year. These are important solutions for addressing climate change but may not be able to sell themselves to a data center.

So far, the data center buildout has come with a hefty emissions toll. A few years ago, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all had ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Now they’ve all seen emissions rise, largely because of data centers that are needed to power AI.

Some people are optimistic. AI could help speed up progress in areas like the search for new catalysts, as Evelyn Wang, MIT’s VP of energy and climate, pointed out during a panel. And data centers won’t add to climate and water problems forever, Wang told the Associated Press. (She puts the timeline at about a decade until data centers no longer add to planet-warming emissions.)

But a whole lot of natural gas is coming online to meet the immediate demand created by new data centers. And once those power plants are built, they have a decades-long lifetime. 

That’s partly why public pushback to AI is growing—people are seeing more pollution and noise near these data centers and the power plants that provide them with electricity. Overall, what I’m hearing this week is that many in the climate sector are skeptical of AI, at best. 

“AI leaders are now on thin ice when it comes to license to operate and sinking deep underwater when it comes to public support,” said UN climate chief Simon Stiell in a speech this week. “Tech titans need to start showing why the benefits of AI outweigh its skyrocketing costs—for the many, not just the tiny few.” 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Energy Secretary Chris Wright is pitching a future of fossil fuel abundance. It’s not always an easy sell while war drags on and oil prices surge.

© Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The lawsuit, filed by Michigan, claimed oil companies colluded to obstruct solar power and to misrepresent climate risks, making energy costlier.

© Rebecca Cook/Reuters

"Seismic shift": Māori set to invest in First Nations projects in Australia under new deal. One of the biggest and wealthiest Māori tribal authorities, the Waikato-Tainui, has signed a deal to invest in large-scale First Nations projects in Australia in renewable energy, mining, agriculture and more. Indigenous business groups say it's a watershed moment towards greater economic self-determination.

Each year, the editorial team at MIT Technology Review puts together a list of 35 innovators under 35—a group of researchers, inventors, and other young minds worth following.

The team worked on the newest edition of the list for months, and the final slate includes nine individuals from all over the world in the climate and energy category. Each one has a fascinating story and is tackling an important challenge.

I think it’s worth zooming out and considering the energy and climate awardees as a group. Taken together, these innovators and their work can tell us something about where climate tech is at this moment—and where it’s heading.

AI is the dominant technology story, both for its potential and its challenges.

We split the innovators into four main categories this year: biotech, climate and energy, computing and robotics, and AI. It probably won’t surprise you that AI features heavily in the work of many innovators in other categories.

Climate innovator Jae-Won Chung, for example, built software to make AI more energy-efficient. By measuring the energy demands of open-source models, he hopes the industry can better understand and address the impact of AI. (If this work sounds familiar, it’s because we spoke with him last year for our investigation into AI’s energy demands.)

But AI also has the potential to improve many areas of research. Jing Wei is using AI to track pollution more effectively, essentially using machine learning to fill in gaps in data from disparate sources like satellites and weather stations. Zhonghua Zheng developed AI climate models that work better for cities, a well-known blind spot for traditional models.

We need better ways to get the critical materials used to build new technologies.

As we begin to rely on new technologies to power our world, we’ll see a major shift in the materials we need to build them.

Lithium is a prime example: The metal underpins lithium-ion batteries, which are crucial not only for electric vehicles, but also for large-scale energy storage on the grid. We could face lithium shortages as soon as this decade, and the prospect of supply crunches applies to other critical minerals, too—copper is another one to watch closely.

Brine is currently the cheapest source of lithium, but the process to get the metal out can take months and harm the local environment. Mohammad Alkhadra is the cofounder and CEO of Lithios, a startup working to quickly and efficiently extract lithium from brines.

Hardrock ore is the most common source of lithium, but it’s more expensive than brine. Benjamin Mowbray cofounded and serves as CTO for Rock Zero, which is working to extract lithium from hardrock ore.

Addressing climate change will require overhauling all corners of our society, sometimes in surprising ways.

To reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions we will obviously need to rethink major sectors, like the electrical grid and transportation, to move away from fossil fuels. But outside these primary sources of climate pollution are seemingly infinite, less obvious problems to figure out, too.

Heavy industry, including steel production, is a major one, making up about 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Laureen Meroueh is making cleaner, cheaper steel using a new kind of furnace that simplifies the chemical process required to produce the metal.

Plastics are generally made with fossil fuels, so we’ll need alternatives to this incredibly useful category of materials. Joseph Nguthiru is making a bioplastic replacement for fossil-derived packaging that uses an invasive weed. Also using available materials in a creative way, Diana Orembe is making fish food for aquaculture with food waste.

And refrigerants are often incredibly powerful greenhouse gases. Jinyoung Seo is developing solid refrigerants that could eliminate worries about leakage. A device using these materials could reduce energy consumption by 20% compared to conventional technology.

I’m constantly learning about new challenges we face in the climate and energy world, and I’m often surprised by the ideas people are coming up with to address them. For more on all the under-35 innovators and their work, check out our full 2026 list.  

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

CenterPoint Energy disclosed to federal regulators on Sept. 14 that an unauthorized party obtained personal information belonging to some of its customers through an external-facing system, days after a post on a cybercrime forum advertised a data set the seller said covered roughly 7.5 million customer records.

The Houston-based utility, which delivers electricity and natural gas to about 7 million metered customers across Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio and Texas, said in a Form 8-K that it learned of the online post this month and opened an investigation with outside forensic experts. It has reported the matter to law enforcement.

Operations were not affected. The filing states that the company's "delivery of electric and gas services has not been impacted" and remains undisrupted — a distinction that matters for a utility, where regulators and customers draw a sharp line between the theft of billing records and interference with grid operations.

CenterPoint has not confirmed the volume or authenticity of the advertised data set, and has not described how the intruder got in or how long access persisted. The forum poster, using a hexadecimal-styled handle, claimed to have pulled the records from an API endpoint that lacked adequate authentication and rate limiting, and listed fields including customer names, phone numbers, email addresses, service and billing addresses, account and premise identifiers, billing amounts and past-due balances, billing and due dates, service and rate information, autopay and paperless billing status, driver’s license numbers, last four digits of Social Security numbers.

Also read: Origin Energy Data Breach Affects 900,000 Current and Former Customers

The actor claimed, additional identity information was exposed through a second account-verification function. According to the post, the extraction was split across seven parallel data ranges covering Texas and Minnesota. The actor said that security changes, including CAPTCHA enforcement, were eventually enforced and that prevented further data collection. These claims remain unverified.

Plaintiffs' firms moved faster than the investigation. At least one has already announced an inquiry into potential claims on behalf of affected customers — now a standard sequel to any large consumer breach at a regulated utility.

The incident is not CenterPoint's first brush with data exposure; the company was linked to earlier third-party file-transfer compromises, though analysts at the time judged much of that data to have originated outside its systems.

A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. 

But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.

Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap.

“Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter,” says Dakota Gruener, the organization’s cofounder and chief executive. “Our sense is the world may need to make very consequential decisions on timelines far shorter than our research system is prepared for.”

The hope is the exercise will guide scientific efforts and encourage philanthropies or government agencies to fund high-priority work and “responsibly accelerate research,” says Gruener.

If all the work is done in a coordinated way, it would take about a decade and cost around $370 million—and if it’s not, it would require roughly 20 years and nearly $1.4 billion, the report estimates.

While Gruener stresses that Reflective doesn’t advocate using this form of solar geoengineering, the report does make the case for conducting outdoor experiments, which would release successively larger amounts of sulfur dioxide (or materials that would convert into it) in the stratosphere to observe what happens.

That is a controversial standpoint. Since 2002, hundreds of academics have signed an open letter calling for a ban on outdoor experiments and an “international non-use agreement,” arguing that such a powerful technology could never be governed in a globally equitable way. And some signatories argue that more studies can never address one of the biggest questions about using solar geoengineering: Who gets to do it.  

