Methane emissions in the US are worse than scientists previously estimated, a new study has found.
The study, published today in Nature, represents one of the most comprehensive surveys yet of methane emissions from US oil- and gas-producing regions. Using measurements taken from planes, the researchers found that emissions from many of the targeted areas were significantly higher than government estimates had found. The undercounting highlights the urgent need for new and better ways of tracking the powerful greenhouse gas.
Methane emissions are responsible for nearly a third of the total warming the planet has experienced so far. While there are natural sources of the greenhouse gas, including wetlands, human activities like agriculture and fossil-fuel production have dumped millions of metric tons of additional methane into the atmosphere. The concentration of methane has more than doubled over the past 200 years. But there are still large uncertainties about where, exactly, emissions are coming from.
Answering these questions is a challenging but crucial first step to cutting emissions and addressing climate change. To do so, researchers are using tools ranging from satellites like the recently launched MethaneSAT to ground and aerial surveys.
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that roughly 1% of oil and gas produced winds up leaking into the atmosphere as methane pollution. But survey after survey has suggested that the official numbers underestimate the true extent of the methane problem.
For the sites examined in the new study, “methane emissions appear to be higher than government estimates, on average,” says Evan Sherwin, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who conducted the analysis as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University.
The data Sherwin used comes from one of the largest surveys of US fossil-fuel production sites to date. Starting in 2018, Kairos Aerospace and the Carbon Mapper Project mapped six major oil- and gas-producing regions, which together account for about 50% of onshore oil production and about 30% of gas production. Planes flying overhead gathered nearly 1 million measurements of well sites using spectrometers, which can detect methane using specific wavelengths of light.
Sherwin et al., Nature
Here’s where things get complicated. Methane sources in oil and gas production come in all shapes and sizes. Some small wells slowly leak the gas at a rate of roughly one kilogram of methane an hour. Other sources are significantly bigger, emitting hundreds or even thousands of kilograms per hour, but these leaks may last for only a short period.
The planes used in these surveys detect mostly the largest leaks, above roughly 100 kilograms per hour (though they catch smaller ones sometimes, down to around one-tenth that size, Sherwin says). Combining measurements of these large leak sites with modeling to estimate smaller sources, researchers estimated that the larger leaks account for an outsize proportion of emissions. In many cases, around 1% of well sites can make up over half the total methane emissions, Sherwin says.
But some scientists say that this and other studies are still limited by the measurement tools available. “This is an indication of the current technology limits,” says Ritesh Gautam, a lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
Because the researchers used aerial measurements to detect large methane leaks and modeled smaller sources, it’s possible that the study may be overestimating the importance of the larger leaks, Gautam says. He pointed to several other recent studies, which found that smaller wells contribute a larger fraction of methane emissions.
The problem is, it’s basically impossible to use just one instrument to measure all these different methane sources. We’ll need all the measurement technologies available to get a clearer picture, Gautam explains.
Ground-based tools attached to towers can keep constant watch over an area and detect small emissions sources, though they generally can’t survey large regions. Aerial surveys using planes can cover more ground but tend to detect only larger leaks. They also represent a snapshot in time, so they can miss sources that only leak methane for periods.
And then there are the satellites. Earlier this month, Google and EDF launched MethaneSAT, which joined the growing constellation of methane-detecting satellites orbiting the planet. Some of the existing satellites map huge areas, getting detail only on the order of kilometers. Others have much higher resolution, with the ability to pin methane emissions down to within a few dozen meters.
Satellites will be especially helpful in finding out more about the many countries around the world that haven’t been as closely measured and mapped as the US has, Gautham says.
Understanding methane emissions is one thing; actually addressing them is another matter. After identifying a leak, companies then need to take actions like patching faulty pipelines or other equipment, or closing up the vents and flares that routinely release methane into the atmosphere. Roughly 40% of methane emissions from oil and gas production have no net cost, since the money saved by not losing the methane is more than enough to cover the cost of the abatement, according to estimates from the International Energy Agency.
Over 100 countries joined the Global Methane Pledge in 2021, taking on a goal of cutting methane emissions 30% from 2020 levels by the end of the decade. New rules for oil and gas producers announced by the Biden administration could help the US meet those targets. Earlier this year, the EPA released details of a proposed methane fee for fossil-fuel companies, to be calculated on the basis of excess methane released into the atmosphere.
While researchers are slowly getting a better picture of methane emissions, addressing them will be a challenge, as Sherwin notes: “There’s a long way to go.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Hydropower is a staple of clean energy—the modern version has been around for over a century, and it’s one of the world’s largest sources of renewable electricity.
But last year, weather conditions caused hydropower to fall short in a major way, with generation dropping by a record amount. In fact, the decrease was significant enough to have a measurable effect on global emissions. Total energy-related emissions rose by about 1.1% in 2023, and a shortfall of hydroelectric power accounts for 40% of that rise, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency.
Between year-to-year weather variability and climate change, there could be rocky times ahead for hydropower. Here’s what we can expect from the power source and what it might mean for climate goals.
Drying up
Hydroelectric power plants use moving water to generate electricity. The majority of plants today use dams to hold back water, creating reservoirs. Operators can allow water to flow through the power plant as needed, creating an energy source that can be turned on and off on demand.
This dispatchability is a godsend for the grid, especially because some renewables, like wind and solar, aren’t quite so easy to control. (If anyone figures out how to send more sunshine my way, please let me know—I could use more of it.)
But while most hydroelectric plants do have some level of dispatchability, the power source is still reliant on the weather, since rain and snow are generally what fills up reservoirs. That’s been a problem for the past few years, when many regions around the world have faced major droughts.
The world actually added about 20 gigawatts of hydropower capacity in 2023, but because of weather conditions, the amount of electricity generated from hydropower fell overall.
The shortfall was especially bad in China, with generation falling by 4.9% there. North America also faced droughts that contributed to hydro’s troubles, partly because El Niño brought warmer and drier conditions. Europe was one of the few places where conditions improved in 2023—mostly because 2022 was an even worse year for drought on the continent.
As hydroelectric plants fell short, fossil fuels like coal and natural gas stepped in to fill the gap, contributing to a rise in global emissions. In total, changes in hydropower output had more of an effect on global emissions than the post-pandemic aviation industry’s growth from 2022 to 2023.
A trickle
Some of the changes in the weather that caused falling hydropower output last year can be chalked up to expected yearly variation. But in a changing climate, a question looms: Is hydropower in trouble?
The effects of climate change on rainfall patterns can be complicated and not entirely clear. But there are a few key mechanisms by which hydropower is likely to be affected, as one 2022 review paper outlined:
Rising temperatures will mean more droughts, since warmer air sucks up more moisture, causing rivers, soil, and plants to dry out more quickly.
Winters will generally be warmer, meaning less snowpack and ice, which often fills up reservoirs in the early spring in places like the western US.
There’s going to be more variability in precipitation, with periods of more extreme rainfall that can cause flooding (meaning water isn’t stored neatly in reservoirs for later use in a power plant).
What all this will mean for electricity generation depends on the region of the world in question. One global study from 2021 found that around half of countries with hydropower capacity could expect to see a 20% reduction in generation once per decade. Another report focused on China found that in more extreme emissions scenarios, nearly a quarter of power plants in the country could see that level of reduced generation consistently.
It’s not likely that hydropower will slow to a mere trickle, even during dry years. But the grid of the future will need to be prepared for variations in the weather. Having a wide range of electricity sources and tying them together with transmission infrastructure over wide geographic areas will help keep the grid robust and ready for our changing climate.
Chinese EVs have entered center stage in the ongoing tensions between the US and China. The vehicles could help address climate change, but the Biden administration is wary of allowing them into the market. There are two major motivations: security and the economy. Read more in my colleague Zeyi Yang’s latest newsletter here.
Keeping up with climate
A new satellite that launched this week will be keeping an eye on methane emissions. Tracking leaks of the powerful greenhouse gas could be key in addressing climate change. (New York Times)
→ This isn’t our first attempt at tracking greenhouse gases from space—but here’s how MethaneSAT is different from other methane-detecting satellites. (Heatmap)
Smarter charging of EVs could be essential to the grid of the future, and California is working on a new program to test it out. (Canary Media)
The magnets that power wind turbines nearly always wind up in a landfill. A new program aims to change that by supporting new methods of recycling. (Grist)
→ One company wants to do without the rare earth metals that are used in today’s powerful magnets. (MIT Technology Review)
Data centers burn through water to keep machinery cool. As more of the facilities pop up, in part to support AI tools like ChatGPT, they could stretch water supplies thin in some places. (The Atlantic)
No US state has been more enthusiastic about heat pumps than Maine. While it might seem an unlikely match—the appliances can lose some of their efficiency in the cold—the state is a success story for the technology. (New York Times)
New rules from the US Securities and Exchange Commission would require companies to report their emissions and expected climate risks. The final version is watered down from an earlier proposal, which would have included a wider variety of emissions. (Associated Press)
This week, the US Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a set of long-awaited climate rules, requiring most publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse-gas emissions and the climate risks building up on their balance sheets.
