These four charts sum up the state of AI and energy

While it’s rare to look at the news without finding some headline related to AI and energy, a lot of us are stuck waving our hands when it comes to what it all means.

Sure, you’ve probably read that AI will drive an increase in electricity demand. But how that fits into the context of the current and future grid can feel less clear from the headlines. That’s true even for people working in the field. 

A new report from the International Energy Agency digs into the details of energy and AI, and I think it’s worth looking at some of the data to help clear things up. Here are four charts from the report that sum up the crucial points about AI and energy demand.

1. AI is power hungry, and the world will need to ramp up electricity supply to meet demand. 

This point is the most obvious, but it bears repeating: AI is exploding, and it’s going to lead to higher energy demand from data centers. “AI has gone from an academic pursuit to an industry with trillions of dollars at stake,” as the IEA report’s executive summary puts it.

Data centers used less than 300 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2020. That could increase to nearly 1,000 terawatt-hours in the next five years, which is more than Japan’s total electricity consumption today.

Today, the US has about 45% of the world’s data center capacity, followed by China. Those two countries will continue to represent the overwhelming majority of capacity through 2035.  

2. The electricity needed to power data centers will largely come from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in the near term, but nuclear and renewables could play a key role, especially after 2030.

The IEA report is relatively optimistic on the potential for renewables to power data centers, projecting that nearly half of global growth by 2035 will be met with renewables like wind and solar. (In Europe, the IEA projects, renewables will meet 85% of new demand.)

In the near term, though, natural gas and coal will also expand. An additional 175 terawatt-hours from gas will help meet demand in the next decade, largely in the US, according to the IEA’s projections. Another report, published this week by the energy consultancy BloombergNEF, suggests that fossil fuels will play an even larger role than the IEA projects, accounting for two-thirds of additional electricity generation between now and 2035.

Nuclear energy, a favorite of big tech companies looking to power operations without generating massive emissions, could start to make a dent after 2030, according to the IEA data.

3. Data centers are just a small piece of expected electricity demand growth this decade.

We should be talking more about appliances, industry, and EVs when we talk about energy! Electricity demand is on the rise from a whole host of sources: Electric vehicles, air-conditioning, and appliances will each drive more electricity demand than data centers between now and the end of the decade. In total, data centers make up a little over 8% of electricity demand expected between now and 2030.

There are interesting regional effects here, though. Growing economies will see more demand from the likes of air-conditioning than from data centers. On the other hand, the US has seen relatively flat electricity demand from consumers and industry for years, so newly rising demand from high-performance computing will make up a larger chunk. 

4. Data centers tend to be clustered together and close to population centers, making them a unique challenge for the power grid.  

The grid is no stranger to facilities that use huge amounts of energy: Cement plants, aluminum smelters, and coal mines all pull a lot of power in one place. However, data centers are a unique sort of beast.

First, they tend to be closely clustered together. Globally, data centers make up about 1.5% of total electricity demand. However, in Ireland, that number is 20%, and in Virginia, it’s 25%. That trend looks likely to continue, too: Half of data centers under development in the US are in preexisting clusters.

Data centers also tend to be closer to urban areas than other energy-intensive facilities like factories and mines. 

Since data centers are close both to each other and to communities, they could have significant impacts on the regions where they’re situated, whether by bringing on more fossil fuels close to urban centers or by adding strain to the local grid. Or both.

Overall, AI and data centers more broadly are going to be a major driving force for electricity demand. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a unique part of our energy picture to continue watching moving forward. 

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

Tariffs are bad news for batteries

Update: Since this story was first published in The Spark, our weekly climate newsletter, the White House announced that most reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days. That pause does not apply to China, which will see an increased tariff rate of 125%.

Today, new tariffs go into effect for goods imported into the US from basically every country on the planet.

Since Donald Trump announced his plans for sweeping tariffs last week, the vibes have been, in a word, chaotic. Markets have seen one of the quickest drops in the last century, and it’s widely anticipated that the global economic order may be forever changed.  

While many try not to look at the effects on their savings and retirement accounts, experts are scrambling to understand what these tariffs might mean for various industries. As my colleague James Temple wrote in a new story last week, anxieties are especially high in climate technology.

These tariffs could be particularly rough on the battery industry. China dominates the entire supply chain and is subject to monster tariff rates, and even US battery makers won’t escape the effects.   

First, in case you need it, a super-quick refresher: Tariffs are taxes charged on goods that are imported (in this case, into the US). If I’m a US company selling bracelets, and I typically buy my beads and string from another country, I’ll now be paying the US government an additional percentage of what those goods cost to import. Under Trump’s plan, that might be 10%, 20%, or upwards of 50%, depending on the country sending them to me. 

In theory, tariffs should help domestic producers, since products from competitors outside the country become more expensive. But since so many of the products we use have supply chains that stretch all over the world, even products made in the USA often have some components that would be tariffed.

In the case of batteries, we could be talking about really high tariff rates, because most batteries and their components currently come from China. As of 2023, the country made more than 75% of the world’s lithium-ion battery cells, according to data from the International Energy Agency.

Trump’s new plan adds a 34% tariff on all Chinese goods, and that stacks on top of a 20% tariff that was already in place, making the total 54%. (Then, as of Wednesday, the White House further raised the tariff on China, making the total 104%.)

But when it comes to batteries, that’s not even the whole story. There was already a 3.5% tariff on all lithium-ion batteries, for example, as well as a 7.5% tariff on batteries from China that’s set to increase to 25% next year.

If we add all those up, lithium-ion batteries from China could have a tariff of 82% in 2026. (Or 132%, with this additional retaliatory tariff.) In any case, that’ll make EVs and grid storage installations a whole lot more expensive, along with phones, laptops, and other rechargeable devices.

