Climate tech companies are going public. What’s next?

This year, there’s been a wave of notable energy companies going public via IPO in the US.

The solar and battery company Solv Energy went public in February, to the tune of $6 billion. X-energy, which is building small modular nuclear reactors, did the same in April, and its stocks surged on its first day of trading to hit a $11.5 billion market cap. Most recently, the geothermal company Fervo Energy went public in mid-May, and its market cap is now about $12.4 billion.

Those are all success stories in the IPO world. And it certainly doesn’t feel like a coincidence that all these companies are racing to provide electricity in an era of rising demand (partly due to data centers). Let’s take a look at how these firms are doing, what this moment says about the grid, and what’s coming next. 

Let’s start with Fervo Energy, a company we’ve covered a lot over the years that’s working to develop enhanced geothermal energy. (We included it on our 2025 list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch.) While conventional geothermal requires finding specific spots with hot rock, water, and fractures to support a power plant, Fervo essentially uses fracking techniques to create the necessary conditions.

The company was founded in 2017, and it raised about $1.5 billion from investors over the years before its IPO.

Fervo’s first commercial project, Cape Station in Utah, is expected to have a capacity of about 500 megawatts. The first unit is set to start generating power for customers by October and the next two units by January 2027.

The new funding from the IPO could help the company scale. Fervo currently has over 600 megawatts’ worth of binding power purchase agreements. And it has leases for land that could together generate more than 40 gigawatts of electricity. (As of 2024, the entire US geothermal fleet had a capacity of just 4 gigawatts.)

The company also has an eye on cutting construction and drilling costs—its Cape Station plant is expected to cost about $7 per kilowatt, which is cheaper than new nuclear power plants but over twice the expense of building a new natural-gas plant in the US. 

X-energy also aims to provide reliable clean power: it’s part of the wave of next-generation nuclear companies working on small modular reactors. The company is building high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, which flow helium over self-contained pebbles of nuclear fuel. These reactors will each generate 80 megawatts of electricity, less than one-tenth the output of larger ones like Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the most recent addition to the commercial nuclear fleet in the US.  

X-energy also saw its IPO go well, and prices surged in trading after the initial offering. One interesting tidbit here—the company had previously planned to go public in 2023 but decided against it because of difficult market conditions.

The company is still years away from demonstrating its technology in a commercial project. 

You may recall a story I wrote last year about its effort to build nuclear reactors at the site of a Dow Chemical plant in Texas. The company recently received a key environmental approval for that project, though it’s still waiting for the final green light from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction.

Finally, Solv Energy builds solar and energy storage projects, mostly for utilities and independent power producers. Solar and batteries are some of the cheapest and easiest technologies to add to the grid, so this one could get a lot of capacity online, quickly. The company already has 21 gigawatts’ worth of projects operational across 35 states.

Many companies in the energy sector are pinning their hopes on the rapid growth in data center construction and operation. The AI boom has transformed the energy landscape, pushing electricity demand higher in a country where it’s been relatively flat for the last decade or so. Solv Energy mentioned data centers over a dozen times in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission before its IPO. 

And Fervo and X-energy are particularly connected to the tech giants driving AI. Google has been a longtime investor in Fervo and also pioneered what it calls its clean transition tariff with the company. Amazon is a client of X-energy as well as an investor; it reportedly owns close to 20% of the company.

Fervo and X-energy are also in industries that occupy a political sweet spot. President Trump and his administration have gone after wind power and other renewables, cutting off existing support and slowing approvals for new projects. Meanwhile, geothermal and particularly nuclear power have kept favor with the federal government and enjoyed continued tax credits and grant funding.

If a few big leaders cash through these IPOs, it could help investors feel more confident about supporting the energy sector, even if that money is concentrated in later-stage ventures like these rather than earlier-stage companies. 

We could see other firms, particularly in nuclear and geothermal, attempt a similar route in the year ahead.

