Oct 6 2024
A new law in California protects consumers’ brain data. Some think it doesn’t go far enough.

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

On September 28, California became the second US state to officially recognize the importance of mental privacy in state law. That pink, jelly-like, throbbing mass under your skull—a.k.a. your brain—contains all your thoughts, memories, and ideas. It controls your feelings and actions. Measuring brain activity can reveal a lot about a person—and that’s why neural data needs to be protected.

Regular Checkup readers will be familiar with some of the burgeoning uses of “mind-reading” technologies. We can track brain activity with all sorts of devices, some of which measure brain waves while others track electrical activity or blood flow. Scientists have been able to translate this data into signals to help paralyzed people move their limbs or even communicate by thought alone.

But this data also has uses beyond health care. Today, consumers can buy headsets that allow them to learn more about how their brains work and help them feel calm. Employers use devices to monitor how alert their employees are, and schools use them to check if students are paying attention.

Brain data is precious. It’s not the same as thought, but it can be used to work out how we’re thinking and feeling, and reveal our innermost preferences and desires. So let’s look at how California’s law might protect mental privacy—and how far we still have to go.

The new bill amends the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which grants consumers rights over personal information that is collected by businesses. The term “personal information” already included biometric data (such as your face, voice, or fingerprints). Now it also explicitly includes neural data.

The bill defines neural data as “information that is generated by measuring the activity of a consumer’s central or peripheral nervous system, and that is not inferred from nonneural information.” In other words, data collected from a person’s brain or nerves.

The law prevents companies from selling or sharing a person’s data and requires them to make efforts to deidentify the data. It also gives consumers the right to know what information is collected and the right to delete it.

“This new law in California will make the lives of consumers safer while sending a clear signal to the fast-growing neurotechnology industry there are high expectations that companies will provide robust protections for mental privacy of consumers,” Jared Genser, general counsel to the Neurorights Foundation, which cosponsored the bill, said in a statement. “That said, there is much more work ahead.”

Genser hopes the California law will pave the way for national and international legislation that protects the mental privacy of individuals all over the world. California is a good place to start—the state is home to plenty of neurotechnology companies, so there’s a good chance we’ll see the effects of the bill ripple out from there.

But some proponents of mental privacy aren’t satisfied that the law does enough to protect neural data. “While it introduces important safeguards, significant ambiguities leave room for loopholes that could undermine privacy protections, especially regarding inferences from neural data,” Marcello Ienca, an ethicist at the Technical University of Munich, posted on X.

One such ambiguity concerns the meaning of “nonneural information,” according to Nita Farahany, a futurist and legal ethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “The bill’s language suggests that raw data [collected from a person’s brain] may be protected, but inferences or conclusions—where privacy risks are most profound—might not be,” Farahany wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Ienca and Farahany are coauthors of a recent paper on mental privacy. In it, they and Patrick Magee, also at Duke University, argue for broadening the definition of neural data to what they call “cognitive biometrics.” This category could include physiological and behavioral information along with brain data—in other words, pretty much anything that could be picked up by biosensors and used to infer a person’s mental state.

After all, it’s not just your brain activity that gives away how you’re feeling. An uptick in heart rate might indicate excitement or stress, for example. Eye-tracking devices might help give away your intentions, such as a choice you’re likely to make or a product you might opt to buy. These kinds of data are already being used to reveal information that might otherwise be extremely private. Recent research has used EEG data to predict volunteers’ sexual orientation or whether they use recreational drugs. And others have used eye-tracking devices to infer personality traits.

Given all that, it’s vital we get it right when it comes to protecting mental privacy. As Farahany, Ienca, and Magee put it: “By choosing whether, when, and how to share their cognitive biometric data, individuals can contribute to advancements in technology and medicine while maintaining control over their personal information.”

Now read the rest of The Checkup

Read more from MIT Technology Review‘s archive

Nita Farahany detailed her thoughts on tech that aims to read our minds and probe our memories in a fascinating Q&A last year. Targeted dream incubation, anyone? 

There are lots of ways that your brain data could be used against you (or potentially exonerate you). Law enforcement officials have already started asking neurotech companies for data from people’s brain implants. In one case, a person had been accused of assaulting a police officer but, as brain data proved, was just having a seizure at the time.

EEG, the technology that allows us to measure brain waves, has been around for 100 years. Neuroscientists are wondering how it might be used to read thoughts, memories, and dreams within the next 100 years.

Electrodes implanted in or on the brain can provide us with the most detailed insights into how our minds work. They can also provide us with amazing imagery, like this video that essentially shows what a thought looks like as it is being formed.

What exactly is going on in our brains, anyway? When neuroscientists used electrodes implanted deep in the brains of people being treated for epilepsy, they found order and chaos. 

From around the web

Infections are responsible for 13% of cancers. Here’s how to protect against four of them. (New York Times)

Scientists have created the first map of the neurons in a fruit fly’s brain. All 139,225 of them. (Nature)

Oropouche fever is surging in South America. Disturbingly, there are increasing reports of the virus harming pregnant women and their babies. (Viruses)

Women in heterosexual relationships already do more housework and household organization than their partners. Is technology making things worse? (BBC Future)

Do you sigh during your sleep? It could be a sign of something serious. (Nature)

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Oct 4 2024
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is set to look for life-friendly conditions around Jupiter

NASA is poised to launch Europa Clipper, a $5.2 billion mission to Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, as early as October 10. The spacecraft will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It will study Europa, a possible home for extraterrestrial life, through a series of flybys after reaching Jupiter in 2030. 

