Oct 7 2025
2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Ather Energy and its premium e-scooters

More than 70% of the 200 million registered vehicles in India are two-wheelers. Ather Energy builds e-scooters for the rising middle class that could help commuters ditch highly-polluting, gas-guzzling models.

While sales of Tesla or BYD cars drove electric vehicle adoption elsewhere in the world, two-wheelers have led the green energy transition in India. As one of the earliest “pure play” e-scooter makers, Ather Energy has helped drive micromobility EV penetration throughout India and boosted the shift away from carbon-emitting vehicles.

In 2018, the company introduced an expensive sports scooter, with features like a touchscreen dashboard, built-in navigation, and over-the-air software updates, previously unseen in two-wheelers. Today the company has two product lines: the Ather 450 (a sporty performance scooter) and the Ather Rizta (a family-friendly scooter for daily use). 

Central to the company’s success has been its focus on product quality and the rider experience. Ather installs its own software, manufactures the vast majority of its hardware, and wants to invest much of the proceeds from its initial public offering into R&D. 

Key indicators

  • Industry: Electric vehicles
  • Founded: 2013
  • Headquarters: Bengaluru, India
  • Notable fact: Unlike competitors who either rebranded an acquired scooter or sold imported EVs from China, Ather does almost everything in-house, from its software stack to hardware design.

Potential for impact

While emissions of individual two-wheelers is much less compared to that of a car or a larger vehicle, the sheer number of these scooters on Indian roads adds up. Two-wheelers contribute about one-third of transport emissions in India, and successful electrification could reduce their share to just 3% by 2050. Ather’s success in moving people from gas-guzzling scooters to electric could not only propel India closer to its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2070 but also reduce health impacts in a country where around 1.5 million deaths a year are from breathing polluted air.

As the country’s leading EV-only scooter maker, Ather’s successful expansion could supercharge India’s shift away from fossil fuels, and help achieve the government’s goal of reducing air pollution, while also building a market presence internationally.

In mid-2024 Ather introduced the Ather Rizta, a spacious family scooter with a large seat, more storage, and fast charging, which sold over 100,000 units within a year of its launch. To catch up to well-capitalized competitors, such as Ola Electric, Ather is spending $105 million to build a third factory that aims to produce 500,000 two-wheelers a year by March 2027. It has also expanded its charging network to some 4,000 charging points and has pushed into newer markets, including Nepal and Sri Lanka. 

Caveats

In the past five years, driven by state and federal incentives, electric vehicle competition turned fierce in India. Car and scooter makers raced to capture the market, including legacy automakers TVS Motor and Bajaj Auto. Both have since zoomed past Ather, selling cheaper e-scooters and scaling faster, by leveraging their sprawling retail presence. Together, they have cornered a combined share of 40% of India’s e-scooter market. 

Meanwhile, EV adoption has grown more slowly in India than expected. Indian EV sales were 7.6% in 2024, far off pace of hitting the government’s target of 30% by 2030.

For Ather to have a real impact on India’s transport emissions, it must scale significantly. The company is working to double its retail footprint to 700 stores and continue its expansion into smaller cities. But geopolitics could interfere: China’s retaliatory export ban on critical rare earth minerals in response to US tariffs announced in April caused a ripple effect; Ather said in August that it has found it hard to secure the magnets it needs for its motors. 

Next steps

As the Indian government rolls back subsidies that slashed the cost of purchasing an electric scooter, Ather plans to launch cheaper options. In mid-2024, it began transitioning to a newer battery chemistry called lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) that has lower environmental impacts, requires fewer expensive minerals, and should be about 20% cheaper than other battery packs. 

The company isn’t profitable, but its gross profit per vehicle has been improving. Momentum seems to be building—in May, Ather reported its annual sales to March 2025 were up 42 percent compared to the year prior. Now, the company is betting that investing further into product innovation will help it take the lead in India’s two-wheeler revolution. 

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Oct 7 2025
2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Cyclic Materials and its rare earth recycling tech

Rare earth magnets are essential for clean energy, but only a tiny fraction of the metals inside them are ever recycled. Cyclic Materials aims to change that by opening one of the largest rare earth magnet recycling operations outside of China next year. By collecting a wide range of devices and recycling multiple metals, the company seeks to overcome the economic challenges that have long held back such efforts.

Powerful rare earth magnets are at the heart of many advanced technologies, from electric vehicle motors and wind turbine generators to smartphones and robots. Demand for key magnet metals like neodymium is expected to surge as the energy transition progresses, and new supplies are urgently needed—especially outside of China, which dominates the rare earth supply chain and further escalated export restrictions in response to recent US tariffs.