Unfortunately, the federal agency watered down the regulations amid intense lobbying from business interests, undermining their ultimate effectiveness—and missing the best shot the US may have for some time at forcing companies to reckon with the rising dangers of a warming world.
These new regulations were driven by the growing realization that climate risks are financial risks. Global corporations now face climate-related supply chain disruptions. Their physical assets are vulnerable to storms, their workers will be exposed to extreme heat events, and some of their customers may be forced to relocate. There are fossil-fuel assets on their balance sheets that they may never be able to sell, and their business models will be challenged by a rapidly changing planet.
These are not just coal and oil companies. They are utilities, transportation companies, material producers, consumer product companies, even food companies. And investors—you, me, your aunt’s pension—are buying and holding these fossilized stocks, often unknowingly.
Investors, policymakers, and the general public all need clearer, better information on how businesses are accelerating climate change, what they are doing to address those impacts, and what the cascading effects could mean for their bottom line.
The new SEC rules formalize and mandate what has essentially been a voluntary system of corporate carbon governance, now requiring corporations to report how climate-related risks may affect their business.
They also must disclose their “direct emissions” from sources they own or control, as well as their indirect emissions from the generation of “purchased energy,” which generally means their use of electricity and heat.
But crucially, companies will have to do so only when they determine that the information is financially “material,” providing companies considerable latitude over whether they do or don’t provide those details.
The original draft of the SEC rules would have also required corporations to report emissions from “upstream and downstream activities” in their value chains. That generally refers to the associated emissions from their suppliers and customers, which can often make up 80% of a company’s total climate pollution.
The loss of that requirement and the addition of the “materiality” standard both seem attributable to intense pressure from business groups.
To be sure, these rules should help make it clearer how some companies are grappling with climate change and their contributions to it. Out of legal caution, plenty of businesses are likely to determine that emissions are material.
And clearer information will help accelerate corporate climate action as firms concerned about their reputation increasingly feel pressure from customers, competitors, and some investors to reduce their emissions.
But the SEC could and should have gone much further.
After all, the EU’s similar policies are much more comprehensive and stringent. California’s emissions disclosure law, signed this past October, goes further still, requiring both public and private corporations with revenues over $1 billion to report every category of emissions, and then to have this data audited by a third party.
Unfortunately, the SEC rules merely move corporations to the starting line of the process required to decarbonize the economy, at a time when they should already be deep into the race. We know these rules don’t go far enough, because firms already following similar voluntary protocols have shown minimal progress in reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.
The disclosure system upon which the SEC rules are based faces two underlying problems that have limited how much and how effectively any carbon accounting and reporting can be put to use.
First: problems with the data itself. The SEC rules grant firms significant latitude in carbon accounting, allowing them to set different boundaries for their “carbon footprint,” model and measure emissions differently, and even vary how they report their emissions. In aggregate, what we will end up with are corporate reports of the previous year’s partial emissions, without any way to know what a company actually did to reduce its carbon pollution.
Second: limitations in how stakeholders can use this data. As we’ve seen with voluntary corporate climate commitments, the wide variations in reporting make it impossible to compare firms accurately. Or as the New Climate Institute argues, “The rapid acceleration in the volume of corporate climate pledges, combined with the fragmentation of approaches and the general lack of regulation or oversight, means that it is more difficult than ever to distinguish between real climate leadership and unsubstantiated greenwashing.”
Investor efforts to evaluate carbon emissions, decarbonization plans, and climate risks through ESG (environmental, social, and governance) rating schemes have merely produced what some academics call “aggregate confusion.” And corporations have faced few penalties for failing to clearly disclose emissions or even meet their own standards.
All of which is to say that a new set of SEC carbon accounting and reporting rules that largely replicate the problems with voluntary corporate action, by failing to require consistent and actionable disclosures, isn’t going to drive the changes we need, at the speed we need.
Companies, investors, and the public require rules that drive changes inside companies and that can be properly assessed from outside them.
This system needs to track the main sources of corporate emissions and incentivize companies to make real investments in efforts to achieve deep emissions cuts, both within the company and across its supply chain.
The good news is that even though the rules in place are limited and flawed, regulators, regions, and companies themselves can build upon them to move toward more meaningful climate action.
The smartest firms and investors are already going beyond the SEC regulations. They’re developing better systems to track the drivers and costs of carbon emissions, and taking concrete steps to address them: reducing fuel use, building energy-efficient infrastructure, and adopting lower-carbon materials, products, and processes.
It is now just good business to look for carbon reductions that actually save money.
The SEC has taken an important, albeit flawed, first step in nudging our financial laws to recognize climate impacts and risks. But regulators and corporations need to pick up the pace from here, ensuring that they’re providing a clear picture of how quickly or slowly companies are moving as they take the steps and make the investments needed to thrive in a transitioning economy—and on an increasingly risky planet.
Dara O’Rourke is an associate professor and co-director of the master of climate solutions program at the University of California, Berkeley.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
There’s a looming problem in the carbon removal space.
By one count, nearly 800 companies around the world are exploring a wide variety of methods for drawing planet-warming greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and storing it away or putting it to use, a gigantic leap from the five startups I could have named in 2019. Globally, venture investors poured more than $4 billion into this sector between 2020 and the end of last year, according to data provided by PitchBook.
The trouble is, carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is a very expensive product that, strictly speaking, no one needs right now. It’s not a widget; it’s waste management for invisible garbage, a public good that nobody is eager to pay for.
“CDR is a pure cost, and we’re trying to force it to be something that’s profitable—and the only way you can do that is with public money or through voluntary markets,” says Emily Grubert, an associate professor at Notre Dame, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary in the US Energy Department’s Office of Carbon Management.
Both of those are playing a part to certain degrees. So far, the main markets for carbon removal come from government procurement, which is limited; government subsidies, which don’t cover the cost; and voluntary purchases by corporations and individuals, which are restricted to those willing to pay the true cost of high-quality, reliable removal. You can also use the CO2 as a feedstock in other products, but then you’re generally starting with a high-cost version of a cheap commodity.
Given these market challenges, some investors are scratching their heads as they witness the huge sums flowing into the space.
In a report last summer, the venture capital firm DCVC said that all of the approaches it evaluated faced “multiple feasibility constraints.” It noted that carbon-sucking direct-air-capture factories are particularly expensive, charging customers hundreds of dollars per ton.
“That will still likely be the case in five, seven, even 10 years—which is why we at DCVC are somewhat surprised to see hundreds of millions of dollars in capital flowing into early-stage direct air capture companies,” the authors wrote.
Rachel Slaybaugh, a DCVC partner, said of direct-air capture in the report: “I’m not saying we won’t need it. And I’m not saying there won’t eventually be good businesses here. I’m saying right now the markets are very nascent, and I don’t see how you can possibly make a venture return.”
In background conversations, several industry insiders I’ve spoken with acknowledge that the number of carbon removal companies is simply unsustainable, and that a sizable share will flame out at some point.
The sector has taken off, in part, because a growing body of studies has found that a huge amount of carbon removal will be needed to keep rising temperatures in check. By some estimates, nations may have to remove 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year by midcentury to keep the planet from blowing past 2 °C of warming, or to pull it back into safer terrain.
On top of that, companies are looking for ways to meet their net-zero commitments. For now, some businesses are willing to pay the really high current costs for carbon removal, in part to help the sector scale up. These include Microsoft and companies participating in the $1 billion Frontier program.
At the moment, I’m told, corporate demand is outstripping the availability of reliable forms of carbon removal. There are only a handful of direct-air-capture plants, which take years to construct, and companies are still testing out or scaling up other approaches, like burying biochar and pumping bio-oil deep underground.
Costs are sure to come down, but it’s always going to be relatively expensive to do this well, and there are only so many corporate customers that will be willing to pay the true cost, observers say. So as carbon removal capacity catches up with that corporate demand, the fate of the industry will increasingly depend on how much more help governments are willing to provide—and on how thoughtfully they craft any accompanying rules.
Countries may support the emerging industry through carbon trading markets, direct purchases, mandates on polluters, fuel standards, or other measures.
It seems safe to assume that nations will continue to dangle more carrots or wield bigger sticks to help the sector along. Notably, the European Commission is developing a framework for certifying carbon dioxide removal, which could allow countries to eventually use various approaches to work toward the EU goal of climate neutrality by 2050. But it’s far from clear that such government support will grow as much and as quickly as investors hope or as entrepreneurs need.
Indeed, some observers argue it’s a “fantasy” that nations will ever fund high-quality carbon removal—on the scale of billions of tons a year—just because climate scientists said they should (see: our decades of inaction on climate change). To put it in perspective, the DCVC report notes that removing 100 billion tons at $100 a ton would add up to $10 trillion—“more than a tenth of global GDP.”
Growing financial pressures in the sector could play out in a variety of worrisome ways.
“One possibility is there’s a bubble and it pops and a lot of investors lose their shirts,” says Danny Cullenward, a climate economist and research fellow with the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University.
