Aug 8 2024
What to know about China’s push for hydrogen-powered transportation

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.

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard of hydrogen-powered vehicles but never seen one. Over 18,000 are in the US, almost exclusively in California. On the outside they look just like traditional vehicles, but they are powered by electricity generated from a hydrogen fuel cell, making them far cleaner and greener.  

So when I learned that in parts of China, companies are putting hydrogen-powered bikes on the road for anyone to ride, it was a real “the future is here” moment for me. I looked deeper into it and wrote a story. 

These bikes have water-bottle-sized hydrogen tanks, which can make them easier than regular bikes to ride, though the tanks have to be swapped out every 40 miles. But they haven’t exactly been getting rave reviews. One rider in Shanghai told me the speed boost from hydrogen felt lacking, and the user experience was hurt by hardware and software design flaws. Many people on social media agree with him. 

Youon, one of the largest players in China’s bike-sharing industry, has thrown its support behind hydrogen energy. It has put thousands of hydrogen-powered bikes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, in the hopes of kick-starting a trend. 

But for clean energy experts, it’s a head-scratcher as to why these hydrogen bikes are being promoted in the first place: Hydrogen bikes are less efficient than ordinary e-bikes, and they won’t make much economic sense in the long run.

It’s not just one company taking this path. The collective appetite for hydrogen bikes has been much bigger than I expected. By my own counting, Youon has half a dozen competitors in the hydrogen bike field, and several cities have embraced the idea. While the future of hydrogen-powered shared bikes is uncertain, their proliferation represents a much larger trend happening in China: exploring how hydrogen can be used in transportation. 

It’s no secret that China has already become a world leader in producing affordable and capable electric vehicles, but the Chinese government and companies aren’t stopping there. A significant number of local policies have been set up in recent years to subsidize the production of hydrogen vehicles, waive toll fees for them, and build more refuel stations for hydrogen. Now China has about 21,000 hydrogen vehicles on the road and more than 400 refuel stations.

It’s worth having a reality check about China’s push for hydrogen: While using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles comes with no carbon emissions, that’s not the case for actually producing hydrogen. In China, the vast majority comes from fossil fuels, which cost much less than producing hydrogen with water and renewable energy. (To learn the difference between “gray,” “blue,” and “green” hydrogen, read this piece by my colleague Casey Crownhart.) 

The sad truth is that China will rely on coal and natural gas for making hydrogen for a while. The fact that hydrogen is a byproduct of processing coal explains why many cities in China with abundant coal resources are also at the frontier of the hydrogen industry. For them, the economic argument for hydrogen can trump the environmental costs, and as a result, even though hydrogen vehicles create a pathway for the transportation system to further decarbonize in the future, they are doing very little to address climate change now. 

The same issue applies to electric vehicles in China: Yes, electricity is cleaner than gas as a car fuel, but the majority of electricity in China still comes from fossil fuels, so how much cleaner is it really? 

But hydrogen vehicle companies need to answer an additional question: If China is already pretty good at making batteries for EVs, why should it bother spending any time or resources on hydrogen vehicles?

For now, the Chinese companies have come up with one good answer, and it’s not bikes. It’s heavy trucks. 

“Hydrogen passenger vehicles are kind of a dead end here … I think for fleet vehicles, trucking, long-distance cargo, hydrogen is competitive with long-range electric vehicles. Maybe it’s a toss-up?” says David Fishman, a senior manager at the Lantau Group, an energy consulting firm.

If you think about it, cargo trucks bump up against some of EVs’ biggest limitations today: They need to go ultra-long distances while being refueled quickly to save time. Meanwhile, the limitations of hydrogen vehicles, like the lack of refuel stations and the higher production costs, make them much more suitable for commercial fleets than for individual car buyers.

As a result, Chinese hydrogen trucking companies are feeling confident, says Fishman. If hydrogen really becomes a next-generation mainstream fuel, it will probably start with trucks in China.

Do you think hydrogen or lithium batteries are the future of clean transportation? Let me know your pick at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. In China, private companies are responsible for verifying peoples’ identities on social media. Now the government is trying to take back that control by introducing a new “national internet ID” system, a move that became instantly controversial. (New York Times $)

2. Record-high temperatures in southern China are pushing the grid to its limit. On August 2, the power demand of Shanghai was more than the entire capacity of the Philippines. (Bloomberg $)

3. Honor, a smartphone maker once owned by Huawei, is getting ready to go public. Documents show that the local government of Shenzhen has given it “unusually” large support, including a dedicated city hall team with a “no matter left overnight” policy. (Reuters $)

4. App developers in China can circumvent Apple’s high fees by charging users through Tencent’s and ByteDance’s super apps. Apple now wants to close that loophole. (Bloomberg $)

5. The Biden administration is planning to ban the use of Chinese software in US autonomous vehicles. (Reuters $)

6. The new R-rated Disney movie Deadpool & Wolverine had to take out references to cocaine and homosexuality and replace “vibrator” with “massage gun” to pass China’s censors. (Wall Street Journal $)

7. A university in Beijing has started offering the country’s first bachelor’s degree in “marriage services and management.” It will teach everything from matchmaking to divorce counseling. (CNBC)

Lost in translation

Cheap knockoff phones defined made-in-China gadgets in the 2000s, but they disappeared after domestic brands like Xiaomi brought their prices down significantly. Now, these knockoffs are making a comeback in livestream shopping channels, according to the Chinese publication IT Times. 