A key thing to watch here will be whether Fervo and X-energy in particular can succeed in scaling up and deploying their technology. If either of these companies stumbles or misses a timeline, it could have ripple effects for those hoping to follow in these very lucrative footsteps. 

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

Climate tech companies are pivoting to critical minerals

We’re over a year into the second Trump administration here in the US, and support for climate causes is weak. But climate tech companies are finding ways to survive and even thrive in this new environment, including by focusing on potential benefits outside decarbonization.

Suddenly, it feels like every climate tech company has a story to tell about topics that are politically in vogue: data centers, energy abundance, or critical minerals. In my newest story, I covered Boston Metal’s latest funding round. Largely known for its efforts to produce steel with lower greenhouse gas emissions, the company raised $75 million from new and existing investors to help support its critical metals business.

Focusing on metals like niobium and tantalum won’t have the massive climate benefit that cleaner steel would, but it could generate the cash the company needs to keep going. It’s a strategy I’m noticing more as these tough industries like steel look ever tougher to succeed in with limited federal support in the US.  

Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis technology uses electricity to produce metals.

I covered the startup last year, when it announced a major milestone for its steel business, running its pilot reactor in Massachusetts and producing a literal ton of material.

Now the company’s focus has shifted, and it is going all-in on making other metals, from niobium and tantalum (used in aircraft engines and high-end steel alloys) to chromium and vanadium.

The steel industry is a difficult one: It operates at a massive scale, and the product doesn’t command too high a price. Focusing on other metals, especially ones the US government deems critical, could be a way to stay afloat, maybe even long enough to meaningfully cut emissions from the steel industry. 

“By deploying in the critical metals industry where we can go very fast, we generate the resources to continue with the development of steel,” says Tadeu Carneiro, CEO of Boston Metal.

Other companies are also hoping critical materials could help their business models.

California-based Brimstone has a new process to make cement—another heavily polluting industry that’s proving difficult to decarbonize. The company uses a new starting material to help cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. In addition to cement, it makes supplementary cementitious materials that can be added into concrete as well as smelter-grade alumina.

Last year, the US Department of Energy canceled $1.3 billion in funding that had been set aside for cement-related projects. Brimstone saw one of its awards canceled, as did Sublime Systems, another cement startup I’ve covered a lot over the years.

At the time, a Brimstone representative told me that the company saw the cancellation as a “misunderstanding” and said the facility the funding had been designated for would make not only cement, but also alumina, which would support US aluminum production.

Today, the company’s website prominently highlights that it produces critical minerals in addition to cement.

Some carbon dioxide removal companies are hoping to hop on the critical minerals train, too, aiming to work with the mining industry. Others are pitching that they can help mining operations operate more efficiently or serve as cleanup for active or abandoned mine sites.

All of this is part of a much broader messaging shift. Everyone from politicians to heads of energy companies is talking less about climate.

It’s a trend that makes me nervous, even if I understand the impulse. I worry that if we keep too quiet on climate, companies might lose the plot and make choices that won’t help cut emissions. But for some, leaning into a different priority or pushing a different message could help them stay in business long enough to make a difference. We’ll all have to wait to see how it all pans out.

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

The Tesla Semi could be a big deal for electric trucking

The Tesla Semi has officially arrived. The company recently released a photo of the first vehicle rolling off its new full-scale production line.

This moment has been nearly a decade in the making: The company first announced the truck in late 2017. And now we’ve got final battery specs, official prices, and big news about big orders.

The Semi is a relatively affordable electric semitruck with pretty impressive performance. It also comes at a moment when Tesla has lost its grip on the global electric-vehicle market. Let’s talk about what’s new with the Tesla Semi and why this could be a breakout moment for electric trucking.

Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, like buses and semitrucks, make up a small fraction of vehicles on the road but contribute an outsize fraction of pollution, including both carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx) and small particles. Globally, trucks and buses represent about 8% of total vehicles on the road, but they create 35% of carbon dioxide emissions from road transport.