If so, that could shut down the development of otherwise promising carbon removal methods before we’ve learned how well and affordably they work (or not).
The other danger is that when an especially frothy sector fizzles, it can turn public or political sentiment against the space and kill the appetite for further investment. This, after all, is precisely what played out after the cleantech 1.0 bubble burst. Conservatives assailed government lending to green startups, and VCs, feeling burned, backed away for the better part of a decade.
But Cullenward fears another possibility even more. As funding runs dry, startups eager to bring in revenue and expand the market may resort to selling cheaper, but less reliable, forms of carbon removal—and lobbying for looser standards to allow them.
He sees a scenario where the sector replicates the sort of widespread credibility problems that have occurred with voluntary carbon offsets, building up big marketplaces that move a lot of money around but don’t achieve all that much for the atmosphere.
Now read the rest of The Spark
Related reading
In December, I highlighted an essay by Grubert and another former DOE staffer, in which they warned that sucking down greenhouse gas to cancel out corporate emissions could come at the expense of more pressing public needs.
In an earlier piece, I explored how the energy, attention, and money flowing into carbon removal could feed unrealistic expectations about how much we can rely on it—and thus how much we can carry on emitting.
In a story out today, Tech Review’s Casey Crownhart explains why hydrogen vehicles may be lurching toward a dead end, as vehicle sales stagnate and fueling stations shut down. (MIT Technology Review)
A Trump victory would be bad news for climate change. In particular, I took a hard look at what it might mean for Joe Biden’s landmark law, the Inflation Reduction Act. (Short answer: nothing good.) (MIT Technology Review)
The Inflation Reduction Act includes a little-known methane fee, which kicks into effect for excess emissions in 2024. Grist reports that the US’s largest oil and gas companies could be on the hook for more than $1 billion, based on recent emissions patterns—marking another reason why, as I reported, Trump would likely try to rescind the provision. (Grist)
The US Securities and Exchange Commission could release long-awaited climate rules as soon as next week, requiring companies to disclose their corporate emissions and exposure to climate risks. Heatmap explores why the SEC is doing this and what it may mean for businesses, climate progress, and the cottage industry forming to conduct emissions accounting. (Heatmap)
President Joe Biden’s crowning legislative achievement was enacting the Inflation Reduction Act, easily the nation’s largest investment into addressing the rising dangers of climate change.
Yet Donald Trump’s advisors and associates have clearly indicated that dismantling the landmark law would sit at the top of the Republican front-runner’s to-do list should he win the presidential election. If he succeeds, it could stall the nation’s shift to cleaner industries and stunt efforts to cut the greenhouse-gas pollution warming the planet.
The IRA unleashes at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for renewable energy sources, electric vehicles, batteries, heat pumps, and more. It is the “backbone” of the Biden administration’s plan to meet the nation’s commitments under the Paris climate agreement, putting the US on track to cut emissions by as much as 42% from 2005 levels by the end of this decade, according to the Rhodium Group, a research firm.
But the sprawling federal policy package marks the “biggest defeat” conservatives have suffered during Biden’s tenure, according to Myron Ebell, who led the Environmental Protection Agency transition team during Trump’s administration. And repealing the law has become an obsession among many conservatives, including the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, widely seen as a far-right road map for the early days of a second Trump administration.
The IRA’s tax credits for EVs and clean power projects appear especially vulnerable, climate policy experts say. Losing those provisions alone could reshape the nation’s emissions trajectory, potentially adding back hundreds of millions of metric tons of climate pollution this decade.
Moreover, Trump’s wide-ranging pledges to weaken international institutions, inflame global trade wars, and throw open the nation’s resources to fossil-fuel extraction could have compounding effects on any changes to the IRA, potentially undermining economic growth, the broader investment climate, and prospects for emerging green industries.
Farewell to EV tax credits
The IRA leverages government funds to accelerate the energy transition through a combination of direct grants and tax credits, which allow companies or individuals to cut their federal obligations in exchange for buying, installing, investing in, or producing cleaner power and products. It is enacted law, not a federal agency regulation or executive order, which means that any substantial changes would need to be achieved through Congress.
But the tax cuts for individuals pushed through during Trump’s time in office are set to expire next year. If he wins a second term, legislators seeking to extend those cuts could crack up the tax code and excise key components of the IRA, particularly if Republicans retain control of the House and pick up seats in the Senate. Eliminating any of those tax credits could help offset the added cost of restoring those Trump-era benefits.
Numerous policy observers believe that the pair of EV tax credits in the IRA, which together lop $7,500 off the cost of electric cars and trucks, would be one of the top targets. Subsidizing the cost of EVs polls terribly among Republicans, and throughout the primaries, most of the party’s candidates for president have fiercely attacked government support for the vehicles—none more than Trump himself.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event in Iowa.
SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
On the campaign trail, he has repeatedly, erroneously referred to the policy as a mandate rather than a subsidy, while geographically tailoring the critique to his audience.
At a December rally in Iowa, the nation’s biggest corn producer, he pledged to cancel “Crooked Joe Biden’s insane, ethanol-killing electric-vehicle mandate on day one.”
And in the battleground state of Michigan in September, he pandered to the fears of autoworkers.
“Crooked Joe is siding with the left-wing crazies who will destroy automobile manufacturing and will destroy the country itself,” Trump said. “The damn things don’t go far enough, and they’re too expensive.”
Other Trump targets
Other IRA components likely to fall into Trump’s crosshairs include tax credits for investing in or operating emissions-free power plants that would come online in 2025 or later, says Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington, DC.
These so-called technology-neutral credits are intended to replace earlier subsidies dedicated to renewables like solar and wind, encompassing a more expansive suite of energy-producing possibilities like nuclear, bioenergy, or power plants with carbon capture capabilities.
Those latter categories are more likely to have Republican support than, say, solar farms. But any policy primarily designed to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels would likely be a ripe target in a second Trump administration, given the industry’s support for the candidate and his ideological opposition to climate action.
A number of other provisions could also come under attack within the law. Among them:
additional measures supporting the growing adoption of EVs, including tax credits for individuals and businesses that install charging infrastructure;
fees on methane emissions from wells, processing plants, and pipelines, when they exceed certain thresholds;
a reinstated Superfund excise tax on crude oil and petroleum products, which could raise billions of dollars to fund the cleanup of hazardous-waste sites;
Observers are quick to note, however, that a wholesale repeal of the IRA is unlikely, because—well—it’s working.
By some accounts, the law has helped spur hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment into projects that could create nearly 200,000 jobs—and get this: eight of the 10 congressional districts set to receive the biggest clean-energy investments announced in recent quarters are led by Republicans, according to one analysis (and backed up by others).
A disproportionate amount of the money is also flowing into low-income areas and “energy communities,” or regions that previously produced fossil fuels, according to data from the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group.
As more and more renewables projects, mineral processing facilities, battery plants, and EV factories bring jobs and tax revenue to red states, the politics around clean energy are shifting, at least behind the scenes if not always in the public debate.
All of which means some sizable share of Republicans will likely push back on more sweeping changes to the IRA, particularly if they would raise the costs on businesses and reduce the odds that new projects will move forward, says Sasha Mackler, executive director of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, DC, think tank.
“Most of the tax credits are pretty popular within industry and in red states, which are generally the constituency that the Republican Party listens to when they shape their policies,” Mackler says. “When you start to go beyond the top-line political rhetoric and look at the actual tax credits themselves, they’re on much firmer ground than you might initially think just reading the newspaper and looking at what’s being said on the campaign trail.”
That means it might prove more difficult to rescind some of the hit-list items above than Trump would hope. And there are other big parts of the legislative package that Republicans might avoid picking fights over at all, such as the support for processing critical minerals, manufacturing batteries, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, and producing biofuels, given the broader support for these areas.
DC sources also say that clean-energy-focused policy shops and some climate tech companies themselves are already playing defense, stressing the importance of these policies to legislators in the run-up to the election. Meanwhile, if staffers at the Department of Energy and other federal agencies aren’t already rushing to get as much of the grant-based money in the IRA out the door as possible, they should be, says Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who advised Democrats on crafting the law.
Among other funds, the law appropriates nearly $12 billion for the DOE’s loans office, which provides financing to accelerate the development of clean-energy projects. It also sets aside $5 billion in EPA grants designed to help states, local governments, and tribes implement efforts to cut greenhouse-gas pollution.
“If DOE and EPA work fast enough, that money should be difficult to somehow claw back, because it will have been spent,” Stokes says.
Impact
Still, there’s no question that Trump and legislators eager to curry his favor could do real damage to the IRA and the clean-energy industries poised to benefit from it.
How much damage depends, of course, on what he succeeds in unraveling.
But take the example of the power sector subsidies. A study last year in the journal Science noted that with the IRA’s support for clean electricity, around 68% of the country’s power generation would come from low-emission sources by 2030, as opposed to 54% without the law.
The Rhodium Group estimates that the IRA could cut power-sector pollution by nearly 500 million tons in 2030, as a central estimate.