Europa isn’t a craterous rock like our moon. Its surface is coated with ice, and telescope and spacecraft observations suggest it harbors a colossal liquid ocean in its interior that holds twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined. Europa also possesses some of life’s critical building blocks: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. These conditions could be sufficient for life to have developed there, either in the depths of the ocean or in subsurface lakes. 

Europa Clipper isn’t on the hunt for extraterrestrial life, however. Instead, its team hopes to assess the moon’s habitability—how well it could support life. The probe will use its range of scientific instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, magnetometers, and radars, to collect chemical, physical, and geological data in a series of flybys. Promising results could justify a mission to land on Europa and search for life. 

Early this year, everything seemed on track for the planned October launch. But in May, mission team members caught wind of a potential issue with Europa Clipper’s electronics. Testing data had indicated that the spacecraft’s transistors, devices that regulate the flow of electricity on the probe, wouldn’t survive the intense radiation consisting of charged particles trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic field, which is 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. 

“The mission team was advised that similar parts were failing at lower radiation doses than expected,” NASA said in a statement. Disassembling the spacecraft and replacing faulty transistors could have pushed the mission’s launch window well past October. 

After months of follow-up testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, and Applied Physics Laboratory, researchers concluded that any potential transistor damage wouldn’t impair mission operations. It was determined that the transistors could be heated to heal damage, and the 20-day breaks between large radiation exposures would offer enough recovery time. According to the New York Times, the spacecraft will also carry a box of the probe’s various transistors so that the team can monitor for damage, a bit like canaries in a coal mine. On September 9, Europa Clipper passed a milestone review called Key Decision Point E, approving it to proceed for launch. 

After arriving in orbit around Jupiter, Europa Clipper will conduct 49 close flybys of Europa. At its closest, the spacecraft will come within 16 miles (26 kilometers) of the surface for detailed observations. 

For more on Europa Clipper, see MIT Technology Review’s feature on the mission.

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Oct 4 2024
AI-generated images can teach robots how to act

Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories.

Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed a new system, called Genima, that fine-tunes the image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion to draw robots’ movements, helping guide them both in simulations and in the real world. The research is due to be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) next month.

The system could make it easier to train different types of robots to complete tasks—machines ranging from mechanical arms to humanoid robots and driverless cars. It could also help make AI web agents, a next generation of AI tools that can carry out complex tasks with little supervision, better at scrolling and clicking, says Mohit Shridhar, a research scientist specializing in robotic manipulation, who worked on the project.

“You can use image-generation systems to do almost all the things that you can do in robotics,” he says. “We wanted to see if we could take all these amazing things that are happening in diffusion and use them for robotics problems.” 

To teach a robot to complete a task, researchers normally train a neural network on an image of what’s in front of the robot. The network then spits out an output in a different format—the coordinates required to move forward, for example. 

Genima’s approach is different because both its input and output are images, which is easier for the machines to learn from, says Ivan Kapelyukh, a PhD student at Imperial College London, who specializes in robot learning but wasn’t involved in this research.

“It’s also really great for users, because you can see where your robot will move and what it’s going to do. It makes it kind of more interpretable, and means that if you’re actually going to deploy this, you could see before your robot went through a wall or something,” he says. 

Genima works by tapping into Stable Diffusion’s ability to recognize patterns (knowing what a mug looks like because it’s been trained on images of mugs, for example) and then turning the model into a kind of agent—a decision-making system.

MOHIT SHRIDHAR, YAT LONG (RICHIE) LO, STEPHEN JAMES ROBOT LEARNING LAB

First, the researchers fine-tuned stable Diffusion to let them overlay data from robot sensors onto images captured by its cameras. 

The system renders the desired action, like opening a box, hanging up a scarf, or picking up a notebook, into a series of colored spheres on top of the image. These spheres tell the robot where its joint should move one second in the future.

The second part of the process converts these spheres into actions. The team achieved this by using another neural network, called ACT, which is mapped on the same data. Then they used Genima to complete 25 simulations and nine real-world manipulation tasks using a robot arm. The average success rate was 50% and 64%, respectively.

Although these success rates aren’t particularly high, Shridhar and the team are optimistic that the robot’s speed and accuracy can improve. They’re particularly interested in applying Genima to video-generation AI models, which could help a robot predict a sequence of future actions instead of just one. 

The research could be particularly useful for training home robots to fold laundry, close drawers, and other domestic tasks. However, its generalized approach means it’s not limited to a specific kind of machine, says Zoey Chen, a PhD student at the University of Washington, who has also previously used Stable Diffusion to generate training data for robots but was not involved in this study. 

“This is a really exciting new direction,” she says. “I think this can be a general way to train data for all kinds of robots.”

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Oct 4 2024
These 15 companies are innovating in climate tech

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

It’s finally here! We’ve just unveiled our 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch. This annual project is one the climate team at MIT Technology Review pours a lot of time and thought into, and I’m thrilled to finally share it with you. 

Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face. 

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few reflections on this year’s list as a whole. Because this slate of companies exemplifies a few key themes that I see a lot in my reporting on climate technology. 

1. Addressing climate change requires building a lot of stuff, on a massive scale, and fast. 

A handful of the companies we included on this list stand out because of the sheer scale at which they’re building and deploying technology. And we need scale, because addressing climate change requires going from tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year to net zero.

BYD, for example, featured on our 2023 list, and it was a clear choice for our team to feature the company again. 

For a while, the title of the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) producer has depended on how you define an EV. If you include plug-in hybrids, BYD takes the crown. If you take the purist point of view and only count fully battery-powered vehicles, Tesla wins.

But now, BYD is knocking on Tesla’s door for even that purist title, outselling the company in the last quarter of 2023. The company’s dominant speed and scale at getting EVs onto the roads makes it one I’m keeping my eyes on. 

Other companies are still growing but making significant progress. LanzaJet just opened a factory in Georgia that can produce nine million gallons of alternative jet fuel each year. That’s only a tiny fraction of the billions of gallons of fuel used every year, but it’s a major step forward for alternative fuels. And First Solar, a US solar manufacturer, just opened a $1.1 billion factory in Alabama, and plans to open another in Louisiana in 2025. 

2. With climate impacts embedded in longstanding systems, we need creative new ways to tackle old problems. 

There are parts of the race to address climate change that most people are probably familiar with. Fossil fuels and their associated emissions are clearly visible in power plants, for example, or in gas-powered vehicles. 

But hidden climate challenges exist within familiar objects. Producing items from shampoo bottles to sidewalks can emit huge amounts of planet-warming pollution. We featured a few companies tackling these less visible problems. 

Sublime Systems is on the list again this year. The company is making progress scaling up its electrochemical process to make cement with significantly lower emissions than the conventional method. We also highlight a company working in the chemical industry: Solugen runs a factory in Houston, and is about to open another in Minnesota, making chemicals with biological starting ingredients rather than fossil fuels.  

3. Climate change is a vast problem that touches virtually every industry, so there’s a lot of work to do. 

As we discussed potential companies for this list over the last few months, I was struck by how tricky it was going to be to represent all the industries we wanted to. I could have personally picked 15 companies just working on batteries, for example.

We wanted some energy companies on the list, of course, as well as some in transportation. But then there’s also agriculture, chemicals, fuels, and what about climate adaptation? I think our final list shows just how massive an umbrella term “climate tech” has become. 

For example, there’s Rumin8, an Australian company making supplements for cows that can cut down on how much methane they belch out. And then we have Pano AI, which is installing camera stations that pair up with AI to better detect wildfires, which are worsening as the planet heats up. 

The world has a lot of work to do to make the progress needed on climate change. I’ll be watching to see what difference these companies are able to make this year, and beyond.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Check out the full list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch to get an in-depth look at all the companies we featured. 

We’re hosting a virtual event on producing climate-friendly food, coming up on Thursday, October 10 at noon eastern time. My colleague James Temple and I will be speaking with folks from Rumin8 and Pivot Bio, the two food companies on this year’s list. This event is exclusive to subscribers, so do subscribe if you haven’t already, then register here!

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station.

GETTY IMAGES

Another thing

The UK just shut down its final coal-fired power plant. It’s a major milestone for the country, which has historically relied heavily on the notoriously polluting fossil fuel. 

I dug into the data to see how the nation replaced coal on its grid, and how the rest of the world is faring on the journey to phase out coal. Check out the full story here.

And one more

James Temple wrote a smart essay that pushes back against the idea that AI is going to be our climate savior. There are certainly promising applications of AI across climate, but the technology is also power-hungry. And it would be a mistake to expect AI to deliver us from all of our problems. You should definitely give it a read. 

Keeping up with climate  

See the latest photos of the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene. The storm struck Florida as a Category 4 storm, but the highest death toll has been in mountainous western North Carolina, where devastating floods hit. (Washington Post)

→ Even people who have lived with hurricanes for years are facing tougher decisions, as Jeff VanderMeer discusses in a guest essay. (New York Times)

The immediate devastation from the hurricane is clear, but the long-term effects could ripple across the grid. Key equipment is down in western North Carolina, and there’s a critical shortage of repair supplies. (Latitude Media)

A major policy question in the US right now: where should low-emissions hydrogen go? (Canary Media)

→ Earlier this year, I explained why hydrogen could be used for nearly everything—but probably shouldn’t. (MIT Technology Review)

An oil executive spoke at an NYC climate event put on by the New York Times. Then, protestors shut down the talk. (Inside Climate News)

Charm Industrial is working with the US Forest Service on a carbon removal pilot project. The idea? Convert trees and other material from forest-thinning projects into bio-oil, then inject it deep underground. (Heatmap News) 

→ We covered Charm Industrial’s technology, based on corn stalks, in this 2022 story. (MIT Technology Review)

Rich countries pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for loss and damage from disasters fueled by climate change. It was a tiny fraction of what experts say is needed, and new funding has slowed to a trickle. (Grist)

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Oct 4 2024
People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing

“All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,” a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. 

The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short summaries. 

The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like “Man” and “Wow” and “Oh right” and “Hold on, let me get this right.” The “hosts” even interrupt each other. 

