The US is continuing its decades-long effort to commercialize a technology that converts sunlight into heat, funding a series of new projects using that energy to brew beer, produce low-carbon fuels, or keep grids running.
On July 25, the Department of Energy will announce it is putting $33 million into nine pilot or demonstration projects based on concentrating solar thermal power, MIT Technology Review can report exclusively. The technology uses large arrays of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto a receiver, where it’s used to heat up molten salt, ceramic particles, or other materials that can store that energy for extended periods.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, DOE continues to invest in the next-generation solar technologies we need to tackle the climate crisis and ensure American scientific innovation remains the envy of the world,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement.
The DOE has been funding efforts to get concentrated solar energy off the ground since at least the 1970s. The idea was initially driven in part by the quest to develop more renewable, domestic sources of energy during the oil crisis of that era.
But early commercial efforts to produce clean electricity based on this technology have been bedeviled by high costs, low output, and other challenges.
Researchers continued to try to drive the field forward, in part by moving to higher-temperature systems that are more efficient and switching to new types of materials that can withstand them. The focus of the concentrating solar field has also shifted away from using the technology to produce electricity—a job that its solar photovoltaic cousin now does incredibly effectively, cheaply, and on a massive scale—and toward using it to provide the heat needed for various industrial processes or as a form of very long-duration energy storage for grids.
Indeed, a core promise of the technology is that heat can be stored more efficiently than electricity, potentially offering an alternative to very expensive large-scale battery plants. This could be especially useful for dealing with prolonged dips in renewable generation as solar, wind, and other fluctuating sources come to produce a larger and larger share of electricity.
Among the awardees:
More than $7 million of the DOE funds will support a project at Firestone Walker Brewery in Paso Robles, California, which will tap into solar thermal energy to produce the steam needed for its lineup of IPAs and other beers.
Another $6 million will go to Premier Resource Management’s planned concentrating solar power plant in Bakersfield, California, which would store thermal energy in retired fracking sites.
Researchers at West Virginia University, who are working with NASA, secured $5 million to explore the use of solar thermal to produce a clean form of hydrogen, a fuel as well as a feedstock in the production of fertilizer, steel, and other industrial goods.
The DOE funds pilot and demonstration projects in the hopes of kick-starting commercialization of emerging energy technologies, helping research groups or companies to refine them, scale them up, and drive down costs.
In the case of concentrating solar thermal, costs still need to fall by about half to “really unlock broader applications,” says Becca Jones-Albertus, director of DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.
But she says the department continues to invest in the development of the technology because it remains one of the most promising ways to address three big areas where the world still needs better solutions to cut climate-warming emissions: long-duration grid storage, industrial heat, and steady forms of carbon-free electricity.
This August, strange balloons will drift high above Colorado. These airy aircraft, launched from the back of a pickup truck, will be equipped with sensors that can measure heat on the ground, pinpointing new wildfire outbreaks from above.
The company behind the balloons, called Urban Sky, also plans to use them to understand conditions on the ground before fires start. Approximately 237,500 acres burn in Colorado annually, according to 2011–2020 data from the Rocky Mountain Area Coordination Center. The hope is that this new high-altitude tool might allow humans to manage—or at least understand—those blazes better.
“Wildfire is a natural part of ecosystems,” says Michael Falkowski, manager of the wildland fire programs at NASA. But climate change has proved to be an accelerant, rendering fires bigger, more intense, and more frequent. At the same time, more people are living closer to wild spaces, and the US’s history of fire suppression, which has crowded forests and left old and dead vegetation sitting around, is fanning the flames.
To deal with modern fires, Falkowski says, researchers and fire agencies have to gather data before those fires start and after they’re done smoldering, not just as they’re burning. That makes it possible to understand the risks ahead of time and try to mitigate them, track ongoing blazes, and understand the threats fires pose to communities and the environment.
Before a fire takes hold, researchers can map vegetation and estimate how wet or dry it is. During a fire, they can map where and how hot the activity is. When it’s all over, they can assess the severity of the burn and track air quality.
An infrared image of the 2023 Pass Fire in New Mexico, taken by an Urban Sky balloon.
COURTESY URBAN SKY
Still, the most acute phase is obviously the one when the fire is actually burning. In the heat of that moment, it can be hard to get a handle on when and where, exactly, the fire is taking hold. Satellites do some of that work, surveying large areas all at once. But the primary governmental satellites produce pictures with pixels around 300 meters across, and they can’t always get a super timely look at a given spot, since their view is limited by their orbit.
Airplanes and helicopters can map a fire’s extent in more detail, but they’re expensive to operate and dangerous to fly. They have to coordinate with other aircraft and have smaller views, being closer to the ground. They’re also a limited resource.
Urban Sky aims to combine the advantages of satellites and aircraft by using relatively inexpensive high-altitude balloons that can fly above the fray—out of the way of airspace restrictions, other aircraft, and the fire itself. The system doesn’t put a human pilot at risk and has an infraredsensor system called HotSpot that provides a sharp, real-time picture, with pixels 3.5 meters across. “We targeted that resolution with the goal of being able to see a single burning tree,” says Jared Leidich, chief technology officer at Urban Sky. “And so that would show up essentially as one pixel—one hot pixel.” The company has some competition: Others, like Aerostar and LUX Aerobot, also make balloons that can monitor wildfires.
The Urban Sky team has launched balloons in previous tests, but in August, the technology will monitor potential fires for an actual (unspecified) customer. Sending the balloon-lofted HotSpot up will be a surprisingly simple affair, thanks to the balloon’s relatively small size: While the company makes several sizes, the original is about as big as a van at launch, inflating to the size of a small garage once it’s aloft and surrounded by lower-pressure air. The Urban Sky team uses weather software to calculate where to launch a balloon so that it will drift over the fire at the right elevation. Then the team packs one up, along with compressed helium or hydrogen gas, and drives a truck out to that location. The balloon is hooked onto a mast jutting from the vehicle, filled up with the lighter-than-air molecules, and released. The whole process takes about 10 minutes.
Once the balloon hits its cruising altitude, the HotSpot sensor turns on. Through satellite communication networks, an onboard processor sends real-time information about actual hot spots back to people on the ground.
The balloons can hover over a fire for about 18 hours, using the whims of the atmosphere to stay in place. They fly near the top of the troposphere and the bottom of the next atmospheric layer: the stratosphere. “Those often have winds going in different directions,” explains Leidich. To move back and forth, the balloon simply has to go up or down.
Urban Sky’s unnamed customer for its August deployment takes data on wind patterns and fuels (also known as trees, bushes, and grass) to try to understand the spots where fires are most likely to start and spread. It is interested in integrating Urban Sky’s on-the-ground (read: in-the-air) data on where fires actually do break out. “They want to add an extra step to the process where they actually scan the areas that are high risk,” says Leidich.
During the campaign, if officials identify or suspect a fire, Urban Sky can send out the truck. “We put a balloon up over the area to scan the area and say, ‘Yes, there is a fire. Here it is,’” says Leidich.
COURTESY URBAN SKY
If they get yeses where they should and nos where there is nothing to see, the proof of concept could lead to wider adoption of the HotSpot system, perhaps offering a simple and timely way for other regions to get a handle on their own fires.
This year, Urban Sky also has a grant through NASA’s FireSense program, which aims to find innovative ways to learn about all three fire phases (before, during, and after). At the moment, the August campaign and the NASA program are the primary customers for Hot Spot, although the company also sells regularly updated aerial images of 12 cities in the western US.
“It’s kind of an interesting technology to be able to do this active fire detection and tracking from a high-altitude platform,” Falkowski says of Urban Sky’s balloons.
With NASA’s support, the team is hoping to redesign the system for longer flights, build in a more robust communication system, and incorporate a sensor that captures blue, green, and near-infrared light, which would make it possible to understand those plant-based “fuels” better and assign risk scores to forests accordingly. Next year the team is planning to again hover over real fires, this time for NASA.
And there will always be fires to hover over. As there always have been, Falkowski points out. “Fire is not a bad thing,” he says. “These ecosystems evolved with fire. The problem is humans are getting too close to places that just need to burn.”
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next.You can read more from the series here.
Last week, Amazon trumpeted that it had purchased enough clean electricity to cover the energy demands of all the offices, data centers, grocery stores, and warehouses across its global operations, seven years ahead of its sustainability target.
That news closely followed Google’s acknowledgment that the soaring energy demands of its AI operations helped ratchet up its corporate emissions by 13% last year—and that it had backed away from claims that it was already carbon neutral.
If you were to take the announcements at face value, you’d be forgiven for believing that Google is stumbling while Amazon is speeding ahead in the race to clean up climate pollution.
But while both companies are coming up short in their own ways, Google’s approach to driving down greenhouse-gas emissions is now arguably more defensible.
In fact, there’s a growing consensus that how a company gets to net zero is more important than how fast it does so. And a new school of thought is emerging that moves beyond the net-zero model of corporate climate action, arguing that companies should focus on achieving broader climate impacts rather than trying to balance out every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.
But to understand why, let’s first examine how the two tech giants’ approaches stack up, and where company climate strategies often go wrong.
Perverse incentives
The core problem is that the costs and complexity of net-zero emissions plans, which require companies to cut or cancel out every ton of climate pollution across their supply chains, can create perverse incentives. Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.