One largely untapped supply is the mountain of rare earth magnet–containing devices discarded each year. In China, rare earth magnet manufacturers recycle significant amounts of scrap from their fabrication process, and a smaller number of magnets are collected for recycling at end of life. But globally, just 0.2% of rare earths are recycled from spent devices, largely because it’s hard to collect magnets that are contained within billions of old gadgets.

Cyclic Materials is trying to address that challenge. In its two-part recycling process, rare earth–containing devices will first be amassed at “spoke” facilities. The devices will be shredded, and their magnet waste will be separated from steel parts and other recyclable metals before being sent to centralized “hubs,” where the company will use a chemical extraction process to recover a purified mixture of rare earth metals. 

Today, Cyclic Materials is constructing its first spoke facility in Mesa, Arizona, and its first commercial hub in Kingston, Ontario. These plants are expected to begin recycling magnets commercially next year in what is shaping up to be one of the largest such operations in the Western world.

Key indicators

  • Industry: Critical minerals
  • Founded: 2021
  • Headquarters: Toronto, Canada
  • Notable fact: Cyclic Materials is recovering rare earth magnets from wind turbines and has collected used turbines on three continents.

Potential for impact

With the first big waves of EVs and wind turbines approaching the end of their useful lives, rare earth magnet recycling could recover valuable resources and make the energy transition more sustainable. Cyclic Materials says its process uses 95% less water and produces roughly 60% fewer emissions than rare earth mining does.

The company is starting small, with its Kingston hub designed to recycle 500 metric tons of magnet waste a year. (By 2035, there could be over 43,000 metric tons of recyclable rare earth magnets in the US alone.) But with a list of roughly 2,000 potential device suppliers and customers, as well as more than $100 million in funding, the firm is positioning itself for global expansion. 

Caveats

Making a profit from rare earth recycling isn’t easy—it can cost more to collect and recycle rare earth magnets, which are deeply embedded in devices of different sizes and shapes, than a recycler will earn from reselling the metals. Even if rare earth metals can be recycled cost-effectively, there are only a few magnet makers outside of China to sell them to.

Cyclic Materials has signed agreements with a range of suppliers, including e-scooter and e-bike giant Lime and RenerCycle, which decommissions old wind turbines, to hoover up magnets wherever it can. Earlier this year, the firm announced it will sell its recycled rare earth mixture to the Brussels-based chemical company Solvay. But it will need more buyers to scale up further, which could mean waiting for the supply chain outside of China to expand. 

In the meantime, Cyclic Materials’ spoke facilities will also recycle aluminum, steel, and copper, providing additional revenue streams.

Next steps

Cyclic Materials intends to build more spoke and hub facilities around the world, first scaling its operations in North America, then expanding to Europe and Asia. It also plans to keep innovating: At its R&D center in Kingston, the company is developing ways to address recycling challenges in specific industries, such as how to rapidly deconstruct wind turbine generators and separate out their supersized magnets.

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Oct 3 2025
EV tax credits are dead in the US. Now what?

On Wednesday, federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end.

Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 in credits toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They’ve been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong.

The tax credits’ demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. And transportation is a major contributor to US climate pollution, with cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes together making up roughly 30% of total greenhouse-gas emissions.

To anticipate what’s next for the US EV market, we can look to countries like Germany, which have ended similar subsidy programs. (Spoiler alert: It’s probably going to be a rough end to the year.)

When you factor in fuel savings, the lifetime cost of an EV can already be lower than that of a gas-powered vehicle today. But EVs can have a higher up-front cost, which is why some governments offer a tax credit or rebate that can help boost adoption for the technology.

In 2016, Germany kicked off a national incentive program to encourage EV sales. While the program was active, drivers could get grants of up to about €6,000 toward the purchase of a new battery-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Eventually, the government began pulling back the credits. Support for plug-in hybrids ended in 2022, and commercial buyers lost eligibility in September 2023. Then the entire program came to a screeching halt in December 2023, when the government announced it would be ending the incentives with about one week’s notice.

Monthly sales data shows the fingerprints of those changes. In each case where there’s a contraction of public support, there’s a peak in sales just before a cutback, then a crash after. These short-term effects can be dramatic: There were about half as many battery-electric vehicles sold in Germany in January 2024 than there were in December 2023. 

We’re already seeing the first half of this sort of boom-bust cycle in the US: EV sales ticked up in August, making up about 10% of all new vehicle sales, and analysts say September will turn out to be a record-breaking month. People rushed to take advantage of the credits while they still could.

Next comes the crash—the next few months will probably be very slow for EVs. One analyst predicted to the Washington Post that the figure could plummet to the low single digits, “like 1 or 2%.”

Ultimately, it’s not terribly surprising that there are local effects around these policy changes. “The question is really how long this decline will last, and how slowly any recovery in the growth will be,” Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway who collects EV sales data, said in an email. 