The economic effects could be huge. The US still imports the majority of its lithium-ion batteries, and nearly 70% of those imports are from China. The US imported $4 billion worth of lithium-ion batteries from China just during the first four months of 2024.

Although US battery makers could theoretically stand to benefit, there are a limited number of US-based factories. And most of those factories are still purchasing components from China that will be subject to the tariffs, because it’s hard to overstate just how dominant China is in battery supply chains.

While China makes roughly three-quarters of lithium-ion cells, it’s even more dominant in components: 80% of the world’s cathode materials are made in China, along with over 90% of anode materials. (For those who haven’t been subject to my battery ramblings before, the cathode and anode are two of the main components of a battery—basically, the plus and minus ends.)

Even battery makers that work in alternative chemistries don’t seem to be jumping for joy over tariffs. Lyten is a California-based company working to build lithium-sulfur batteries, and most of its components can be sourced in the US. (For more on the company’s approach, check out this story from 2024.) But tariffs could still spell trouble. Lyten has plans for a new factory, scheduled for 2027, that rely on sourcing affordable construction materials. Will that be possible? “We’re not drawing any conclusions quite yet,” Lyten’s chief sustainability officer, Keith Norman, told Heatmap News.

The battery industry in the US was already in a pretty tough spot. Billions of dollars’ worth of factories have been canceled since Trump took office.  Companies making investments that can total hundreds of millions or billions of dollars don’t love uncertainty, and tariffs are certainly adding to an already uncertain environment.

We’ll be digging deeper into what the tariffs mean for climate technology broadly, and specifically some of the industries we cover. If you have questions, or if you have thoughts to share about what this will mean for your area of research or business, I’d love to hear them at casey.crownhart@technologyreview.com. I’m also on Bluesky @caseycrownhart.bsky.social.

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

We should talk more about air-conditioning

Things are starting to warm up here in the New York City area, and it’s got me thinking once again about something that people aren’t talking about enough: energy demand for air conditioners. 

I get it: Data centers are the shiny new thing to worry about. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be thinking about the strain that gigawatt-scale computing installations put on the grid. But a little bit of perspective is important here.

According to a report from the International Energy Agency last year, data centers will make up less than 10% of the increase in energy demand between now and 2030, far less than the energy demand from space cooling (mostly air-conditioning).

I just finished up a new story that’s out today about a novel way to make heat exchangers, a crucial component in air conditioners and a whole host of other technologies that cool our buildings, food, and electronics. Let’s dig into why I’m writing about the guts of cooling technologies, and why this sector really needs innovation. 

One twisted thing about cooling and climate change: It’s all a vicious cycle. As temperatures rise, the need for cooling technologies increases. In turn, more fossil-fuel power plants are firing up to meet that demand, turning up the temperature of the planet in the process.

“Cooling degree days” are one measure of the need for additional cooling. Basically, you take a preset baseline temperature and figure out how much the temperature exceeds it. Say the baseline (above which you’d likely need to flip on a cooling device) is 21 °C (70 °F). If the average temperature for a day is 26 °C, that’s five cooling degree days on a single day. Repeat that every day for a month, and you wind up with 150 cooling degree days.

I explain this arguably weird metric because it’s a good measure of total energy demand for cooling—it lumps together both how many hot days there are and just how hot it is.  

And the number of cooling degree days is steadily ticking up globally. Global cooling degree days were 6% higher in 2024 than in 2023, and 20% higher than the long-term average for the first two decades of the century. Regions that have high cooling demand, like China, India, and the US, were particularly affected, according to the IEA report. You can see a month-by-month breakdown of this data from the IEA here.

That increase in cooling degree days is leading to more demand for air conditioners, and for energy to power them. Air-conditioning accounted for 7% of the world’s electricity demand in 2022, and it’s only going to get more important from here.

There were fewer than 2 billion AC units in the world in 2016. By 2050, that could be nearly 6 billion, according to a 2018 report from the IEA. This is a measure of progress and, in a way, something we should be happy about; the number of air conditioners tends to rise with household income. But it does present a challenge to the grid.  

Another piece of this whole thing: It’s not just about how much total electricity we need to run air conditioners but about when that demand tends to come. As we’ve covered in this newsletter before, your air-conditioning habits aren’t unique. Cooling devices tend to flip on around the same time—when it’s hot. In some parts of the US, for example, air conditioners can represent more than 70% of residential energy demand at times when the grid is most stressed.

The good news is that we’re seeing innovations in cooling technology. Some companies are building cooling systems that include an energy storage component, so they can charge up when energy is plentiful and demand is low. Then they can start cooling when it’s most needed, without sucking as much energy from the grid during peak hours.

We’ve also covered alternatives to air conditioners called desiccant cooling systems, which use special moisture-sucking materials to help cool spaces and deal with humidity more efficiently than standard options.

And in my latest story, I dug into new developments in heat exchanger technology. Heat exchangers are a crucial component of air conditioners, but you can really find them everywhere—in heat pumps, refrigerators, and, yes, the cooling systems in large buildings and large electronics installations, including data centers.

We’ve been building heat exchangers basically the same way for nearly a century. These components basically move heat around, and there are a few known ways to do so with devices that are relatively straightforward to manufacture. Now, though, one team of researchers has 3D-printed a heat exchanger that outperforms some standard designs and rivals others. This is still a long way from solving our looming air-conditioning crisis, but the details are fascinating—I hope you’ll give it a read. 

We need more innovation in cooling technology to help meet global demand efficiently so we don’t stay stuck in this cycle. And we’ll need policy and public support to make sure that these technologies make a difference and that everyone has access to them too. 