GETTY IMAGES
How much these projections change would depend on which and how many of the provisions supporting the shift to cleaner power legislators manage to remove. In addition to the technology-neutral credits noted above, the IRA also provides federal support for extending the life of nuclear plants, deploying energy storage, and adding carbon capture and storage capabilities.
Meanwhile, an earlier report from RMI (formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute) offered a hint at what’s at stake for the EV sector. The research group noted that the assorted provisions within the IRA, when combined with the EPA’s proposal to tighten tailpipe rules, could propel electric passenger vehicles to 76% of all new sales by 2030. Without it, they will only make up about half such sales by that point. (Notably, however, the Biden administration is now reportedly considering relaxing those rules to give automakers more time to ramp up EV production.)
All told, some 37 million additional EVs could hit the nation’s roads between now and 2032, eliminating more than 830 million tons of transportation emissions by that year and 2.4 billion tons by 2040, RMI estimates.
That adds up to a huge difference in the market prospects for EV makers, and in the economics of building new plants.
The loss of the EV credits could create another notable ripple effect. For a purchased vehicle to qualify for one of the $3,750 tax credits, at least 60% of the battery components must be manufactured or assembled in North America. The other credit is available only if the batteries include a significant share of critical minerals extracted or processed in the US or through free-trade partners, or recycled in North America.
The varied goals of these “domestic content requirements,” which helped drive the law past the legislative finish line, included ensuring that the US produces more of materials and components for cleantech industries domestically, creating more jobs, reducing the nation’s reliance on China, and safeguarding US energy security as the country moves away from fossil fuels.
Losing the tax credits could dim hopes for reaching those goals—though some critics argue that trade deals and IRS interpretations have already watered down the credits’ provisions, ensuring that more manufacturers and models qualify.
Trump’s broader agenda
Trump has made clear he intends to hamstring additional climate efforts and bolster the oil and gas sector through numerous other means, potentially including federal regulations, executive orders, and Department of Justice actions. All of these would only magnify any impact from changes he might make to the IRA.
If he wins in November, he’s also likely, for instance, to direct the EPA to eliminate those tailpipe rules altogether. He may work to slow down, cut off, or claw back some of the $7.5 billion allocated under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to build out a national EV charging network.
Trump could also remove and refuse to replace the staff necessary to implement and oversee programs and funding throughout the DOE, the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies. And he would very likely pull the US out of the Paris climate agreement again.
How much of this Trump accomplishes could depend, in part, on how emboldened he feels upon entering office for a second term, when he’d likely still be battling multiple criminal cases against him.
“It just depends if we assume he’s going to respect the law and color within the lines of our legal system, or if he’s going to be a fascist,” Stokes says. “That’s a huge question—and we should take it very seriously.”
The potentially chaotic economic and geopolitical effects of such policies, at a point of spiraling global conflicts, could easily dwarf any direct consequences of altering climate laws and regulations.
As Freed puts it: “A world that is less stable and much more dangerous, economically and militarily, would have incalculable damage on climate and energy issues in a second Trump term.”
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
For someone who does not own or drive a car, I sure do have a lot of thoughts about them.
I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about transportation in general, since it’s one of the biggest areas we need to clean up to address climate change: it accounts for something like a quarter of global emissions. And the vehicles that we use to shuttle around to work, school, and the grocery store in many parts of the world are a huge piece of the problem.
Last week, MIT Technology Review hosted an event where my colleagues and I dug into a conversation about the future of batteries and the materials that go into them. We got so many great questions, and we answered quite a few of them (subscribers should check out the recording of the full event here).
But there were still a lot of questions, particularly about EVs, that we didn’t get to, so let’s take a look at a few. (I’ve edited these for length and clarity, but they came from subscribers, so thank you to everyone who submitted!)
Why is there not a bigger push for plug-in hybrids during the transition to full EVs? Could those play a role?
Hybrids are sometimes relegated to the fringes of the EV discussion, but I think they’re absolutely worth talking about.
Before we get into this, let’s get a couple of terms straight. All hybrid vehicles use both an internal-combustion engine that burns gasoline and a battery, but there are two key types to know about. Plug-in hybrids can be charged up using an EV charger and run for short distances on electricity. Conventional hybrids have a small battery to help recapture energy that would otherwise be wasted, which boosts gas mileage, but they always run on gasoline.
Any technology that helps reduce emissions immediately can help address climate change, and even a conventional hybrid will cut emissions by something like 20%.
Personally, I think plug-in hybrids in particular are a great option for people who can’t commit to an EV just yet. These vehicles often have a range of around 50 miles on electricity, so if you’re commuting short distances, nearly all your driving can be zero-emissions.
Plug-ins aren’t the perfect solution, though. For one thing, the vehicles may have higher rates of problems than both EVs and gas-powered vehicles, and they need a bit more maintenance. And some studies have shown that plug-in hybrids don’t tend to get the full emissions benefits advertised, because people use the electric mode less than expected.
Ultimately, we need to stop burning fossil fuels, so we’ll need to get used to vehicles that run without gasoline at all. But in the meantime, dipping a toe into the world of electric vehicles could be a good option for many drivers.
Will current charging technology be able to support EVs? How practical is it to bring chargers to remote areas of the country?
These questions hit on one of the biggest potential barriers to EV adoption: charging availability.
In many parts of the world, there’s a massive need to build more chargers to support the EVs already on the road, not to mention all the new ones being built and sold each year. Some agencies have recommended that there should be one public charger for every 10 EVs on the road, though factors like density and rates of at-home charging mean different communities will have different needs.
The US had about 24 EVs per charger as of the end of 2022, while the EU is at about 13, and China is among the leading nations with around eight. Improving that ratio is crucial to getting more drivers comfortable with EVs.
But building out the charging network is a big project, and one that looks different for different communities. In dense cities, many people live in apartments as opposed to single-family homes with garages, so even more public chargers will be needed to make up for the lack of at-home charging. For rural communities, or those that are less wealthy, getting any chargers built at all can be a challenge.
These so-called charging deserts often suffer from a sort of chicken-and-egg problem: there’s a lack of demand for chargers because people aren’t driving EVs, and people aren’t driving EVs because there are no chargers.
Public funding will be key to filling in gaps left by private companies installing charging networks. In the US, some money is tied to making sure that disadvantaged communities will benefit.
The bottom line is that it’s possible to make chargers available and equitable, but it’s definitely going to take a while, and it’s going to be expensive.
What about hydrogen—could that be an alternative to batteries?
I’ve been digging into this question, so stay tuned for a story coming very soon. But I’ll give you a sneak peek: the short answer is that I think there are many reasons to be skeptical of claims that hydrogen will swoop in to save the day for vehicles.
A small number of vehicles on the road today do use hydrogen as a fuel. The Toyota Mirai is one of the most popular fuel-cell models on the market, though only a few thousand were sold last year.
The big draw is that fueling up such a car looks a lot like fueling up a gas-powered vehicle today, taking just a few minutes at a pump. Even the fastest chargers can take around half an hour to juice up an EV, so hydrogen refueling is generally faster and more convenient.
But for a range of reasons, hydrogen vehicles are more expensive both to buy and to drive, and they’re likely to stay that way. There are better uses for hydrogen, too, in heavy industry and fertilizer and even long-range shipping. So EVs are probably going to be our best option for a long while.
I hope I’ve piqued your interest—look out for a longer story on this topic soon. In the meantime, check out some of our other transportation coverage.
Related reading
We put electric vehicles on our 2023 list of breakthrough technologies—see why here.
The EV revolution is happening faster in China than anywhere else in the world. So it’s no wonder that the country is also a center for the world of virtual power plants, which pull together energy resources like EV batteries. Read more about why China needs VPPs in my colleague Zeyi Yang’s latest story.
Keeping up with climate
Plastic is really difficult to recycle. A new report shows that some companies knew just how extensive the challenges are and obscured the truth for decades. (The Guardian)
The EU is finalizing rules around pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. The certification will favor techniques that work over long time scales and can be measured effectively. (The Verge)
EVs can run into trouble in extreme heat and cold. New materials, especially advancements in a part of the battery called the electrolyte, could help EVs last longer and stand up to tough conditions. (Scientific American)
A growing group of companies wants to enlist the earth to help store energy. Sage Geosystems just raised $17 million for geothermal energy storage. (Canary Media)
→ Fervo Energy demonstrated that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)
Restringing power lines could be key in supercharging clean energy. The process can be quicker and cheaper than building new transmission lines, as long as red tape doesn’t get in the way. (Heatmap News)
Farmers are getting better at growing more crops faster on less land. The problem is, the benefits are focused on plants going into cars and cows, not people. (Wired)
There was something strange about the way the sharks were moving between the islands of the Bahamas.
Tiger sharks tend to hug the shoreline, explains marine biologist Austin Gallagher, but when he began tagging the 1,000-pound animals with satellite transmitters in 2016, he discovered that these predators turned away from it, toward two ancient underwater hills made of sand and coral fragments that stretch out 300 miles toward Cuba. They were spending a lot of time “crisscrossing, making highly tortuous, convoluted movements” to be near them, Gallagher says.