On Douyin and Kuaishou, cheap domestic 5G phones that look like Apple or Huawei products are trying to attract low-income consumers with promises of high-end specs and dirt-cheap prices as low as 298 yuan (a little over $40). Once consumers receive these phones, they usually realize that the claims about the specs are misleading, and the companies making the phones don’t even have proper business registrations. While stricter regulations in China and abundant domestic competition have pushed knockoff phones out of brick-and-mortar stores, they seem to thrive in the less-regulated online markets.

One more thing

Readers of China Report, hi! This is Zeyi. It’s been almost two years since I sent out the first edition of this newsletter, and sadly this will be my last, as I’m leaving MIT Technology Review. 

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this newsletter. I was able to wander off and talk about so many different things, from the weirdly terrifying customer service center of Tencent to my frustrations about the TikTok ban, from newsletter after newsletter talking about electric vehicles (not sorry about that) to the fun deep dives into social media and digital culture. And I’m very thankful to everyone who replied with insightful or heartfelt feedback.

Stay tuned, as MIT Technology Review will bring back China Report shortly. Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy our other newsletters, or this incredibly petty response by Pizza Hut Hong Kong to the win over Italy for an Olympics fencing gold. And yes, I’m all for pineapples on pizza.

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Aug 7 2024
Your future air conditioner might act like a battery

As temperatures climb on hot days, many of us are quick to crank up our fans or air conditioners. These cooling systems can be a major stress on electrical grids, which has inspired some inventors to create versions that can store energy as well as use it. 

Cooling represents 20% of global electricity demand in buildings, a share that’s expected to rise as the planet warms and more of the world turns to cooling technology. During peak demand hours, air conditioners can account for over half the total demand on the grid in some parts of the world today.

New cooling technologies that incorporate energy storage could help by charging themselves when renewable electricity is available and demand is low, and still providing cooling services when the grid is stressed.  

“We say, take the problem, and turn it into a solution,” says Yaron Ben Nun, founder and chief technology officer of Nostromo Energy.

One of Nostromo Energy’s systems, which it calls an IceBrick, is basically a massive ice cube tray. It cools down a solution made of water and glycol that’s used to freeze individual capsules filled with water. One IceBrick can be made up of thousands of these containers, which each hold about a half-gallon, or roughly two liters, of water.

Insulation keeps the capsules frozen until it’s time to use them to help cool down a building. Then the ice is used to drop the temperature of the water-glycol mixture, which in turn cools down the water that circulates in the building’s chilling system. The whole thing is designed to work as an add-on with existing equipment, Ben Nun says. 

Nostromo installed its first system in the US in 2023, at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles. It has a capacity of 1.4 megawatt-hours, and it also serves the neighboring Waldorf Astoria. The installation contains 40,000 capsules, amounting to about 150,000 pounds of ice. It usually charges up for 10 to 12 hours, starting at night and finishing around midday. That leaves it ready to discharge its cooling power between the late afternoon and evening, when demand on the grid is high and solar power is dropping off as the sun sets.

Using the IceBrick increases the total electricity needed for cooling, as some energy is lost to inefficiency during the cycle. But the goal is to decrease the energy demand during peak hours, which can cut costs for building owners, Ben Nun says. The company is in the process of securing roughly $300 million in funding, in part from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, to fully finance 200 of these systems in California, he adds. 

closeup of the Ice brick system from Nostromo showing pipes with red connectors leading to metal cube shapes
Nostromo’s IceBrick is made of individual capsules that freeze and thaw to store energy.
NOSTROMO

While building owners can benefit immediately from these individual energy storage solutions, the real potential to help the grid comes when systems are linked together, Ben Nun says. 

When the grid is extremely stressed, utility companies are sometimes forced to shut off electricity supply to some areas, leaving people there without power when they need it most. Technologies that can adjust to meet the grid’s needs could help reduce reliance on these rolling blackouts. 

This kind of approach isn’t new—many commercial units have large tanks that hold chilled water or another cooling fluid that can drop the temperature in a building at a moment’s notice. But Nostromo’s technology can store more energy with much less material, because it uses the freezing and melting process rather than just cooling down a liquid, Ben Nun says. 

Startup Blue Frontier has differentiated itself in this space by building cooling systems that use desiccants. These materials can suck up moisture—like the little packets of silica beads that often come with new shoes and bags. But instead of those beads, the company is using a concentrated salt solution.

Blue Frontier’s cooling units pass a stream of air over a thin layer of the desiccant, which pulls moisture out of the air. That dry air is then used in an evaporative cooling process (similar to the way sweat cools your skin).

Desiccant cooling systems can be more efficient than the traditional vapor compression air conditioners on the market today, says Daniel Betts, founder and CEO of Blue Frontier. But the system also benefits from the ability to charge up during certain times and deliver cooling at other times.

The key to the energy storage aspect of desiccant cooling is the recharging: Like sponges, desiccants can only soak up a limited amount of water before they need to be wrung out. Blue Frontier does this by causing some water in the salt solution to evaporate, typically with a heat pump, to make it more concentrated. The recharging system can run constantly, or in bursts that can be timed to match periods when electricity is cheap or when more renewable power is available.

The benefit of these energy storage technologies is that they don’t require people turn their cooling systems down or off to help relieve stress on the grid, Betts says. 

Blue Frontier is testing several systems with customers today and hopes to manufacture larger quantities soon. And while commercial buildings are getting the first installations, Betts says he’s interested in bringing the technology to homes and other buildings too.

One challenge facing the companies working on these incoming technologies is finding a way to store large amounts of energy effectively without adding too much cost, says Ankit Kalanki, a principal in the carbon-free buildings program at the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit energy think tank. Cooling technologies like air conditioners are already expensive, so future solutions will have to be priced competitively to make it in the market. But given the world’s growing cooling demand, there’s still a significant opportunity for new technologies to help meet those needs, he adds.