When I spoke to experts (including Andrew) for a story last year, several told me that Germany’s subsidies were ending too soon, and that they were concerned about what cutting off support early would mean for the long-term prospects of the technology in the country. And Germany was much further along than the US, with EVs making up 20% of new vehicle sales—twice the American proportion.

EV growth did see a longer-term backslide in Germany after the end of the subsidies. Battery-electric vehicles made up 13.5% of new registrations in 2024, down from 18.5% the year before, and the UK also passed Germany to become Europe’s largest EV market. 

Things have improved this year, with sales in the first half beating records set in 2023. But growth would need to pick up significantly for Germany to reach its goal of getting 15 million battery-electric vehicles registered in the country by 2030. As of January 2025, that number was just 1.65 million. 

According to early projections, the end of tax credits in the US could significantly slow progress on EVs and, by extension, on cutting emissions. Sales of battery-electric vehicles could be about 40% lower in 2030 without the credits than what we’d see with them, according to one analysis by Princeton University’s Zero Lab.

Some US states still have their own incentive programs for people looking to buy electric vehicles. But without federal support, the US is likely to continue lagging behind global EV leaders like China. 

As Andrew put it: “From a climate perspective, with road transport responsible for almost a quarter of US total emissions, leaving the low-hanging fruit on the tree is a significant setback.” 

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

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Sep 30 2025
Coming soon: Our 2025 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch

The need to cut emissions and adapt to our warming world is growing more urgent. This year, we’ve seen temperatures reach record highs, as they have nearly every year for the last decade. Climate-fueled natural disasters are affecting communities around the world, costing billions of dollars. 

That’s why, for the past two years, MIT Technology Review has curated a list of companies with the potential to make a meaningful difference in addressing climate change (you can revisit the 2024 list here). We’re excited to share that we’ll publish our third edition of Climate Tech Companies to Watch on October 6. 

The list features businesses from around the world that are building technologies to reduce emissions or address the impacts of climate change. They represent advances across a wide range of industries, from agriculture and transportation to energy and critical minerals. 

One notable difference about this year’s list is that we’ve focused on fewer firms—we’ll highlight 10 instead of the 15 we’ve recognized in previous years. 

This change reflects the times: Climate science and technology are in a dramatically different place from where they were just one year ago. The US, the world’s largest economy and historically its biggest polluter, has made a U-turn on climate policy as the Trump administration cancels hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, tax credits, and loans designed to support the industry and climate research.  

And the stark truth is that time is of the essence. This year marks 10 years since the Paris Agreement, the UN treaty that aimed to limit global warming by setting a goal of cutting emissions so that temperatures would rise no more than 1.5 °C above preindustrial temperatures. Today, experts agree that we’ve virtually run out of time to reach that goal and will need to act fast to limit warming to less than 2 °C.

The companies on this year’s list are inventing and scaling technologies that could help. There’s a wide array of firms represented, from early-stage startups to multibillion-dollar businesses. Their technologies run the gamut from electric vehicles to the materials that scaffold our world. 

Of course, we can’t claim to be able to predict the future: Not all the businesses we’ve recognized will succeed. But we’ve done our best to choose companies with a solid technical footing, as well as feasible plans for bringing their solutions to the right market and scaling them effectively. 

We’re excited to share the list with you in just a few days. These companies are helping address one of the most crucial challenges of our time. Who knows—maybe you’ll even come away feeling a little more hopeful.

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Sep 26 2025
Fusion power plants don’t exist yet, but they’re making money anyway

This week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced it has another customer for its first commercial fusion power plant, in Virginia. Eni, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, signed a billion-dollar deal to buy electricity from the facility.

One small detail? That reactor doesn’t exist yet. Neither does the smaller reactor Commonwealth is building first to demonstrate that its tokamak design will work as intended.

This is a weird moment in fusion. Investors are pouring billions into the field to build power plants, and some companies are even signing huge agreements to purchase power from those still-nonexistent plants. All this comes before companies have actually completed a working reactor that can produce electricity. It takes money to develop a new technology, but all this funding could lead to some twisted expectations. 

Nearly three years ago, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory hit a major milestone for fusion power. With the help of the world’s most powerful lasers, scientists heated a pellet of fuel to 100 million °C. Hydrogen atoms in that fuel fused together, releasing more energy than the lasers put in.

It was a game changer for the vibes in fusion. The NIF experiment finally showed that a fusion reactor could yield net energy. Plasma physicists’ models had certainly suggested that it should be true, but it was another thing to see it demonstrated in real life.

But in some ways, the NIF results didn’t really change much for commercial fusion. That site’s lasers used a bonkers amount of energy, the setup was wildly complicated, and the whole thing lasted a fraction of a second. To operate a fusion power plant, not only do you have to achieve net energy, but you also need to do that on a somewhat constant basis and—crucially—do it economically.