It wasn’t immediately clear what attracted sharks to the area: while satellite images clearly showed the subsea terrain, they didn’t pick up anything out of the ordinary. It was only when Gallagher and his colleagues attached 360-degree cameras to the animals that they were able to confirm what they were so drawn to: vast, previously unseen seagrass meadows—a biodiverse habitat that offered a smorgasbord of prey.
The discovery did more than solve a minor mystery of animal behavior. Using the data they gathered from the sharks, the researchers were able to map an expanse of seagrass stretching across 93,000 square kilometers of Caribbean seabed—extending the total known global seagrass coverage by more than 40%, according to a study Gallagher’s team published in 2022. This revelation could have huge implications for efforts to protect threatened marine ecosystems—seagrass meadows are a nursery for one-fifth of key fish stocks and habitats for endangered marine species—and also for all of us above the waves, as seagrasses can capture carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests.
Animals have long been able to offer unique insights about the natural world around us, acting as organic sensors picking up phenomena that remain invisible to humans. More than 100 years ago, leeches signaled storms ahead by slithering out of the water; canaries warned of looming catastrophe in coal mines until the 1980s; and mollusks that close when exposed to toxic substances are still used to trigger alarms in municipal water systems in Minneapolis and Poland.
Attaching 360-degree cameras to tiger sharks helped demystify the
animals’ strange movements around the Bahamas.
COURTESY OF BENEATH THE WAVES
These days, we have more insight into animal behavior than ever before thanks to sensor tags, which have helped researchers answer key questions about globe-spanning migrations and the sometimes hard-to-reach places animals visit along the way. In turn, tagged animals have increasingly become partners in scientific discovery and planetary monitoring.
But the data we gather from these animals still adds up to only a relatively narrow slice of the whole picture. Results are often confined to silos, and for many years tags were big and expensive, suitable only for a handful of animal species—like tiger sharks—that are powerful (or large) enough to transport them.
This is beginning to change. Researchers are asking: What will we find if we follow even the smallest animals? What if we could monitor a sample of all the world’s wildlife to see how different species’ lives intersect? What could we learn from a big-data system of animal movement, continuously monitoring how creatures big and small adapt to the world around us? It may be, some researchers believe, a vital tool in the effort to save our increasingly crisis-plagued planet.
Wearables for the wild
Just a few years ago, a project called ICARUS seemed ready to start answering the big questions about animal movement.
A team led by Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in southern Germany and a pioneer in the field, launched a new generation of affordable and lightweight GPS sensors that could be worn by animals as small as songbirds, fish, and rodents.
Martin Wikelski envisions a big-data system that monitors animal behavior to help us better understand the environment.
CHRISTIAN ZIEGLER/MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR ORNITHOLOGY
These Fitbits for wild creatures, to use Wikelski’s analogy, could produce live location data accurate to a few meters and simultaneously allow scientists to monitor animals’ heart rates, body heat, and sudden movements, plus the temperature, humidity, and air pressure in their surroundings. The signals they transmitted would be received by a three-meter antenna affixed to the International Space Station—the result of a €50 million investment from the German Aerospace Centre and the Russian Space Agency—and beamed down to a data bank on Earth, producing a map of the animals’ paths in close to real time as they crisscrossed the globe.
Wikelski and his peers hoped the project, formally the International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space, would provide insights about a much wider variety of animals than they’d previously been able to track. It also aimed to show proof of concept for Wikelski’s dream of the past several decades: the Internet of Animals—a big-data system that monitors and analyzes animal behavior to help us understand the planet and predict the future of the environment.
Researchers have been laying the groundwork for years, connecting disparate data sets on animal movement, the environment, and weather and analyzing them with the help of AI and automated analytics. But Wikelski had his sights on something even grander and more comprehensive: a dashboard in which 100,000 sensor-tagged animals could be simultaneously monitored as near-real-time data flowed in from Earth-imaging satellites and ground-based sources.
By bringing together each of these snapshots of animals’ lives, we might begin to understand the forces that are shaping life across the planet. The project had the potential to help us better understand and conserve the world’s most vulnerable species, showing how animals are responding to the challenges of climate change and ecosystem loss. It also promised another way to monitor the Earth itself during a period of increasing instability, transforming our animal co-inhabitants into sentinels of a changing world.
When ICARUS first went into space in 2018, it was widely celebrated in the press. Yet what should have been a moment of glory for Wikelski and the field of animal ecology instead became a test of his will. The ICARUS antenna first went down for a year because of a technical issue; it went back up but was only just out of testing in February 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted the project altogether.
Wikelski and his peers, though, have used the time since to innovate and evangelize. They now envision a more complete and technologically advanced version of the Internet of Animals than the one they hoped to build even just a few years ago, thanks to innovations in tracking technologies and AI and satellite systems. They have made even smaller and cheaper sensors and found a new, more affordable way to work in space with microsatellites called CubeSats. Their efforts have even gotten NASA to invest its time and resources into the possibility of building the Internet of Animals.
Now Wikelski and his collaborators are again on the verge, with an experimental CubeSat successfully transmitting data as part of a testing phase that started last June. If all goes as planned, another fully operational ICARUS CubeSat will begin collecting data next year, with more launches to follow.
The potential benefits of this system are extraordinary and still not yet fully understood, says Scott Yanco, a researcher in movement ecology at the University of Michigan. Perhaps it could help prevent mountain lion attacks or warn about a zoonotic disease about to make a jump to humans. It could alert researchers of behavioral changes that seem to happen in some animals before earthquakes, a phenomenon Wikelski has studied, and determine what conditions tell boobies in the Indo-Pacific to lay fewer eggs in years before strong El Niños or signal to weaver birds in the Niger Delta to build their nests higher up before floods.
“You can talk to 100 scientists about this,” Yanco says, “and they’re all going to give you a different answer of what they’re interested in.”
But first, a lot still needs to go right.
Animals as sentinels
When I first spoke with Wikelski, in early 2022, ICARUS was live, tracking 46 species from the ISS 400 kilometers overhead. Wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses and speaking in a German accent with a tone of unfailing urgency, he was excited to tell me about a tagged blackbird who made a 1,000-or-so-kilometer crossing from Belarus to Albania.
That was actually pretty routine, Wikelski said, but almost everything else he had been seeing over the past year of road-testing had been stranger than expected. White storks were crossing back and forth over the Sahara five times a season, without apparent reason. Cuckoos, which are tree-dwelling birds ill suited to long periods at sea, were making uninterrupted journeys from India to the Horn of Africa. “Now, any time you look, totally novel aspects appear, and novel connections appear across continents,” he told me.
This could have been a mystifying mess. But for Wikelski, it was “beautiful data.”
The practice of tagging animals to monitor their movements has been used for more than 100 years, though it began with a stroke of luck. In the 1820s, a hunter in a village in central Africa threw a 30-inch spear that lodged itself nonfatally in the neck of a white stork. This became what might have been the world’s first tag on a wild animal, says Yanco: the bird somehow flew back to Germany in the spring, helping settle the mystery of where storks disappeared to in the winter.
By the 1890s, scientists had started tracking wild birds with bands fitted around their legs—but 49 out of every 50 ring-tagged birds were never seen again. Starting in the 1960s, thousands of birds received very-high-frequency radio tags known as “pingers,” but these were only powerful enough to broadcast a few kilometers. To capture the data, researchers had to embark on cartoonish chase scenes, in which tagged birds were pursued by an oversize homing antenna pointed out the roof of a car, plane, or hang-glider.
More than 100 years
ago, leeches held in a
contraption called the
Tempest Prognosticator
provided signals of storms ahead by slithering out of
water in glass bottles.In the 1820s, a hunter in central Africa threw a spear that lodged itself
nonfatally in the neck
of a white stork. This
became what might have been the world’s first wild-animal tag.
NASA invented
space-based animal
tracking in 1970 when it
strapped a transmitter
collar the weight of two
bowling balls around the
neck of Monique the Space Elk, a local news celebrity at the time.Canaries warned of looming catastrophe
in coal mines until the
1980s.
Wikelski tried all three. During a stint at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the mid-’90s, he was studying thrushes and would gun an Oldsmobile around the Midwest at over 70 miles per hour. He’d set off as the songbirds got going at around 2 a.m., which tended to draw the attention of local police. Wikelski found that contrary to the conventional wisdom, thrushes used just 29% of their energy on their overnight migrations, less than they expended hunting and sheltering during stopovers. But the hassle of his process, which also entailed capturing and recapturing birds to weigh them, convinced Wikelski that, among other things, he needed better tools.
Thinking bigger (and higher)
It was not immediately clear that the solution to Wikelski’s problems would be in space, though the idea of tracking animals via satellite had been explored decades before his Oldsmobile experiments.
In fact, NASA invented space-based animal tracking back in 1970 when it strapped a transmitter collar the weight of two bowling balls around the neck of Monique the Space Elk, a local news celebrity at the time. (Monique was actually two elks: the anointed Monique, who wore a dummy collar for testing and press photos, and another, who accidentally caught a misfired tranquilizer dart and subsequently got the satellite transmitter collar.) After the Moniques met untimely deaths—one from starvation, the other at the hands of a hunter—the project went dormant too.