That may mean buying inexpensive carbon credits to offset ongoing pollution from their direct operations or that of their suppliers, rather than undertaking the tougher task of slashing those emissions at the source. Those programs can involve paying other parties to plant trees, restore coastal ecosystems, or alter agriculture practices in ways that purport to reduce emissions or pull carbon dioxide out of the air. The snag is, numerousstudies and investigativestories have shown that such efforts often overstate the climate benefits, sometimes wildly.
Net-zero goals can also compel companies to buy what are known as renewable energy credits (RECs), which ostensibly support additional generation of renewable electricity but raise similar concerns that the climate gains are overstated.
The argument for RECs is that companies often can’t purchase a pure stream of clean electricity to power their operations, since grid operators rely on a mix of natural gas, coal, solar, wind, and other sources. But if those businesses provide money or an indication of demand that spurs developers to build new renewables projects and generate more clean electricity than they would have otherwise, the companies can then claim this cancels out ongoing pollution from the electricity they use.
Experts, however, are less and less convinced of the value of RECs at this stage.
The claim that clean-energy projects wouldn’t have been built without that added support is increasingly unconvincing in a world where those facilities can easily compete in the marketplace on their own, Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame, previously told me. And if a company’s purchase of such credits doesn’t bring about changes that reduce the emissions in the atmosphere, it can’t balance out the company’s ongoing pollution.
‘Creative accounting’
For its part, Amazon is relying on both carbon credits and RECs.
In its sustainability report, the company says that it reached its clean-electricity targets and drove down emissions by improving energy efficiency, buying more carbon-free power, building renewables projects at its facilities, and supporting such projects around the world. It did this in part by “purchasing additional environmental attributes (such as renewable energy credits) to signal our support for renewable energy in the grids where we operate, in line with the expected generation of the projects we have contracted.”
But there’s yet another issue that can arise when a company pays for clean power that it’s not directly consuming, whether through RECs or through power purchase agreements made before a project is built: Merely paying for renewable electricity generation that occurred at some point, somewhere in the world, isn’t the same as procuring the amount of electricity that the company consumed in the specific places and times that it did so. As you may have heard, the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, even as Amazon workers and operations keep grinding around the world and around the clock.
Paying a solar-farm operator some additional money for producing electricity it was already going to generate in the middle of the day doesn’t in any meaningful way reverse the emissions that an Amazon fulfillment center or server farm produces by, say, drawing electricity from a natural-gas power plant two states away in the middle of the night.
“The reality on the ground is that its data centers are driving up demand for fossil fuels,” argued a report last week from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers that has been pushing the company to take more aggressive action on climate change.
The organization said that a significant share of Amazon’s RECs aren’t driving development of new projects. It also stressed that those payments and projects often aren’t generating electricity in the same areas and at the same times that Amazon is consuming power.
The employee group estimates that 78% of Amazon’s US energy comes from nonrenewable sources and accuses the company of using “creative accounting” to claim it’s reached its clean-electricity goals.
To its credit, Amazon is investing billions of dollars in renewables, electrifying its fleet of delivery vehicles, and otherwise making real strides in reducing its waste and emissions. In addition, it’s lobbying US legislators to make it easier to permit electric transmission projects, funding more reliable forms of carbon removal, and working to diversify its mix of electricity sources. The company also insists it’s being careful and selective about the types of carbon offsets it supports, investing only in “additional, quantifiable, real, permanent, and socially beneficial” projects.
“Amazon is focused on making the grid cleaner and more reliable for everyone,” the company said in response to an inquiry from MIT Technology Review. “An emissions-first approach is the fastest, most cost-effective and scalable way to leverage corporate clean-energy procurement to help decarbonize global power grids. This includes procuring renewable energy in locations and countries that still rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their grids, and where energy projects can have the biggest impact on carbon reduction.”
The company has adopted what’s known as a “carbon matching” approach (which it lays out further here), stressing that it wants to be sure the emissions reduced through its investments in renewables equal or exceed the emissions it continues to produce.
But a recent study led by Princeton researchers found that carbon matching had a “minimal impact” on long-term power system emissions, because it rarely helps get projects built or clean energy generated where those things wouldn’t have happened anyway.
“It’s an offsetting scheme at its core,” Wilson Ricks, an author of the study and an energy systems researcher at Princeton, said of the method, without commenting on Amazon specifically.
(Meta, Salesforce, and General Motors have also embraced this model, the study notes.)
The problem in asserting that a company is effectively running entirely on clean electricity, when it’s not doing so directly and may not be doing so completely, is that it takes off any pressure to finish the job for real.
Backing off claims of carbon neutrality
Google has made its own questionable climate claims over the years as well, and it faces growing challenges as the energy it uses for artificial intelligence soars.
But it is striving to address its power consumption in arguably more defensible ways and now appears to be taking some notable course-correcting steps, according to its recent sustainability report.
Google says that it’s no longer buying carbon credits that purport to prevent emissions. With this change, it has also backed away from the claim that it had already achieved carbon neutrality across its operations years ago.
“We’re no longer procuring carbon avoidance credits year-over-year to compensate for our annual operational emissions,” the company told MIT Technology Review in a statement. “We’re instead focusing on accelerating an array of carbon solutions and partnerships that will help us work toward our net-zero goal, while simultaneously helping develop broader solutions to mitigate climate change.”
Notably, that includes funding the development of more expensive but possibly more reliable ways of pulling greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere through direct air capture machines or other methods. The company pledged $200 million to Frontier, an effort to pay in advance for one billion tons of carbon dioxide that startups will eventually draw down and store.
Those commitments may not allow the company to make any assertions about its own emissions today, and some of the early-stage approaches it funds might not work at all. But the hope is that these sorts of investments could help stand up a carbon removal industry, which studies find may be essential for keeping warming in check over the coming decades.
Clean power around the clock
In addition, for several years now Google has worked to purchase or otherwise support generation of clean power in the areas where it operates and across every hour that it consumes electricity—an increasingly popular approach known as 24/7 carbon-free energy.
The idea is that this will stimulate greater development of what grid operators increasingly need: forms of carbon-free energy that can run at all hours of the day (commonly called “firm generation”), matching up with the actual hour-by-hour energy demands of corporations. That can include geothermal plants, nuclear reactors, hydroelectric plants, and more.
More than 150 organizations and governments have now signed the 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Compact, a pledge to ensure that clean-electricity purchases match up hourly with their consumption. Those include Google, Microsoft, SAP, and Rivian.
The Princeton study notes that hourly matching is more expensive than other approaches but finds that it drives “significant reductions in system-level CO2 emissions” while “incentivizing advanced clean firm generation and long-duration storage technologies that would not otherwise see market uptake.”
In Google’s case, pursuing 24/7 matching has steered the company to support more renewables projects in the areas where it operates and to invest in more energy storage projects. It has also entered into purchase agreements with power plants that can deliver carbon-free electricity around the clock. These include several deals with Fervo Energy, an enhanced-geothermal startup.
The company says its goal is to achieve net-zero emissions across its supply chains by 2030, with all its electricity use synced up, hour by hour, with clean sources across every grid it operates on.
Energy-hungry AI
Which brings us back to the growing problem of AI energy consumption.
Jonathan Koomey, an independent researcher studying the energy demands of computing, argues that the hue and cry over rising electricity use for AI is overblown. He notes that AI accounts for only a sliver of overall energy consumption from information technology, which produces about 1.4% of global emissions.
But major data center companies like Google, Amazon, and others will need to make significant changes to ensure that they stay ahead of rising AI-driven energy use while keeping on track with their climate goals.
They will have to improve overall energy efficiency, procure more clean energy, and use their clout as major employers to push utilities to increase carbon-free generation in the areas where they operate, he says. But the clear focus must be on directly cutting corporate climate pollution, not mucking around with RECs and offsets.
“Reduce your emissions; that’s it,” Koomey says. “We need actual, real, meaningful emissions reductions, not trading around credits that have, at best, an ambiguous effect.”
Google says it’s already making progress on its AI footprint, while stressing that it’s leveraging artificial intelligence to find ways to drive down climate pollution across sectors. Those include efforts like Tapestry, a project within the company’s X “moonshot factory” to create more efficient and reliable electricity grids, as well as a Google Research collaboration to determine airline flight paths that produce fewer heat-trapping cirrus clouds.
“AI holds immense promise to drive climate action,” the company said in its report.
The contribution model
The contrasting approaches of Google and Amazon call to mind an instructive hypothetical that a team of carbon market researchers sketched out in a paper this January. They noted that one company could do the hard, expensive work of directly eliminating nearly every ton of its emissions, while another could simply buy cheap offsets to purportedly address all of its own. In that case the first company would have done more actual good for the climate, but only the latter would be able to say it had reached its net-zero target.
Given these challenges and the perverse incentives driving companies toward cheap offsets, the authors have begun arguing for a different approach, known as the “contribution model.”
Like Koomey and others, they stress that companies should dedicate most of their money and energy to directly cutting their emissions as much as possible. But they assert that companies should adopt a new way of dealing with what’s left over (either because that remaining pollution is occurring outside their direct operations or because there are not yet affordable, emissions-free alternatives).
Instead of trying to cancel out every ongoing ton of emissions, a company might pick a percentage of its revenue or set a defensible carbon price on those tons, and then dedicate all that money toward achieving the maximum climate benefit the money can buy, says Libby Blanchard, a research scholar at the University of Cambridge. (She coauthored the paper on the contribution model with Barbara Haya of the University of California, Berkeley, and Bill Anderegg at the University of Utah.)