So in the wake of the NIF news, all eyes went to companies like Commonwealth, Helion, and Zap Energy. Who would be the first to demonstrate this milestone in a more commercially feasible reactor? Or better yet, who would be the first to get a power plant up and running?

So far, the answer is none of them.

To be fair, many fusion companies have made technical progress. Commonwealth has built and tested its high-temperature superconducting magnets and published research about that work. Zap Energy demonstrated three hours of continuous operation in its test system, a milestone validated by the US Department of Energy. Helion started construction of its power plant in Washington in July. (And that’s not to mention a thriving, publicly funded fusion industry in China.)  

These are all important milestones, and these and other companies have seen many more. But as Ed Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at Berkeley, summed it up to me: “They don’t have a reactor.” (He was speaking specifically about Commonwealth, but really, the same goes for the others.)

And yet, the money pours in. Commonwealth raised over $800 million in funding earlier this year. And now it’s got two big customers signed on to buy electricity from this future power plant.

Why buy electricity from a reactor that’s currently little more than ideas on paper? From the perspective of these particular potential buyers, such agreements can be something of a win-win, says Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute.

By putting a vote of confidence behind Commonwealth, Eni could help the fusion startup get the capital it needs to actually build its plant. The company also directly invests in Commonwealth, so it stands to benefit from success. Getting a good rate on the capital needed to build the plant could also mean the electricity is ultimately cheaper for Eni, Stein says. 

Ultimately, fusion needs a lot of money. If fossil-fuel companies and tech giants want to provide it, all the better. One concern I have, though, is how outside observers are interpreting these big commitments. 

US Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been loud about his support for fusion and his expectations of the technology. Earlier this month, he told the BBC that it will soon power the world.

He’s certainly not the first to have big dreams for fusion, and it is an exciting technology. But despite the jaw-dropping financial milestones, this industry is still very much in development. 

And while Wright praises fusion, the Trump administration is slashing support for other energy technologies, including wind and solar power, and spreading disinformation about their safety, cost, and effectiveness. 

To meet the growing electricity demand and cut emissions from the power sector, we’ll need a whole range of technologies. It’s a risk and a distraction to put all our hopes on an unproven energy tech when there are plenty of options that actually exist. 

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

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Sep 23 2025
An oil and gas giant signed a $1 billion deal with Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Eni, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies, just agreed to buy $1 billion in electricity from a power plant being built by Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The deal is the latest to illustrate just how much investment Commonwealth and other fusion companies are courting as they attempt to take fusion power from the lab to the power grid. 

“This is showing in concrete terms that people that use large amounts of energy, that know the energy market—they want fusion power, and they’re willing to contract for it and to pay for it,” said Bob Mumgaard, cofounder and CEO of Commonwealth, on a press call about the deal.   

The agreement will see Eni purchase electricity from Commonwealth’s first commercial fusion power plant, in Virginia. The facility is still in the planning stages but is scheduled to come online in the early 2030s.

The news comes a few weeks after Commonwealth announced a $863 million funding round, bringing its total funding raised to date to nearly $3 billion. The fusion company also announced earlier this year that Google would be its first commercial power customer for the Virginia plant.

Commonwealth, a spinout from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, is widely considered one of the leading companies in fusion power. Investment in the company represents nearly one-third of the total global investment in private fusion companies. (MIT Technology Review is owned by MIT but is editorially independent.)

Eni has invested in Commonwealth since 2018 and participated in the latest fundraising round. The vast majority of the company’s business is in oil and gas, but in recent years it’s made investments in technologies like biofuels and renewables.

“A company like us—we cannot stay and wait for things to happen,” says Lorenzo Fiorillo, Eni’s director of technology, research and development, and digital. 

One open question is what, exactly, Eni plans to do with this electricity. When asked about it on the press call, Fiorillo referenced wind and solar plants that Eni owns and said the plan “is not different from what we do in other areas in the US and the world.” (Eni sells electricity from power plants that it owns, including renewable and fossil-fuel plants.)

Commonwealth is building tokamak fusion reactors that use superconducting magnets to hold plasma in place. That plasma is where fusion reactions happen, forcing hydrogen atoms together to release large amounts of energy.

The company’s first demonstration reactor, which it calls Sparc, is over 65% complete, and the team is testing components and assembling them. The plan is for the reactor, which is located outside Boston, to make plasma within two years and then demonstrate that it can generate more energy than is required to run it.

While Sparc is still under construction, Commonwealth is working on plans for Arc, its first commercial power plant. That facility should begin construction in 2027 or 2028 and generate electricity for the grid in the early 2030s, Mumgaard says.

Despite the billions of dollars Commonwealth has already raised, the company still needs more money to build its Arc power plant—that will be a multibillion-dollar project, Mumgaard said on a press call in August about the company’s latest fundraising round. 