Just rethinking air conditioning won’t be enough to meet the massive increase in energy demand for cooling, which could triple between now and 2050. To both do that and cut emissions, we’ll still need significantly more renewable energy capacity as well as gigantic battery installations on the grid. But adding flexibility into air-conditioning systems could help cut the investment needed to get to a zero-carbon grid.

Cooling systems can help us cope with our warming climate, Ben Nun says, but there’s a problem with the current options: “You’ll cool yourself, but you keep on warming the globe.”

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Aug 6 2024
Hydrogen bikes are struggling to gain traction in China

If you are in China and looking to ride a shared bike in the city, you might find something on the bike that looks a little different: a water-bottle-size hydrogen tank.

At least a dozen cities in China now have some kind of hydrogen-powered shared bikes for their residents. They offer an easier ride than traditional bikes and a safer energy source than lithium batteries. One Chinese company is betting that this will be the next big thing in public transportation, while others are riding on a national trend toward government policies that encourage the development of the hydrogen industry.

Yet the reception has been mixed. Riders have reported unsatisfactory experiences with current hydrogen bikes, and energy experts doubt whether it makes economic sense to replace e-bikes with hydrogen-powered ones. Even though hydrogen could be a great power source for long-distance transportation in the future, it may not be suitable for urban biking, a completely different task.

While there are companies in other countries that are working on hydrogen-powered bikes—and one French company already has a mature product—China stands out for putting these bikes to use as public transportation. Bike-sharing became hugely popular in the country during the 2010s tech boom. With support from deep-pocketed companies like Alibaba and Meituan, standardized, internet-connected shared bikes have filled urban streets since, sometimes resulting in incredible waste. 

Youon, a Chinese company with over 1 million bikes on the streets of over 300 cities, is one of the main players in the bike-sharing industry. Facing fierce domestic competition, the company has chosen to differentiate its brand by investing in hydrogen bikes since 2018, with four models now available to buy or rent.

A hydrogen bike is not very different in concept from an e-bike. The difference is in whether the energy is stored in a lithium-ion battery or a hydrogen tank.

Each of Youon’s hydrogen bikes stores 20 grams of hydrogen in the form of metal powders, which can absorb and release the gas in a tank at low pressures (less than 10 bar). When the rider starts pedaling, the hydrogen is fed to a fuel cell under the seat, where a chemical reaction takes place to produce electricity. At its peak, a hydrogen bike can go as fast as 23 kilometers (14 miles) per hour. One tank of hydrogen lasts 40 to 60 kilometers (25 to 37 miles), and replacing the tank takes a few seconds.

Why hydrogen?

E-bikes have existed in China for a long time. According to the official figures, there are around 350 million in China today, and they are commonly used by everyday commuters and professional delivery workers. 

However, many of China’s largest cities have shied away from commissioning e-bikes as part of the public transportation network or even banned them, because lithium batteries pose a fire risk. In 2023, Chinese fire departments received a total of 21,000 reports of e-bikes catching fire, a 17.4% increase from the previous year. 

That created a supply vacuum for Youon. It’s positioned itself as a safer alternative thanks to its use of hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored in a low-pressure state, and if there’s any leak, it will dissipate quickly without causing an explosion, the company says on its website.

It’s a strategy that’s worked: These bikes have been more readily accepted by local governments. In 2022, Youon sold 2,000 of its hydrogen bikes to Lingang, a new high-tech district in Shanghai; in 2023, the company sold 500 hydrogen bikes to the Daxing district of Beijing. Today, its hydrogen bikes can be found in over six Chinese cities. 

Youon has since doubled down on its investment in hydrogen. The company has launched a product that lets users generate hydrogen at home with solar power and water. It also worked with the local government of Jiangsu, where its headquarters are, to publish a set of industry standards covering safety requirements, hydrogen tanks, and more. “Hydrogen energy is also an essential pathway to achieving carbon neutrality,” said Sun Jisheng, the CEO of Youon, at an industry conference in June.

The problem

However, that’s about where the advantage of hydrogen bikes ends.

David Fishman, a China-based senior manager of the Lantou Group, an energy consultancy, says he struggles to see the advantage. “Maybe the safety angle is a relevant factor for someone who doesn’t like carrying around lithium-ion batteries and storing them in their house,” he says. Other than that, hydrogen bikes are less energy-efficient than battery-powered bikes, and it costs more to produce hydrogen in the first place.

The main advantage of hydrogen as an energy source is that it has much higher energy density, meaning a hydrogen tank with the same weight as a lithium battery would produce more energy and power the vehicles to go farther. However, that advantage only kicks in for trips over 800 kilometers, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

That means hydrogen is a more economical choice for long-distance transportation like ships, planes, and trucks. Bikes, however, are almost on the exact opposite end of the transportation spectrum. Few people would bike for long distances, let alone those who are only renting a public bike for a short time. For anything shorter than 800 km, battery-powered vehicles are more energy efficient, says Jacobson. He estimates that a battery-powered bike consumes only 40% of the energy of a hydrogen-powered equivalent and also takes up less space.

On top of that, the company’s hydrogen bikes have failed to impress many of the early adopters. 

a row of blue Yuoun hydrogen bikes for rent in the city

VIA YOUONBIKESHARE.COM

Gu, a resident of Lingang who only wishes to use his last name for this story, tells MIT Technology Review that he tried the bikes several times and they never felt effort-saving to him. Instead, the bike, along with the hydrogen tank and fuel-cell-powered motors, felt heavy and hard to maneuver. As a user, he has no idea whether the bike was running as expected or if the difficulty he encountered was due to its running out of hydrogen, although the company is supposed to block any bike with low hydrogen reserves from being unlocked.