That could mean funding well-managed forestry projects that help trap carbon dioxide, protect biodiversity, and improve air and water quality. It could mean supporting research and development on the technologies still needed to slow global warming and efforts to scale them up, as Google seems to be doing. Or it could even mean lobbying for stricter climate laws, since few things can drive change as quickly as public policy.
But the key difference is that the company won’t be able to claim that those actions canceled out every ton of remaining emissions—only that it took real, responsible steps to “contribute” to addressing the problem of climate change.
The hope is that this approach frees companies to focus on the quality of the projects it funds, not the quantity of cheap offsets it buys, Blanchard says.
It could “replace this race to the bottom with a race to the top,” she says.
As with any approach put before profit-motivated companies that employ ranks of savvy accountants and attorneys, there will surely be ways to abuse this method in the absence of appropriate safeguards and oversight.
And plenty of companies may refuse to adopt it, since they won’t be able to claim they’ve achieved net-zero emissions, which has become the de facto standard for corporate climate action.
But Blanchard says there’s one obvious incentive for them to move away from that goal.
“There’s way less risk that they’ll be sued or accused of greenwashing,” she says.
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
This week, we are taking a short break from China and turning to its neighbor South Korea instead. As K-pop sweeps the world and accumulates a massive, devout fan base, these fans have been turning their power into action. Today, I published a story about Kpop4planet, a group of volunteers who are using K-pop’s influence to hold large corporations accountable for their carbon footprints.
One of the most interesting (and also successful) campaigns Kpop4planet has organized shines a light on the carbon footprint of music streaming. Aware that K-pop fans stream significantly more than average (sometimes over five hours a day!) to support their favorite artists, the group successfully campaigned to get Korea’s largest domestic streaming platform to pledge to use 100% renewable energy by 2030.
I have to admit, before working on this story, it didn’t really cross my mind that streaming music could be so polluting. Streaming an album more than 27 times uses more energy than it takes to produce a CD, according to researchers, but it’s surprisingly hard to draw a conclusive answer on whether streaming is more polluting than CDs or records overall. What we do know is that since the carbon emissions associated with streaming are produced in faraway data centers and through invisible data transmissions, the problem is harder to pin down.
During my reporting, I talked to several experts about how to correctly understand the climate impact of music streaming, and one thing became clear: It all comes down to how we stream—the content, the device, the length, etc. They also recommended a bunch of things that any music streaming user can do to leave a smaller carbon footprint.
So here are the things you can do if you are a heavy music streamer:
1. Use small devices instead of big TVs.
A major part of streaming’s carbon footprint comes from the device that’s used to play the music or video. And some are much more power hungry than others. A 50-inch LED TV consumes 100 times more electricity than a smartphone when used for streaming, according to the International Energy Agency. It also consumes more electricity if the screen stays on, displaying videos or lyrics, rather than just playing the audio. So using a smartphone to stream cuts energy consumption to a minimum.
2. Wait longer to buy a new phone.
Yes, smartphones are designed to be pretty energy-efficient to use, but manufacturing them is another story. “In the life-cycle analysis of a phone, 85% to 90% of its lifetime energy occurs in its production,” says Laura Marks, a professor in media art and philosophy at Simon Fraser University. The manufacturing process usually involves fossil fuels, plastics, and minerals that could pollute the environment.
“So if I were to make a couple of recommendations, one of them would be to keep your devices for as long as possible, because that’s a huge, huge component of streaming that’s often overlooked,” she says.
3. Return to digital downloads, and only use streaming in selected situations.
While few people still download music files today, experts have agreed that one of the most climate-friendly ways to listen to music is to keep a digital file of your favorite song and return to it repeatedly.
We also need to change our mindset about treating streaming as the only way to listen to music, says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor in the music industry program at Drexel University. “The first and the easiest [suggestion] is to think about streaming music like Styrofoam plates or plastic forks. It doesn’t mean I never use those; it’s just that I don’t eat every meal off of them,” he says. If you are listening to a large variety of music, maybe streaming is the best choice; if you are listening to a few songs repeatedly, go for a digital download or even an old-fashioned CD.
4. Push for streaming platforms to do their part.
Climate action is not just about individual responsibility—it also means pushing corporations to do better. Just as Kpop4planet chased after Melon, Korea’s largest domestic music streaming service, you can also hold your favorite music streaming service accountable.
A big part of that is figuring out where the platforms’ data centers are, as these can account for a third to a half of streaming’s carbon footprint, according to Marks. These gigantic facilities draw significant amounts of electricity. If they can switch to using renewable energy, that will be much more meaningful than any action one individual can take. It’s also important not to fall for empty promises, and to seek specific plans on where and how they plan to source renewable energy.
5. Cherish music and resist overconsumption.
Many experts mention the Jevons paradox, which states that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used can lead to more total consumption. In the case of streaming, this means that even if the technology can become more energy-efficient on a per-song basis, the business model and the sheer convenience often encourage users to listen to more and more songs without considering the climate consequences.
To resist that mindset, Marks suggests, we should cherish listening to music more. “Instead of streaming all day, it could mean really enjoying the performance of a song—just listening to it a couple of times and then talking with your friends about it,” she says.
My conclusion? It’s never too late to become aware of the climate impact of music streaming and think about what we can do to make it even just a little greener.
1. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is flush with cash. But China’s strict control of capital means it has to seek external investment to build up its supply chain outside the country. (Financial Times $)
2. China is asking the World Trade Organization to settle its dispute with the US about EV tariffs. (Reuters $)
3. US-China trade conflicts are spreading to the mattress market, where US retailers say the domestic market is being flooded by Chinese products. (Wall Street Journal $)
4. A new movie in China used AI face-swapping technology to make Jackie Chan look decades younger. Critics hated it. (South China Morning Post $)
5. The failed assassination attempt at a Trump rally not only boosted support for the former president but also caused the price of a Chinese stock to soar—all because the name of the company sounds like “Trump Wins Big” in Chinese. (Bloomberg $)
6. China denies it’s building a naval base in Cambodia. Satellite images show that it is. (New York Times $)
7. Claw-machine arcades are cropping up in Hong Kong—but it’s a result of the failing retail market and low demand for commercial property. (Nikkei Asia $)
Lost in translation
Morowali, a remote, agricultural community in Indonesia, has been transformed into a hub for heavy industry by the entrance of a Chinese company, according to the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek. Tsingshan Holding Group, a Chinese steel and nickel company, was instrumental in investing in and setting up the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), where a rich local reserve of nickel ore is converted into high-purity nickel sulfate that’s essential for electric vehicle batteries.
IMIP has created at least 100,000 jobs and contributed significantly to Indonesia’s economy, but it has also led to environmental and health challenges for local communities. Concerns about air and water pollution, garbage disposal, and worker safety have intensified following an explosion in 2023 that killed eight Chinese workers and 13 Indonesian workers. Now, local workers are organizing to sit down with management and push for changes in worker welfare.
One more thing
If you want a guaranteed sighting of a UFO, come to Shenzhen. Last week, a Chinese company tested an electric helicopter that looks just like a UFO. Flying at a low height and able to land on water, the vehicle is designed for transporting tourists and displaying ads in the future.
Manned UFO looking eVTOL by Shenzhen Smart Drone Co making maiden flight Flying saucer is low altitude UAV operating @ 10-30 m & can land safely on water surface Designed for sightseeing & advertising performances Use 6-axis & 12-propeller duct design that’s entirely contained… pic.twitter.com/kUiaRKPnAY
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Corporate climate claims can be confusing—and sometimes entirely unintuitive.
Tech giants Amazon and Google both recently released news about their efforts to clean up their climate impact. Both were a mixed bag, but one bit of news in particular made me prick up my ears. Google’s emissions have gone up, and the company stopped claiming to be “net zero” (we’ll dig into this term more in a moment). Sounds bad, right? But in fact, one might argue that Google’s apparent backslide might actually represent progress for climate action.
My colleague James Temple dug into this news, along with the recent Amazon announcement, for a story this week. Let’s take a sneak peek at what he found and untangle why corporate climate efforts can be so tricky to wrap your head around.
To make sense of these recent announcements, the most important phrase to understand is “net-zero emissions.”
Companies produce greenhouse-gas emissions by making products, transporting them around, or just using electricity. Some corporate leaders may want to reduce those emissions so they can be a smaller part of the climate-change problem (or brag about their progress). Net-zero emissions refers to the point at which the emissions a company produces are canceled out by those it eliminates. But very different paths can all lead to that point.
One way to get rid of emissions is to take actions to reduce them in your operations. Imagine, for example, Amazon replacing its delivery trucks with EVs or building solar panels on warehouses.
This sort of direct action tends to be hard and expensive, and it’s probably impossible for any company to totally wipe out all its emissions right now, given that so much of our economy still relies on fossil fuels. So to reach net zero, many companies choose to disappear their emissions with math instead.
A company might buy carbon credits or renewable-energy credits, essentially paying someone to make up for its own climate impact. That might mean giving a nonprofit money to plant some trees, which suck up and store carbon, or funneling funds to developers and claiming that more renewables projects will get built as a result.
Not all credits are all bad—but often, carbon offsets and renewable-energy credits reflect big claims with little to back them up. And if companies are going after a net-zero label for their business, they may be incentivized to buy cheap credits, even if they don’t actually deliver on claims.
As James puts it in his story, “Corporate sustainability officers often end up pursuing the quickest, cheapest ways of cleaning up a company’s pollution on paper, rather than the most reliable ways of reducing its emissions in the real world.”