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

How to save a glacier

Glaciers generally move so slowly you can’t see their progress with the naked eye. (Their pace is … glacial.) But these massive bodies of ice do march downhill, with potentially planet-altering consequences.  

There’s a lot we don’t understand about how glaciers move and how soon some of the most significant ones could collapse into the sea. That could be a problem, since melting glaciers could lead to multiple feet of sea-level rise this century, potentially displacing millions of people who live and work along the coasts.

A new group is aiming not only to further our understanding of glaciers but also to look into options to save them if things move toward a worst-case scenario, as my colleague James Temple outlined in his latest story. One idea: refreezing glaciers in place.

The whole thing can sound like science fiction. But once you consider how huge the stakes are, I think it gets easier to understand why some scientists say we should at least be exploring these radical interventions.

It’s hard to feel very optimistic about glaciers these days. (The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is often called the “doomsday glacier”—not alarming at all!)

Take two studies published just in the last month, for example. The British Antarctic Survey released the most detailed map to date of Antarctica’s bedrock—the foundation under the continent’s ice. With twice as many data points as before, the study revealed that more ice than we thought is resting on bedrock that’s already below sea level. That means seawater can flow in and help melt ice faster, so Antarctica’s ice is more vulnerable than previously estimated.

Another study examined subglacial rivers—streams that flow under the ice, often from subglacial lakes. The team found that the fastest-moving glaciers have a whole lot of water moving around underneath them, which speeds melting and lubricates the ice sheet so it slides faster, in turn melting even more ice.

And those are just two of the most recent surveys. Look at any news site and it’s probably delivered the same gnarly message at some point recently: The glaciers are melting faster than previously realized. (Our site has one, too: “Greenland’s ice sheet is less stable than we thought,” from 2016.) 

The new group is joining the race to better understand glaciers. Arête Glacier Initiative, a nonprofit research organization founded by scientists at MIT and Dartmouth, has already awarded its first grants to researchers looking into how glaciers melt and plans to study the possibility of reversing those fortunes, as James exclusively reported last week.

Brent Minchew, one of the group’s cofounders and an associate professor of geophysics at MIT, was drawn to studying glaciers because of their potential impact on sea-level rise. “But over the years, I became less content with simply telling a more dramatic story about how things were going—and more open to asking the question of what can we do about it,” he says.

Minchew is among the researchers looking into potential plans to alter the future of glaciers. Strategies being proposed by groups around the world include building physical supports to prop them up and installing massive curtains to slow the flow of warm water that speeds melting. Another approach, which will be the focus of Arête, is called basal intervention. It basically involves drilling holes in glaciers, which would allow water flowing underneath the ice to be pumped out and refrozen, hopefully slowing them down.

If you have questions about how all this would work, you’re not alone. These are almost inconceivably huge engineering projects, they’d be expensive, and they’d face legal and ethical questions. Nobody really owns Antarctica, and it’s governed by a huge treaty—how could we possibly decide whether to move forward with these projects?

Then there’s the question of the potential side effects. Just look at recent news from the Arctic Ice Project, which was researching how to slow the melting of sea ice by covering it with substances designed to reflect sunlight away. (Sea ice is different from glaciers, but some of the key issues are the same.) 

One of the project’s largest field experiments involved spreading tiny silica beads, sort of like sand, over 45,000 square feet of ice in Alaska. But after new research revealed that the materials might be disrupting food chains, the organization announced that it’s concluding its research and winding down operations.

Cutting our emissions of greenhouse gases to stop climate change at the source would certainly be more straightforward than spreading beads on ice, or trying to stop a 74,000-square-mile glacier in its tracks. 

But we’re not doing so hot on cutting emissions—in fact, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose faster than ever in 2024. And even if the world stopped polluting the atmosphere with planet-warming gases today, things may have already gone too far to save some of the most vulnerable glaciers. 

The longer I cover climate change and face the situation we’re in, the more I understand the impulse to at least consider every option out there, even if it sounds like science fiction. 

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

This startup just hit a big milestone for green steel production

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

Green-steel startup Boston Metal just showed that it has all the ingredients needed to make steel without emitting gobs of greenhouse gases. The company successfully ran its largest reactor yet to make steel, producing over a ton of metal, MIT Technology Review can exclusively report.

The latest milestone means that Boston Metal just got one step closer to commercializing its technology. The company’s process uses electricity to make steel, and depending on the source of that electricity, it could mean cleaning up production of one of the most polluting materials on the planet. The world produces about 2 billion metric tons of steel each year, emitting over 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in the process.

While there are still a lot of milestones left before reaching the scale needed to make a dent in the steel industry, the latest run shows that the company can scale up its process.

Boston Metal started up its industrial reactor for steelmaking in January, and after it had run for several weeks, the company siphoned out roughly a ton of material on February 17. (You can see a video of the molten metal here. It’s really cool.)

Work on this reactor has been underway for a while. I got to visit the facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 2022, when construction was nearly done. In the years since, the company has been working on testing it out to make other metals before retrofitting it for steel production. 

Boston Metal’s approach is very different from that of a conventional steel plant. Steelmaking typically involves a blast furnace, which uses a coal-based fuel called coke to drive the reactions needed to turn iron ore into iron (the key ingredient in steel). The carbon in coke combines with oxygen pulled out of the iron ore, which gets released as carbon dioxide.

Instead, Boston Metal uses electricity in a process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE). Iron ore gets loaded into a reactor, mixed with other ingredients, and then electricity is run through it, heating the mixture to around 1,600 °C (2,900 °F) and driving the reactions needed to make iron. That iron can then be turned into steel. 