“The first-order questions, from my perspective, are not technical,” Aarti Gupta, co-initiator of the non-use initiative and professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told me in a recent on-stage interview. 

“The core question is: Who would control a planet-altering technology like stratospheric aerosol injection? Who would develop it, and who would deploy it, and to what end? To serve what purposes, and whose purposes? Those questions are very fundamental, because this planet-altering technology will have winners and losers.”

‘Fast enough to matter’

Since Gruener incorporated Reflective in late 2023, the nonprofit has quickly become an important  player in solar geoengineering research. It has now raised more than $20 million from a number of prominent charities and individuals, and it’s provided around $4 million to several dozen research groups. Reflective has also undertaken a handful of its own projects to promote research, including the development of an open-source solar geoengineering simulator and an online hub for collaborative research.

Earlier this year, Reflective released its SAI Uncertainties database, which identified a long list of scientific unknowns and  engineering obstacles that would need to be addressed before even a small-scale solar geoengineering effort could move ahead. (I wrote about the specific scenario and the unknowns in this earlier piece.)

Some of the biggest uncertainties involve what gas or particles would make the most sense to use and what would happen once they were released in the dry stratosphere. It’s not clear, for example, whether they’d spread out in a way that maximizes the reflectivity—or clump together and quickly fall out into the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. 

The road map builds upon the database, highlighting the path to addressing most of those questions. 

The road map

The initial phase in Reflective’s road map, labeled “foundational knowledge,” includes additional computer simulation studies and lab experiments designed to shed light on the potential impacts on different regions, ecosystems, and phenomena, including ocean circulation patterns, ice sheets, and crop yields. 

The report also notes the need to begin developing more observational tools during this phase to improve understanding of the baseline conditions of the stratosphere—and, in turn, our ability to assess any effects from the eventual release of materials.

This first stage would last two to three years and cost $30 million to $75 million, though some of the analysis and observational work would continue into subsequent phases. 

The next stage would include using modified aircraft to release 10 metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, four times over the course of two seasons. The full research stage could take four to eight years and cost $70 million to $150 million, the report says. The work during it may reduce uncertainty about the “cooling efficacy” of solar geoengineering, or how much the planet would cool per ton of sulfur released, by about 25%.

The experiments during the next phase would step those levels up dramatically, releasing 25,000 tons of sulfur dioxide over the course of one season, at least once but possibly twice. That research stage, which includes other work as well, would last four to 11 years, run $270 million to $1.1 billion, and decrease efficacy uncertainty by around 66%, according to the road map.

The final phase of research would be ongoing monitoring of full-scale solar geoengineering, if the world goes ahead with it. The goal would be to gather real-life data on the technology in action, update estimates of the effects in models, and spot any “unexpected or undesired consequences.”

Gruener says that the road map is intended as a Version 1, meant to be “concrete enough for people to argue with.” But Reflective intends to update the plan as it receives additional reactions from researchers and other observers, and it will invite such feedback through a mechanism on the site.

She also notes that there are firm “stage gates,” set up between the latter stages—in other words, research shouldn’t proceed to the next phase if the experiments suggest that the releases don’t have the hoped-for impact, show worrisome downsides, or fail to resolve crucial uncertainties.

“Our road map has these gates precisely because there may be points where the answer is ‘You should stop,’” she says.

Termination shock

Most observers I spoke to about the report agree that these studies could reduce uncertainty about the effectiveness of solar geoengineering and our technical ability to carry it out. 

But highlighting the scientific importance of outdoor experiments won’t necessarily make them any easier to move ahead with. Several earlier proposals to carry out such experiments, including Harvard’s SCoPEx and the UK-based SPICE project, were ultimately halted amid opposition from environmentalists or policymakers.

In addition, not everyone agrees that experiments at those scales will get us to the point where we’re capable of making an “informed decision.” 