This sort of issue is why I tend to be suspicious of companies that claim to have already achieved net-zero emissions or 100% renewable energy. Cleaning up emissions is hard, and if you’ve already claimed victory, I’d say the odds are good that you’re taking an easy way out.
Which brings us to Google’s news. Google has claimed that its operations have operated with net-zero emissions since 2007. Now it’s not claiming that anymore—not really because it suddenly decided to take huge steps back in how it operates, but because it’s stopped buying carbon offsets on a massive scale. Instead, it’s focusing on investing in other ways to tackle emissions.
So what’s the next step for big companies looking to have a material impact on climate action? James has us covered again: In a 2022 story, he laid out six potential ways to rethink corporate climate goals.
Instead of buying up credits, companies can instead put that money toward investing in permanent carbon removal. Developing more reliable methods of pulling climate pollution out of the atmosphere and locking it away might be more expensive, but investing in those efforts will help the market mature and support companies that need commitments.
Companies can also contribute money to research and development for areas that are difficult to decarbonize—think aviation, shipping, steel, and cement. Those sectors touch basically every industry, so helping them make progress could be a worthy use of dollars.
If there’s one takeaway in this tangle of news, I’d say that we could all ask more questions and dig a little deeper into claims from big corporations. Remember, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Now read the rest of The Spark
Related reading
Read more about Big Tech climate action, including why Amazon’s renewable-energy claims might be more complicated than they appear at first glance, in James’s latest story.
And here’s his piece on six ways that we can rethink net-zero climate plans.
For more on how the climate “solution” of carbon offsets might be adding millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, read this 2021 deep dive.
KPOP4PLANET
Another thing
A small group of K-pop fans is working to clean up music streaming. Streaming can consume a lot of computing power, and all that energy used in data centers supporting it can mean big-time emissions.
A group called Kpop4planet put pressure on a streaming service to commit to using 100% renewables for its data centers by 2030. And the fans’ organizing paid off, because the service agreed.
It’s been mixed news this year so far for the EV market in the US. Overall sales are up, but some automakers are seeing deliveries stall. Also notable: Tesla has historically dominated, but it just dropped below 50% of the market for the first time. (Inside Climate News)
New materials that help tackle humidity could make air-conditioning a lot more efficient. Several companies are trying to bring machines based on these desiccant materials to the market. (Wired)
→ I wrote last year about how these moisture-sucking materials could help us beat the heat. (MIT Technology Review)
Electric vehicles are associated with lower emissions over their lifetimes than gas-powered cars, but they don’t start out that way, largely because of the climate cost of building their batteries. This calculator estimates how far you need to drive for EVs to break even with gas vehicles. (PNAS)
Nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems is selling its high-tech magnets now. The company is still working toward flipping on its fusion reactor. (TechCrunch)
The near-term future of EVs might include gas tanks, since some automakers are building electric vehicles that include gas-powered generators. The difference between these and plug-in hybrids is subtle, but basically these would have simpler guts inside. They could help bring more drivers onto team electric. (Heatmap News)
San Francisco launched a new ferry that runs entirely on hydrogen fuel cells. It’s the first such commercial passenger ferry in the world. One challenge could be securing a reliable source of low-emissions hydrogen. (Canary Media)
File this under weird effects of climate change: Melting ice sheets are making days longer. Ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica makes the Earth wider, slowing the planet’s rotation. It’s only on the scale of about a millisecond per century, but it could be enough to throw off precise timekeeping. (The Guardian)
Rules around tax credits for hydrogen fuel were proposed to ensure that the money went to projects that help the climate. Now those rules seem to be in trouble. (Heatmap News)
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Look on the bottom of a plastic water bottle or takeout container, and you might find a logo there made up of three arrows forming a closed loop shaped like a triangle. Sometimes called the chasing arrows, this stamp is used on packaging to suggest it’s recyclable.
Those little arrows imply a nice story, painting a picture of a world where the material will be recycled into a new bottle or some such product, maybe forming an endless loop of reuse. But the reality of plastics recycling today doesn’t match up to that idea. Only about 10% of the plastic ever made has been recycled; the vast majority winds up in landfills or in the environment.
Researchers have been working to address the problem by coming up with new recycling methods, sometimes called advanced, or chemical, recycling. My colleague Sarah Ward recently wrote about one new study where researchers used a chemical process to recycle mixed-fiber clothing containing polyester, a common plastic.
The story shows why these new technologies are so appealing in theory, and just how far we would need to go for them to fix the massive problem we’ve created.
One major challenge for traditional recycling is that it requires careful sorting. That’s possible (if difficult) for some situations—humans or machines can separate milk jugs from soda bottles from takeout containers. But when it comes to other products, it becomes nearly impossible to sort out their components.
Take clothing, for instance. Less than 1% of clothing is recycled, and part of the reason is that much of it is a mixture of different materials, often including synthetic fibers as well as natural ones. You might be wearing a shirt made of a cotton-polyester blend right now, and your swimsuit probably contains nylon and elastane. My current crochet project uses yarn that’s a blend of wool and acrylic.
It’s impossible to manually or mechanically pick out the different materials in a fabric the way you can by sorting your kitchen recycling, so researchers are exploring new methods using chemistry.
In the study Sarah wrote about, scientists demonstrated a process that can recycle a fabric made from a blend of cotton and polyester. It uses a solvent to break the chemical bonds in polyester in around 15 minutes, leaving other materials mostly intact.
If this could work quickly and at large scale, it might someday allow facilities to dissolve polyester from blended textiles, separating it from other fibers and in theory allowing each component to be reused in future products.
But there are a few challenges with this process that I see a lot in recycling methods. First, reaching a large industrial scale would be difficult—as one researcher that Sarah spoke to pointed out, the solvent used in the process is expensive and tough to recover after it’s used.
Recycling methods also often wind up degrading the product in some way, a tricky problem to solve. This is a major drawback to traditional mechanical recycling as well—often, recycled plastic isn’t quite as strong or durable as the fresh stuff. In the case of this study, the problem isn’t actually with the plastic, but with the other materials that researchers are trying to preserve.
The beginning of the textile recycling process involves shredding the clothing into fine pieces to allow the chemicals to seep in and do their work breaking down the plastic. That chops up the cotton fibers too, rendering them too short to be spun into new yarn. So instead of a new T-shirt, the cotton from this process might be broken down and used as something else, like biofuel.
There’s potential for future improvement—the researchers tried to change up their method to disassemble the fabrics in a way that would preserve longer cotton fibers, but the reported research suggests it doesn’t work well with the chemical process so far.
This story got me thinking about a recent feature from ProPublica, where Lisa Song took a look at the reality of commercial advanced recycling today. She focused on pyrolysis, which uses heat to break down plastic into its building blocks. As she outlines in the story, while the industry pitches these new methods as a solution to our plastics crisis, the reality of the technology today is far from the ideal we imagine.
Most new recycling methods are still in development, and it’s really difficult to recover useful materials at high rates in a way that makes it possible to use them again. Doing all that at a scale large enough to even make a dent in our plastics problem is a massive challenge.
Just something to keep in mind the next time you see those little arrows.
Now read the rest of The Spark
Related reading
Read Sarah’s full story on efforts to recycle mixed textiles here.
I wrote about several other efforts to recycle mixtures of plastic using chemistry in this piece from 2022.
For a full account on the state of the hard problem that is the plastics crisis, check out this feature story.
Keeping up with climate
The world has been 1.5 °C hotter than preindustrial temperatures for each of the last 12 months, according to new data. We still haven’t technically passed the 1.5 °C limit set out by international climate treaties, since those consider the average temperature over many years. (The Guardian)
Google has stopped claiming to be carbon neutral, ceasing purchases of carbon offsets to balance its emissions. The company says the plan is to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, though its emissions are actually up by nearly 50% since 2019. (Bloomberg)
→ Big tech companies are expecting emissions to tick up in part because of the explosion of AI, which is an energy hog. (MIT Technology Review)
A small school district in Nebraska got an electric bus, paid for by federal funding. The vehicle quickly became a symbol for the cultural tensions brought on by shifting technology. (New York Times)
Hurricane Beryl hit the Texas coast this week and did damage across the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. While meteorologists had a good idea of where it would go, better forecasting hasn’t stopped hurricane damage from increasing. (E&E News)
Earlier this year, the Indian government stopped a popular EV subsidy. Some in the industry say that short-lived subsidies can hamper the growth of electrification. (Rest of World)
The US is about to get its first solar-covered canal. Covering the Arizona waterway with solar panels will provide a new low-emissions energy source on tribal land. (Canary Media)
Electricity prices in the US are up almost 20% since early 2021. But some states that have built the most clean energy have lower rate increases overall. (Latitude Media)
Hydropower is the world’s leading source of renewable electricity, generating more power in 2022 than all other renewables combined. But while hydropower is helping clean up our electrical grid, it’s not always a positive force for fish.
Dams that create reservoirs on rivers can change habitats. And for some species, especially those that migrate long distances, hydropower facilities can create dangerous or insurmountable barriers. In some parts of the world, including the US, Canada, and Europe, governments have put protections in place to protect ecosystems from hydropower’s potential harms.
New environmental regulations can leave older facilities facing costly renovations or force them to shutter entirely. That’s a big problem, because pulling hydropower plants off the grid eliminates a flexible, low-emissions power source that can contribute to progress in fighting climate change. New technologies, including fish-safe turbines, could help utilities and regulators come closer to striking a balance between the health of river ecosystems and global climate goals.