The latest commitment from Eni could help Commonwealth secure the funding it needs to get Arc built. “These agreements are a really good way to create the right environment for building up more investment,” says Paul Wilson, chair of the department of nuclear engineering and engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Even though commercial fusion energy is still years away at a minimum, investors and big tech companies have pumped money into the industry and signed agreements to buy power from plants once they’re operational. 

Helion, another leading fusion startup, has plans to produce electricity from its first reactor in 2028 (an aggressive timeline that has some experts expressing skepticism). That facility will have a full generating capacity of 50 megawatts, and in 2023 Microsoft signed an agreement to purchase energy from the facility in order to help power its data centers.

As billions of dollars pour into the fusion industry, there are still many milestones ahead. To date, only the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has demonstrated that a fusion reactor can generate more energy than the amount put into the reaction. No commercial project has achieved that yet. 

“There’s a lot of capital going out now to these startup companies,” says Ed Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “What I’m not seeing is a peer-reviewed scientific article that makes me feel like, boy, we really turned the corner with the physics.”

But others are taking major commercial deals from Commonwealth and others as reasons to be optimistic. “Fusion is moving from the lab to be a proper industry,” says Sehila Gonzalez de Vicente, global director of fusion energy at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force. “This is very good for the whole sector to be perceived as a real source of energy.”

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Sep 19 2025
Clean hydrogen is facing a big reality check

Hydrogen is sometimes held up as a master key for the energy transition. It can be made using several low-emissions methods and could play a role in cleaning up industries ranging from agriculture and chemicals to aviation and long-distance shipping.

This moment is a complicated one for the green fuel, though, as a new report from the International Energy Agency lays out. A number of major projects face cancellations and delays, especially in the US and Europe. The US in particular is seeing a slowdown after changes to key tax credits and cuts in support for renewable energy. Still, there are bright spots for the industry, including in China, and new markets could soon become crucial for growth.

Here are three things to know about the state of hydrogen in 2025.

1. Expectations for annual clean hydrogen production by 2030 are shrinking, for the first time.

    While hydrogen has the potential to serve as a clean fuel, today most is made with processes that use fossil fuels. As of 2025, about a million metric tons of low-emissions hydrogen are produced annually. That’s less than 1% of total hydrogen production.

    In last year’s Global Hydrogen Report, the IEA projected that global production of low-emissions hydrogen would grow to as high as 49 million metric tons annually by 2030. That prediction has been steadily climbing since 2021, as more places around the world sink money into developing and scaling up the technology.

    In the 2025 edition, though, the IEA’s production prediction had shrunk to 37 million metric tons annually by 2030.

    That’s still a major expansion from today’s numbers, but it’s the first time the agency has cut its predictions for the end of the decade. The report cited the cancellations of both electrolysis projects (those that use electricity to generate hydrogen) and carbon capture projects as reasons for the pullback. The cancelled and delayed projects included sites across Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Australia. 

    2. China is dominating production today and could produce competitively cheap green hydrogen by the end of the decade.

      Speaking of electrolysis projects, China is the driving force in manufacturing and development of electrolyzers, the devices that use electricity to generate green hydrogen, according to the new IEA report. As of July 2025, the country accounted for 65% of the installed or almost installed electrolyzer capacity in the world. It also manufactures nearly 60% of the world’s electrolyzers.

      A major barrier for clean hydrogen today is that dirty methods based on fossil fuels are just so much cheaper than cleaner ones.

      But China is well on its way to narrowing that gap. Today, it’s roughly three times more expensive to make and install an electrolyzer anywhere else in the world than in China. The country could produce green hydrogen that’s cost-competitive with fossil hydrogen by the end of the decade, according to the IEA report. That could make the fuel an obvious choice for both new and existing uses of hydrogen.

      3. Southeast Asia could be a major emerging market for low-emissions hydrogen.

        One region that could become a major player in the green hydrogen market is Southeast Asia. The economy is growing fast, and so is energy demand.

        There’s an existing market for hydrogen in Southeast Asia already. Today, the region uses about 4 million metric tons of hydrogen annually, largely in the oil refining industry and the chemical business, where it is used to make ammonia and methanol.

        International shipping is also concentrated in the region—the port of Singapore supplied about one-sixth of all the fuel used in global shipping in 2024, more than any other single location. Today, that total consists almost exclusively of fossil fuels. But there’s been work to test cleaner fuels, including methanol and ammonia, and interest in shifting to hydrogen in the longer term.

        Clean hydrogen could slot into these existing industries and help cut emissions. There are 25 projects under development right now in the region, though additional support for renewables will be crucial to getting significant capacity up and running.

        Overall, hydrogen is getting a reality check, revealing problems cutting through the hype we’ve seen in recent years. The next five years will tell whether the fuel can live up to the still-lofty hopes.  

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

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        Sep 12 2025
        Texas banned lab-grown meat. What’s next for the industry?