Wil Burns, a research professor and legal scholar at American University and a signatory to the International Non-Use Agreement, fears that scientists won’t be able to understand the extent of the potential downsides, including impacts on the protective ozone layer and changes to regional precipitation patterns, until we’re carrying out full-fledged solar geoengineering.

“The research would give you some answers,” he says. “I just don’t think it gives you answers that are that relevant. To get to those relevant answers, you have to deploy at scale—and I just don’t think that’s ever tenable.”

That’s because, in his view, using the technology would violate principles of intergenerational equity: If the world continues emitting greenhouse gases, increased levels of solar geoengineering would merely mask the continued warming of the planet. Burns says that means future generations—people who had no say in its use—couldn’t turn it off without triggering a sudden surge of warming, known as termination shock. 

“What that would do, in my mind, is put a sword of Damocles over future generations,” he says. “So even if you could, quote-unquote, ‘prove it works,’ I don’t think from an intergenerational perspective it would ever be tenable.”

(Some researchers, however, have argued that the risks of termination shock are less likely than often assumed—and that solar geoengineering could be slowly dialed down over time.)

‘The right approach’

Ilan Gur, the former CEO of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK research department that funded 21 geoengineering research projects last year, applauds Reflective’s road map. 

“Whether you’re a scientist or a policymaker or just a concerned citizen, our goal should be as quickly and efficiently as possible to answer the biggest questions scientifically that would tell us [whether] this is an approach that might work or that would never work,” he says. “We should all want to spend the effort and money to buy down that uncertainty, so my view is 100% the approach that Reflective is taking is the right one.”

Sebastian Eastham, an associate professor in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London who is leading an ARIA-funded research project exploring another approach to engineered cooling, agrees that the outdoor experiments described in the Reflective road map can’t resolve all the unknowns. But he says the map helps begin a conversation about how to make decisions concerning the use of a tool with potential benefits and risks, in the face of escalating climate dangers.

“Every hard decision that has ever been taken has been in the context of unresolved uncertainty,” he says. “That’s just the nature of things.”

Eastham adds that it’s become essential to move beyond computer simulations to address some of the key questions, arguing that appropriately designed and executed outdoor experiments can teach us so much more than millions of hours of computational processing time “that it almost becomes irresponsible to say, ‘Well, there cannot be ever any experiment.’”

The risk is “that we spin our wheels running the same computational simulations over and over and over again,” he says. That could prevent researchers from learning essential things about the effectiveness or the dangers of stratospheric aerosol injection. 

Weighing the risks

Gruener says the risks that solar geoengineering could exacerbate inequality need to be considered, but notes that unchecked warming also threatens to disproportionately harm developing regions.

She also acknowledges that outdoor experiments won’t fully address the scientific unknowns but stresses that they can answer a lot—and carry little environmental risk. She notes that 10 tons of sulfur dioxide is less than 2% of the amount that the global aviation industry releases into the atmosphere each day.

“Some people will be uncomfortable with any discussion of any outdoor experiment, but if we want decisions made on good science … then these are questions that an experiment will be necessary to address,” Gruener says.

She fears that the rising dangers of climate change will put growing pressure on nations and other actors to move forward with solar geoengineering, even if no one has done the necessary research to reduce scientific uncertainty and sort out the technical challenges.

“We don’t think the alternative is decisions not happening at all,” she says. “We think the alternative is decisions being made in a panic or on lack of evidence.”

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar.

Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the US’s reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

There’s an argument to be made about reducing reliance on any single source of a crucial energy technology. But all this tension raises a broader question for me: How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?

This is hardly America’s first push to move away from Chinese influence in the battery supply chain. One of the major policy tools used in recent years is restricting the tax credits designed to incentivize use of the new technologies. Limiting the types of projects that are eligible can help reduce the cost of local technologies so they’re more competitive with otherwise cheaper imported options.

Back in 2022, the US government designed the tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act to restrict where a battery’s minerals could be mined, processed, or recycled, as well as where a battery and its components were assembled.

Those tax credits underwent a makeover in 2025, but the Trump administration has taken a similar tack. New legislation requires that starting in 2026, 55% of the cost of materials used for new energy storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries or the projects won’t qualify for tax credits. 