Tesla’s latest addition to its vehicle lineup, the Class 8 Semi, could be part of the solution to cleaning up this polluting sector. (I’ll note here that I briefly interned at Tesla in 2016. I don’t have any ties to or financial interest in the company today.) 

In November 2017, Elon Musk took to the stage at a lavish event in LA to announce the Semi. At that event, Musk promised a truck that could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in five seconds, could achieve a range of 500 miles, and would come with thermonuclear-explosion-proof glass. (Remember the era before the Twitter takeover and DOGE, when this was what Musk was known for? A simpler time.)

Soon after the unveiling, major corporations including Walmart put in early orders for Tesla Semis. Deliveries were expected in 2019.

That deadline obviously didn’t work out. The date was pushed back several times, and Tesla did start delivering a small number of pilot trucks, beginning in 2022. But this year, things got more serious, with the company releasing its final production specifications in February and rolling its first Semi off its high-volume production line in late April. 

And last week, WattEV announced an order of 370 Tesla Semis. WattEV offers electric freight operations, essentially providing trucks as a service to companies so they don’t have to purchase their own or supply their own charging infrastructure. The company will pay over $100 million for the new trucks, and the first 50 should be delivered this year, with the full fleet expected by the end of 2027. Those trucks will be supported by megawatt-charging systems located in Oakland, Fresno, Stockton, and Sacramento.

With the factory up and running and a huge order on the books, it feels as if the Tesla Semi has truly arrived. And some of Musk’s claims from 2017 ring true: The base model has a range of about 320 miles, and the long-range version about 480 miles (quite close to his 500-mile claim).

Delivering this much range for this big truck means a whopping battery. The base model Tesla Semi battery pack has a usable capacity of 548 kilowatt-hours, according to a document filed with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). But the battery is even more massive in the long-range version, which boasts a whopping 822 kilowatt-hour battery. Compare these to the Tesla Model 3, which typically comes with a 64 kilowatt-hour pack.

I reached out to Tesla to confirm the battery size and ask other questions for this article; the company didn’t respond.

These trucks cost quite a bit more than they were expected to in 2017. At that time, the expected price was $150,000 for the base model and $180,000 for the long-range. Today, Tesla is pricing the trucks at $260,000 and $300,000, respectively, according to documentation filed with CARB.

That’s considerably more expensive than the median diesel truck being sold today, which rang in at $172,500 for the 2025 model year, according to research from the International Council on Clean Transportation. But it’s much cheaper than similar battery-electric trucks available today, where the median is about $411,000.

And in California, where companies can get vouchers that cover $120,000 towards the purchase price of an electric truck, the Tesla Semi is competitive right away, especially since electric trucks tend to be much cheaper to run and maintain than diesel ones.

Over the years, it wasn’t always clear that the Tesla Semi would ever actually hit the roads. (At that same 2017 event, Musk announced a new Roadster sports car, and that’s nowhere to be seen.) So it’s encouraging to see the factory starting up, and a large order that looks like it could lend this project some commercial momentum.

Tesla had a massive impact on the electric vehicle market, and if it can scale production and support charging infrastructure, it could help do the same for trucking.

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The balcony solar boom is coming to the US

Dozens of US states are considering legislation to allow people to install plug-in solar systems, often called balcony solar. These small arrays require little to no setup and could help cut emissions and power bills.

Balcony solar is already popular in Europe, and proponents say that the systems could make solar power more accessible for more people in the US, including renters. As popularity rises, though, some experts caution that there are safety concerns with how balcony solar would work with existing electrical equipment in homes.

Let’s talk about what balcony solar is, why it’s unique, and how new testing requirements could affect our progress toward deploying the technology in the US.

Plug-in solar systems are designed to be simple to install, often requiring no electrician or specialized worker at all. They’re small, and many can be plugged into existing outlets.

People across Germany have installed over a million balcony solar systems. They generally measure up to roughly two square meters or about 20 square feet, and can generate up to 800 watts—enough to power a standard microwave.