That’s where companies like Natel Energy come in. The company started with two big goals: high performance and fish survival, says Gia Schneider, Natel’s cofounder and chief commercial officer.
The company is making new designs for the turbines that generate electricity in hydropower plants as water rushes through equipment and moves their blades. Conventional turbine blades can move as fast as 30 meters per second, or about 60 to 70 miles per hour, Schneider says. When straight, thin edges are moving that quickly and striking fish, “it’s fairly obvious why that’s not a good outcome,” she says.
Natel’s turbine design focuses on preventing fast-moving equipment from making fatal contact with fish. The blades have a thicker leading edge that pushes water out in front of it, creating a stagnation zone, or “basically an airbag for fish,” Schneider says. The blades are also curved, so even if fish are struck, they don’t take a direct hit.
The company has tested its turbines with a range of species, including American eels, alewife, and rainbow trout. In the case of one recent study with American eels, scientists found that over 99% of eels survived after 48 hours of passing through Natel’s equipment. In comparison, one 2010 study found that just 40% of tagged European eels were able to pass through the turbines of a hydropower plant, though survival depended a lot on the size of both the eel and equipment in question.
Changing turbine designs won’t help fish survive all power plants: at some of the biggest plants with the tallest dams, rapid changes in water pressure can kill fish. But Schneider says that the company’s technology could be slotted into up to half of the existing US hydropower fleet to make plants more fish-safe.
Hydropower is one of the world’s older renewable energy sources. By 2030, more than 20% of the global fleet’s generating units will be more than 55 years old, according to the International Energy Agency. The average age of a hydropower plant in the US today is roughly 65 years.
In the US, privately held hydropower plants are licensed by an agency called the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for a term of up to 50 years. Roughly 17 gigawatts’ worth of hydropower facilities (enough to power 13 million homes) are up for relicensing by 2035, according to the National Hydropower Association.
Since many of those facilities were started up, there have been significant changes to environmental requirements, and some plants may face high costs and difficult engineering work as they try to adhere to new rules and stay in operation. Adding screens to basically filter fish out of the intake for hydropower plants is one potential solution in some cases, but both installation and maintenance of such a system can add significant cost. In these facilities, Natel’s technology represents an alternative, Schneider says.
Natel has installed several projects in Maine, Oregon, and Austria. They all involve relatively small turbines, but the company is on the way to undertaking bigger projects and recently won a bid process with a manufacturing partner to supply a larger turbine that’s three meters in diameter to an existing plant, Schnieder says. The company is also licensing its fish-safe turbine designs to existing manufacturers.
Whether utilities move to adopt fish-safe design could depend on how it affects efficiency, or the amount of energy that can be captured by a given water flow. Natel’s turbine designs will, in some cases, be slightly less efficient than today’s conventional ones, Schneider says, though the difference is marginal, and they likely still represent an improvement over older designs.
While there’s sometimes a trade-off between fish-safe design and efficiency, that’s not the case with all novel turbines in all cases. A 2019 study from the US Army Corps of Engineers found that one new design improved fish safety while also producing more power.
Slotting new turbines into hydropower plants won’t solve all the environmental challenges associated with the technology, though. For example, the new equipment would only be relevant for downstream migration, like when eels move from freshwater rivers out into the ocean to reproduce. Other solutions would still be needed to allow a path for upstream migration.
Ideally, the best solution for many plants would likely be natural bypasses or ramps, which allow free passage of many species in both directions, says Ana T. Silva, a senior research scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. However, because of space requirements, these can’t always be installed or used.
Natel CTO Abe Schneider holds a large trout used in fish passage testing at the Monroe Hydro Plant in Madras, Oregon.
NATEL
People have been trying to improve fish passage for a long time, says Michael Milstein, a senior public affairs officer at NOAA Fisheries, part of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The solutions in place today include fish ladders, where fish swim or hop up into successively taller pools to pass dams. Other dams are too tall for that, and fish are captured and loaded onto trucks to go around them.
The challenge, Milstein says, is that “every river is different, and every dam is different.” Solutions need to be adapted to each individual situation, he adds; fish-safe turbines would be most important when there’s no bypass and going through a facility is the only option fish have.
The issue of protecting ecosystems and providing safe passage for fish has sparked fierce debates over existing hydropower projects across the western US and around the world.
Even with the current state-of-the-art technology, “it’s not always possible to provide sufficient passage,” Milstein says. Several dams are currently being removed from the Klamath River in Oregon and Northern California because of the effects on local ecosystems. The dams drastically changed the river, wiping out habitat for local salmon, steelhead, and lamprey and creating ideal conditions for parasites to decimate fish populations.
But while hydropower facilities can have negative environmental impacts, climate change can also be extremely harmful to wildlife, Natel’s Schneider points out. If too many hydropower plants are shut down, it could leave a gap that keeps more fossil fuels on the grid, hampering efforts to address climate change.
Reducing hydropower plants’ impact on local environments could help ensure that more of them can stay online, generating renewable electricity that plays an important role in our electrical grid. “Fish-safe turbines won’t solve everything—there are many, many problems in our rivers,” Schneider says. “But we need to start tackling all of them, so this is one tool.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Some people track sports scores or their favorite artists’ tour set lists. Meanwhile, I’m just waiting to hear which climate tech startups are getting big funding awards from government agencies. It’s basically the same thing.
Every few years, the US agency that’s often called the “energy moonshot factory” announces such awards for a few companies to help them scale up their technology. (The agency’s official name is the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy, or ARPA-E.) The grants are designed to help companies take their tech from the lab or pilot stage and get it out into the world.
The latest batch of these awards was just announced, totaling over $63 million split between four companies. Let’s dig into the winners and consider what each one’s technology says about their respective corners of climate action.
Antora Energy: Heat batteries for industry
Let’s start with the company you’re most likely to know if you follow this newsletter: Antora Energy. The California-based company is building thermal batteries for use in heavy industry. I covered the company and its first pilot project last year, and thermal batteries were the readers’ choice winner on our list of Breakthrough Technologies this year.
In case you need a quick refresher, the basic idea behind Antora’s technology is to store energy from cheap, clean wind and solar power in the form of heat, and then use that heat in industrial facilities. It’s an elegant solution to the problem that renewables are available only sometimes, while industry needs clean energy all the time if it wants to cut its carbon emissions, which amount to a whopping 30% of the global total.
Antora was awarded $14.5 million to scale its technology. One thing the company hopes to achieve with the cash influx is progress on its second product, which delivers not only heat but also electricity.
Queens Carbon: Lower-emissions cement
Cement is a climate villain hiding in plain sight, as I’ve covered in this newsletter before. Producing the gray slabs that scaffold our world accounts for about 7% of global emissions.
The challenge in cleaning up the process lies, at least in part, in the fact that lava-hot temperatures are required to kick off the chemical reactions that make cement—I’m talking over 1,500 °C (2,700 °F).
Queens Carbon developed a new process that cuts down the temperature needed to under 540 °C (1,000 °F). Still toasty, but easier to reach efficiently and with electricity, the company’s CEO, CTO, and cofounder Daniel Kopp said on a press call about the awards. Ideally, that electricity will be supplied with renewables, which could mean big emissions savings.
Queens Carbon will also pocket $14.5 million, and the funding should help with the construction of a pilot plant currently being built in partnership with a major cement producer, Kopp said on the press call. The company plans to scale up to a full-size plant in late 2028 or 2029.
Ion Storage Systems: Next-generation batteries for EVs
The world is always clamoring for better batteries, and Maryland-based Ion Storage Systems wants to deliver with its solid-state lithium-metal technology.
We named lithium-metal batteries one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2021. The chemistry could deliver higher energy density, meaning longer range in EVs.
Ion Storage Systems is planning to produce its batteries first for military customers. With the funding ($20 million worth), the company may be able to get its tech ready for larger-scale production for the wider customer base of the electric-vehicle market.
I was really interested to hear about the emphasis on manufacturing from CTO Greg Hitz on the press call, as scaling up manufacturing has been a major challenge for other companies trying to build solid-state batteries. Hitz also said that the company’s batteries don’t need to be squeezed at high pressure within cells or heated up, and they can be more simply integrated into battery packs.
AeroShield Materials: High-tech insulation for more efficient buildings
Last but certainly not least is AeroShield Materials. Between 30% and 40% of energy we put into our buildings for heat and cooling is lost through windows and doors—that’s about $40 billion per year for residential buildings, said Elise Strobach, the company’s CEO and cofounder, on the press call.
AeroShield is making materials called aerogels that are clear, lightweight, and fire resistant. They can help make windows 65% more energy efficient, Strobach says.
Insulation isn’t always the most exciting topic, but efficiency is one of the best ways to cut down the need for more energy and provide a straightforward way to slash emissions. AeroShield is starting with windows and doors but plans to explore other projects like retrofitting windows and producing insulation for freezer and refrigerator doors, Strobach said on the call. The $14.5 million award will help build a pilot manufacturing facility.
These projects cover a huge range of businesses, from transportation and buildings to heavy industry. The one thing they have in common? All urgently need to clean up their act if the world is going to address climate change. Each of these awards is a big vote of confidence from an agency that’s had a lot of experience in energy technology—but what really matters is what these companies do with the money now.
There’s a growing pool of money for scientists exploring whether we can reflect away more sunlight to ease warming caused by climate change.
Quadrature Climate Foundation is among the organizations providing millions of dollars for research into solar geoengineering. This sort of funding can help scientists pursue lab work, modeling, and maybe even outdoor experiments that could improve our understanding of the often controversial field.