        Last week, a legal battle over lab-grown meat kicked off in Texas. On September 1, a two-year ban on the technology went into effect across the state; the following day, two companies filed a lawsuit against state officials.

        The two companies, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods, are part of a growing industry that aims to bring new types of food to people’s plates. These products, often called cultivated meat by the industry, take live animal cells and grow them in the lab to make food products without the need to slaughter animals.

        Texas joins six other US states and the country of Italy in banning these products. These legal challenges are adding barriers to an industry that’s still in its infancy and already faces plenty of challenges before it can reach consumers in a meaningful way.

        The agriculture sector makes up a hefty chunk of global greenhouse-gas emissions, with livestock alone accounting for somewhere between 10% and 20% of climate pollution. Alternative meat products, including those grown in a lab, could help cut the greenhouse gases from agriculture.

        The industry is still in its early days, though. In the US, just a handful of companies can legally sell products including cultivated chicken, pork fat, and salmon. Australia, Singapore, and Israel also allow a few companies to sell within their borders.

        Upside Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, was one of the first to receive the legal go-ahead to sell its products in the US, in 2022. Wildtype Foods, one of the latest additions to the US market, was able to start selling its cultivated salmon in June.

        Upside, Wildtype, and other cultivated-meat companies are still working to scale up production. Products are generally available at pop-up events or on special menus at high-end restaurants. (I visited San Francisco to try Upside’s cultivated chicken at a Michelin-starred restaurant a few years ago.)

        Until recently, the only place you could reliably find lab-grown meat in Texas was a sushi restaurant in Austin. Otoko featured Wildtype’s cultivated salmon on a special tasting menu starting in July. (The chef told local publication Culture Map Austin that the cultivated fish tastes like wild salmon, and it was included in a dish with grilled yellowtail to showcase it side-by-side with another type of fish.)

        The as-yet-limited reach of lab-grown meat didn’t stop state officials from moving to ban the technology, effective from now until September 2027.

        The office of state senator Charles Perry, the author of the bill, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, whose president, Carl Ray Polk Jr., testified in support of the bill in a March committee hearing.

        “The introduction of lab-grown meat could disrupt traditional livestock markets, affecting rural communities and family farms,” Perry said during the meeting.

        In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Polk said the two-year moratorium would help the industry put checks and balances in place before the products could be sold. He also expressed concern about how clearly cultivated-meat companies will be labeling their products.

        “The purpose of these bans is to try to kill the cultivated-meat industry before it gets off the ground,” said Myra Pasek, general counsel of Upside Foods, via email. The company is working to scale up its manufacturing and get the product on the market, she says, “but that can’t happen if we’re not allowed to compete in the marketplace.”

        Others in the industry have similar worries. “Moratoriums on sale like this not only deny Texans new choices and economic growth, but they also send chilling signals to researchers and entrepreneurs across the country,” said Pepin Andrew Tuma, the vice president of policy and government relations for the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on alternative proteins, in a statement. (The group isn’t involved in the lawsuit.) 

        One day after the moratorium took effect on September 1, Wildtype Foods and Upside Foods filed a lawsuit challenging the ban, naming Jennifer Shuford, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, among other state officials.

        A lawsuit wasn’t necessarily part of the scale-up plan. “This was really a last resort for us,” says Justin Kolbeck, cofounder and CEO of Wildtype.

        Growing cells to make meat in the lab isn’t easy—some companies have spent a decade or more trying to make significant amounts of a product that people want to eat. These legal battles certainly aren’t going to help. 

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

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        Sep 10 2025
        AI is changing the grid. Could it help more than it harms?

        The rising popularity of AI is driving an increase in electricity demand so significant it has the potential to reshape our grid. Energy consumption by data centers has gone up by 80% from 2020 to 2025 and is likely to keep growing. Electricity prices are already rising, especially in places where data centers are most concentrated. 

        Yet many people, especially in Big Tech, argue that AI will be, on balance, a positive force for the grid. They claim that the technology could help get more clean power online faster, run our power system more efficiently, and predict and prevent failures that cause blackouts. 

        This story is a part of MIT Technology Review’s series “Power Hungry: AI and our energy future,” on the energy demands and carbon costs of the artificial-intelligence revolution.

        There are early examples where AI is helping already, including AI tools that utilities are using to help forecast supply and demand. The question is whether these big promises will be realized fast enough to outweigh the negative effects of AI on local grids and communities. 

        A delicate balance

        One area where AI is already being used for the grid is in forecasting, says Utkarsha Agwan, a member of the nonprofit group Climate Change AI.

        Running the grid is a balancing act: Operators have to understand how much electricity demand there is and turn on the right combination of power plants to meet it. They optimize for economics along the way, choosing the sources that will keep prices lowest for the whole system.

