The Green Blueprint

There are many forces that could hold back AI in the power system: computing infrastructure, power availability, regulation, and corporate inertia. The biggest one? Good data.  Utilities and grid operators are awash in data. But getting access to it – or making sense of it – is very difficult.  For a better understanding of how to change that, we turn to someone who spends a lot of his time in the...

Early in her career, Amanda Li worked on many deals in solar and storage as part of a billion-dollar sustainable infrastructure fund. And she discovered a problem that often hinders deployment: the underwriting process is cumbersome and slow. “All of it was in spreadsheets, word documents, emails. When you look at a solar deal, there's a lot of documentation, a lot of counterparties to deal with,...

When Brian Janous took charge of Microsoft’s clean energy strategy in 2011, the company’s data center demand was modest. He was measuring new demand in the tens of megawatts. Over the years, that grew to hundreds of megawatts of new demand as hyperscale computing expanded. And then everything changed in the spring of 2023, with the public launch of ChatGPT 3.5, which ran on Microsoft’s data center...

In the early 2000s, Steve Cotton ran a company serving the fast-growing data center industry with backup battery systems. And when those systems reached the end of their lives, the company monetized kilotons of lead-acid batteries by sending them to recycling facilities – industrial plants that break down and burn the components. “It's very dangerous. You've got lead dust all over the floor. You'v...

Can a couple trillion dollars feel small? Global investments in the energy transition – from the buildout of factories and power projects to project finance and government debt – hit nearly $1.8 trillion last year.  That’s almost as big as the GDP of South Korea. It’s nearly 20% more than the year before, and nearly eight times more than a decade ago. But even with those record levels of spending,...

If we want any chance of affordably and reliably building a grid powered 100% by zero-carbon resources, we need to triple the capacity of virtual power plants.  That’s the conclusion of a report released last fall by the Department of Energy, which examined the different business models and integration approaches for tying solar, batteries, thermostats, electric cars, water heaters, and other dist...

The storage market is full of surprises. Last year, global storage installations were a third higher than expected, driven mostly by Chinese policy to attach batteries to renewables.  Meanwhile, a ramp-up in manufacturing is causing oversupply – and a potential shakeout for smaller battery makers. By 2030, the world could see 1.8 terawatt-hours of storage capacity installed, according to Bloomberg...

As President Biden’s green industrial policies reignite the US manufacturing base, AI computing workloads soar, and machines across the economy turn electric, the power grid is facing an historic increase in demand. After almost two decades of flat electricity consumption, suddenly America’s grid planners are doubling their forecasts for demand – raising the urgency for new infrastructure. This we...

Artificial intelligence is quickly accelerating drug discovery, healthcare services, product design, and manufacturing efficiency. Now it's here for materials development – and it could be one of the most influential uses of AI in energy. A decade ago, Greg Mulholland started playing around with machine learning as a way to accelerate product development of materials inside LEDs. After seeing its...

Turbulent. Equilibrating. Those are the words that investors Gabriel Kra and Carly Anderson use to describe the last year for venture capital in climate tech.  We now have a full picture of the year for climate tech venture investing in 2023. Fresh data from Sightline Climate shows a decline in deal counts, round sizes, and a dropoff in repeat investors.  It was a year of rising interest rates, de...

When the numbers for 2023 are finalized, there could be another 320 to 413 gigawatts of solar installed around the world – bringing global capacity to nearly 1.5 terawatts. Solar is now on track to surpass coal and fossil gas capacity in the next few years, bringing generation to 10% of global electricity supply.  There's universal recognition that we're firmly in the solar era. But outlooks on ho...

The competing trends in the energy transition from 2023 were stark: a looming peak in demand for oil, gas, and coal; a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels; and an increasingly realistic pathway to triple renewables development. But we also experienced the hottest global temperatures in 125,000 years, record US oil & gas production, inflation headwinds that challenged large renewa...