For more on where the money is coming from and how this might affect our efforts to address climate change, check out my colleague James Temple’s story here.
One more issue
We often talk about tech that’s serious business—but technology also has a huge effect on how we have fun. That’s the idea behind our latest print edition, the Play issue.
For the issue, I wrote about board games that take on the topic of climate change. Are they accurate about the challenge ahead, and crucially, can they be fun? Check out my take here. (For a more in-depth look at one particular game, a new climate-themed Catan, give this newsletter a read.)
I’d also highly recommend this feature from my colleague Eileen Guo, who looked into the growing business of surf pools—facilities that bring a usually ocean-based activity onto land. She gave one a spin, and considered how these spots affect places facing water scarcity.
The whole issue is great—find all the stories here.
Keeping up with climate
A new startup will take sodium sulfate, a waste material from manufacturing lithium-ion batteries, and turn it into chemicals that can go into new batteries. Aepnus Technology calls its approach a “fully circular” one. (Heatmap)
Solugen just scored a loan worth over $200 million from the US Department of Energy. The company uses biology to make chemicals used in industries from agriculture to concrete. (C&EN News)
Some Olympic teams, including the delegation from the US, plan to bring their own air conditioners to the Paris games this summer. It could be a big setback for the event’s climate goals. (Associated Press)
Advanced recycling promises an almost miraculous solution to our plastics crisis, but a close look at the industry reveals some problems. Very little plastic is made with these methods, and the industry is selling them on the basis of some tricky accounting. (ProPublica)
You may not know the name Yet-Ming Chiang, but you’ve probably heard of some of the companies he’s had a hand in starting, including Sublime Systems and Form Energy. Learn more about this MIT professor and serial entrepreneur here. (Cipher)
Running Tide had grand plans to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere with the help of the ocean. Now, the startup is shutting down. Here’s what the company’s implosion means for carbon removal’s future. (Latitude Media)
→ The company was in some rocky waters a couple of years ago, as my colleague James Temple revealed at the time. (MIT Technology Review)
Volkswagen is investing $1 billion in the EV startup Rivian. The deal has the two companies creating a joint venture, and it could provide a path forward for Rivian, which has faced some struggles getting its vehicles to market. (TechCrunch)
For nearly as long as surfing has existed, surfers have been obsessed with the search for the perfect wave. It’s not just a question of size, but also of shape, surface conditions, and duration—ideally in a beautiful natural environment.
While this hunt has taken surfers from tropical coastlines reachable only by boat to swells breaking off icebergs, these days—as the sport goes mainstream—that search may take place closer to home. That is, at least, the vision presented by developers and boosters in the growing industry of surf pools, spurred by advances in wave-generating technology that have finally created artificial waves surfers actually want to ride.
Some surf evangelists think these pools will democratize the sport, making it accessible to more communities far from the coasts—while others are simply interested in cashing in. But a years-long fight over a planned surf pool in Thermal, California, shows that for many people who live in the places where they’re being built, the calculus isn’t about surf at all.
Just some 30 miles from Palm Springs, on the southeastern edge of the Coachella Valley desert, Thermal is the future home of the 118-acre private, members-only Thermal Beach Club (TBC). The developers promise over 300 luxury homes with a dazzling array of amenities; the planned centerpiece is a 20-plus-acre artificial lagoon with a 3.8-acre surf pool offering waves up to seven feet high. According to an early version of the website, club memberships will start at $175,000 a year. (TBC’s developers did not respond to multiple emails asking for comment.)
That price tag makes it clear that the club is not meant for locals. Thermal, an unincorporated desert community, currently has a median family income of $32,340. Most of its residents are Latino; many are farmworkers. The community lacks much of the basic infrastructure that serves the western Coachella Valley, including public water service—leaving residents dependent on aging private wells for drinking water.
Just a few blocks away from the TBC site is the 60-acre Oasis Mobile Home Park. A dilapidated development designed for some 1,500 people in about 300 mobile homes, Oasis has been plagued for decades by a lack of clean drinking water. The park owners have been cited numerous times by the Environmental Protection Agency for providing tap water contaminated with high levels of arsenic, and last year, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against them for violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Some residents have received assistance to relocate, but many of those who remain rely on weekly state-funded deliveries of bottled water and on the local high school for showers.
Stephanie Ambriz, a 28-year-old special-needs teacher who grew up near Thermal, recalls feeling “a lot of rage” back in early 2020 when she first heard about plans for the TBC development. Ambriz and other locals organized a campaign against the proposed club, which she says the community doesn’t want and won’t be able to access. What residents do want, she tells me, is drinkable water, affordable housing, and clean air—and to have their concerns heard and taken seriously by local officials.
Despite the grassroots pushback, which twice led to delays to allow more time for community feedback, the Riverside County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the plans for the club in October 2020. It was, Ambriz says, “a shock to see that the county is willing to approve these luxurious developments when they’ve ignored community members” for decades. (A Riverside County representative did not respond to specific questions about TBC.)
The desert may seem like a counterintuitive place to build a water-intensive surf pool, but the Coachella Valley is actually “the very best place to possibly put one of these things,” argues Doug Sheres, the developer behind DSRT Surf, another private pool planned for the area. It is “close to the largest [and] wealthiest surf population in the world,” he says, featuring “360 days a year of surfable weather” and mountain and lake views in “a beautiful resort setting” served by “a very robust aquifer.”
In addition to the two planned projects, the Palm Springs Surf Club (PSSC) has already opened locally. The trifecta is turning the Coachella Valley into “the North Shore of wave pools,” as one aficionado described it to Surfer magazine.
The effect is an acute cognitive dissonance—one that I experienced after spending a few recent days crisscrossing the valley and trying out the waves at PSSC. But as odd as this setting may seem, an analysis by MIT Technology Review reveals that the Coachella Valley is not the exception. Of an estimated 162 surf pools that have been built or announced around the world, as tracked by the industry publication Wave Pool Magazine, 54 are in areas considered by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI) to face high or extremely high water stress, meaning that they regularly use a large portion of their available surface water supply annually. Regions in the “extremely high” category consume 80% or more of their water, while those in the “high” category use 40% to 80% of their supply. (Not all of Wave Pool Magazine’s listed pools will be built, but the publication tracks all projects that have been announced. Some have closed and over 60 are currently operational.)
Zoom in on the US and nearly half are in places with high or extremely high water stress, roughly 16 in areas served by the severely drought-stricken Colorado River. The greater Palm Springs area falls under the highest category of water stress, according to Samantha Kuzma, a WRI researcher (though she notes that WRI’s data on surface water does not reflect all water sources, including an area’s access to aquifers, or its water management plan).
Now, as TBC’s surf pool and other planned facilities move forward and contribute to what’s becoming a multibillion-dollar industry with proposed sites on every continent except Antarctica, inland waves are increasingly becoming a flash point for surfers, developers, and local communities. There are at least 29 organized movements in opposition to surf clubs around the world, according to an ongoing survey from a coalition called No to the Surf Park in Canéjan, which includes 35 organizations opposing a park in Bordeaux, France.
While the specifics vary widely, at the core of all these fights is a question that’s also at the heart of the sport: What is the cost of finding, or now creating, the perfect wave—and who will have to bear it?
Though wave pools have been around since the late 1800s, the first artificial surfing wave was built in 1969, and also in the desert—at Big Surf in Tempe, Arizona. But at that pool and its early successors, surfing was secondary; people who went to those parks were more interested in splashing around, and surfers themselves weren’t too excited by what they had to offer. The manufactured waves were too small and too soft, without the power, shape, or feel of the real thing.
The tide really turned in 2015, when Kelly Slater, widely considered to be the greatest professional surfer of all time, was filmed riding a six-foot-tall, 50-second barreling wave. As the viral video showed, he was not in the wild but atop a wave generated in a pool in California’s Central Valley, some 100 miles from the coast.
Waves of that height, shape, and duration are a rarity even in the ocean, but “Kelly’s wave,” as it became known, showed that “you can make waves in the pool that are as good as or better than what you get in the ocean,” recalls Sheres, the developer whose company, Beach Street Development, is building multiple surf pools around the country, including DSRT Surf. “That got a lot of folks excited—myself included.”
In the ocean, a complex combination of factors—including wind direction, tide, and the shape and features of the seafloor—is required to generate a surfable wave. Re-creating them in an artificial environment required years of modeling, precise calculations, and simulations.
Surf Ranch, Slater’s project in the Central Valley, built a mechanical system in which a 300-ton hydrofoil—which resembles a gigantic metal fin—is pulled along the length of a pool 700 yards long and 70 yards wide by a mechanical device the size of several train cars running on a track. The bottom of the pool is precisely contoured to mimic reefs and other features of the ocean floor; as the water hits those features, its movement creates the 50-second-long barreling wave. Once the foil reaches one end of the pool, it runs backwards, creating another wave that breaks in the opposite direction.
While the result is impressive, the system is slow, producing just one wave every three to four minutes.
Around the same time Slater’s team was tinkering with his wave, other companies were developing their own technologies to produce multiple waves, and to do so more rapidly and efficiently—key factors in commercial viability.
Fundamentally, all the systems create waves by displacing water, but depending on the technology deployed, there are differences in the necessary pool size, the project’s water and energy requirements, the level of customization that’s possible, and the feel of the wave.
Thomas Lochtefeld is a pioneer in the field and the CEO of Surf Loch, which powers PSSC’s waves. Surf Loch uses pneumatic technology, in which compressed air cycles water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls and lets operators create countless wave patterns.