But its research lived on in Argos, a weather monitoring system established in 1978 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the French space agency. It pioneered a way to track a tagged animal’s location by beaming up a short stream of analog data and measuring wave compression—the so-called Doppler shift—as a polar-orbiting satellite zoomed overhead at thousands of miles an hour. But this captured locations to only a few hundred meters, at best, and typically required a clear line of sight between tag and satellite—a challenge when working with animals below the canopy of rainforests, for instance.
Wikelski worked extensively with Argos but found that the technology didn’t enable him to capture the highly detailed whole-life data he craved. By the late ’90s, he was on an island in Panama, exploring an alternative approach that followed hundreds of animals from 38 species, including small mammals and insects.
Using six long-distance radio towers, Wikelski and Roland Kays, now the director of the Biodiversity Laboratory at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, started to develop the Automated Radio Telemetry System (ARTS), a radio collar tracking system that could penetrate thick canopy. Crucially, ARTS revealed interactions between species—for example, how predatory ocelots support the island’s palm trees by eating large quantities of rabbit-like agoutis, after the rodents bury palm seeds underground as a snack for later. The researchers also found that despite what everyone believed, many of the animal inhabitants don’t remain on the island year-round, but frequently travel to the mainland. Kays and Wikelski had demonstrated in microcosm the kinds of insights that fine-grained multispecies tracking could provide even in challenging environments.
But Wikelski was frustrated that he couldn’t follow animals off the map. “If we don’t know the fate of an animal, we will never be able to really do good biology,” he says. The only solution would be to have a map with no edge.
This was around the time that GPS trackers became small enough to be used in animal tags. While radio tags like those used by Argos estimated location by transmitting signals to receivers, GPS systems like those in cars download data from three or more satellites to triangulate location precisely.
Wikelski became a man possessed by the idea of using this technology to create a truly global animal monitoring system. He envisioned digital tags that could capture GPS data throughout the day and upload packets of data to satellites that would periodically pass overhead. This idea would generate both excitement and a lot of skepticism. Peers told Wikelski that his dream system was unrealistic and unworkable.
At the turn of the millennium, he took a position at Princeton with the notion that the institutional pedigree might earn an audience for his “crazy” idea. Not long after he arrived, the chief of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came for a talk, and Wikelski asked whether the agency would benefit from a satellite system that could track birds. “He looked at me as if I came from a different planet,” Wikelski remembers. Still, he got a meeting with NASA—though he says he was laughed out of the building. By this time, the agency had apparently forgotten all about Monique.
Undeterred, in 2002 Wikelski launched ICARUS, a half-joke (for fans of Greek mythology) at his own immodest ambitions. It aimed to use digital GPS tags and satellites that would relay the information to a data center on Earth nearly as instantly as the ARTS system had.
Wikelski’s big ideas continued to run into big doubts. “At the time, people told us technology-wise, it will never work,” he says. Even 10 years ago, when Wikelski was making proposals to space agencies, he was told to avoid digital tech altogether in favor of tried-and-tested Argos-style communication. “Don’t go digital!” he recalls people telling him. “This is completely impossible! You have to do it analog.”
Moving away from the fringe
In the two decades since ICARUS was established, the scientific community has caught up, thanks to developments in consumer tech. The Internet of Things made two-way digital communications with small devices viable, while lithium batteries have shrunk to sizes that more animals can carry and smartphones have made low-cost GPS and accelerometers increasingly available.
“We’re going from where we couldn’t really track most vertebrate species on the planet to flipping it. We’re now able to track most things,” says Yanco, emphasizing that this is possible “to varying degrees of accuracy and resolution.”
The other key advance has been in data systems, and in particular the growth of Movebank, a central repository of animal tracking data that was developed from Wikelski’s ARTS system. Movebank brings together terrestrial-animal tracking data from various streams, including location data from the Argos system and from new high-res digital satellites, like ICARUS’s antenna on the ISS. (There are also plans to incorporate CubeSat data.) To date, it has collected 6 billion data points from more than 1,400 species, tracking animals’ full life cycles in ways that Wikelski once could only dream about. It is now a key part of the plumbing of the animal internet.
The field also had some practical successes, which in turn allowed it to marshal additional resources. In 2016 in London, for instance, where air pollution was responsible for nearly 10,000 human deaths a year, researchers from Imperial College and the tech startup Plume Labs released 10 racing pigeons equipped with sensors for nitrogen dioxide and ozone emissions from traffic. Daily updates (tweeted out by the Pigeon Air Patrol account) showed how taking a pigeon’s path through the neighborhoods revealed pollution hot spots that weather stations missed.
Diego Ellis Soto, a NASA research fellow and a Yale PhD candidate studying animal ecology, highlights an experiment from 2018: flocks of storks were outfitted with high-resolution GPS collars to monitor the air movements they encountered over the open ocean. Tagged storks were able to capture live data on turbulence, which can be notoriously hard for airlines to predict.
Among the critical roles for these animal sensors was one that was once considered eccentric: predicting weather and the world’s fast-changing climate patterns. Animals equipped with temperature and pressure sensors essentially act as free-roaming weather buoys that can beam out readings from areas underserved by weather stations, including polar regions, small islands, and much of the Global South. Satellites struggle to measure many environmental variables, including ocean temperatures, which can also be prohibitively expensive for drones to collect. “Eighty percent of all measurements in Antarctica of sea surface temperature are collected by elephant seals, and not by robots or icebreakers,” Ellis Soto says. “These seals can just swim underneath the ice and [do] stuff that robots can’t do.” The seals are now tagged yearly, and the data they collect helps refine weather models that predict El Niño and sea-level rise.
When the ICARUS antenna was installed on the ISS in August 2018, it seemed poised to unlock even more capabilities and discoveries. In the antenna’s short life, the project recorded the movements of bats, birds, and antelope in near-real time, from Alaska to the islands of Papua New Guinea, and transferred the data to Movebank. But when the experiment ground to a premature halt, Wikelski knew he’d have to do something different, and he concocted a plan by which ICARUS could continue—whether it could rely on a major space agency or not.
Another shot
Rather than a system of major satellites, the new incarnation of ICARUS will run on CubeSats: low-cost, off-the-shelf microsatellites launched into low Earth orbit (around the same height as the ISS) for around $800,000, meaning even developing nations that harbor space ambitions can be part of the project. CubeSats also offer the benefit of truly global coverage; the ISS’s orbital path means it can’t pick up signals from polar regions further north than southern Sweden or further south than the tip of Chile.
There’s currently one ICARUS CubeSat in testing, having launched into orbit last summer. If all goes well, a CubeSat funded by the Max Planck Society, in collaboration with the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, will launch next April, followed by another in winter 2025, and—they’re hoping—another in 2026. Each further addition allows the tags to upload once more per day, increasing the temporal resolution and bringing the system closer to truly real-time tracking.
Outfitting even small animals with lightweight, inexpensive GPS sensors, like the one on this blackbird, and monitoring how they move around the world could provide insights into the global effects of climate change.
Wikelski and his partners have also rededicated themselves to making even smaller tags. They’re close to the goal of getting them down to three grams, which would in theory make it possible to track more than half of mammal species and around two-fifths of birds, plus hundreds of species of crocodiles, turtles, and lizards. ICARUS’s tags are also now cheaper (costing just $150) and smarter. ICARUS developed AI-on-chip systems that can reduce the energy use by orders of magnitude to cut down on the size of batteries, Wikelski explains. There are also new tags being tested by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and Wikelski’s institute at Max Planck that harvest energy from animal movements, like a self-winding wristwatch. Finally, these new ICARUS sensors can also be reprogrammed remotely, thanks to their two-way Internet of Things–style communications. A new ecosystem of tag makers—professional and DIY—is further driving down prices, open-sourcing innovation, and allowing experimentation.
Still, not everyone has bought into ICARUS. Critics question the costs compared with those of existing terrestrial monitoring initiatives like MOTUS, a national Canadian bird conservation program that uses a network of 750 receiving towers. Others argue that researchers can make better use of the thousands of animals already tracked by Argos, which is upgrading to more accurate tags and is also set to launch a series of CubeSats. The total cost of a fully realized ICARUS system—100,000 animals at any one time, some of which die or disappear as new ones are tagged—is around $10 million to $15 million a year. “If you’re thinking about how to tag a moose or bighorn sheep, you might need to hire a helicopter and the whole team and the vet,” says Ellis Soto, who has long collaborated with Wikelski. “So the costs can be extremely, extremely limiting.”
But, proponents argue, the initiative would beget a lot more information than other Earth-imaging space missions and be significantly cheaper than sending humans or drones to collect data from remote locations like polar ice sheets. Wikelski also emphasizes that no one entity will bear the cost. He is working with local communities in Bhutan, South Africa, Thailand, China, Russia, and Nigeria and gets requests from people across the world who want to connect tags to ICARUS. With cheap satellites and cheap tags, he sees a route to scale.