Now the plug-in solar wave is coming to the US. Many Americans have already installed DIY balcony solar without the permission of their utilities—it’s something of a regulatory gray area. In late 2025, Utah became the first state to explicitly allow people to install and use balcony solar systems. Over two dozen other states are now considering similar legislation.

Generally, utilities require users to sign an interconnection agreement before they can plug in large arrays of solar panels that generate power for the grid. There can be fees and permits, and it all amounts to an expensive and lengthy process.

Utah’s law ditched the interconnection requirement for panels that have a low power cap and that are certified by a national testing facility. (Legislation under consideration in other states, including New York, includes the same requirements.) The thinking is that since the panels produce very little power, which would be used to meet a home’s own energy demand and probably not get sent back to the grid, the same requirements shouldn’t apply. 

As for that certification piece, in January the national testing and certification lab UL Solutions released UL 3700, a testing protocol to certify balcony solar systems and ensure that they’re safe. 

There are three main safety considerations to address for these plug-in solar systems, says Joseph Bablo, manager of principal engineering, energy, and industrial automation at UL Solutions. First, there’s the possibility of overloading a circuit. Generally, electrical circuits have circuit breakers, which can trip and interrupt current if necessary. But if there’s a solar panel adding extra power to a circuit, a traditional breaker might not be able to respond to overload. Over time, overloaded circuits can damage equipment or even start a fire. 

Second, these small systems are typically installed on the outside of homes, and outdoor power outlets generally have ground fault circuit interruption (GFCI). Basically, if an outlet or its surroundings are wet, it can shut down to prevent electric shock. Many GFCI systems may not work if there’s power going back into an outlet from a solar panel.

Finally, there’s touch safety: If a plug gets disconnected from the wall, the blades of the plug may still have power running through them for a short time. If a panel is getting sunlight, those blades could be energized for longer than is typical.

The new UL Solutions testing framework aims to address these concerns. One of the key recommendations is that plug-in solar panels should use a special outlet that’s designed specifically for them. The safety measures included in that connection, and within a panel, would ensure that the panels are safe.

The need for a special outlet means that currently, people who want to plug in a solar panel array would probably need to have an electrician come and update their wiring in order to comply with the protocol, Bablo says. “I know they want to say ‘No electrician, no permits’—we’re not there.”

Today, anyone can buy products like solar panels and inverters, some of which carry their own component UL certifications, and string them together. (Inverters are covered under UL 1741, for example.)

But the gold standard is to have an entire system that meets the safety requirements, and that means adhering to the new standard, Bablo says. As of early May, there aren’t any plug-in solar systems that have been fully certified by UL Solutions. And Bablo said he couldn’t share information about what, if any, are in the pipeline.  

Even with the new certification requirements, Bablo still thinks plug-in solar still has the potential to help more people access the technology. “There’s a way for it to work, but we want it to work safely,” he says.

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It’s time to make a plan for nuclear waste

Today, nuclear energy enjoys a rare moment of support across the political spectrum in the US. Interest from tech companies that are scrambling to meet demand for massive data centers has sparked a resurgence of money and attention in the industry. That newfound interest is exactly why it’s time to talk about an old problem: nuclear waste. 

In the US alone, nuclear reactors produce about 2,000 metric tons of high-level waste each year. And there’s nowhere to put it.

Though newly popular, the nuclear program in the US is nothing new. The US hosts more reactors and production capacity than any other country in the world. And yet nearly seven decades after the first permanent nuclear facility in the US went online, there’s still not a long-term solution for nuclear waste. 

Used fuel is largely stored onsite at operating and shut-down reactors, in pools and casks made of steel and concrete. Experts generally agree that these methods are safe, but they’re not designed to be permanent.

The leading strategy around the world for long-term storage of this high-level radioactive waste is to house it in a deep geological repository—dig a hole, put radioactive material down there, and fill it up with concrete. These holes, hundreds of meters underground, are designed to be a permanent home.