Another common complaint is the inconvenience of finding and returning the bikes because there are only a limited number in the city and they have to be returned to specific locations for easy retrieval or tank replenishment. 

“The bike has to be returned to a designated spot. But even if I put the bike at that very location, there’s GPS drifting, and I’d be charged a very high fee for them to move the bike,” Gu says.

On social media, hydrogen-bike users have complained a lot about similar experiences. Youon has found itself caught up in headlines at least a couple of times recently, with stories where users question whether their bikes are really useful for their daily commutes. 

Youon didn’t respond to questions sent by MIT Technology Review.

The future of hydrogen bikes

Despite all these issues, there are at least half a dozen more companies in China working to launch hydrogen-powered shared bikes. These are often startups operating small-scale pilot projects in cities that have sizable hydrogen industries, like Foshan or Xiaoyi. 

Many of these cities have even bigger plans—they are vying to become the hub of the hydrogen economy in China, which is increasingly betting on it as the future of clean energy. 

This year, for the first time, hydrogen energy was mentioned in an annual official report from Beijing, which summarizes government work. The Chinese government said it vows to “accelerate the development of hydrogen energy … after enforcing the lead in smart, connected new energy vehicles.” The mention injected a boost of confidence into the hydrogen industry in China, which already produces more hydrogen every year than any other country.

Not all of this is good news for the environment. About 80% of hydrogen produced in China actually comes from burning coal or natural gas, and some of the fiercest government support for hydrogen comes from coal-mining cities looking to transition. While the country is moving in the direction of green hydrogen (hydrogen generated with renewable energy and water), the fuel will remain polluting for a long time.

When a technology is still in the early stages, finding the best use case for it is key. There are plenty of companies in China working on developing hydrogen-powered trucks and other long-distance forms of transportation, but considering the size of the bike-sharing market in the country, it’s no surprise that turning their attention to bikes seems like a profitable idea to some. 

However, if there’s no way to dramatically improve the performance or economics of hydrogen bikes, it’s hard to imagine the current batch of experiments lasting for long. As companies move from piloting their new products to seeking adoption and profits, they will have some serious questions to answer.

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Aug 3 2024
Why investors care about climate tech’s green premium

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

Talking about money can be difficult, but it’s a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to climate tech. 

I’ve been thinking more about the financial piece of climate innovation since my colleague James Temple sat down for a chat with Mike Schroepfer, former CTO of Meta and a current climate tech investor. They talked about Schroepfer’s philanthropic work as well as his climate-tech venture firm, Gigascale Capital. (I’d highly recommend reading the full Q&A here.) 

In their conversation, Schroepfer spoke about investing in companies not solely because of their climate promises, but because they can deliver a cheaper, better product that happens to have benefits for climate action too. 

This all got me thinking about what we can expect from new technologies financially. What do they need to do to compete, and how quickly can they do so? 

Look through the portfolio of a climate-focused venture capital firm or walk around a climate-tech conference, and you’ll be struck by the creativity and straight-up brilliance of some of the proposed technologies.

But in order to survive, they need a lot more than a good idea, as my colleague David Rotman pointed out in a story from December outlining six takeaways from this century’s first boom in climate tech. Countless companies rose to stardom with shiny new ideas starting around 2006 before crashing and failing by 2013.

As David put it, there are lessons in that rise and fall for today’s boom in climate technology: “The brilliance of many new climate technologies is evident, and we desperately need them. But none of that will ensure success. Venture-backed startups will need to survive on the basis of economics and financial advantages, not good intentions.”

Often, companies looking to help address climate change with new products are competing with an established industry. These newcomers must contend with what Bill Gates has called the “green premium.”

The green premium is the cost difference between a cheaper product that increases pollution and a more expensive alternative that offers climate benefits. In order to get people on board with new technologies, we need to close that gap. 

As Gates has outlined in his writings on this topic, there are basically two ways to do this: We need to find ways to either increase the cost of polluting products or cut the cost of the version that causes little to no climate pollution.

Some policies aim to go after the first of these options—the European Union has put a price on carbon, raising the cost of fossil-fuel-based products, for example. But relying on policy can leave companies at the whims of political winds in markets like the US. 

So that leaves the other option: New technology needs to get cheaper. 

As Schroepfer explained in his chat with James, one of the focuses at his venture firm, Gigascale Capital, is picking companies that can compete on economics or offer other benefits to customers. As he put it, a company should basically be saying: “Hey, this is a better product. [whispers] By the way, it’s better for the environment.”

It’s unrealistic to expect companies to have better, cheaper products right out of the gate, Schroepfer acknowledges. But he says that the team is looking for companies that can—over the course of a relatively short, roughly five-to-10-year period—grow to compete on cost, or even gain a cost advantage over the alternatives.

Schroepfer points to batteries and solar power as examples of technologies that are competitive today. When it’s available, electricity produced with solar panels is the cheapest on the planet. Batteries are 90% less expensive than they were just 15 years ago.

But these cases reveal the tricky thing about the green premium: Many new technologies can eventually make up the gap, but it can take much longer than businesses and investors are willing to wait. Solar panels and lithium-ion batteries were available commercially in the 1990s, but it’s taken until now to get to the point where they’re cheap and widespread.

Some technologies just getting started today could be the batteries and solar power of the 2040s, if we’re willing to invest the time and money to get them there. And I already see a few instances where people are willing to pay more for climate-friendly products today, in part because of hopes for their future.  