To test it out, I copied every story from MIT Technology Review’s 125th-anniversary issue into NotebookLM and made the system generate a 10-minute podcast with the results. The system picked a couple of stories to focus on, and the AI hosts did a great job at conveying the general, high-level gist of what the issue was about. Have a listen.

MIT Technology Review 125th Anniversary issue

The AI system is designed to create “magic in exchange for a little bit of content,” Raiza Martin, the product lead for NotebookLM, said on X. The voice model is meant to create emotive and engaging audio, which is conveyed in an “upbeat hyper-interested tone,” Martin said.

NotebookLM, which was originally marketed as a study tool, has taken a life of its own among users. The company is now working on adding more customization options, such as changing the length, format, voices, and languages, Martin said. Currently it’s supposed to generate podcasts only in English, but some users on Reddit managed to get the tool to create audio in French and Hungarian. 

Yes, it’s cool—bordering on delightful, even—but it is also not immune from the problems that plague generative AI, such as hallucinations and bias. 

Here are some of the main ways people are using NotebookLM so far. 

On-demand podcasts

Andrej Karpathy, a member of OpenAI’s founding team and previously the director of AI at Tesla, said on X that Deep Dive is now his favorite podcast. Karpathy created his own AI podcast series called Histories of Mysteries, which aims to “uncover history’s most intriguing mysteries.” He says he researched topics using ChatGPT, Claude, and Google, and used a Wikipedia link from each topic as the source material in NotebookLM to generate audio. He then used NotebookLM to generate the episode descriptions. The whole podcast series took him two hours to create, he says. 

“The more I listen, the more I feel like I’m becoming friends with the hosts and I think this is the first time I’ve actually viscerally liked an AI,” he wrote. “Two AIs! They are fun, engaging, thoughtful, open-minded, curious.” 

Study guides

The tool shines when it is given complicated source material that it can describe in an easily accessible way. Allie K. Miller, a startup AI advisor, used the tool to create a study guide and summary podcast of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

Machine-learning researcher Aaditya Ura fed NotebookLM with the code base of Meta’s Llama-3 architecture. He then used another AI tool to find images that matched the transcript to create an educational video. 

Mohit Shridhar, a research scientist specializing in robotic manipulation, fed a recent paper he’d written about using generative AI models to train robots into NotebookLM.

“It’s actually really creative. It came up with a lot of interesting analogies,” he says. “It compared the first part of my paper to an artist coming up with a blueprint, and the second part to a choreographer figuring out how to reach positions.”

Event summaries 

Alex Volkov, a human AI podcaster, used NotebookLM to create a Deep Dive episode summarizing of the announcements from OpenAI’s global developer conference Dev Day.  

Hypemen

The Deep Dive outputs can be unpredictable, says Martin. For example, Thomas Wolf, the cofounder and chief science officer of Hugging Face, tested the AI model on his résumé and received eight minutes of “realistically-sounding deep congratulations for your life and achievements from a duo of podcast experts.”

Just pure silliness

In one viral clip, someone managed to send the two voices into an existential spiral when they “realized” they were, in fact, not humans but AI systems. The video is hilarious. 

The tool is also good for some laughs. Exhibit A: Someone just fed it the words “poop” and “fart” as source material, and got over nine minutes of two AI voices analyzing what this might mean. 

The problems

NotebookLM created amazingly realistic-sounding and engaging AI podcasts. But I wanted to see how it fared with toxic content and accuracy. 

Let’s start with hallucinations. In one AI podcast version of a story I wrote on hyperrealistic AI deepfakes, the AI hosts said that a journalist called “Jess Mars” wrote the story. In reality, this was an AI-generated character from a story I had to read out to record data for my AI avatar. 

This made me wonder what other mistakes had crept into the AI podcasts I had generated. Humans already have a tendency to trust what computer programs say, even when they are wrong. I can see this problem being amplified when the false statements are made by a friendly and authoritative voice, causing wrong information to proliferate.    

Next I wanted to put the tool’s content moderation to the test. I added some toxic content, such as racist stereotypes, into the mix. The model did not pick it up. 

I also pasted an excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into NotebookLM. To my surprise, the model started generating audio based on it. Despite being programmed to be hyper-enthusiastic about topics, the AI voices expressed clear disgust and discomfort with the text, and they added a lot of context to highlight how problematic it was. What a relief.

I also fed NotebookLM policy manifestos from both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. 

The hosts were far more enthusiastic about Harris’s election platform, calling the title “catchy” and saying its approach was a good way to frame things. For example, the AI hosts supported Harris’s energy policy. “Honestly, that’s the kind of stuff people can really get behind—not just some abstract policy, but something that actually impacts their bottom line,” the female host said. 

Harris manifesto

For Trump, the AI hosts were more skeptical. They repeatedly pointed out inconsistencies in the policy proposals, called the language “intense,” deemed certain policy proposals “head scratchers,” and said the text catered to Trump’s base. They also asked whether Trump’s foreign policy could lead to further political instability. 

Trump manifesto

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: “NotebookLM is a tool for understanding, and the Audio Overviews are generated based on the sources that you upload. Our products and platforms are not built to favor any specific candidates or political viewpoints.”