Crucially for the climate, this process emits oxygen rather than carbon dioxide (that infamous greenhouse gas). If renewables like wind and solar or nuclear power are used as the source of electricity, then this approach can virtually cut out the climate impact from steel production. 

MOE was developed at MIT, and Boston Metal was founded in 2013 to commercialize the technology. Since then, the company has worked to take it from lab scale, with reactors roughly the size of a coffee cup, to much larger ones that can produce tons of metal at a time. That’s crucial for an industry that operates on the scale of billions of tons per year.

“The volumes of steel everywhere around us—it’s immense,” says Adam Rauwerdink, senior vice president of business development at Boston Metal. “The scale is massive.”

BOSTON METAL

Making the huge amounts of steel required to be commercially relevant has been quite the technical challenge. 

One key component of Boston Metal’s design is the anode. It’s basically a rounded metallic bit that sticks into the reactor, providing a way for electricity to get in and drive the reactions required. In theory, this anode doesn’t get used up, but if the conditions aren’t quite right, it can degrade over time.

Over the past few years, the company has made a lot of progress in preventing inert anode degradation, Rauwerdink says. The latest phase of work is more complicated, because now the company is adding multiple anodes in the same reactor. 

In lab-scale reactors, there’s one anode, and it’s quite small. Larger reactors require bigger anodes, and at a certain point it’s necessary to add more of them. The latest run continues to prove how Boston Metal’s approach can scale, Rauwerdink says: making reactors larger, adding more anodes, and then adding multiple reactors together in a single plant to make the volumes of material needed.

Now that the company has completed its first run of the multi-anode reactor for steelmaking, the plan is to keep exploring how the reactions happen at this larger scale. These runs will also help the company better understand what it will cost to make its products.

The next step is to build an even bigger system, Rauwerdink says—something that won’t fit in the Boston facility. While a reactor of the current size can make a ton or two of material in about a month, the truly industrial-scale equipment will make that amount of metal in about a day. That demonstration plant should come online in late 2026 and begin operation in 2027, he says. Ultimately, the company hopes to license its technology to steelmakers. 

In steel and other heavy industries, the scale can be mind-boggling. Boston Metal has been at this for over a decade, and it’s fascinating to see the company make progress toward becoming a player in this massive industry. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

We named green steel one of our 2025 Breakthrough Technologies. Read more about why here.

I visited Boston Metal’s facility in Massachusetts in 2022—read more about the company’s technology in this story (I’d say it pretty much holds up). 

Climate tech companies like Boston Metal have seen a second boom period for funding and support following the cleantech crash a decade ago. Read more in this 2023 feature from David Rotman. 

GETTY

Another thing

Electricity demand is rising faster in the US than it has in decades, and meeting it will require building new power plants and expanding grid infrastructure. That could be a problem, because it’s historically been expensive and slow to get new transmission lines approved. 

New technologies could help in a major way, according to Brian Deese and Rob Gramlich. Read more in this new op-ed. 

And one more

Plants have really nailed the process of making food from sunlight in photosynthesis. For a very long time, researchers have been trying to mimic this process and make an artificial leaf that can make fuels using the sun’s energy.

Now, researchers are aiming to make energy-dense fuels using a specialized, copper-containing catalyst. Read more about the innovation in my colleague Carly Kay’s latest story. 

Keeping up with climate

Energy storage is still growing quickly in the US, with 18 gigawatts set to come online this year. That’s up from 11 GW in 2024. (Canary Media)

Oil companies including Shell, BP, and Equinor are rolling back climate commitments and ramping up fossil-fuel production. Oil and gas companies were accounting for only a small fraction of clean energy investment, so experts say that’s not a huge loss. But putting money toward new oil and gas could be bad for emissions. (Grist)

Butterfly populations are cratering around the US, dropping by 22% in just the last 20 years. Check out this visualization to see how things are changing where you live. (New York Times)

New York City’s congestion pricing plan, which charges cars to enter the busiest parts of the city, is gaining popularity: 42% of New York City residents support the toll, up from 32% in December. (Bloomberg)

Here’s a reality check for you: Ukraine doesn’t have minable deposits of rare earth metals, experts say. While tensions between US and Ukraine leaders ran high in a meeting to discuss a minerals deal, IEEE Spectrum reports that the reality doesn’t match the political theater here. (IEEE Spectrum)

Quaise Energy has a wild drilling technology that it says could unlock the potential for geothermal energy. In a demonstration, the company recently drilled several inches into a piece of rock using its millimeter-wave technology. (Wall Street Journal)

Here’s another one for the “weird climate change effects” file: greenhouse-gas emissions could mean less capacity for satellites. It’s getting crowded up there. (Grist)

The Biden administration funded agriculture projects related to climate change, and now farmers are getting caught up in the Trump administration’s efforts to claw back the money. This is a fascinating case of how the same project can be described with entirely different language depending on political priorities. (Washington Post)

You and I are helping to pay for the electricity demands of big data centers. While some grid upgrades are needed just to serve big projects like those centers, the cost of building and maintaining the grid is shared by everyone who pays for electricity. (Heatmap)

The best time to stop a battery fire? Before it starts.

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

Flames erupted last Tuesday amid the burned wreckage of the battery storage facility at Moss Landing Power Plant. It happened after a major fire there burned for days and then went quiet for weeks.

The reignition is yet another reminder of how difficult fires in lithium-ion batteries can be to deal with. They burn hotter than other fires—and even when it looks as if the danger has passed, they can reignite.

As these batteries become more prevalent, first responders are learning a whole new playbook for what to do when they catch fire, as a new story from our latest print magazine points out. Let’s talk about what makes battery fires a new challenge, and what it means for the devices, vehicles, and grid storage facilities that rely on them.