One example that comes to mind is low-emissions steel. H2 Green Steel, a Swedish company working to make steel without fossil fuels, says it has customers who have agreed to pay 20% to 30% more for its products than metal made with fossil fuels. But that’s just the price today: Some reports predict that these technologies will be able to compete on cost by 2040 or 2050. 

Most new technologies designed to address climate change will need to make a case for themselves in the market. The question for the rest of us: How much support and time are we willing to put in to give them the best shot of getting there?

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on what the former Meta CTO has been up to in climate, read the full Q&A here. There’s a whole lot more to unpack, including work on glacier stabilization, ocean-based carbon removal, and even solar geoengineering. 

For more on the lessons that companies can take away from the first cleantech boom, give this story from my colleague David Rotman a read.

Another thing

The US Department of Energy is putting $33 million into nine concentrating solar projects, as my colleague James Temple reported exclusively last week. 

Concentrating solar power uses mirrors to direct sunlight, which heats up some target material. It’s not a new technology, and the DOE has been funding efforts to get it going since the 1970s. But it could be useful in industries from food and beverages to low-carbon fuels. Read the full story here. 

Keeping up with climate  

Western battery startups could be in big trouble. While new chemistries and alternative architectures attracted a lot of investor attention a few years ago, the companies are now facing the reality of competing with massive existing manufacturers. (The Information)

California’s largest wildfire of the year has burned well over 300,000 acres so far. Climate change has helped create the conditions that supercharge blazes. (Inside Climate News)

The UAE has been trying to juice up rainfall with high-tech cloud seeding operations. But the whole thing may be more about the show than the science—check out this great deep dive for more. (Wired)

Congestion pricing plans—like the one recently proposed and then abandoned in New York City—can be unpopular with voters. Yet people generally come around once they start to see the benefits. Here’s an in-depth look at how attitudes toward these plans change over time. (Grist)

Air New Zealand backed down from a goal to cut its emissions nearly 30% by the end of the decade. The first major airline to walk back such a promise, the company points to a lack of supply for alternative fuels, as well as delays in new aircraft deliveries. (BBC)

Global methane emissions are climbing at the quickest pace in decades. The powerful greenhouse gas is responsible for over half the warming we’ve experienced so far. (The Guardian) 

Demand for air conditioning is swelling in Africa. But the industry isn’t well regulated, and some residents are struggling to get reliable systems and keep harmful refrigerant gases from leaking. (Associated Press)

Southeast Asia is home to a fleet of relatively new coal power plants. Pulling these facilities off the grid early could be a major step to cutting emissions from global electricity production. (Cipher News)

Correction: an earlier version of this story misstated the name of Mike Schroepfer’s firm. It is Gigascale Capital.

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Jul 30 2024
From Meta CTO to climate tech investor: Mike Schroepfer on his big pivot

As the pandemic locked down cities in early 2020, Mike Schroepfer, then the chief technology officer of Meta, found himself with more free time than he’d ever had in his career. 

In quiet moments that would have been filled with work travel, social events, or his children’s school activities, he reflected on how well humanity can pull together in the face of an acute crisis—implementing public health measures, mass-producing tests, and turbocharging the development of vaccines. 

But the experience also reinforced his view that we are particularly bad at addressing slow-motion catastrophes like climate change, where the risks are grave and growing but mostly looming in the distance. 

As he learned more about global warming, Schroepfer came to believe he had a role to play: By leveraging his technical expertise and financial resources, he could accelerate essential research and help society develop the understanding and tools we may need to avoid or prepare for the escalating dangers.

As the threat of climate change consumed more and more of his time, he decided in 2021 to step down from his CTO role and dedicate himself to addressing the challenge through both philanthropic and for-profit efforts. (He remains a senior fellow at Meta.)

I’m willing to take a lot of risks that these things just don’t work and that people make fun of me for wasting my money, and I’m willing to stick it out and keep trying. 

Mike Schroepfer

In May 2023, he announced Gigascale Capital, a venture fund backing early-stage climate tech companies, including startups working to commercialize fusion, cut landfill emissions, and reduce methane pollution from cattle. That summer, he also launched Carbon to Sea, a $50 million nonprofit effort to accelerate research on ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), a means of drawing down more planet-warming carbon dioxide into the oceans by adding substances like olivine, basalt, or lime.

This year, as MIT Technology Review first reported, he launched Outlier Projects, which is donating grants to research groups working in three areas: removing greenhouse gas from the air, preventing glaciers from collapsing, and exploring the contentious idea of solar geoengineering, a catch-all term for a variety of ways that we might be able to cool the planet by casting more heat back into space.

Last week, Schroepfer sat down with MIT Technology Review in his offices at Gigascale Capital, in downtown Palo Alto, California, to discuss his approach to the problem, why he’s willing to spend money on controversial climate interventions, and what AI and the presidential election could mean for progress on clean energy.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Is there a unifying philosophy across your climate efforts? 

The foundation is that when you get a set of people and you get them all pointed in the same direction, and they wake up every morning and say “We’re going to go solve this problem and nothing else matters,” it’s often surprising what they can get done. 

I think the other unifying theme, which also unifies my career, is: Technology is the only thing I have seen that removes constraints. 

I just saw this again and again and again at Meta, where we would reduce cost, improve efficiency, develop a new technology, and then a thing that was a hard constraint before just got removed. 

Through the proper development and deployment of technology, we can remove either-or decisions and move to the world I want to move to, which is a yes-and decision. 

How do we bring the standard of living of 8 billion people up to those of the West and have a planet that my children can live on? That’s really the question, and the only answer I can see is technology.