How to try it yourself

  1. Got to NotebookLM and create a new notebook. 
  2. You first need to add a source. It can be a PDF document, a public YouTube link, an MP3 file, a Google Docs file, or a link to a website, or you can paste in text directly. 
  3. A “Notebook Guide” pop-up should appear. If not, it’s in the right-hand corner next to the chat. This will display a short AI-generated summary of your source material and suggested questions you can ask the AI chatbot about it. 
  4. The Audio Overview feature is in the top-right corner. Click “Generate.” This should take a few minutes. 
  5. Once it is ready, you can either download it or share a link. 

Rhiannon Williams contributed reporting.

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Oct 2 2024
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: First Solar and its advanced solar panels

First Solar is expanding production of its thin-film solar cells and opening new factories to meet a surge of demand. Meanwhile, it’s investing in perovskites—tiny crystalline materials that many view as a key solar technology of the future. 

The world needs more electricity than ever, as the AI boom puts intense demand on data centers and more heat waves increase the use of air-conditioning. To reduce emissions and keep global warming in check, a larger share of that electricity must come from renewables. 

Much of the growth in renewables comes from solar. And First Solar is one of the largest manufacturers of solar panels in the US, which is the world’s second-largest solar market after China. The company is benefiting from US tariffs on foreign-made solar panels and tax credits made available through the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Today, Chinese firms produce the vast majority of the world’s solar panels. Most build cells that incorporate a layer of silicon to absorb the sun’s light and awaken electrons within, which then flow out as current. Instead of silicon, First Solar’s cells rely on a thin film made from two other elements: cadmium and tellurium. These cells can be produced more quickly than silicon cells, using less energy and water. 

But there’s still room for improvement in the cells’ performance. Today’s best silicon solar panels convert roughly 25% of the sun’s energy into electricity, and cadmium telluride tends to lag behind that. To boost efficiency, First Solar is now looking to incorporate a new class of materials called perovskites into its cells. These tiny crystals absorb different wavelengths of light from those absorbed by silicon or cadmium telluride. Cells that add perovskites to the mix—known as perovskite tandem solar cells—could potentially convert even more of the sun’s energy into electricity. 

First Solar is among a handful of companies exploring how to layer these crystals into commercial solar cells to improve performance. Last year it acquired a firm called Evolar, a leader in thin-film and perovskite research, to further this aim. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Renewable energy 
  • Founded: 1999
  • Headquarters: Tempe, Arizona, USA
  • Notable fact: First Solar’s backlog of orders totals 76 gigawatts and stretches out to 2030.

Potential for impact

Globally, solar energy accounted for more than three times as much new capacity for electricity generation as wind in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency. There are a few reasons why—the price of panels has dropped dramatically in the past 20 years as production ramped up, and they’re relatively easy to install and maintain. 

Solar’s future looks just as bright—global solar capacity is expected to reach nearly 2,000 terawatt-hours this year, and the IEA says we could see it quadruple by the end of the decade. In the US, First Solar’s expanding production and its recent investments into perovskites will shape the solar market for years to come. 

Caveats 

One of the biggest obstacles to bringing more utility-scale solar plants online in the US is hooking these projects up to the grid once they’re built. The federal agency that approves grid interconnections has a backlog of requests. Right now it takes about five years, on average, for a new solar plant to open. Recent reforms aim to make this process faster, but their impact is still unclear. 

Compounding this problem is a shortage of transformers, which step the voltage of electricity up or down; these are crucial to managing the flow of clean energy across the grid. And there are siting challenges, since developers must obtain permits and some community groups oppose large installations. First Solar’s customers are overwhelmingly based in the US and include developers of new solar projects that face all these issues, which could limit the company’s growth.

The fate of the US solar industry is strongly influenced by domestic policy, and the US presidential election could affect First Solar’s expansion plans in a few ways (even if tax credits to US manufacturers have enjoyed broad bipartisan support). Though it seems unlikely that the IRA would be repealed, it’s possible that a new administration could amend parts of it. 

The new president could impose higher tariffs and place more restrictions on imports. First Solar has publicly supported such tariffs—which critics blame for the high price of US panels. Or the president could lower tariffs and decrease import restrictions. Uncertainty on policy matters could make developers less willing to place new orders until a new administration is in place. 

And there’s no guarantee that the company can make tandem cells work. Perovskites are notoriously unstable and break down in the sun—rather inconvenient for a solar material. First Solar will need to find new ways to produce and package them at scale, and prove to customers that these panels will work reliably for years once installed. 

Finally, though First Solar’s panels avoid concerns about forced labor in the supply chain for silicon produced in China, such problems have also occurred in the company’s own supply chain. 

Next steps

Later this year, First Solar will begin producing miniature versions of tandem solar panels at a factory in Ohio. If these panels perform well in tests, the company will manufacture full-size prototypes at its new R&D center nearby.  

Meanwhile, First Solar is building new manufacturing facilities to expand production of its cadmium telluride panels. The company opened its first factory in India earlier this year and now manufactures in four countries—India, the US, Malaysia, and Vietnam. 

In the US, First Solar just opened a new plant in Alabama, with another to follow in Louisiana in 2025. By 2027, the company expects to have more than 25 gigawatts of annual manufacturing capacity—more than the total capacity of new utility-scale US solar installed last year. 

Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

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Oct 2 2024
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Electric Hydrogen and its push to mass-produce a carbon-free fuel

Large swaths of the global economy are nearly impossible to electrify but could run on low-emissions hydrogen, helping the world transition away from fossil fuels. Electric Hydrogen is working toward more efficient, affordable production of green hydrogen.

Electric Hydrogen is striving to develop production methods that make it easier and more affordable to generate huge amounts of green hydrogen.
Hydrogen has emerged as a promising alternative to fossil fuels for the transportation sector and as a feedstock in the production of steel, fertilizer, methanol, and other products. 

But hydrogen production to date has been pretty dirty. The vast majority of hydrogen is produced from natural gas, emitting significant levels of planet-warming greenhouse gasses. It can also be generated by an electrolyzer, a device that uses electricity to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. But most electrolyzers are small and expensive, and they consume lots of energy and water. Moreover, they typically rely on electrical grids that aren’t powered by predominantly clean energy.

Electric Hydrogen wants to address these issues by developing electrolyzers that have about 10 times the capacity of today’s standard devices while also being more affordable and efficient.

The company is already operating a pair of electrolyzer plants in California, including a one-megawatt facility in San Carlos and a 10-megawatt project in San Jose. In April, Electric Hydrogen opened an electrolyzer factory in Devens, Massachusetts, which will crank out its first line of 100-megawatt electrolyzers. The company also raised $380 million in funding in 2023 from backers including BP, United Airlines, and Microsoft, making it the first electrolyzer company to be valued at over $1 billion. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Hydrogen
  • Founded: 2020
  • Headquarters: Natick, Massachusetts, USA
  • Notable fact: Two of the company’s three cofounders came from First Solar, a solar panel manufacturer that is also featured on this year’s list.

Potential for impact

To slow the pace of climate change, we need to drastically reduce our use of fossil fuels. Heavily polluting industries like fertilizer and chemical manufacturing are notoriously difficult to clean up. Fertilizer alone accounted for 2% of global emissions in 2022, according to a study published in Scientific Reports. It’s also tricky to eliminate emissions from certain types of transportation, including shipping and aviation, mainly because fuels can simply store more energy for a given weight than today’s batteries. 

It’s these sectors where hydrogen shows the most promise, because it can be made into fuel that produces only water vapor as a by-product. But it’s hard to make clean hydrogen cost-competitive with fossil fuels. 

Caveats

Electric Hydrogen will need to prove that its 100-megawatt electrolyzer systems can operate reliably at a low cost. To make low-emission hydrogen, the electrolyzers will need to use a lot of renewable energy, which may not always be available. In addition, Electric Hydrogen doesn’t share many details publicly about how its technology works, which makes it difficult to gauge the company’s claims and progress. 

Next steps

The good news is that the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by the Biden administration in 2022, provided generous subsidies aimed at accelerating  US-based hydrogen production. Though the details of how exactly these tax credits will be awarded are still being worked out, Electric Hydrogen is poised to benefit greatly from them in the coming years, either directly or through cost reductions for its customers.

Meanwhile, Electric Hydrogen plans to send the Natick facility’s first electrolyzer systems to OCI, a clean methanol manufacturer in Beaumont, Texas, later this year. Full commercial operation of these systems is expected in 2025, and the methanol will likely be used for maritime shipping around Europe. The company is also hoping to build out its business in Europe and Australia within the next few years. 

If these electrolyzers work as efficiently and affordably as hoped, it will mark a huge step toward the company’s goal of producing clean, affordable hydrogen.

Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

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Oct 2 2024
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Pivot Bio and its nitrogen-delivering microbes

Pivot Bio is using genetically edited microbes to deliver just the right amount of nitrogen to crops, cutting climate emissions without reducing agricultural yields.

The development of synthetic fertilizer was one of the great achievements of the last century, providing an abundant source of nitrogen that boosted crop yields and helped feed a growing global population. 

But the product is also a climate and environmental disaster. The production process releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and after it’s applied to fields it releases nitrous oxide, a far more powerful greenhouse gas. Synthetic fertilizer contributes about 5% of worldwide climate emissions and pollutes groundwater, lakes, and rivers.

Pivot Bio, a biotechnology company based in Berkeley, California, is harnessing microbes to deliver a usable form of nitrogen directly to the roots of crops, reducing the amount of synthetic fertilizer farmers need to use and the pollution that comes with it.

Nitrogen is an essential ingredient for photosynthesis, but most plants can’t directly absorb it from the air. Fertilizer manufacturers help them along by breaking down the strong triple bonds between nitrogen molecules and combining those molecules with hydrogen to form ammonia. After it’s applied in fields, much of the fertilizer turns into ammonium and nitrate, nitrogen-rich compounds that plants can take up and use to grow.

Certain bacteria and other microorganisms in soil pull off a similar trick naturally, if not as consistently. Pivot is putting a modern twist on this natural process, genetically engineering select microbes to increase the amount of nitrogen they deliver to the roots of plants over the growing season.