“Fires in batteries are pretty nasty,” says Nadim Maluf, CEO and cofounder of Qnovo, a company that develops battery management systems and analytics.

While first responders might be able to quickly douse a fire in a gas-powered vehicle with a hose, fighting an EV fire can require much more water. Often, it’s better to just let battery fires burn out on their own, as Maya Kapoor outlines in her story for MIT Technology Review. And as one expert pointed out in that story, until a battery is dismantled and recycled, “it’s always going to be a hazard.”

One very clear example of that is last week’s reignition at Moss Landing, the world’s biggest battery storage project. In mid-January, a battery fire destroyed a significant part of a 300-megawatt grid storage array. 

The site has been quiet for weeks, but residents in the area got an alert last Tuesday night urging them to stay indoors and close windows. Vistra, the owner of Moss Landing Power Plant, didn’t respond to written questions for this story but said in a public statement that flames were spotted at the facility on Tuesday and the fire had burned itself out by Wednesday morning.

Even after a battery burns, some of the cells can still hold charge, Maluf says, and in a large storage installation on the grid, there can be a whole lot of stored energy that can spark new blazes or pose a danger to cleanup crews long after the initial fire.

Vistra is currently in the process of de-linking batteries at Moss Landing, according to a website the company set up to share information about the fire and aftermath. The process involves unhooking the electrical connections between batteries, which reduces the risk of future problems. De-linking work began on February 22 and should take a couple of weeks to complete.

Even as crews work to limit future danger from the site, we still don’t know why a fire started at Moss Landing in the first place. Vistra’s site says an investigation is underway and that it’s working with local officials to learn more.

Battery fires can start when cells get waterlogged or punctured, but they can also spark during normal use, if a small manufacturing defect goes unnoticed and develops into a problem. 

Remember when Samsung Galaxy Note phones were banned from planes because they kept bursting into flames? That was the result of a manufacturing defect that could lead to short-circuiting in some scenarios. (A short-circuit basically happens when the two separate electrodes of a battery come into contact, allowing an uncontrolled flow of electricity that can release heat and start fires.)

And then there’s the infamous Chevy Bolt—those vehicles were all recalled because of fire risk. The issues were also traced back to a manufacturing issue that caused cells to short-circuit. 

One piece of battery safety is designing EV packs and large stationary storage arrays so that fires can be slowed down and isolated when they do occur. There have been major improvements in fire suppression measures in recent years, and first responders are starting to better understand how to deal with battery fires that get out of hand. 

Ultimately, though, preventing fires before they occur is the goal. It’s a hard job. Identifying manufacturing defects can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, Maluf says. Battery chemistry and cell design are complicated, and the tiniest problem can lead to a major issue down the road. 

But fire prevention is important to gain public trust, and investing in safety improvements is worth it, because we need these devices more than ever. Batteries are going to be crucial in efforts to clean up our power grid and the transportation sector.

“I don’t believe the answer is stopping these projects,” Maluf says. “That train has left the station.”

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

For more on the Moss Landing Power Plant fire, catch up with my newsletter from a couple of weeks ago. 

Batteries are a “master key” technology, meaning they can unlock other tech that helps cut emissions, according to a 2024 report from the International Energy Agency. Read more about the current state of batteries in this story from last year. 

New York City is interested in battery swapping as a solution for e-bike fires, as I covered last year. 

Keeping up with climate

BP Is dropping its target of increasing renewables by 20-fold by 2030. The company is refocusing on fossil fuels after concerns about earnings. Booooo. (Reuters)

This refinery planned to be a hub for alternative jet fuels in the US. Now the project is on shaky ground after the Trump administration has begun trying to claw back funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. (Wired)
→ Alternative jet fuels are one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2025. As I covered, the fuels will be a challenge to scale, and that’s even more true if federal funding falls through. (MIT Technology Review)

Chinese EVs are growing in popularity in Nigeria. Gas-powered cars are getting more expensive to run, making electric ones attractive, even as much of the country struggles to get consistent access to electricity. (Bloomberg)

EV chargers at federal buildings are being taken out of service—the agency that runs federal buildings says they aren’t “mission critical.” This one boggles my mind—these chargers are already paid for and installed. What a waste. (The Verge)

Congestion pricing that charges drivers entering the busiest parts of Manhattan has cut traffic, and now the program is hitting revenue goals, raising over $48 million in the first month. Expect more drama to come, though, as the Trump administration recently revoked authorization for the plan, and the MTA followed up with a lawsuit. (New York Times)

New skyscrapers are designed to withstand hurricanes, but the buildings may fare poorly in less intense wind storms, according to a new study. (The Guardian)

Ten new battery factories are scheduled to come online this year in the US. The industry is entering an uncertain time, especially with the new administration—will this be a battery boom or a battery bust? (Inside Climate News)

Proposed renewable-energy projects in northern Colombia are being met with opposition from Indigenous communities in the region. The area could generate 15 gigawatts of electricity, but local leaders say that they haven’t been consulted about development. (Associated Press)

This farm in Virginia is testing out multiple methods designed to pull carbon out of the air at once. Spreading rock dust, compost, and biochar on fields can help improve yields and store carbon. (New Scientist)

What’s driving electricity demand? It isn’t just AI and data centers.

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

Electricity demand rose by 4.3% in 2024 and will continue to grow at close to 4% annually through 2027, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. 

If that sounds familiar, it may be because there’s been a constant stream of headlines about energy demand recently, largely because of the influx of data centers—especially those needed to power the AI that’s spreading seemingly everywhere. These technologies are sucking up more power from the grid, but they’re just a small part of a much larger story. 