There aren’t any operating geological repositories for spent fuel yet, but some countries are well on their way. Finland is the furthest along; as of 2026, the country is testing its facility. Final approvals are expected soon, and operations could start later this year. Some other countries aren’t far behind.

France is home to over 50 nuclear reactors, and its grid gets more of its power from nuclear than any other. The country also has the world’s most established program for reprocessing spent fuel. The process separates out the plutonium and uranium to create a type of fuel known as mixed oxide (MOX) fuel. But reprocessing isn’t a perfect recycling loop, so the leftovers from this process still need somewhere to go. The country currently stores waste onsite at the La Hague reprocessing plant, but it plans to build a repository. Initial approvals could come later this decade, and pilot operations could start up by 2035.

Technically, the US also has a destination for its spent fuel: Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The site, which is on federal land, was designated by Congress in 1987. However, progress has entirely stalled out because of political opposition. In 2011, the federal government stopped providing funding for the site, and for roughly a decade, there’s been no activity to speak of.

In the meantime, waste continues to pile up.

The nuclear industry is kicking into a new gear around the world. China is home to the world’s fastest–growing nuclear energy program, and countries including Bangladesh and Turkey are building their first reactors.

Even the long-established US program is seeing growth: Interest in and approval for nuclear energy have spiked, and Big Tech is throwing money around to meet rising electricity demand. Companies are proposing (and beginning to receive regulatory approval for) next-generation reactors, which employ different coolants, fuels, and designs.

Given all this new interest, and the impending arrival of new types of nuclear waste, it’s time for nuclear companies, as well as their powerful customers, to push for progress on building geological storage facilities. As the richest country on the planet and home to a large chunk of the activity in next-generation reactors, the US should aim to join the leaders rather than continue to lag behind. 

Directing even a small fraction of the recent surge in funding and attention to progress on waste could make a difference. Some experts are calling for a new organization in the US to manage nuclear waste rather than leaving it to the Department of Energy. This organization would mirror programs in Finland, Canada, and France.

The process of planning, building, and commissioning a permanent solution for nuclear waste is a long one. Finland started planning in the 1980s and selected its site in the early 2000s, and it’s nearly ready to start accepting waste. For countries that don’t have a permanent storage solution sorted, the best time to start was decades ago. But the second-best time is now. 

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Will fusion power get cheap? Don’t count on it.

Fusion power could provide a steady, zero-emissions source of electricity in the future—if companies can get plants built and running. But a new study suggests that even if that future arrives, it might not come cheap.

Technologies tend to get less expensive over time. Lithium-ion batteries are now about 90% cheaper than they were in 2013. But historically, different technologies tend to go through this curve at different rates. And the cost of fusion might not sink as quickly as the prices of batteries or solar.

It’s tricky to make any predictions about the cost of a technology that doesn’t exist yet. But when there’s billions of dollars of public and private funding on the line, it’s worth considering what assumptions we’re making about our future energy mix and its cost.

One crucial measure is a metric called experience rate—the percentage by which an energy technology’s cost declines every time capacity doubles. A higher figure means a quicker price drop and better economic gains with scaling.

Historically, the experience rate is 12% for onshore wind power, 20% for lithium-ion batteries, and 23% for solar modules. Other energy technologies haven’t gotten cheap quite as quickly—fission is at just 2%.

In the new study, published in Nature Energy, researchers aimed to improve predictions of fusion’s future price by estimating the technology’s experience rate. The team looked at three key characteristics that can correlate with experience rate: unit size, design complexity, and the need for customization. The larger and more complex a technology is, and/or the more it needs to be customized for different use cases, the lower the experience rate.

The researchers interviewed fusion experts, including public-sector researchers and those working at companies in the private sector. They had the experts evaluate fusion power plants on those characteristics and used that info to predict the experience rate. (One note here: The study focused only on magnetic confinement and laser inertial confinement, two of the leading fusion approaches, which together receive the vast majority of funding today. Other approaches could come with different cost benefits.)