And we can’t forget about tariffs. Import taxes for batteries increased to 25% in January, up from 7.5%.

But the new executive order is a more drastic move. It bans the installation of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment” that poses a national security risk. The order specifically calls out battery energy storage systems, as well as inverters and transformers.

“An outright ban was a bit of a surprise, and it does create a bit of concern for domestic players in the US,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an energy industry analyst.

The move is likely to slow deployment of grid-connected energy storage projects in the near term, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy. Projects could face delays as developers wait for clarity on the rules.

Depending on the detailed guidance from the Department of Energy, which is expected by the end of the year, some projects may need to find alternative sources for their cells, whether they’re domestically produced or imported from other countries. These will likely be more expensive than Chinese imports, says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. “Worst case, those projects could get canceled,” he says.

Technically, the order applies even to existing energy storage plants, though it’s unlikely that they’ll be taken offline because of their batteries’ origin. Since most of these plants currently use Chinese batteries, enforcing the order to the letter would essentially mean removing most installed battery energy storage from the US grid, Kikuma says.

In the longer term, the US will eventually be able to meet its own demand for batteries. The country could have enough capacity by about 2030, though some factories may not ramp up or run at their full capability, meaning domestic supply won’t actually meet demand until later in the 2030s. 

New factories from LG Energy Solutions, Samsung SDI, Ford, and SK On are set to come online or ramp up by next year. In an ironic twist, a slowing EV market is helping, as some factories originally designed for vehicle batteries are retooling to build cells for grid storage instead. 

But it will come at a cost. Today, batteries produced in the US are still significantly more expensive than those made in China. Even switching to imports from other countries like South Korea would likely be more expensive.

This is a crucial issue that goes beyond the US and even beyond batteries. China is miles ahead of much of the rest of the world on technologies like solar panels and batteries. Through years of government support and experience with research and manufacturing, the nation is an energy powerhouse.

There’s a delicate political balance to maintain as the world figures out how to navigate this situation. There’s cheap technology on offer, which can help drastically reduce emissions and energy costs. But there can be risks associated with relying too much on any one player for crucial technologies.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Five years after virtually every world leader agreed to “phase down” the burning of coal for climate reasons, the fuel is more widely used than ever.

© Ahmad Mulia Panjaitan/Associated Press

The state is considering extending the life of its last nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon, and allowing construction of new reactors to help meet its clean energy goals.

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes.

The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid. 

Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“It really came down to a handful of big projects,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But there was also growth in the category of so-called behind-the-meter batteries, which include both residential and industrial battery storage systems. These projects, generally smaller than utility-scale installations, are typically owned and operated by homeowners or businesses rather than utilities or power providers. 

In the behind-the-meter category, data centers led the way, making up about three-quarters of new batteries in the commercial sector. But residential batteries saw a sharp slowdown. These systems are often installed in homes to store power from solar panels or serve as a backup source in case of a blackout. Home installations are projected to drop by 16% in 2026 compared with last year, according to the report.

That drop happened largely because a tax credit that helped subsidize home battery systems ended in 2025, Tomouk says. Home installations should recover by the end of the decade, he adds. And tax credits for nonresidential batteries have largely survived.

Overall, batteries are a bright spot in energy right now. “This is one of the strong sectors in the US,” says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy.

As the battery market continues to grow, one major trend to keep an eye on is a move toward US-made technology. Today, nearly all the systems coming online use cells made in China, though some are put together into complete energy storage systems in the US.

Tariffs were already pushing the US energy storage industry toward domestic production. And beginning this year, energy storage tax credits required projects to limit their reliance on batteries imported from China. There’s a lot of manufacturing capacity set to come online in the US, though these factories probably won’t be able to meet demand until at least 2030 or so, Tomouk says, so prices could tick up.

No company in the United States has ever restarted a reactor that was seemingly closed for good, but there are now three major efforts underway to do so.

© Nick Rohlman/The Gazette, via Associated Press

The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s.