More and more farmers are putting it to use in their fields. The company’s products were applied to 5 million acres last year, up from 1 million two years earlier. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Food and agriculture 
  • Founded: 2011
  • Headquarters: Berkeley, California, USA
  • Notable fact: Pivot Bio says its products can replace 40 pounds of synthetic fertilizer per acre. US corn farmers generally apply about 150 to 220 pounds of fertilizer per acre every year, depending on the variety and hoped-for yield.

Potential for impact

Pivot sells the microbes as a seed coating or as a liquid that farmers can apply in furrows at the time of planting. 

The company says the current version of its main product, designed for corn, can replace about 25% of the synthetic fertilizer normally used, without reducing crop output. The company has also developed nitrogen-delivering microbes tailored for wheat, sorghum, and other small grains, all selling for around or below the price of traditional fertilizer. Pivot adds that farmers have applied its products to more than 10 million acres (if you count repeated uses), nearly all in the US so far.

Pivot says that while generating a million tons of ammonia as fertilizer produces 2.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, manufacturing the microbes needed to deliver a million tons of nitrogen in the field produces only about 35,000 tons of emissions. The company estimates that its customers have cut emissions by the equivalent of more than 900,000 tons since the start of 2022. About 78% of that reduction occurred just last year, though the company says some of that increase was due to improved data collection.

A handful of academic studies have backed up the company’s claims that its products can reduce fertilizer use and emissions without lowering crop yields.

Caveats

Some farmers have reported mixed results in their fields, and Pivot’s products don’t necessarily increase yields over what’s possible with standard fertilizer use. That isn’t necessary for the company to make the case that it can help the climate—but it would make Pivot an easier sell to farmers.

Many are loath to cut down their use of synthetic fertilizer, a tried-and-true product, unless new policies require them to do so or pollution-cutting products promise to boost productivity as well.

The other obvious challenge with Pivot’s approach is that it’s not a complete solution to synthetic fertilizer pollution, since it can replace only a fraction of that fertilizer.

Next steps

But it’s a big fraction in an industry that’s notoriously challenging to clean up, and one that’s set to grow.

Chris Abbott, the company’s CEO, stresses that Pivot can save farmers money, since its products are cost competitive with synthetic fertilizer but will more reliably deliver nitrogen that actually translates to plant growth.

The company expects that its next generation of microbes, scheduled to be ready for the 2026 US planting season, will be 25% more effective at generating nitrogen at the roots of crops. With future improvements, Abbott believes, the products will eventually be capable of replacing as much as half the synthetic fertilizer in fields, with crop yields the same or better. 

If Pivot nears that goal and continues to win over farmers, it could begin to meaningfully reduce one of agriculture’s biggest sources of climate pollution.

Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

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Oct 2 2024
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Sun King connects low-income households to clean energy

Sun King is helping poor households across Asia and Africa access reliable, clean power and healthier ways of cooking. 

Accessing clean sources of energy has always been a challenge for low-income communities worldwide, given the high up-front costs. At least hundreds of millions of people around the world have unreliable or no access to the electricity grid, forcing many of them to spend as much as 10% of their incomes on dirty fuels—like kerosene and diesel—that harm both their health and the environment.

One work-around for this challenge is to allow households to pay for clean energy in small, affordable amounts as they use it. 

This is what Sun King has been able to deliver. By providing solar panels, handheld solar-powered lamps, batteries, and home systems that power lights and devices to communities in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, it says, it offers reliable renewable electricity to some 40 million people. Its pay-as-you-go business model allows households to spend as little as $0.15 per day.

Now, having acquired PayGo Energy in 2023, Sun King is expanding its product portfolio into clean cooking. 

PayGo’s stoves run on liquefied petroleum gas, which produces less of the health-damaging and climate-warming pollution generated by charcoal, biomass, and similar fuels used to heat basic stoves in many homes. The household costs for the stoves and fuel are subsidized by carbon credits that the company earns for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, through a voluntary carbon offsets program. 

Crucially, PayGo has earned high marks from academic experts for developing household cookstoves that reliably reduce indoor air pollution and climate emissions. Sun King says it’s also developing other cooking appliances, like pressure cookers, that could run on the renewable electricity it provides. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Renewable energy 
  • Founded: 2008
  • Headquarters: Nairobi, Kenya
  • Notable fact: Sun King supplies solar products to more than 40 million people in 10 African and two Asian countries.

Potential for impact

Sun King’s whole range of product lines helps cut the emissions driving climate change. 

For instance, it has already sold 23 million solar products to previous users of kerosene lamps, each of which can pump out around a ton of carbon dioxide a decade. 

And by reducing the need to collect biomass to produce household light, heat, or fuel for cooking, the company can help reduce deforestation as well as the emissions that occur from burning plant matter.

Cooking with wood and charcoal is a major contributor to global warming, responsible for approximately 2% of worldwide carbon emissions. The particulate pollution it releases also kills millions of people annually.

Voluntary carbon markets for clean cookstoves will only work if the programs are conducted in a transparent and credible manner; such programs have come under severe criticism for inflating the climate benefits of the appliances, in part by overestimating how much they’re actually used. But PayGo was among a few cookstove projects that researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found did meet stringent quality criteria, in part by “metering” actual usage of cleaner replacement stoves. The stoves also use a fuel that meets World Health Organization health standards for indoor air pollution.

By operating in more rigorous ways, the company could help drive more investment in cookstove projects that actually make a difference for both public health and climate change.