One demo pool in Australia uses what looks like a giant mechanical doughnut that sends out waves the way a pebble dropped in water sends out ripples. Another proposed plan uses a design that spins out waves from a circular fan—a system that is mobile and can be placed in existing bodies of water.
Of the two most popular techniques in commercial use, one relies on modular paddles attached to a pier that runs across a pool, which move in precise ways to generate waves. The other is pneumatic technology, which uses compressed air to push water through chambers the size of bathroom stalls, called caissons; the caissons pull in water and then push it back out into the pool. By choosing which modular paddles or caissons move first against the different pool bottoms, and with how much force at a time, operators can create a range of wave patterns.
Regardless of the technique used, the design and engineering of most modern wave pools are first planned out on a computer. Waves are precisely calculated, designed, simulated, and finally tested in the pool with real surfers before they are set as options on a “wave menu” in proprietary software that surf-pool technologists say offers a theoretically endless number and variety of waves.
On a Tuesday afternoon in early April, I am the lucky tester at the Palm Springs Surf Club, which uses pneumatic technology, as the team tries out a shoulder-high right-breaking wave.
I have the pool to myself as the club prepares to reopen; it had closed to rebuild its concrete “beach” just 10 days after its initial launch because the original beach had not been designed to withstand the force of the larger waves that Surf Loch, the club’s wave technology provider, had added to the menu at the last minute. (Weeks after reopening in April, the surf pool closed again as the result of “a third-party equipment supplier’s failure,” according to Thomas Lochtefeld, Surf Loch’s CEO.)
I paddle out and, at staffers’ instructions, take my position a few feet away from the third caisson from the right, which they say is the ideal spot to catch the wave on the shoulder—meaning the unbroken part of the swell closest to its peak.
The entire experience is surreal: waves that feel like the ocean in an environment that is anything but.
An employee test rides a wave, which was first calculated, designed, and simulated on a computer.
SPENCER LOWELL
In some ways, these pneumatic waves are better than what I typically ride around Los Angeles—more powerful, more consistent, and (on this day, at least) uncrowded. But the edge of the pool and the control tower behind it are almost always in my line of sight. And behind me are the PSSC employees (young men, incredible surfers, who keep an eye on my safety and provide much-needed tips) and then, behind them, the snow-capped San Jacinto Mountains. At the far end of the pool, behind the recently rebuilt concrete beach, is a restaurant patio full of diners who I can’t help but imagine are judging my every move. Still, for the few glorious seconds that I ride each wave, I am in the same flow state I experience in the ocean itself.
Then I fall and sheepishly paddle back to PSSC’s encouraging surfer-employees to restart the whole process. I would be having a lot of fun—if I could just forget my self-consciousness, and the jarring feeling that I shouldn’t be riding waves in the middle of the desert at all.
Though long inhabited by Cahuilla Indians, the Coachella Valley was sparsely populated until 1876, when the Southern Pacific Railroad added a new line out to the middle of the arid expanse. Shortly after, the first non-native settlers came to the valley and realized that its artesian wells, which flow naturally without the need to be pumped, provided ideal conditions for farming.
Agricultural production exploded, and by the early 1900s, these once freely producing wells were putting out significantly less, leading residents to look for alternative water sources. In 1918, they created the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) to import water from the Colorado River via a series of canals. This water was used to supply the region’s farms and recharge the Coachella Aquifer, the region’s main source of drinking water.
The author tests a shoulder-high wave at PSSC, where she says the waves were in some ways better than what she rides around Los Angeles.
SPENCER LOWELL
The water imports continue to this day—though the seven states that draw on the river are currently renegotiating their water rights amid a decades-long megadrought in the region.
The imported water, along with CVWD’s water management plan, has allowed Coachella’s aquifer to maintain relatively steady levels “going back to 1970, even though most development and population has occurred since,” Scott Burritt, a CVWD spokesperson, told MIT Technology Review in an email.
This has sustained not only agriculture but also tourism in the valley, most notably its world-class—and water-intensive—golf courses. In 2020, the 120 golf courses under the jurisdiction of the CVWD consumed 105,000 acre-feet of water per year (AFY); that’s an average of 875 AFY, or 285 million gallons per year per course.
Surf pools’ proponents frequently point to the far larger amount of water golf courses consume to argue that opposing the pools on grounds of their water use is misguided.
PSSC, the first of the area’s three planned surf clubs to open, requires an estimated 3 million gallons per year to fill its pool; the proposed DSRT Surf holds 7 million gallons and estimates that it will use 24 million gallons per year, which includes maintenance and filtration, and accounts for evaporation. TBC’s planned 20-acre recreational lake, 3.8 acres of which will contain the surf pool, will use 51 million gallons per year, according to Riverside County documents. Unlike standard swimming pools, none of these pools need to be drained and refilled annually for maintenance, saving on potential water use. DSRT Surf also boasts about plans to offset its water use by replacing 1 million square feet of grass from an adjacent golf course with drought-tolerant plants.
Pro surfer and PSSC’s full-time “wave curator” Cheyne Magnusson watches test waves from the club’s control tower.
SPENCER LOWELL
With surf parks, “you can see the water,” says Jess Ponting, a cofounder of Surf Park Central, the main industry association, and Stoke, a nonprofit that aims to certify surf and ski resorts—and, now, surf pools—for sustainability. “Even though it’s a fraction of what a golf course is using, it’s right there in your face, so it looks bad.”
But even if it were just an issue of appearance, public perception is important when residents are being urged to reduce their water use, says Mehdi Nemati, an associate professor of environmental economics and policy at the University of California, Riverside. It’s hard to demand such efforts from people who see these pools and luxury developments being built around them, he says. “The questions come: Why do we conserve when there are golf courses or surfing … in the desert?”
(Burritt, the CVWD representative, notes that the water district “encourages all customers, not just residents, to use water responsibly” and adds that CVWD’s strategic plans project that there should be enough water to serve both the district’s golf courses and its surf pools.)
Locals opposing these projects, meanwhile, argue that developers are grossly underestimating their water use, and various engineering firms and some county officials have in fact offered projections that differ from the developers’ estimates. Opponents are specifically concerned about the effects of spray, evaporation, and other factors, which increase with higher temperatures, bigger waves, and larger pool sizes.
As a rough point of reference, Slater’s 14-acre wave pool in Lemoore, California, can lose up to 250,000 gallons of water per day to evaporation, according to Adam Fincham, the engineer who designed the technology. That’s roughly half an Olympic swimming pool.
More fundamentally, critics take issue with even debating whether surf clubs or golf courses are worse. “We push back against all of it,” says Ambriz, who organized opposition to TBC and argues that neither the pool nor an exclusive new golf course in Thermal benefits the local community. Comparing them, she says, obscures greater priorities, like the water needs of households.
The PSSC pool requires an estimated 3 million gallons of water per year. On top of a $40 admission fee, a private session there would cost between $3,500 and $5,000 per hour.
SPENCER LOWELL
The “primary beneficiary” of the area’s water, says Mark Johnson, who served as CVWD’s director of engineering from 2004 to 2016, “should be human consumption.”
Studies have shown that just one AFY, or nearly 326,000 gallons, is generally enough to support all household water needs of three California families every year. In Thermal, the gap between the demands of the surf pool and the needs of the community is even more stark: each year for the past three years, nearly 36,000 gallons of water have been delivered, in packages of 16-ounce plastic water bottles, to residents of the Oasis Mobile Home Park—some 108,000 gallons in all. Compare that with the 51 million gallons that will be used annually by TBC’s lake: it would be enough to provide drinking water to its neighbors at Oasis for the next 472 years.
Furthermore, as Nemati notes, “not all water is the same.” CVWD has provided incentives for golf courses to move toward recycled water and replace grass with less water-intensive landscaping. But while recycled water and even rainwater have been proposed as options for some surf pools elsewhere in the world, including France and Australia, this is unrealistic in Coachella, which receives just three to four inches of rain per year.
Instead, the Coachella Valley surf pools will depend on a mix of imported water and nonpotable well water from Coachella’s aquifer.
But any use of the aquifer worries Johnson. Further drawing down the water, especially in an underground aquifer, “can actually create water quality problems,” he says, by concentrating “naturally occurring minerals … like chromium and arsenic.” In other words, TBC could worsen the existing problem of arsenic contamination in local well water.
When I describe to Ponting MIT Technology Review’s analysis showing how many surf pools are being built in desert regions, he seems to concede it’s an issue. “If 50% of the surf parks in development are in water-stressed areas,” he says, “then the developers are not thinking about the right things.”
Before visiting the future site of Thermal Beach Club, I stopped in La Quinta, a wealthy town where, back in 2022, community opposition successfully stopped plans for a fourth pool planned for the Coachella Valley. This one was developed by the Kelly Slater Wave Company, which was acquired by the World Surf League in 2016.
Alena Callimanis, a longtime resident who was a member of the community group that helped defeat the project, says that for a year and a half, she and other volunteers often spent close to eight hours a day researching everything they could about surf pools—and how to fight them. “We knew nothing when we started,” she recalls. But the group learned quickly, poring over planning documents, consulting hydrologists, putting together presentations, providing comments at city council hearings, and even conducting their own citizen science experiments to test the developers’ assertions about the light and noise pollution the project could create. (After the council rejected the proposal for the surf club, the developers pivoted to previously approved plans for a golf course. Callimanis’s group also opposes the golf course, raising similar concerns about water use, but since plans have already been approved, she says, there is little they can do to fight back.)