The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It then undergoes further refining to purify it before it is made into products like rebar and car frames.

The process relies on coal, and it generates roughly 7% of the carbon emissions that drive climate change—about as much as the fashion industry. Decarbonization has proved difficult: Profit margins are tight and furnaces have long service lives, making investment tough to justify.

Now Laureen Meroueh may have found a way to clean up steelmaking without driving up the price. Meroueh, the founder of Hertha Metals, invented a new furnace that simplifies the chemistry behind the process. Her method turns iron ore into refined liquid steel in a single step, and it swaps coal for natural gas. Together, those changes slash emissions by at least half, she says, and cut costs by 25% compared with steelmaking business as usual.

If it catches on, the tech could be transformative. “There’s huge value in reducing the size of this production system,” says Iryna Zenyuk, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine. “They’re massive. They’re inefficient and require a lot of energy input, so even if they just save energy efficiency, that’s already a big step.”

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the steel industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system.

Still, it’s a risky endeavor, but pushing limits isn’t new for Meroueh. At 12 she was accepted into a pilot program to take college-­level courses through Florida Atlantic University in lieu of a traditional secondary education. She was immediately drawn to engineering and explored topics including calculus and ocean wave energy.

Despite the rigorous coursework, she would spend hours sitting in trees and surfing, which fostered a deep appreciation for nature and a desire to safeguard it. “I don’t know how you can’t be drawn toward trying to help protect that,” she says. 

Now 34, Meroueh has let that passion inform her professional goals. After finishing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, she led a green hydrogen startup before founding Hertha in 2022. A first-generation Lebanese-American from an entrepreneurial family, she saw starting her own company as a typical path. “Seeing how common it is to take that jump to start your own business is what made me feel like ‘This is normal,’” she explains on a video call from her office at Hertha’s pilot plant in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.

That facility can produce one metric ton of steel per day. “One ton per day is a big metric for steel,” says Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, one of the company’s investors. (Hertha had raised about $20 million in funding as of July 2026.) 

Swaminathan says the company’s scale-up is “impressive,” especially given how little the team has spent. Competitors, he notes, have created far less steel with $50 million or $100 million in funding.

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system. While other approaches to making green steel center on using hydrogen to free oxygen from iron ore—a method that could one day cut or eliminate emissions—Meroueh says Hertha is content for the time being with a continued reliance on fossil fuels, mainly to keep costs down. The current Hertha plant could eventually switch to a fully decarbonized system without drastically changing the hardware, she says, if hydrogen becomes more affordable. 

In the meantime, plans are underway to expand into a new plant next to the existing one. The facility is slated to produce 10,000 metric tons of high-purity steel per year and should reach full capacity by the end of 2027. By 2030, Meroueh believes, Hertha can up its output to 500,000 metric tons per year with the addition of a third site. That’s only a fraction of the approximately 80 million metric tons of steel produced annually in the US, but Zenyuk says making even one metric ton is still an achievement.

In Meroueh’s mind, the world isn’t going to outgrow its need for steel, so she’s asking another question: “How can we be smarter about how we make things … so that it’s also not going to harm us in the long term?”

If you’ve had to fill up your vehicle’s gas tank or buy a plane ticket lately, you’ve probably felt the effects of rising fossil-fuel prices. But farmers buying fertilizer for their crops are especially aware of just how far the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran have spread.

Fertilizer prices have been on a roller coaster this year, kicked off in part by trade disruptions and high prices for natural gas, a key ingredient in fertilizer production. Let’s take a closer look at why conventional fertilizer prices are so sky-high, and how a few more climate-friendly alternatives could bring farmers some relief.

As fossil-fuel prices go up, nearly all industries are affected, since most of our economy relies on these fuels to move goods and people around.

But fertilizer is even more intertwined with these fluctuations, because natural gas is used as both an energy source and a chemical input in the production of ammonia, a key fertilizer ingredient. So as natural-gas prices have spiked in recent months because of the war in Iran, fertilizer prices have followed. (It’s worth briefly noting here that fertilizer production is also a major source of greenhouse-gas emissions, accounting for about 2% of the global total.)