There are a variety of potential approaches to ocean carbon removal—everything from sinking kelp, which doesn’t seem to be working that well, to iron fertilization and other things. So why enhanced ocean alkalinity? Why was that the one where you said, let’s dive deep?

In reading about all the different approaches, it stood out as the most likely, the most scalable, the most cost effective, and the most permanent, yet the least well understood.

And so it was super high impact if it works, but we need to know more. 

I had no prior bias to this. I like kelp. I like all these things. I’m not a one-solution sort of person. I want as many things to work as possible. 

As an engineer, my reading of technological deployment is that the relatively elegant, simple solutions end up being the ones that scale. And OAE is about as simple as it gets. 

Let’s switch gears to a touchy topic: solar geoengineering. Why did you decide that was an important area where you wanted to support research? 

We did a broad search for problems that are defined as high impact, high scientific uncertainty. Those are the ones that I think fit what we’re comfortable with and good at. And as we did that search, the two—besides carbon removal—that came out were solar radiation management (SRM) and glacier stabilization.

SRM felt like an orthogonal solution because it is a way to make rapid cooling if we need to—if this becomes a humanitarian crisis.

We’re already losing lives due to heat, but it’s going to get to the point where people aren’t going to tolerate it, and the question is: What do you do at that point? 

Humans are good in a crisis, but it felt like, hey, we ought to get started now. To really start doing the rigorous work to understand “Does this work? Is it effective? What are the safety concerns?” while we’re not in a crisis moment, so that we’re prepared.

You mentioned glacier restoration as well. Why was that a problem you wanted to contribute to?

Assume we solve every other problem. We remove all the carbon, we electrify everything. We’ve still got a sea-level-rise problem, mostly because of glaciers that are moving. 

One of the approaches is to simply pump water out of the bottom of the glacier to remove the lubrication layer that’s causing them to move. We have glaciers with boreholes already in them that are highly instrumented, and they’re already moving. So dropping a pump in there and pumping out water is a very, very, very low-risk activity that starts to answer some basic questions, like: Does this work at all? Would it be feasible? Would it be overwhelmingly impossible because of energy or cost needs?

Whatever approach you take to it, we’re talking about a massive infrastructure project that’s just gonna be incredibly costly. On the other hand, if the Thwaites Glacier (sometimes called the Doomsday Glacier) does slide into the sea, then every city around the world, plus every low-lying nation, has to do these massive infrastructure projects.

Can we pull together as a global society to address this thing in the most efficient way, or are we just going to leave everyone to deal with it on their own? 

This is where I think people underweight the power of the prototype or the power of the proof of concept.

We can talk theoretically. I can bring scientists over and they can say, “I’ve got a big spreadsheet which explains to you how expensive this is going to be.”

I don’t know. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re not. Instead, let’s get on a plane. And let me show you. It was moving this fast. We did this. It’s now moving this fast. Here’s the pump. We’re pumping water out. 

glacier near Brown Station
The Thwaites Glacier.
KARI SCAMBOS/NSIDC

I think a lot of what my role in the world is to do is to get us to there. I’m willing to take a lot of risks that these things just don’t work and that people make fun of me for wasting my money, and I’m willing to stick it out and keep trying. 

What I hope I do is put a bunch of proof points on the board, so that when the time comes that we need to start making decisions about these things, we’re not starting from scratch—we’re starting from a running start.

And you think that just having a greater amount of certainty and clarity—in terms of what the risks are, and how viable these solutions are, and what they will cost, and how we do it—can change the dynamics …

I think it does.

… where suddenly you could see nations pulling together in a way where it’s hard to imagine when there’s so much uncertainty? 

Yeah. Or it goes the other way, where you decide, “Hey, we’ve had all these crazy ideas, and none of them are going to work, so we got to do something else.” 

But as you say, the alternatives are moving lots of people or building big seawalls, and those are going to get pretty overwhelming pretty quickly. 

My career has been putting tools in the toolbox. My job was to stock that toolbox such that when we needed it, we were ready to go. And I’m applying that same approach here, which is just like, “Hey, what are the things that I can help push forward in some way so that if we need them, or if we need to understand them, we’re a lot further along than we are today?” Right? 

We’ve mostly talked about your philanthropic efforts so far, but you also set up Gigascale Capital, a venture fund. How does your investment strategy and approach differ from that of a traditional tech venture firm? For instance, are you investing over longer time horizons than the standard five to 10 years? 

We’re here to prove that if you pick the right climate tech companies with the right founders, that can be an amazing business. They’re disrupting trillion-dollar industries, and so you ought to be able to get good returns on that. And that’s what’s going to be required to get a bunch of people to open up their checkbooks and really spend the trillions of dollars we need a year to solve these problems.

So we look for companies with—we’ve jokingly called it at times the “green discount.”

Those trends are freight trains that are going down the hill and are pretty hard to stop.

Mike Schroepfer

Like, “Hey, this is a better product. [whispers] By the way, it’s better for the environment.” Sort of the little asterisk if you read the fine print at the bottom. 

The starting point is, the consumer wants it because it provides a lot of benefits; enterprise wants it because it’s cheaper. That is the selling point of all the products we back. And then it also happens to be a lot lower carbon, or zero carbon, compared to whatever alternative it’s displacing.

Your mentioning the green discount reminds me of Bill Gates’s green premium (the Microsoft cofounder’s thesis that it takes heavy investments in climate tech to reduce their cost premium relative to polluting products over time). There are some products, like green steel and green cement, where the alternatives are more expensive. Does that mean that you’re not investing in those areas, or is it just that you would with the hope that eventually they’ll be able to get those costs down?