What’s actually behind this demand growth is complicated. Much of the increase comes from China, India, and Southeast Asia. Air-conditioning, electric vehicles, and factories all play a role. And of course, we can’t entirely discount the data centers. Here are a few key things to know about global electricity in 2025, and where things are going next.

China, India, and Southeast Asia are the ones to watch.

Between now and 2027, about 85% of electricity demand growth is expected to come from developing and emerging economies. China is an especially major force, having accounted for over half of global electricity demand growth last year.

The influence of even individual sectors in China is staggering. For example, in 2024, about 300 terawatt-hours’ worth of electricity was used just to produce solar modules, batteries, and electric vehicles. That’s as much electricity as Italy uses in a year. And this sector is growing quickly. 

A boom in heavy industry, an increase in the number of air conditioners, and a robust electric-vehicle market are all adding to China’s power demand. India and Southeast Asia are also going to have above-average increases in demand, driven by economic growth and increased adoption of air conditioners. 

And there’s a lot of growth yet to come, as 600 million people across Africa still don’t have access to reliable electricity.

Data centers are a somewhat minor factor globally, but they can’t be counted out.

According to another IEA projection published last year, data centers are expected to account for less than 10% of global electricity demand growth between now and 2030. That’s less than the expected growth due to other contributors like electric vehicles, air conditioners, and heavy industry.

However, data centers are a major storyline for advanced economies like the US and many countries in Europe. As a group, these nations have largely seen flat or declining electricity demand for the last 15 years, in part because of efficiency improvements. Data centers are reversing that trend.

Take the US, for example. The IEA report points to other research showing that the 10 states hosting the most data center growth saw a 10% increase in electricity demand between 2019 and 2023. Demand in the other 40 states declined by about 3% over the same period.

One caveat here is that nobody knows for sure what’s going to happen with data centers in the future, particularly those needed to run AI. Projections are all over the place, and small changes could drastically alter the amount of energy required for the technology. (See the DeepSeek drama.)

One bit I found interesting here is that China could see data centers emerge as yet another source of growing electricity demand in the future, with demand projected to double between now and 2027 (though, again, it’s all quite uncertain).

What this all means for climate change is complicated.

Growth in electricity demand can be seen as a good thing for our climate. Using a heat pump rather than a natural-gas heating system can help reduce emissions even as it increases electricity use. But as we add demand to the grid, it’s important to remember that in many places, it’s still largely reliant on fossil fuels.

The good news in all this is that there’s enough expansion in renewable and low-emissions electricity sources to cover the growth in demand. The rapid deployment of solar power alone contributes enough energy to cover half the demand growth expected through 2027. Nuclear power is also expected to see new heights soon, with recovery in France, restarts in Japan, and new reactors in China and India adding to a stronger global industry.

However, just adding renewables to meet electricity demand doesn’t automatically pull fossil fuels off the grid; existing coal and natural-gas plants are still chugging along all over the world. To make a dent in emissions, low-carbon sources need to grow fast enough not only to meet new demand, but to replace existing dirtier sources.

It isn’t inherently bad that the grid is growing. More people having air-conditioning and more factories making solar panels are all firmly in the “positive” column, I’d argue. But keeping up with this breakneck pace of demand growth is going to be a challenge—one that could have major effects on our ability to cut emissions. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

Transmission equipment is key to getting more power to more people. Here’s why one developer won’t quit fighting to connect US grids, as reported by my colleague James Temple.

Virtual power plants could help meet growing electricity demand for EVs in China, as Zeyi Yang lays out in this story.

Power demand from data centers is rising, and so are emissions. They’re set to climb even higher, as James O’Donnell explains in this story from December.

STEPHANIE ARNETT/MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW

Another thing

Competition is stiff in China’s EV market, so some automakers are pivoting to humanoid robots. With profit margins dropping for electrified vehicles, financial necessity is driving creativity, as my new colleague Caiwei Chen explains in her latest story. 

Keeping up with climate

The Trump administration has frozen funds and set hiring restrictions, and that could leave the US vulnerable to wildfire. (ProPublica)

US tariffs on imported steel and aluminum are set to go into effect next month, and they could be a problem for key grid equipment. The metals are used in transformers, which are in short supply. (Heatmap)

A maker of alternative jet fuel will get access to a $1.44 billion loan it was promised earlier this year. The Trump administration is exploring canceling promised financing, but this loan went ahead after a local representative pressured the White House. (Canary Media)

A third-generation oil and gas worker has pivoted to focus on drilling for geothermal systems. This Q&A is a fascinating look at what it might look like for more workers to move from fossil fuels to renewables. (Inside Climate News)

The Trump administration is working to fast-track hundreds of fossil-fuel projects. The US Army Corps of Engineers is speeding up permits using an emergency designation. (New York Times)

Japan’s government is adopting new climate targets. The country aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 70% from 2013 levels over the next 15 years and reach net zero by 2050. Expansion of renewables and nuclear power will be key in the plan. (Associated Press)

A funding freeze has caused a whole lot of confusion about the state of federal financing for EV chargers in the US. But there’s still progress on building chargers, both from government funds already committed and from the private sector. (Wired)

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the latest target of the Trump administration’s cuts. NOAA provides weather forecasts, and private industry is reliant on the agency’s data. (Bloomberg)

What a major battery fire means for the future of energy storage

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

A few weeks ago, a fire broke out at the Moss Landing Power Plant in California, the world’s largest collection of batteries on the grid. Although the flames were extinguished in a few days, the metaphorical smoke is still clearing.

Some residents in the area have reported health issues that they claim are related to the fire, and some environmental tests revealed pollutants in the water and ground near where the fire burned. One group has filed a lawsuit against the company that owns the site.