Fusion plants will likely be relatively large, similar to other types of facilities (like coal and fission power plants) that rely on generating heat. They will probably need less customization than fission plants—largely because regulations and safety considerations should be simpler—but more than technologies like solar panels. And as for complexity, “there was almost unanimous agreement that fusion is incredibly complex,” says Lingxi Tang, a PhD candidate in the energy and technology policy group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and one of the authors of the study. (Some experts said it was literally off the scale the researchers gave them.)

The final figure the researchers suggest for fusion’s experience rate is between 2% and 8%, meaning it will see a faster price reduction than nuclear power but not as dramatic an improvement as many common energy technologies being deployed today.

That means that it would take a lot of deployment—and likely quite a long time—for the price of building a fusion reactor to drop significantly, so electricity produced by fusion plants could be expensive for a while. And it’s a much slower rate than the 8% to 20% that many modeling studies assume today.

“On the whole, I think questions should be raised about current investment levels in fusion,” Tang says. (The US allocated over $1 billion to fusion in the 2024 fiscal year, and private-sector funding totaled $2.2 billion between July 2024 and July 2025.) “If you’re talking about decarbonization of the energy system, is this really the best use of public money?”

But some experts say that looking to the past to understand the future of energy prices might be misleading.“It’s a good exercise, but we have to be humble about how much we don’t know,” says Egemen Kolemen, a professor at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.

In 2000, many analysts predicted that solar power would remain expensive—but then production exploded and prices came crashing down, largely because China went all in, he says. “People weren’t exactly wrong then,” he adds. “They were just extrapolating what they saw into the future.”

How fast prices drop depends on regulations, geopolitical dynamics, and labor cost, he says: “We haven’t built the thing yet, so we don’t know.”

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Is carbon removal in trouble?

Last week, news outlets reported that Microsoft was pausing carbon removal purchases. It was something of a bombshell.

The thing is, Microsoft is the carbon removal market. The company has single-handedly purchased something like 80% of all contracted carbon removal. If you’re looking for someone to pay you to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, Microsoft is probably who you’re after.

The company has said that it is not permanently ending its carbon removal purchases (though it didn’t directly answer further questions about this apparent pause). But with this flurry of news, there’s a lot of fear in the industry—so, it’s worth talking about the state of carbon removal, and where Big Tech companies fit in.

Carbon removal aims to reliably pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it. There’s a wide range of technologies in this space, including direct air capture (DAC) plants, which usually use some kind of sorbent or solvent to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Another important method is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), in which biomass like trees or waste-derived biofuels are burned for energy, and scrubbing equipment captures the greenhouse gases.

There was a huge boom of interest in carbon removal technologies in the first half of this decade. One UN climate report in 2022 found that nations may need to remove up to 11 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year by 2050 to keep warming to 2 °C above preindustrial levels.

One nagging problem is that the economics here have always been tricky. There’s a major potential public good to pulling carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. The question is, Who will pay for it?

So far, the answer has been Microsoft. The company is by far the largest buyer of carbon removal contracts, and it’s the only purchaser that has made megatonne-scale purchases, says Robert Höglund, cofounder of CDR.fyi, ​​a public-benefit corporation that analyzes the carbon removal sector. “Microsoft has had a huge importance, especially for getting large-scale projects off the ground and showing there is demand for large deals,” Höglund said via email.

Microsoft has pledged to become carbon-negative by 2030 and to remove the equivalent of its historic emissions by 2050. Progress on actually cutting emissions has been tough to achieve though—in the company’s latest Environmental Sustainability Report, published in June 2025, it announced emissions had risen by 23.4% since 2020.

On April 10, Heatmap News reported that Microsoft staff had told suppliers and partners that it was pausing future purchases of carbon removal, though it wasn’t clear whether the company would increase support for existing projects, or when purchases might resume. Bloomberg reported a similar story the next day. In one instance, Microsoft employees said that the decision was related to financial considerations, one source told Bloomberg. 