Indeed, quality carbon credits—like those Sun King plans to release—have begun to fetch higher prices, in a market that has started to discriminate against inflated credits.

Caveats 

Even though Sun King and PayGo Energy adhere to very high standards in monitoring emissions, these approaches are not foolproof and may be flawed by inaccurate or overly generous assumptions.

And it may remain difficult to persuade many households to shift to cleaner stoves, depending on their specific needs, cultural practices, habits, and incomes. 

Meanwhile, though providing off-grid solar power at a low up-front cost is a boon to low-income households in regions with spotty or overpriced electricity, these homes and communities will ideally be connected to large, clean, stable electricity grids in the future. That would ultimately provide the lower-cost, around-the-clock electricity needed to power businesses and create local jobs. 

Next steps 

Sun King is now conducting a pilot initiative with a thousand households across Kenya, to introduce its next-generation clean cookstoves. The company also launched its first dedicated cookstove shop in the same country, known as EasyCook, in July. 

Meanwhile, Sun King continues to improve its solar products and market reach. It has begun rolling out a new home system that delivers increased energy output at a lower retail price, and it launched operations in South Africa and Cameroon this year.

As the cost of solar panels and batteries continue to fall, Sun King’s products are becoming increasingly competitive with traditional grid electricity, offering consumers across growing parts of Africa and Asia cleaner, cheaper, and often more reliable energy.

Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

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Oct 2 2024
2024 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Ceibo and its copper mining tech

Ceibo seeks to eliminate a major potential speed bump for the clean-energy transition: the looming global copper shortage. The firm’s low-impact extraction technology targets ores that aren’t economical to mine today but could help meet the copper demands of an electrified world.

Copper wires form the backbone of the clean-energy economy, connecting cars, buildings, and factories to the grid. Copper is also essential to solar panels, wind turbines, and EVs. Demand for the metal in these and other cleantech applications is expected to nearly triple by 2040. But much of the copper that remains in the ground is locked up in low-grade ores that aren’t economical to mine. The mining technology company Ceibo hopes to change that.

Today, about 20% of the world’s copper is produced from copper oxide ores. Copper is extracted by crushing the rock, placing it in a giant pile, and spraying it with dilute acid. As acid percolates through the rock, the copper dissolves and leaches out. 

The remaining 80% of the world’s copper comes from copper sulfide ores, which don’t dissolve well in acid. To extract that copper, the industry uses a more energy- and water-intensive process that involves concentrating the metal in vats of chemicals before smelting it at high temperatures.

Ceibo is tweaking the lower-impact leaching process so that it works on copper sulfides. The company’s chemistry-based approach mimics the way naturally occurring microbial communities liberate copper from sulfide ores, but at an accelerated pace. By altering conditions within the rock pile, including pH and oxidation state, Ceibo’s tech makes it possible to recover more than 70% of the copper. Companies that are already mining copper oxides can plug the firm’s tech into their existing infrastructure without costly retrofits.

Ceibo is in the process of testing its technology in partnership with key players in the mining industry. The firm has also raised $36 million from clean-energy and mining financiers, part of a growing trend of investment in startups seeking to process copper sulfides with leaching. Among those startups, Ceibo stands out for being headquartered in Chile, the world’s largest copper producer. This could give the firm a home field advantage as it seeks to build partnerships with major industry players and rapidly scale its technology. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Mining 
  • Founded: 2021
  • Headquarters: Santiago, Chile
  • Notable fact: Ceibo got its start offering dust suppression services to copper miners under a different name, Aguamarina. Dust pollution is a major challenge for the copper industry.

Potential for impact

While the cleantech sector’s appetite for copper is expected to surge, the mining sector isn’t keeping pace. With many of the best-quality ore deposits already exhausted, analysts predict a potential copper shortfall of more than 10 millions tons a year by 2040. 

Liberating the potentially vast quantities of copper tied up in sulfide ores that aren’t economical to mine today may be key to closing the copper supply gap. Ceibo is aiming to produce a million tons of copper annually within the next 10 years, with further expansion in the future. At such scales, Ceibo’s relatively low-impact approach to copper processing could help clean up the industry.

Caveats

The idea of using acid to leach sulfide ores isn’t new; researchers have been trying to develop a scalable, cost-effective way to do so for decades. The problem is so well known that industry insiders sometimes refer to it as the Holy Grail of copper mining. 

Environmental variability is a key challenge. A company might develop a method that works well for one particular ore type but fails when applied elsewhere. Ceibo is developing a process that the company says is flexible by design, using a mix of proprietary chemical reagents and geochemical modeling to adjust to conditions on the ground. But the firm still has to demonstrate that its technology can help miners extract copper efficiently at commercial scales in a broad spectrum of geologic and environmental conditions. 

Next steps

So far, Ceibo has focused on proving its process in laboratory settings. To date, in partnership with mining companies, it has tested the performance of its technology on more than 20 ores. Later this year, Ceibo aims to begin running its first on-site pilot tests.

While much of Ceibo’s initial work has taken place in Chile, the firm recently opened a US office to gain a greater foothold in the North American market, which is being buoyed by the Biden administration’s efforts to expand domestic supply chains for critical minerals.

Explore the 2024 list of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch.

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