In the wake of high-profile fires like Moss Landing, there are very understandable concerns about battery safety. At the same time, as more wind, solar power, and other variable electricity sources come online, large energy storage installations will be even more crucial for the grid. 

Let’s catch up on what happened in this fire, what the lingering concerns are, and what comes next for the energy storage industry.

The Moss Landing fire was spotted in the afternoon on January 16, according to local news reports. It started small but quickly spread to a huge chunk of batteries at the plant. Over 1,000 residents were evacuated, nearby roads were closed, and a wider emergency alert warned those nearby to stay indoors.

The fire hit the oldest group of batteries installed at Moss Landing, a 300-megawatt array that came online in 2020. Additional installations bring the total capacity at the site to about 750 megawatts, meaning it can deliver as much energy to the grid as a standard coal-fired power plant for a few hours at a time.

According to a statement that site owner Vistra Energy gave to the New York Times, most of the batteries inside the affected building (the one that houses the 300MW array) burned. However, the company doesn’t have an exact tally, because crews are still prohibited from going inside to do a visual inspection.

This isn’t the first time that batteries at Moss Landing have caught fire—there have been several incidents at the plant since it opened. However, this event was “much more significant” than previous fires, says Dustin Mulvaney, a professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University, who’s studied the plant.

Residents are worried about the potential consequences.The US Environmental Protection Agency monitored the nearby air for hydrogen fluoride, a dangerous gas that can be produced in lithium-ion battery fires, and didn’t detect levels higher than California’s standards. But some early tests detected elevated levels of metals including cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese in soil around the plant. Tests also detected metals in local drinking water, though at levels considered to be safe.

Citing some of those tests, a group of residents filed a lawsuit against Vistra last week, alleging that the company (along with a few other named defendants) failed to implement adequate safety measures despite previous incidents at the facility. The suit’s legal team includes Erin Brockovich, the activist famous for her work on a 1990s case against Pacific Gas & Electric Company involving contaminated groundwater from oil and gas equipment in California.

The lawsuit, and Brockovich’s involvement in particular, raises a point that I think is worth recognizing here: Technologies that help us address climate change still have the potential to cause harm, and taking that seriously is crucial. 

The oil and gas industry has a long history of damaging local environments and putting people in harm’s way. That’s evident in local accidents and long-term pollution, and in the sense that burning fossil fuels drives climate change, which has widespread effects around the world. 

Low-carbon energy sources like wind, solar, and batteries don’t add to the global problem of climate change. But many of these projects are industrial sites, and their effects can still be felt by local communities, especially when things go wrong as they did in the Moss Landing fire. 

The question now is whether those concerns and lawsuits will affect the industry more broadly. In a news conference, one local official called the fire “a Three Mile Island event for this industry,” referring to the infamous 1979 accident at a Pennsylvania nuclear power plant. That was a turning point for nuclear power, after which public support declined sharply. 

With the growing number of electric vehicles and batteries for energy storage on the grid, more high-profile fires have hit the news, like last year’s truck fire in LA, the spate of e-bike battery fires in New York City, or one at a French recycling plant last year. 

“Battery energy storage systems are complex machines,” Mulvaney says. “Complex systems have a lot of potential failures.” 

When it comes to large grid-scale installations, battery safety has already improved since Moss Landing was built in 2020, as Canary Media’s Julian Spector points out in a recent story. One reason is that many newer sites use a different chemistry that’s considered safer. Newer energy storage facilities also tend to isolate batteries better, so small fires won’t spread as dramatically as they did in this case. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about this fire, particularly when it comes to how it started.  Learning from the results of the ongoing investigations will be important, because we can only expect to see more batteries coming online in the years ahead. 

In 2023, there were roughly 54 gigawatts’ worth of utility-scale batteries on the grid globally. If countries follow through on stated plans for renewables, that number could increase tenfold by the end of the decade. 

Energy storage is a key tool in transforming our grid and meeting our climate goals, and the industry is moving quickly. Safety measures need to keep up. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

E-bike battery fires, including ones started by delivery drivers’ vehicles, have plagued New York City. A battery-swapping system could help address the problem. 

Insulating materials layered inside EV batteries could help reduce fire risk. A company making them just got a big boost in the form of a loan from the US Department of Energy. 

New chemistries, like iron-air batteries, promise safer energy storage. Read our profile of Form Energy, which we named one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2024. 

Keeping up with climate

Data centers are expected to be a major source of growth in electricity demand. Being flexible may help utilities meet that demand, according to a new study. (Inside Climate News)

The world’s first lab-grown meat for pets just went on sale in the UK. Meatly is selling limited quantities of its treats, which are a blend of plant-based ingredients and cultivated chicken cells. (The Verge)

Kore Power scrapped plans for a $1.2 billion battery plant in Arizona, but the company isn’t giving up just yet. The new CEO said the new plan is to look for an existing factory that can be transformed into a battery manufacturing facility. (Canary Media)

The auto industry is facing a conundrum: Customers in the US want bigger vehicles, but massive EVs might not make much economic sense. New extended-range electric vehicles that combine batteries and a gas-powered engine that acts as a generator could be the answer. (Heatmap)

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were told to search grants for words related to climate change. It’s not clear what comes next. (Axios)

It might be officially time to call it on the 1.5 °C target. Two new studies suggest that the world has already entered into the runway to surpass the point where global temperatures increase 1.5 °C over preindustrial levels. (Bloomberg)

States are confused over a Trump administration order to freeze funding for EV chargers. Some have halted work on projects under the $5 billion program, while others are forging on. (New York Times)

Cold weather can affect the EV batteries. Criticisms likely portray something way worse than the reality, but in any case, here’s how to make the most of your EV in the winter. (Canary Media)

What a return to supersonic flight could mean for climate change

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

As I’ve admitted in this newsletter before, I love few things more than getting on an airplane. I know, it’s a bold statement from a climate reporter because of all the associated emissions, but it’s true. So I’m as intrigued as the next person by efforts to revive supersonic flight.  