Even as ICARUS explores a grassroots future, one of the biggest changes since the initial launch is the backing Internet of Animals technology has received from the biggest giant in the field: NASA. The agency is now two years into a five-year project to explore how it might get more involved in building out such a system. “We’re very much focused on developing future mission concepts that will come after the current set of ICARUS missions,” says Ryan Pavlick, a researcher in remote sensing of biodiversity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 2024, this will mean “architecture studies” that aim to understand what technical systems might meet the animal-tracking needs of stakeholders including NOAA, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the United States Geological Survey.
While NASA’s project aims to deliver benefits for the American people, a fully realized Internet of Animals would necessarily be global and interspecies. When we spoke in November 2023, Wikelski had just got off the phone discussing how ICARUS can help monitor the global “deal for nature” established by the UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference, whose targets include reducing extinction rates by a factor of 10.
Jill Deppe, who leads the National Audubon Society’s Migratory Bird Initiative, has boundless enthusiasm for how an Internet of Animals could affect organizations like hers. For a century, Audubon has watched migratory birds disappear on journeys to Chile or Colombia. A system that could tell us where birds are dying across the entire Western Hemisphere would allow Audubon to precisely target investments in habitat protection and efforts to address threats, she says.
“Our on-the-ground conservation work is all done on a local scale,” says Deppe. For migratory birds, ICARUS can link these isolated moments into a storyline that spans continents: “How do all of those factors and processes interact? And what does that mean for the birds’ survival?”
Movebank’s live-updating dashboard also makes more dynamic conservation action possible. Beaches can be closed as exhausted shorebirds land, wind farms can halt turbines as bats migrate through, and conservation-conscious farmers—who already aim to flood fields or drain them at times that suit migrating flocks—can do so with real knowledge.
In return, will animals really help us see the future of the planet’s climate?
No one is suggesting that animals take over from the system of satellites, weather stations, balloons, and ocean buoys that currently feed into meteorologists’ complex models. Yet technology that complements these dependable data streams, that captures the ever-changing biological signals of seals, storks, sharks, and other species, is already starting to fill in gaps in our knowledge. Once considered cryptic signs from the fates, or harbingers of doom, their behaviors are messages that have only just begun to show us ways to live on a changing planet.
Matthew Ponsford is a freelance reporter based in London.
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.
The first time I heard the term “virtual power plants,” I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the Chinese grid and led the government to restrict electric-vehicle charging as an emergency solution. I was told at the time that virtual power plants (VPPs) could make grid breakdowns like that less likely to happen again, but I didn’t have a chance to delve in to learn what that meant.
If you, like me, are unsure how a power plant can be virtual, my colleague June Kim just published an insightful article explaining the technology and how it works. For this week’s newsletter, I took the chance to ask her some more questions about VPPs. It turns out the technology has a particularly good synergy with the EV industry, which is why the Chinese government has started to invest in VPPs.
“VPPs are basically just aggregations of distributed energy resources that can balance electricity on the grid,” June says—resources including electric-vehicle chargers, heat pumps, rooftop solar panels, and home battery packs for power backups. “They’re working in coordination to replace the function of a centralized coal plant or gas plant … but also add a whole host of other functionalities that are beneficial for the grid,” she says.
To really make the most of these resources, VPPs introduce another layer: a central smart system that coordinates energy consumption and supply.
This system allows utility companies to handle times of higher energy demand by making adjustments like shifting EV charge time to 2 a.m. to avoid peak hours.
The US government is working to triple VPP capacity by 2030, June says. That capacity is equivalent to 80 to 160 fossil-fuel plants that don’t have to be built. “They expect that EV batteries and the EV charging infrastructure are going to be the biggest factor in building up this additional VPP capacity,” she says.
Considering the significant impact that EVs have on the grid, it’s no surprise that China, where an EV revolution is taking place faster than in any other country, has also turned its attention to VPPs.
By the end of 2023, there were over 20 million EVs in China, almost half the global total. Together, these cars can consume monstrous amounts of energy—but their batteries can also be an emergency backup source. The power shortage that happens in China almost every summer is an urgent reminder that the country needs to figure out how to incorporate these millions of EVs into the existing grid.
Luckily, there are already some moves in this area, both from the Chinese government and from Chinese EV companies.
In January 2024, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning authority, released a blueprint for integrating EV charging infrastructure into the grid. The country plans to start pilot programs with dynamic electricity pricing in a few cities: lower prices late at night can incentivize EV owners to charge their vehicles when the grid is not stressed. The goal is that no more than 40% of EV charging will take place outside these “trough hours.” There will also be a batch of bidirectional charging stations in public and private spaces. At these chargers, batteries can either draw electricity from the grid or send it back.
Meanwhile, NIO, a leading Chinese EV company, is transforming its own charging networks. Last month, 10 NIO charging stations opened in Shanghai that allow vehicles to feed energy back into the grid. The company also has over 2,000 battery-swapping stations across the country. These are ideal energy storage resources for the VPP network. Some of them have already been connected to VPP pilot programs in eastern China, the company said in July 2023.
One of the key obstacles to adoption of VPPs is getting people to sign up to participate. But there’s a compelling reward on offer: money.
If the reverse-charging infrastructure grows larger, millions of Chinese EV owners could make a little income by charging at the right times and selling electricity at others.
We don’t know how much earning potential there is, since these pilot programs are still in their very early stages in China. But existing VPP projects in the US can offer some reference. Over the course of one summer, a Massachusetts home can make an estimated $550; participants in a separate VPP project in Texas can earn an estimated $150 per year. “It’s not huge, but it’s not nothing,” June says.
Obviously, it will take a long time to transform our electric grids. But developing VPPs along with the EV charging network seems like a win-win situation for China: it helps the country maintain its lead in the EV industry, and it also makes the grid more resilient and less dependent on coal power plants. I won’t be surprised if Chinese local governments and companies work together to roll out virtual power plants in earnest over the next few years.
Do you think China will catch up quickly on adopting virtual power plants? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.
Catch up with China
1. The economic shadows of the pandemic have finally receded. This Lunar New Year, the number of travelers and the amount of spending in China finally surpassed pre-pandemic levels. (Bloomberg $)
2. The European Union is probing China’s state-owned train manufacturer for government subsidies that could give it an unfair advantage when bidding for overseas procurements. (Politico)
Last year, the European Commission started another anti-subsidy investigation over imports of Chinese electric vehicles. (MIT Technology Review)
3. Burgeoning sci-fi literature circles in China attracted the prestigious Hugo Awards to be held there last year. But leaked emails show that the awards’ administration team actively censored authors who could upset the Chinese government. (The Guardian)
4. A Volkswagen supplier found a component that might have been produced in Xinjiang, where the use of forced labor has been documented. Now thousands of Porsche, Bentley, and Audi cars are being held at US ports waiting for replacement parts. (Financial Times $)
5. The leading Chinese EV maker BYD is considering building a factory in Mexico. If that happens, we might be able to buy BYD vehicles in the US soon. (Nikkei Asia $)
Exports of BYD cars have grown so much in recent years that the company is now buying and hiring massive ships to help deliver them. (MIT Technology Review)
6. A new report by OpenAI and Microsoft says hackers from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have used their large language models, but mostly for mundane tasks like drafting emails. (New York Times $)
7. China’s first domestically made passenger airplane made its first overseas trip to Singapore. (Reuters $)
8. New Chinese restaurant chains that combine traditional cuisine with fast food are blowing up in China. When are they going to open one in the US? (Time)
Lost in translation
Huaqiangbei is a neighborhood in Shenzhen known as a hub of domestic innovation and imitation. It has always played a pivotal role in introducing expensive products (like iPhones and AirPods) to Chinese users, either through smuggling or by producing knockoff versions. And the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro has again reminded people of Huaqiangbei’s influence on consumer trends, according to Chinese tech columnist Wang Qingrui.
One Shenzhen-based company, EmdoorVR, has already launched a VR headset that looks almost identical to the Vision Pro. This imitator, which is much more limited in function, is named VisionSE and sells for less than 1/10 the price. However, many Huaqiangbei brands have yet to follow suit, since they are not confident about the future of VR headsets. Their hesitation could be another signal that it will be hard for the Vision Pro to find as much acceptance as Apple’s previous successes.
One more thing
For many Chinese families, playing mah-jongg is an essential New Year tradition. But machines are transforming how the game is played: a viral video on social media shows a mah-jongg machine without the usual tiles. Instead, it displays everything on five different screens. It also automatically voices the moves and calculates the results. Not many people in the comments are impressed. Mah-jongg is “99% about feeling the tiles,” says one.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
I wouldn’t exactly say I have favorites when it comes to climate technologies. Anything that could help us get closer to tackling climate change is worth writing about, both to share the potential upsides and to carefully examine for pitfalls. But I have a special spot in my heart and my reporting notebook for batteries.
After all, what’s not to love? They play a crucial role in climate action, there are a million different kinds that can meet basically any need, and they’re at least a little bit magical.