Technology takes time to incubate, so no new technology out of the gate is better, faster, cheaper. But in the life cycle of the company, in five to 10 years—I have to believe, at scale, you can be cost competitive or have a cost advantage versus the alternatives. So that means that, yeah, we only invest in things that we think can either be cost competitive or have some other co-benefit that is a decision maker.

This is why I very cleanly separated philanthropic work where it’s like, “I get nothing out of this—we’re gonna send money away and hope public good, papers, knowledge gets created.” 

And the venture fund is “Nope, this is the capitalistic endeavor to prove to people that if you smartly choose the right solutions, you can make money and fund the low-carbon economy.” That is the bet we’re making.

Given your recent job leading tech and AI efforts at Meta, I’m curious about your thinking about the potential tension between AI energy consumption that’s very much in the news right now and clean energy and climate goals. What do you think companies will need to do to stay on track with their own climate commitments as data centers’ energy demands rise?

Two thoughts on this.

AI is a foundational technology that can enable a lot of benefits for us moving forward. Part of why I still have an affiliation with Meta is because a lot of the work I do there is on Llama, our open-source model, which is allowing that technology to be used by lots of different people in the industry. 

I think foundational technology being open is one of the ways in which humanity moves forward faster and gets more people into prosperity, which is what I care about. 

In terms of energy consumption, I start with let’s get AI as fast as we can, because I think it is good. 

In my time at Meta, we many, many times had multiple-orders-of-magnitude improvements in efficiency or power use. 

So I think the industry right now is trying to build the best thing they can, and that consumes a lot of power and energy. I think if we get to a point where that’s a huge problem and we need to really optimize it from an efficiency standpoint, there are a lot of levers to pull there.

Schroepfer also spoke with MIT Technology Review’s James Temple about his climate philanthropy and investments during the ClimateTech conference last year. You can now watch the full interview above.

And AI or no AI, if you want to electrify everything and remove all fossil fuels, we just have a tremendous amount of clean energy we need to bring on the grid, right? That problem exists whether you have AI or not. So I think it’s a little bit of an over-highlighted sideshow to the real game, which is: How do we get tens of gigawatts of clean energy onto the grid as fast as possible every year? How do we get more solar, more wind, more storage? Can we bring fusion online?

To me, these are the humanitarian game-changers; it is the sort of unlock for a lot of other things.

I hate to get political here, but in light of these recent Supreme Court decisions about federal agency powers, I am curious what you think a Trump win in November might mean for climate and clean energy progress.

The short answer is, I’m not sure. 

Okay, then maybe it’s the same answer to my next question, which is: What do you think it might mean for financial opportunities in the sector, to the degree that Trump has said he would try to roll back Inflation Reduction Act incentives for EVs and other things? Do you think it could weaken the case for private investment into some of these areas?

This goes back to when you asked, What do we believe? What do we invest in? 

Basically, it has to start with the business case: My product is better or cheaper. I think that investment case is durable regardless. I think these things like the IRA can accelerate things and make things easier, but if you remove them, I don’t think that eliminates the fundamental advantages some of these technologies have. 

The exciting thing about this world is that an electric powertrain on a vehicle is fundamentally much more efficient than a gas power train—like 3 to 4X more efficient. So I should be able to build a product that is very cost advantaged to these petrol-burning things. There’s a bunch of issues with the scale and customer adoption and things like that, but the fundamentals are in my favor. 

And I think we see this trend happening in a lot of things. Solar is the cheapest form of energy generation we’ve ever had, and that’s going to continue as we massively increase manufacturing capacity. Batteries have gone down an unbelievable cost curve. And each year, we’re making more batteries than we’ve ever made before.

One of my favorite things is Wright’s Law: this idea that as you double the scale of your production, you generally see a decrease in cost. It varies from product to product, but for batteries, it’s about 20% or so every time we double the production.

If my product gets cheaper by about 5% to 10% a year, at some point I’m gonna win. Those trends are freight trains that are going down the hill and are pretty hard to stop.

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Jul 27 2024
The race to clean up heavy-duty trucks

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

Truckers have to transport massive loads long distances, every single day, under intense time pressure—and they rely on the semi-trucks they drive to get the job done. Their diesel engines spew not only greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, but also nitrogen oxide, which can be extremely harmful for human health.

Cleaning up trucking, especially the biggest trucks, presents a massive challenge. That’s why some companies are trying to ease the industry into change. For my most recent story, I took a look at Range Energy, a startup that’s adding batteries to the trailers of semi-trucks. If the electrified trailers are attached to diesel trucks, they can improve the fuel economy. If they’re added to zero-emissions vehicles powered by batteries or hydrogen, they could boost range and efficiency. 

During my reporting, I learned more about what’s holding back progress in trucking and how experts are thinking about a few different technologies that could help.

The entire transportation sector is slowly shifting toward electrification: EVs are hitting the road in increasing numbers, making up 18% of sales of new passenger vehicles in 2023. 

Trucks may very well follow suit—nearly 350 models of zero-emissions medium- and heavy-duty trucks are already available worldwide, according to data from CALSTART. “I do see a lot of strength and demand in the battery electric space in particular,” says Stephanie Ly, senior manager for e-mobility strategy and manufacturing engagement at the World Resources Institute.

But battery-powered trucks will pose a few major challenges as they take to the roads. First, and perhaps most crucially, is their cost. Battery-powered trucks, especially big models like semi-trucks, will be significantly more expensive than diesel versions today.