Fertilizer trade is being directly affected as well, since about one-third of global seaborne trade in fertilizers passes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed to commercial traffic because of the conflict. Access to fertilizer could get worse for some of the poorest countries around the world because of the strait’s closure, according to a report from the World Bank. While the US largely meets demand for nitrogen fertilizers with domestic production, some imports do come from the Persian Gulf.

At one point in April, the price of urea (the most commonly applied fertilizer) climbed above $850 per metric ton. That’s 80% higher than it was before the conflict and the highest level since 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resulting conflict caused fertilizer costs to hit record highs. Prices have come down significantly, but forecasts remain uncertain.

“There’s just this out-of-control supply chain that’s a lot more volatile than it’s ever been,” says Travis Frey, chief technology officer of Pivot Bio, a company making fertilizer with genetically edited microbes. (For more on these microbes, how they work, and what research is still needed, check out my latest story here.) 

Pivot says its products are cost-competitive with chemical fertilizers today. And because they don’t use natural gas as an input, they aren’t subject to the same price spikes. When the war in Iran started, Pivot increased the volume it planned to produce, dropped prices, and allowed farmers to lock in prices for three years, Frey says.

That could be a major help for those farmers, because high prices could be here to stay for a while. Some fertilizer prices could remain high through at least 2028, according to a report from CoBank, one of the largest banks for the agriculture industry in the US.

That’s partly because the war has caused long-lasting damage: 31 ammonia plants in the Middle East have been affected or shut down completely. That’s on top of 20 ammonia plants that have been damaged in Russia in recent years.

Ongoing high prices can be extremely challenging for farmers. “The fertilizer price spikes, and because farmers have paper-thin margins, this is a real problem,” says Tim Schnabel, founder and CEO of Switch Bioworks, another company working on advanced microbe fertilizers.

Higher costs can help push food prices higher, causing all of us to pay more at the grocery store. (It’s not just fertilizer, by the way. Farmers are also getting hit with wild diesel prices this year.) As long as we’re relying on fertilizers made with fossil fuels, food prices will be tied up with energy prices.

Switch and Pivot are among the companies looking to make alternative fertilizers that use microbes to provide nitrogen to plants. There’s a limit to how much synthetic fertilizers these products can actually replace: Depending on the crop and conditions, Pivot says, its products can replace about 25% of synthetic fertilizer today, and the company hopes to reach 40% to 50% of the total. But these alternatives could be a start to untangling fossil fuels and food.

“We can’t keep doing it like this,” Switch’s Schnabel says. “There’s no way we can build a society where the basis of the food chain depends on fossil fuels.”

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Fertilizer is crucial for the global food supply, but making it uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of emissions. Some companies hope microbes can help.

A growing body of research shows that seeding the soil around a crop’s roots with beneficial microbes can help feed the plant, providing crucial nitrogen to help it grow. This could help reduce the need for chemical fertilizer, production of which accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. It could also cut costs for farmers, a big boon—especially as the Iran war has sent energy and fertilizer prices skyrocketing in recent months. 

Humans have used biological fertilizers like manure for thousands of years, and companies have long been developing microbial fertilizers, including some that rely on genetic engineering. But it’s difficult to engineer microbes that can reliably provide nitrogen for crops while also thriving themselves. 

A startup called Switch Bioworks is taking a new approach that essentially allows microbes to establish themselves and grow into healthy colonies before shifting into nitrogen-producing mode. “We have to reinvent fertilizer,”  says Tim Schnabel, the company’s founder and CEO.

The air is nearly 80% nitrogen, but plants can’t use that “free” nitrogen directly because it doesn’t react readily with other elements. Instead, they rely on so-called fixed nitrogen, which has been converted into more reactive compounds such as ammonia. In nature, microbes can perform this nitrogen fixation. Some plants, like legumes, even have symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, housing them in nodules in their roots. Synthetic fertilizer is essentially industrial nitrogen fixation via the Haber-Bosch process, which uses natural gas to make ammonia that’s applied to fields.