In less than a decade, America has become the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas.  In the mid-2000s, the US was building terminals to import more fossil gas. But that all changed after the fracking boom unlocked vast reserves of hydrocarbons.  The US became a net exporter in 2017. Then, Russia’s war on Ukraine forced a scramble for new supplies of gas in Europe – and American compan...

The nuclear industry is grappling with several issues: high interest rates, rising commodity prices, limited supply chains, fuel availability, and a regulatory environment that has been slow to adapt to new technologies.  In the west, nuclear knowhow has faded over the decades. Even with a surge in policy support and public interest, development is stagnant and capacity has fallen. Momentum has mo...

It took 12 years to triple global renewables – and now we need to do it in eight years.  As the latest UN climate summit begins, there’s a proposal on the table to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Countries may agree to it in theory, but can the market meet it in practice? This week, we’ll look at why this tripling is necessary, how it could be done, and what technologies will dominate. T...

Weather forecasts for the grid depend on supercomputers to calculate the flow of heat, water, and radiation in the atmosphere, and then spit out predictions about what could happen next. These supercomputers are powerful. But they are also expensive and slow, relative to how quickly the weather changes. A new class of AI-based weather forecasts could change the game for grid operators and renewabl...

This is a partner podcast episode, brought to you by Intersect Power. The U.S. grid is in trouble. It's old; it's really hard to build new transmission lines; and that is limiting the amount of wind and solar we can add to the system. Sheldon Kimber, Founder and CEO of the clean energy developer Intersect Power, says the grid is “broken.” But he has a plan to get around those constraints.  In this...

Microsoft was an early mover in integrating OpenAI’s LLM into its Azure cloud services. And now every part of Microsoft’s technology stack — from cloud infrastructure to data analytics to consumer apps — will be “reimagined” for the AI era, said Nadella. As a result, every industry will inevitably be impacted by AI. Utilities will also find themselves at the center of this shift, even if most aren...

Wind, solar and batteries have seen steady, fairly predictable cost drops over the last two decades. But a combination of pressures – supply chain turmoil, grid constraints, interest rates, labor costs – has raised costs for products and projects. And they’re challenging the commercial viability of emerging sectors like offshore wind and hydrogen. So how will the market work through this inflation...

The industrial sector is set to overtake power generation and transportation as the biggest source of planet warming emissions in the US by 2035, according to The Rhodium Group. The sector’s impact is even greater on the global scale. Industry around the world accounts for more carbon dioxide emissions than all forms of transportation combined – largely driven by steel, cement, and chemicals. Ther...

There are a lot of quarterly ups and downs in venture dollars deployed across climatetech. But the trend is generally up. Since 2021, more than 200 new climate investment funds have been created with $121 billion under management, according to CTVC. Earlier this month, Canary Media Editorial Director Eric Wesoff explored the evolved state of climate investing at Canary Media's live event in Berkel...

California is at a crossroads. The state has already installed nearly 1.8 million rooftop solar systems, 5 gigawatts of batteries, and 1.6 million electric cars. But it is also facing some serious challenges. The list is long: controversial policy changes, extreme weather threats, and backlogs – lots and lots of backlogs. It is facing serious backlogs in interconnecting utility-scale solar and sto...

Just as the auto industry resolves supply chain problems from the Covid pandemic, a new disruptive force has emerged: labor disputes. Nearly 20,000 American auto workers are on strike as they ask for higher pay. At the heart of their concerns: will the shift to electric cars make them worse off?  We’ll look at a strike that is raising big questions about how to support the companies making electri...

Renewables and electric vehicles are on a tear, and they’ll soon likely attract $2 trillion in yearly investment. But global emissions have not peaked.  So what are the new frontiers of technology that will make renewables and storage more valuable – and draw down emissions at the speed needed? This week, we’re going to reflect on that question coming out of RE+, a major American conference where...

In the last few months, three major projects in Europe and America have been delayed or canceled, thanks to rapidly rising costs.  Those projects make up more than 10% of current offshore wind capacity in the EU and US, according to Bloomberg. Another 9.7 gigawatts are at risk in America, as developers look to renegotiate contracts. The complexity of offshore wind magnifies the technical and finan...