There may be good news on this front: When you consider the cost of refueling and maintenance, it’s looking like electric trucks could soon compete with diesel. By 2030, the total cost of ownership of a battery electric long-haul truck will likely be lower than that of a diesel one in the US, according to a 2023 report from the International Council on Clean Transportation. The report looked at a number of states including California, Georgia, and New York, and found that the relatively high upfront cost for electric trucks are balanced out by lower operating expenses. 

Another significant challenge for battery-powered trucking is weight: The larger the vehicle, the bigger the battery. That could be a problem given current regulations, which typically limit the weight of a rig both for safety reasons and to prevent wear and tear on roads (in the US, it’s 80,000 pounds). Operators tend to want to maximize the amount of goods they can carry in each load, so the added weight of a battery might not be welcome.

Finally, there’s the question of how far trucks can go, and how often they’ll need to stop. Time is money for truck drivers and fleet operators. Batteries will need to pack more energy into a smaller space so that trucks can have a long enough range to run their routes. Charging is another huge piece here—if drivers do need to stop to charge their trucks, they’ll need much more powerful chargers to enable them to top off quickly. That could present challenges for the grid, and operators might need to upgrade infrastructure in certain places to allow the huge amounts of power that would be needed for fast charging of massive batteries. 

All these challenges for battery electric trucks add up. “What companies are really looking for is something they can swap out,” says Thomas Walker, transportation technology manager at the Clean Air Task Force. And right now, he says, we’re just not quite in a spot where batteries are a clean and obvious switch.

That’s why some experts say we should keep our options open when it comes to technologies for future heavy-duty trucks, and that includes hydrogen. 

Batteries are currently beating out hydrogen in the race to clean up transportation, as I covered in a story earlier this year. For most vehicles and most people, batteries simply make more sense than hydrogen, for reasons that include everything from available infrastructure to fueling cost. 

But heavy-duty trucks are a different beast: Heavier vehicles, bigger batteries, higher power charging, and longer distances might tip the balance in favor of hydrogen. (There are some big “ifs” here, including whether hydrogen prices will get low enough to make hydrogen-powered vehicles economical.) 

For a sector as tough to decarbonize as heavy-duty trucking, we need all the help we can get. As Walker puts it, “It’s key that you start off with a lot of options and then narrow it down, rather than trying to pick which one’s going to win, because we really don’t know.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

To learn more about Range Energy and how its electrified trailers could help transform trucking in the near future, check out my latest story here. 

Hydrogen is losing the race to power cleaner cars, but heavy-duty trucks might represent a glimmer of hope for the technology. Dig into why in my story from earlier this year. 

Getting the grid ready for fleets of electric trucks is going to be a big challenge. But for some short-distance vehicles in certain areas, we may actually be good to go already, as I reported in 2021. 

Urban Sky Microballoon pictured shortly after deployment near Breckenridge, Colorado.
COURTESY URBAN SKY

Two more things

Spotting wildfires early and keeping track of them can be tough. Now one company wants to monitor blazes using high-altitude balloons. Next month in Colorado, Urban Sky is deploying balloons that are about as big as vans, and they’ll be keeping watch using much finer resolution than what’s possible with satellites without a human pilot. Read more about fire-tracking balloons in this story from Sarah Scoles. 

A new forecasting model attempts to marry conventional techniques with AI to better predict the weather. The model from Google uses physics to work out larger atmospheric forces, then tags in AI for the smaller stuff. Check out the details in the latest from my colleague James O’Donnell. 

Keeping up with climate  

Small rocky nodules in the deep sea might be a previously undiscovered source of oxygen. They contain metals such as lithium and are a potential target for deep-sea mining efforts. (Nature)

→ Polymetallic nodules are roughly the size and shape of potatoes, and they may be the future of mining for renewable energy. (MIT Technology Review)

A 350-foot-long blade from a wind turbine off the coast of Massachusetts broke off last week, and hunks of fiberglass have been washing up on local beaches. The incident is a setback for a struggling offshore wind industry, and we’re still not entirely sure what happened. (Heatmap News)

A new report shows that low-emissions steel- and iron-making processes are on the rise. But coal-powered operations are still growing too, threatening progress in the industry. (Canary Media)

Sunday, July 21, was likely the world’s hottest day in recorded history (so far). It edged out a record set just last year. (The Guardian)

Plastic forks, cups, and single-use packages are sometimes stamped with nice-sounding labels like “compostable,” “biodegradable,” or just “Earth-friendly.” But that doesn’t mean you can stick the items in your backyard compost pile—these marketing terms are basically the Wild West. (Washington Post)

While EVs are indisputably better than gas-powered cars in terms of climate emissions, they are heavier, meaning they wear through tires faster. The resulting particulate pollution presents a new challenge, one a startup company is trying to address with new tires designed for electric vehicles. (Canary Media)

Public fast chargers are popping up nearly everywhere in the US—at this pace, they’ll outnumber gas stations by 2030. And deployment is only expected to speed up. (Bloomberg)

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Jul 26 2024
Beer, hydrogen, and heat: Why the US is still trying to make mirror-magnified solar energy work

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.

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Jul 21 2024
Balloons will surf wind currents to track wildfires

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.

Pass Fire (New Mexico) 3.5m Infrared Sample from Urban Sky Microballoon.
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 infrared sensor 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. 

An Urban Sky Microballoon pictured shortly after launch near Greeley, CO.

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.”

Sarah Scoles is a Colorado-based science journalist and the author, most recently, of the book Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons.

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Jul 19 2024
Google, Amazon and the problem with Big Tech’s climate claims

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, numerous studies and investigative stories 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.

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Jul 19 2024
Five ways to make music streaming better for the climate

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. 

What’s your relationship with music streaming? Tell me more about it at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

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.

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