        That makes it necessary to look ahead hours and in some cases days. Operators consider factors such as historical data (holidays often see higher demand) and the weather (a hot day means more air conditioners sucking up power). These predictions also consider what level of supply is expected from intermittent sources like solar panels.

        There’s little risk in using AI tools in forecasting; it’s often not as time sensitive as other applications, which can require reactions within seconds or even milliseconds. A grid operator might use a forecast to determine which plants will need to turn on. Other groups might run their own forecasts as well, using AI tools to decide how to staff a plant, for example. The tools also can’t physically control anything. Rather, they can be used alongside more conventional methods to provide more data.  

        Today, grid operators make a lot of approximations to model the grid, because the system is so incredibly complex that it’s impossible to truly know what’s going on in every place at every time. Not only are there a whole host of power plants and consumers to think about, but there are considerations like making sure power lines don’t get overloaded.

        Working with those estimates can lead to some inefficiencies, says Kyri Baker, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Operators tend to generate a bit more electricity than the system uses, for example. Using AI to create a better model could reduce some of those losses and allow operators to make decisions about how to control infrastructure in real time to reach a closer match of supply and demand.

        She gives the example of a trip to the airport. Imagine there’s a route you know will get you there in about 45 minutes. There might be another, more complicated route that could save you some time in ideal conditions—but you’re not sure whether it’s better on any particular day. What the grid does now is the equivalent of taking the reliable route.

        “So that’s the gap that AI can help close. We can solve this more complex problem, fast enough and reliably enough that we can possibly use it and shave off emissions,” Baker says. 

        In theory, AI could be used to operate the grid entirely without human intervention. But that work is largely still in the research phase. Grid operators are running some of the most critical infrastructure in this country, and the industry is hesitant to mess with something that’s already working, Baker says. If this sort of technology is ever used in grid operations, there will still be humans in the loop to help make decisions, at least when it’s first deployed.  

        Planning ahead

        Another fertile area for AI is planning future updates to the grid. Building a power plant can take a very long time—the typical time from an initial request to commercial operation in the US is roughly four years. One reason for the lengthy wait is that new power plants have to demonstrate how they might affect the rest of the grid before they can connect. 

        An interconnection study examines whether adding a new power plant of a particular type in a particular place would require upgrades to the grid to prevent problems. After regulators and utilities determine what upgrades might be needed, they estimate the cost, and the energy developer generally foots the bill. 

        Today, those studies can take months. They involve trying to understand an incredibly complicated system, and because they rely on estimates of other existing and proposed power plants, only a few can happen in an area at any given time. This has helped create the years-long interconnection queue, a long line of plants waiting for their turn to hook up to the grid in markets like the US and Europe. The vast majority of projects in the queue today are renewables, which means there’s clean power just waiting to come online. 

        AI could help speed this process, producing these reports more quickly. The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, a grid operator that covers 15 states in the central US, is currently working with a company called Pearl Street to help automate these reports.

        AI won’t be a cure-all for grid planning; there are other steps to clearing the interconnection queue, including securing the necessary permits. But the technology could help move things along. “The sooner we can speed up interconnection, the better off we’ll be,” says Rob Gramlich, president of Grid Strategies, a consultancy specializing in transmission and power markets.

        There’s a growing list of other potential uses for AI on the grid and in electricity generation. The technology could monitor and plan ahead for failures in equipment ranging from power lines to gear boxes. Computer vision could help detect everything from wildfires to faulty lines. AI could also help balance supply and demand in virtual power plants, systems of distributed resources like EV chargers or smart water heaters. 

        While there are early examples of research and pilot programs for AI from grid planning to operation, some experts are skeptical that the technology will deliver at the level some are hoping for. “It’s not that AI has not had some kind of transformation on power systems,” Climate Change AI’s Agwan says. “It’s that the promise has always been bigger, and the hope has always been bigger.”

        Some places are already seeing higher electricity prices because of power needs from data centers. The situation is likely to get worse. Electricity demand from data centers is set to double by the end of the decade, reaching 945 terawatt-hours, roughly the annual demand from the entire country of Japan. 

        The infrastructure growth needed to support AI load growth has outpaced the promises of the technology, “by quite a bit,” says Panayiotis Moutis, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the City College of New York. Higher bills caused by the increasing energy needs of AI aren’t justified by existing ways of using the technology for the grid, he says. 

        “At the moment, I am very hesitant to lean on the side of AI being a silver bullet,” Moutis says. 

        Correction: This story has been updated to correct Moutis’s affiliation.

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        Sep 9 2025
        Meet the Ethiopian entrepreneur who is reinventing ammonia production

        Iwnetim Abate is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. 

        “I’m the only one who wears glasses and has eye problems in the family,” Iwnetim Abate says with a smile as sun streams in through the windows of his MIT office. “I think it’s because of the candles.”