Last week, Boom Supersonic completed its first supersonic test flight of the XB-1 test aircraft. I watched the broadcast live, and the vibe was infectious, watching the hosts’ anticipation during takeoff and acceleration, and then their celebration once it was clear the aircraft had broken the sound barrier.

And yet, knowing what I know about the climate, the promise of a return to supersonic flight is a little tarnished. We’re in a spot with climate change where we need to drastically cut emissions, and supersonic flight would likely take us in the wrong direction. The whole thing has me wondering how fast is fast enough. 

The aviation industry is responsible for about 4% of global warming to date. And right now only about 10% of the global population flies on an airplane in any given year. As incomes rise and flight becomes more accessible to more people, we can expect air travel to pick up, and the associated greenhouse gas emissions to rise with it. 

If business continues as usual, emissions from aviation could double by 2050, according to a 2019 report from the International Civil Aviation Organization. 

Supersonic flight could very well contribute to this trend, because flying faster requires a whole lot more energy—and consequently, fuel. Depending on the estimate, on a per-passenger basis, a supersonic plane will use somewhere between two and nine times as much fuel as a commercial jet today. (The most optimistic of those numbers comes from Boom, and it compares the company’s own planes to first-class cabins.)

In addition to the greenhouse gas emissions from increased fuel use, additional potential climate effects may be caused by pollutants like nitrogen oxides, sulfur, and black carbon being released at the higher altitudes common in supersonic flight. For more details, check out my latest story.

Boom points to sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) as the solution to this problem. After all, these alternative fuels could potentially cut out all the greenhouse gases associated with burning jet fuel.

The problem is, the market for SAFs is practically embryonic. They made up less than 1% of the jet fuel supply in 2024, and they’re still several times more expensive than fossil fuels. And currently available SAFs tend to cut emissions between 50% and 70%—still a long way from net-zero.

Things will (hopefully) progress in the time it takes Boom to make progress on reviving supersonic flight—the company plans to begin building its full-scale plane, Overture, sometime next year. But experts are skeptical that SAF will be as available, or as cheap, as it’ll need to be to decarbonize our current aviation industry, not to mention to supply an entirely new class of airplanes that burn even more fuel to go the same distance.

The Concorde supersonic jet, which flew from 1969 to 2003, could get from New York to London in a little over three hours. I’d love to experience that flight—moving faster than the speed of sound is a wild novelty, and a quicker flight across the pond could open new options for travel. 

One expert I spoke to for my story, after we talked about supersonic flight and how it’ll affect the climate, mentioned that he’s actually trying to convince the industry that planes should actually be slowing down a little bit. By flying just 10% slower, planes could see outsized reductions in emissions. 

Technology can make our lives better. But sometimes, there’s a clear tradeoff between how technology can improve comfort and convenience for a select group of people and how it will contribute to the global crisis that is climate change. 

I’m not a Luddite, and I certainly fly more than the average person. But I do feel like, maybe we should all figure out how to slow down, or at least not tear toward the worst impacts of climate change faster. 

Now read the rest of The Spark

Related reading

We named sustainable aviation fuel as one of our 10 Breakthrough Technologies this year. 

The world of alternative fuels can be complicated. Here’s everything you need to know about the wide range of SAFs. 

Rerouting planes could help reduce contrails—and aviation’s climate impacts. Read more in this story from James Temple.  

SARAH ROGERS / MITTR | PHOTO GETTY

Another thing

DeepSeek has crashed onto the scene, upending established ideas about the AI industry. One common claim is that the company’s model could drastically reduce the energy needed for AI. But the story is more complicated than that, as my colleague James O’Donnell covered in this sharp analysis. 

Keeping up with climate

Donald Trump announced a 10% tariff on goods from China. Plans for tariffs on Mexico and Canada were announced, then quickly paused, this week as well. Here’s more on what it could mean for folks in the US. (NPR)
→ China quickly hit back with mineral export curbs on materials including tellurium, a key ingredient in some alternative solar panels. (Mining.com)
→ If the tariffs on Mexico and Canada go into effect, they’d hit supply chains for the auto industry, hard. (Heatmap News)

Researchers are scrambling to archive publicly available data from agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to remove references to climate change. (Inside Climate News)
→ As of Wednesday morning, it appears that live data that tracks carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is no longer accessible on NOAA’s website. (Try for yourself here)

Staffers with Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” entered the NOAA offices on Wednesday morning, inciting concerns about plans for the agency. (The Guardian)

The National Science Foundation, one of the US’s leading funders of science and engineering research, is reportedly planning to lay off between 25% and 50% of its staff. (Politico)

Our roads aren’t built for the conditions being driven by climate change. Warming temperatures and changing weather patterns are hammering roads, driving up maintenance costs. (Bloomberg)

Researchers created a new strain of rice that produces much less methane when grown in flooded fields. The variant was made with traditional crossbreeding. (New Scientist)

Oat milk maker Oatly is trying to ditch fossil fuels in its production process with industrial heat pumps and other electrified technology. But getting away from gas in food and beverage production isn’t easy. (Canary Media)

A new 3D study of the Greenland Ice Sheet reveals that crevasses are expanding faster than previously thought. (Inside Climate News)

In other ice news, an Arctic geoengineering project shut down over concerns for wildlife. The nonprofit project was experimenting with using glass beads to slow melting, but results showed it was a threat to food chains. (New Scientist)