Biological fertilizers aim to replace some of the synthetic fertilizer with microbes that can help fix nitrogen for plants. But one challenge microbial fertilizer companies have run into is that it’s energetically expensive for microbes to make and release ammonia. Putting all their energy into nitrogen fixation can hamper their growth.

There’s a certain level of colonization you want to see around the roots, Schnabel explains. It’s too expensive and logistically challenging to put all those microbes on the plant, so you have to rely on a smaller number of microbes to grow and divide, establishing the population.  

Switch Bioworks is betting that a genetic switch is the answer. A genetic switch is a section or sections of DNA that controls how genes are turned on and off. In this case it works by activating genes that help trigger ammonia production in and release from the cell. The company is working on several options for setting off this change in its microbes. The leading one is to have the microbes react to the nitrogen level in the soil: Once it drops to a certain level, they begin producing ammonia.

“You have this inherent biological reality, where it’s really expensive for microbes to fix nitrogen,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute. It takes a lot of energy, and if they do fix the nitrogen, they want to use it for themselves, to build proteins and survive, he says. Adding genetic switches could help microbes grow and thrive and then help fertilize crops.

Switch is currently trialing its product in six US states, though it’s two to three years from a commercial product, Schnabel says. It’s initially focused on corn, the most-planted crop in the US, with over 90 million acres in 2026.

“It’s too early to tell exactly how well this works in the field,” Schnabel says. The company plans to harvest the plants in late October or early November, but as of August, some corn plants treated with Switch microbes already looked visibly healthier than those that hadn’t. And it’s still developing the products that will eventually make it to the market, he says.

Switch’s products could significantly help to clean up agriculture. “There’s a lot of potential for these companies and products to help farmers reduce emissions,” Blaustein-Rejto says. “This could be a really important solution for a quite hard-to-abate sector.”

While lab results have been promising, field trials are a crucial step in proving a product, Blaustein-Rejto says: “This is one of the final steps before they can go to market and make strong claims to farmers.” Independent trials are important as well, he adds, since there can be a large gap between a company’s reported data and what independent researchers find.

Pivot Bio is another company working to bring microbes to fields. Since it was founded in 2011, its products have been used on millions of acres of crops. The company now produces a range of products: Some versions can be added when seeds are planted, while others are applied to seeds before they’re even on a farm. The company also recently expanded beyond corn to make microbial fertilizers for cotton, wheat, and small grains including sorghum and barley.

Pivot’s initial challenge was trying to get microbes to produce nitrogen, whether they sensed it in the soil or not. Now the company is working to figure out how to make fitter, more robust colonies no matter the environment, says Travis Frey, the company’s chief technology officer.

“Growers right now are experiencing a double whammy from the farm economics point of view,” he says. Fertilizer costs are going up, and the price of commodity crops like corn has dropped. That’s a big opportunity for Pivot and others in the industry, Frey says: “This next decade is when biologicals on the farm are going to go mainstream.”

Fertilizer and seeds are two of the biggest costs for many growers, so reducing dependence on synthetic fertilizers could be a major help for agriculture, says John Havlin, a professor in the department of crop and soil sciences at North Carolina State University.

“I’m very excited about the future of the use of these products,” Havlin says. “They’ll eventually have a role to play to reduce the load of nitrogen that’s being applied.”

However, there’s a ceiling to the amount of fertilizer we can expect microbes to replace. Switch’s modeling suggests that around 50% is likely the maximum, though the initial product will likely be able to replace about 25% of a farm’s synthetic fertilizer, according to the company. Pivot has said its products can replace about one-quarter of the fertilizer used currently. 

That means synthetic fertilizer will be around for a long time. “There is no clear and plausible vision for replacing it entirely in the foreseeable future,” Blaustein-Rejto says. “So other ways to reduce emissions and reduce other types of nitrogen pollution from farms remain really critical.”