        In the small town in Ethiopia where he grew up, Abate’s family had electricity, but it was unreliable. So, for several days each week when they were without power, Abate would finish his homework by candlelight.

        Today, Abate, 32, is an assistant professor at MIT in the department of materials science and engineering. Part of his research focuses on sodium-ion batteries, which could be cheaper than the lithium-based ones that typically power electric vehicles and grid installations. He’s also pursuing a new research path, examining how to harness the heat and pressure under the Earth’s surface to make ammonia, a chemical used in fertilizer and as a green fuel.

        Growing up without the ubiquitous access to electricity that many people take for granted shaped the way Abate thinks about energy issues, he says. He recalls rushing to dry out his school uniform over a fire before he left in the morning. One of his chores was preparing cow dung to burn as fuel—the key is strategically placing holes to ensure proper drying, he says.

        Abate’s desire to devote his attention to energy crystallized in a high school chemistry class on fuel cells. “It was like magic,” he says, to learn it’s possible to basically convert water into energy. “Sometimes science is magic, right?”

        Abate scored the highest of any student in Ethiopia on the national exam the year he took it, and he knew he wanted to go to the US to further his education. But actually getting there proved to be a challenge. 

        Abate applied to US colleges for three years before he was granted admission to Concordia College Moorhead, a small liberal arts college, with a partial scholarship. To raise the remaining money, he reached out to various companies and wealthy people across Ethiopia. He received countless rejections but didn’t let that phase him. He laughs recalling how guards would chase him off when he dropped by prospects’ homes in person. Eventually, a family friend agreed to help.

        When Abate finally made it to the Minnesota college, he walked into a room in his dorm building and the lights turned on automatically. “I both felt happy to have all this privilege and I felt guilty at the same time,” he says.

        Lab notes

        His college wasn’t a research institute, so Abate quickly set out to get into a laboratory. He reached out to Sossina Haile, then at the California Institute of Technology, to ask about a summer research position.

        Haile, now at Northwestern University, recalls thinking that Abate was particularly eager. As a visible Ethiopian scientist, she gets a lot of email requests, but his stood out. “No obstacle was going to stand in his way,” she says. It was risky to take on a young student with no research experience who’d only been in the US for a year, but she offered him a spot in her lab.

        Abate spent the summer working on materials for use in solid oxide fuel cells. He returned for the following summer, then held a string of positions in energy-materials research, including at IBM and Los Alamos National Lab, before completing his graduate degree at Stanford and postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley.

        Meet the rest of this year’s 
        Innovators Under 35.

        He joined the MIT faculty in 2023 and set out to build a research group of his own. Today, there are two major focuses of his lab. One is sodium-ion batteries, which are a popular alternative to the lithium-based cells used in EVs and grid storage installations. Sodium-ion batteries don’t require the kinds of critical minerals lithium-ion batteries do, which can be both expensive and tied up by geopolitics.  

        One major stumbling block for sodium-ion batteries is their energy density. It’s possible to improve energy density by operating at higher voltages, but some of the materials used tend to degrade quickly at high voltages. That limits the total energy density of the battery, so it’s a problem for applications like electric vehicles, where a low energy density would restrict range.

        Abate’s team is developing materials that could extend the lifetime of sodium-ion batteries while avoiding the need for nickel, which is considered a critical mineral in the US. The team is examining additives and testing materials-engineering techniques to help the batteries compete with lithium-ion cells.

        Irons in the fire

        Another vein of Abate’s work is in some ways a departure from his history in batteries and fuel cells. In January, his team published research describing a process to make ammonia underground, using naturally-occurring heat and pressure to drive the necessary chemical reactions.  

        Today, making ammonia generates between 1% and 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s primarily used to fertilize crops, but it’s also being considered as a fuel for sectors like long-distance shipping.

        Abate cofounded a company called Addis Energy to commercialize the research, alongside MIT serial entrepreneur Yet-Ming Chiang and a pair of oil industry experts. (Addis means “new” in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia.) For an upcoming pilot, the company aims to build an underground reactor that can produce ammonia. 

        When he’s not tied up in research or the new startup, Abate runs programs for African students. In 2017, he cofounded an organization called Scifro, which runs summer school programs in Ethiopia and plans to expand to other countries, including Rwanda. The programs focus on providing mentorship and educating students about energy and medical devices, which is the specialty of his cofounder. 

        While Abate holds a position at one of the world’s most prestigious universities and serves as chief science officer of a buzzy startup, he’s quick to give credit to those around him. “It takes a village to build something, and it’s not just me,” he says.

        Abate often thinks about his friends, family, and former neighbors in Ethiopia as he works on new energy solutions. “Of course, science is beautiful, and we want to make an impact,” he says. “Being good at what you do is important, but ultimately, it’s about people.”

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