Just a few blocks from the site of the planned Thermal Beach Club is the Oasis Mobile Home Park, which has been plagued for decades by a lack of clean drinking water.
A water pump sits at the
corner of farm fields in Thermal, California,
where irrigation water is imported from the
Colorado River.
It was a different story in Thermal, where three young activists juggled jobs and graduate programs as they tried to mobilize an under-resourced community. “Folks in Thermal lack housing, lack transportation, and they don’t have the ability to take a day off from work to drive up and provide public comment,” says Ambriz.
But the local pushback did lead to certain promises, including a community benefit payment of $2,300 per luxury housing unit, totaling $749,800. In the meeting approving the project, Riverside County supervisor Manuel Perez called this “unprecedented” and credited the efforts of Ambriz and her peers. (Ambriz remains unconvinced. “None of that has happened,” she says, and payments to the community don’t solve the underlying water issues that the project could exacerbate.)
That affluent La Quinta managed to keep a surf pool out of its community where working-class Thermal failed is even more jarring in light of industry rhetoric about how surf pools could democratize the sport. For Bryan Dickerson, the editor in chief of Wave Pool Magazine, the collective vision for the future is that instead of “the local YMCA … putting in a skate park, they put in a wave pool.” Other proponents, like Ponting, describe how wave pools can provide surf therapy or opportunities for underrepresented groups. A design firm in New York City, for example, has proposed to the city a plan for an indoor wave pool in a low-income, primarily black and Latino neighborhood in Queens—for $30 million.
For its part, PSSC cost an estimated $80 million to build. On top of a $40 general admission fee, a private session like the one I had would cost $3,500 to $5,000 per hour, while a public session would be at least $100 to $200, depending on the surfer’s skill level and the types of waves requested.
In my two days traversing the 45-mile Coachella Valley, I kept thinking about how this whole area was an artificial oasis made possible only by innovations that changed the very nature of the desert, from the railroad stop that spurred development to the irrigation canals and, later, the recharge basins that stopped the wells from running out.
In this transformed environment, I can see how the cognitive dissonance of surfing a desert wave begins to shrink, tempting us to believe that technology can once again override the reality of living (or simply playing) in the desert in a warming and drying world.
But the tension over surf pools shows that when it comes to how we use water, maybe there’s no collective “us” here at all.
Unlike conventional energy sources, green hydrogen offers a way to store and transfer energy without emitting harmful pollutants, positioning it as essential to a sustainable and net-zero future. By converting electrical power from renewable sources into green hydrogen, these low-carbon-intensity energy storage systems can release clean, efficient power on demand through combustion engines or fuel cells. When produced emission-free, hydrogen can decarbonize some of the most challenging industrial sectors, such as steel and cement production, industrial processes, and maritime transport.
“Green hydrogen is the key driver to advance decarbonization,” says Dr. Christoph Noeres, head of green hydrogen at global electrolysis specialist thyssenkrupp nucera. This promising low-carbon-intensity technology has the potential to transform entire industries by providing a clean, renewable fuel source, moving us toward a greener world aligned with industry climate goals.
Accelerating production of green hydrogen
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and its availability is key to its appeal as a clean energy source. However, hydrogen does not occur naturally in its pure form; it is always bound to other elements in compounds like water (H2O). Pure hydrogen is extracted and isolated from water through an energy-intensive process called conventional electrolysis.
Hydrogen is typically produced today via steam-methane reforming, in which high-temperature steam is used to produce hydrogen from natural gas. Emissions produced by this process have implications for hydrogen’s overall carbon footprint: worldwide hydrogen production is currently responsible for as many CO2 emissions as the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined.
A solution lies in green hydrogen—hydrogen produced using electrolysis powered by renewable sources. This unlocks the benefits of hydrogen without the dirty fuels. Unfortunately, very little hydrogen is currently powered by renewables: less than 1% came from non-fossil fuel sources in 2022.
A massive scale-up is underway. According to McKinsey, an estimated 130 to 345 gigawatts (GW) of electrolyzer capacity will be necessary to meet the green hydrogen demand by 2030, with 246 GW of this capacity already announced. This stands in stark contrast to the current installed base of just 1.1 GW. Notably, to ensure that green hydrogen constitutes at least 14% of total energy consumption by 2050, a target that the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) estimates is required to meet climate goals, 5,500 GW of cumulative installed electrolyzer capacity will be required.
However, scaling up green hydrogen production to these levels requires overcoming cost and infrastructure constraints. Becoming cost-competitive means improving and standardizing the technology, harnessing the scale efficiencies of larger projects, and encouraging government action to create market incentives. Moreover, the expansion of renewable energy in regions with significant solar, hydro, or wind energy potential is another crucial factor in lowering renewable power prices and, consequently, the costs of green hydrogen.
Electrolysis innovation
While electrolysis technologies have existed for decades, scaling them up to meet the demand for clean energy will be essential. Alkaline Water Electrolysis (AWE), the most dominant and developed electrolysis method, is poised for this transition. It has been utilized for decades, demonstrating efficiency and reliability in the chemical industry. Moreover, it is more cost effective than other electrolysis technologies and is well suited to be run directly with fluctuating renewable power input. Especially for large-scale applications, AWE demonstrates significant advantages in terms of investment and operating costs. “Transferring small-scale manufacturing and optimizing it towards mass manufacturing will need a high level of investment across the industry,” says Noeres.
Industries that already practice electrolysis, as well as those that already use hydrogen, such as fertilizer production, are well poised for conversion to green hydrogen. For example, thyssenkrupp nucera benefits from a decades-long heritage using electrolyzer technology in the chlor-alkali process, which produces chlorine and caustic soda for the chemical industry. The company “is able to use its existing supply chain to ramp up production quickly, a distinction that all providers don’t share,” says Noeres.
Alongside scaling up existing solutions, thyssenkrupp nucera is developing complementary techniques and technologies. Among these are solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC), which perform electrolysis at very high temperatures. While the need for high temperatures means this technique isn’t right for all customers, in industries where waste heat is readily available—such as chemicals—Noeres says SOEC offers up to 20% enhanced efficiency and reduces production costs.
Thyssenkrupp nucera has entered into a strategic partnership with the renowned German research institute Fraunhofer IKTS to move the technology toward applications in industrial manufacturing. The company envisages SOEC as a complement to AWE in the areas where it is cost effective to reduce overall energy consumption. “The combination of AWE and SOEC in thyssenkrupp nucera’s portfolio offers a unique product suite to the industry,” says Noeres.
While advancements in electrolysis technology and the diversification of its applications across various scales and industries are promising for green hydrogen production, a coordinated global ramp-up of renewable energy sources and clean power grids is also crucial. Although AWE electrolyzers are ready for deployment in large-scale, centralized green hydrogen production facilities, these must be integrated with renewable energy sources to truly harness their potential.
Making the green hydrogen market
Storage and transportation remain obstacles to a larger market for green hydrogen. While hydrogen can be compressed and stored, its low density presents a practical challenge. The volume of hydrogen is nearly four times greater than that of natural gas, and storage requires either ultra-high compression or costly refrigeration. Overcoming the economic and technical hurdles of high-volume hydrogen storage and transport will be critical to its potential as an exportable energy carrier.
In 2024, several high-profile green hydrogen projects launched in the U.S., advancing the growth of green hydrogen infrastructure and technology. The landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides tax credits and government incentives for producing clean hydrogen and the renewable electricity used in its production. In October 2023, the Biden administration announced $7 billion for the country’s first clean hydrogen hubs, and the U.S. Department of Energy further allocated $750 million for 52 projects across 24 states to dramatically reduce the cost of clean hydrogen and establish American leadership in the industry. The potential economic impact from the IRA legislation is substantial: thyssenkrupp nucera expects the IRA to double or triple the U.S. green hydrogen market size.
“The IRA was a wake-up call for Europe, setting a benchmark for all the other countries on how to support the green hydrogen industry in this startup phase,” says Noeres. Germany’s H2Global scheme was one of the first European efforts to facilitate hydrogen imports with the help of subsidies, and it has since been followed up by the European Hydrogen Bank, which provided €720 million for green hydrogen projects in its pilot auction. “However, more investment is needed to push the green hydrogen industry forward,” says Noeres.
In the current green hydrogen market, China has installed more renewable power than any other country. With lower capital expenditure costs, China produces 40% of the world’s electrolyzers. Additionally, state-owned firms have pledged to build an extensive 6,000-kilometer network of pipelines for green hydrogen transportation by 2050.
Coordinated investment and supportive policies are crucial to ensure attractive incentives that can bring green hydrogen from a niche technology to a scalable solution globally. The Chinese green hydrogen market, along with that of other regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, has advanced significantly, garnering global attention for its competitive edge through large-scale projects. To compete effectively, the EU must create a global level playing field for European technologies through attractive investment incentives that can drive the transition of hydrogen from a niche to a global-scale solution. Supportive policies must be in place to also ensure that green products made with hydrogen, such as steel, are sufficiently incentivized and protected against carbon leakage.
A comprehensive strategy, combining investment incentives, open markets, and protection against market distortions and carbon leakage, is crucial for the EU and other countries to remain competitive in the rapidly evolving global green hydrogen market and achieve a decarbonized energy future. “To advance several gigawatt scale or multi-hundred megawatts projects forward,” says Noeres, “we need significantly more volume globally and comparable funding opportunities to make a real impact on global supply chains.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