In a statement in response to written questions, Microsoft said that it was not permanently closing its carbon removal program. “At times we may adjust the pace or volume of our carbon removal procurement as we continue to refine our approach toward sustainability goals. Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach—not a change in ambition,” Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa said in the statement.

Whatever, exactly, is happening behind the scenes, many in the industry are nervous, says Wil Burns, Co-Director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University. People viewed the company as the foundational supporter of carbon removal, he adds.

“This pause—whether it’s short term or whatever it is—the way it’s been rolled out is extremely irresponsible,” Burns says. The vast majority of firms looking to get carbon removal contracts are probably seeking Microsoft deals. So, while Microsoft has every right to change its plans, the company needs to be open with the industry now, he adds.

“I don’t think you can hold yourself out as the paragon of fostering carbon removal and then treat a nascent industry that disrespectfully,” Burns says.

Carbon removal companies were already in turmoil in the US, particularly because of recent policy shifts: Funding has been cut back, and recent changes at the Environmental Protection Agency were aimed at the government’s ability to target carbon pollution.

Now, if the largest corporate backer is shifting plans or taking a significant pause, things could get rocky.

Depending on the extent of this pause, the industry may need to survive on smaller purchases and hope for support from governments and philanthropy, Höglund says. But for carbon removal to truly scale, we need policymakers to create mandates so that emitters are responsible for either storing the carbon dioxide they produce or paying for it, Burns says.

“Maybe the upside of this is Microsoft has sent a wake-up call, that you just can’t rely on the kindness of strangers to make carbon removal scale.”

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Desalination technology, by the numbers

When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers.

I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination, and how big a business it is, still surprised me.

For more on how this crucial water infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable during the war in Iran, check out my latest story. Here, though, let’s look at the state of desalination technology, by the numbers.

Desalination produces 77% of all fresh water and 99% of drinking water in Qatar.

Globally, we rely on desalination for just 1% of fresh-water withdrawals. But for some countries in the Middle East, and particularly for the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Oman), it’s crucial.

Qatar, home to over 3 million people, is one of the most staggering examples, with nearly all its drinking water supplies coming from desalination. But many major cities in the region couldn’t exist without the technology. There are no permanent rivers on the Arabian Peninsula, and supplies of fresh water are incredibly limited, so countries rely on facilities that can take in seawater and pull out the salt and other impurities.

The Middle East is home to just 6% of the world’s population and over 27% of its desalination facilities.

The region has historically been water-scarce, and that trend is only continuing as climate change pushes temperatures higher and changes rainfall patterns.

Of the 17,910 desalination facilities that are operational globally, 4,897 are located in the Middle East, according to a 2026 study in npj Clean Water. The technology supplies not only municipal water used by homes and businesses, but also industries including agriculture, manufacturing, and increasingly data centers.

One massive desalination plant in Saudi Arabia produces over 1 million cubic meters of fresh water per day.

The Ras Al-Khair water and power plant in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia, is one of a growing number of gigantic plants that output upwards of a million cubic meters of water each day. That amount of water can meet the needs of millions of people in Riyadh City. Producing it takes a lot of power—the attached power plant has a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts.

While this plant is just one of thousands across the region, it’s an example of a growing trend: The average size of a desalination plant is about 10 times what it was 15 years ago, according to data from the International Energy Agency. Communities are increasingly turning to larger plants, which can produce water more efficiently than smaller ones.

Between 2024 and 2028, the Middle East’s desalination capacity could grow by over 40%.

Desalination is only going to be more crucial for life in the Middle East. The region is expected to spend over $25 billion on capital expenses for desalination facilities between 2024 and 2028, according to the 2026 npj Clean Water study. More massive plants are expected to come online in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt during that time.

All this growth could consume a lot of electricity. Between growth of the technology generally and the move toward plants that use electricity rather than fossil fuels, desalination could add 190 terawatt-hours of electricity demand globally by 2035, according to IEA data. That’s the equivalent of about 60 million households.

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