In honor of everyone’s favorite Hallmark-ified holiday, I thought I’d share a love letter to batteries. In any case, this should give you some sense of why I keep coming back to this subject. (Most recently, I dove into the topic of an alternative battery chemistry, lithium-sulfur—give that a read if you haven’t!)
So, how do I love batteries? Let me count the ways.
They’re practical
Imagine a world that’s on its way to reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. That would put us on track to limit global warming to less than 2 °C, or 3.6 °F. To get there, the two biggest sectors to clean up are electricity and transportation: how we power the world and get around. And the common denominator is—you guessed it—batteries.
Some low-emissions power sources, like wind and solar, aren’t consistently available, so they need a little backup. That’s where grid storage comes in—we’ll need to build about 100 times more energy storage by 2050 on the grid to be on track for our net-zero scenario.
This won’t all be batteries—storing energy with pumped hydro, compressed air, and other methods could be key. But batteries, especially if cheaper alternatives can scale, will be a major piece of the puzzle.
Electrifying transport is a similar story. We need to move from gas guzzlers to zero-emissions vehicles. And batteries are going to help us do it.
In our net-zero scenario, the world needs about 14 terawatt hours’ worth of batteries for EVs every year by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s something like 90 times greater than production in 2020.
They’re versatile
One of my favorite things about battery technology is its adaptability. Researchers are finding and developing new chemistries all the time, and it’s fascinating to follow.
Lithium-ion batteries tend to be the default for the industries I typically write about (think transportation and energy storage). That’s mostly because these batteries were developed for personal devices that became widespread beginning in the 1990s, so they’ve had a head start on scaling and the cost cuts that come along with it.
Even in existing battery technologies, there’s lots of nuance and innovation. Lithium-ion batteries follow a similar blueprint, but there’s a whole world of flavors. Your phone and laptop probably house pouch cells with higher levels of cobalt, whereas your EV likely runs off cylindrical ones that are high in nickel. And a growing fraction of lithium-ion cells don’t include either of those metals—companies are looking at these options for stationary storage or lower- cost vehicles.
But don’t stop there. Next-generation batteries could give us a different chemistry for every occasion. Need a robust, low-cost battery? Try sodium-ion. Even cheaper, for stationary storage? Zinc flow batteries or iron-air might be the chemistry for you. Something for a long-range, high performance EV? Check out solid state, or maybe something of the lithium-sulfur variety.
I’m often asked which battery chemistry is going to “win.” Not all batteries are going to make it to widespread adoption, and not all battery companies are going to succeed. But I think the answer is that we’ll hopefully see not a single dominant type of battery, but an ever-growing menu of options.
They’re at least a little bit magic
Last but not least, I think that one of the main reasons that I’m obsessed with batteries is that I find them a little bit mystifying. Tiny ions shuttling around in a metal container can store energy for us to use, whenever and wherever we want.
I’ll never get sick of it, and I hope you won’t either. Here’s to spending more time with the ones we love in the year ahead.
Related reading
Read more about lithium-sulfur batteries, which could unlock cheaper EVs with longer range, in my latest story.
If you, like me, can’t get enough batteries, I’ve got a great event coming up this week for you! Join me, senior editor James Temple, and editor-at-large David Rotman for the latest in our Roundtables series, where we’ll be diving into a rousing conversation about batteries and their materials.
This event is open to subscribers, so subscribe if you haven’t yet and come ask all the questions you have about batteries, minerals, and mining! See you there!
STEPHANIE ARNETT/MITTR | ENVATO
More from us
Sales might be down, but heat pumps are still hot. The devices, which can heat and cool spaces using electricity, are gaining ground on fossil fuels in the US. Check out the data in this story for more on why it matters, and what this says about decarbonization prospects for the country and beyond.
Also, I’d like to introduce you to a new colleague, James O’Donnell! He’s joining the AI team, and he’s coming out swinging with a story about how Google is using a new satellite to detect methane leaks. Give it a read, and stay tuned for more great stories from him to come.
Keeping up with climate
Charging EVs might seem like it’s all about being fast, but slow chargers could be the key to getting more renters to adopt the technology. (Grist)
Chinese automaker BYD has seen massive growth in its EV sales, beating out Tesla in the last quarter of 2023 to become the world’s largest EV maker. Here’s how that happened. (New York Times)
→ BYD is moving so fast that the company is getting into shipping to move more vehicles. (MIT Technology Review)
Consumer demand for EVs is slowing a bit. Some companies are looking to smaller vehicles to help jumpstart interest. (IEEE Spectrum)
Dirt is a major carbon store, holding three times as much as the entire atmosphere. The problem for people looking to leverage dirt for carbon removal is that nobody knows exactly how much carbon can be stored in dirt. (Grist)
Last year was an awful one for the offshore wind industry, but things might be looking up in the year ahead. (Heatmap)
This carbon removal startup is powered by sunlight and seawater. Banyu Carbon’s reversible photoacid could help suck up greenhouse gases from the ocean, though experts have questions about the scalability and ecological effects. (Bloomberg)
The key to building less-expensive batteries that could extend the range of EVs might lie in a cheap, abundant material: sulfur.
Addressing climate change is going to require a whole lot of batteries, both to drive an increasingly electric fleet of vehicles and to store renewable power on the grid. Today, lithium-ion batteries are the dominant choice for both industries.
But as the need for more batteries grows, digging up the required materials becomes more challenging. The solution may lie in a growing number of alternatives that avoid some of the most limited and controversial metals needed for lithium-ion batteries, like cobalt and nickel.
One contender chemistry, lithium-sulfur, could soon reach a major milestone, as startup Lyten plans to deliver limited quantities of lithium-sulfur cells to its first customers later this year. The cells (which can be strung together to build batteries of different sizes) will go to customers in the aerospace and defense industries, a step on the journey to building batteries that can stand up to the test of EVs.
When it comes to new options for batteries, “we need something that we can make a lot of, and make it quickly. And that’s where lithium-sulfur comes in,” says Celina Mikolajczak, chief battery technology officer at Lyten.
Sulfur is widely abundant and inexpensive—a major reason that lithium-sulfur batteries could come with a much cheaper price tag. The cost of materials is around half that of lithium-ion cells, Mikolajczak says.
That doesn’t mean the cost for the new batteries will immediately be lower, though. Lithium-ion has had decades to slowly cut costs, as production has scaled and companies have worked out the kinks. But a lower cost of materials means the potential for cheaper batteries in the future.
Not only could lithium-sulfur batteries eventually provide a cheaper way to store energy—they could also beat out lithium-ion on a crucial metric: energy density. A lithium-sulfur battery can pack in nearly twice the energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. That could be a major plus for electric vehicles, allowing automakers to build vehicles that can go farther on a single charge without weighing them down.
However, there are still major technical barriers Lyten needs to overcome for its products to be ready to hit the road in an EV. Chief among them is getting batteries to last.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries built for EVs can last for 800 cycles or more (meaning they can be sapped and recharged 800 times). Lithium-sulfur options tend to degrade much faster, with many efforts today hovering somewhere around 100 cycles, says Shirley Meng, a battery researcher at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory.
That’s because taming the chemical reactions that power lithium-sulfur batteries has proved to be a challenge. Unwanted reactions between lithium and sulfur can sap the life out of batteries and drive them to an early grave.
Lyten is far from the first to go after the promise of lithium-sulfur batteries, with companies big and small making forays into the chemistry for decades. Some, like UK-based Oxis Energy, have shuttered, while others, including Sion Power, have pivoted away from lithium-sulfur. But growing demand for alternatives, and a higher level of interest and funding, could mean that Lyten succeeds where earlier efforts have failed, Meng says.
Lyten has made progress in stretching the lifetime of its batteries, recently seeing some samples reach as high as 300 cycles, Mickolajczak says. She attributes the success to Lyten’s 3D graphene material, which helps prevent unwanted side reactions and boost the cell’s energy density. The company is also looking to use 3D graphene, a more complicated structure than the two-dimensional variety, in other products like sensors and composites.
Even with recent progress, Lyten is still far from producing batteries that can last long enough to power an EV. In the meantime, the company plans to bring its cells to market in places where lifetime isn’t quite so important.
Since lithium-sulfur batteries can be extremely lightweight, the company is working with customers building devices like drones, for which replacing the batteries frequently would be worth the savings on weight, says Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability officer.
The company opened a pilot manufacturing line in 2023 with a maximum capacity of 200,000 cells annually. It recently began producing a small number of cells, which are scheduled for delivery to paying customers later this year.
The company hasn’t publicly shared which companies will receive the first batteries. Moving forward, two of the company’s main focuses are improving lifetime and scaling production of both 3D graphene and battery cells, Norman says.
The road to lithium-sulfur batteries that can power EVs is still a long one, but as Mikolajczak points out, today’s staple chemistry, lithium-ion, has improved leaps and bounds on cost, lifetime, and energy density in the years that companies have been working to tweak it.
People have tried out a massive range of chemistry options in batteries, Mikolajczak says. “To make one of them reality requires that you put in the work.”
(@wqeel7520_memes)