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Home batteries tend to come in two flavors. There are the no-frills, portable systems meant for emergencies, not for full-on integration with solar panels or the power grid. And then there are the Tesla Powerwalls of the world: smart, large devices that can power an entire home but which require a lot of time and money to install.
Cole Ashman, CEO of Pila Energy, wanted to build a battery that combines the best of both of those options — something that is affordable and useful in an emergency but also able to help customers on a daily basis. His years of work at smart-electrical-panel startup Span and as a Powerwall engineer at Tesla gave him the technical chops. His experience growing up in New Orleans and witnessing the aftermath of post-Hurricane Katrina power outages gave him the motivation.
“There’s this need for energy resilience — and hurdles for adoption that exist today,” he said. “We want to bring forward this notion that you don’t have to compromise on the not-so-smart battery or overspend on the primo solution. This is a middle ground.”
The result, the Pila Mesh Home Battery, debuted at the South by Southwest 2025 conference in Texas this spring. On Tuesday, Pila announced it has raised $4 million to scale up manufacturing, via a seed funding round led by R7 Partners and joined by Toyota Ventures, Refactor Capital, GS Futures, and others. The startup aims to deliver its first batteries to customers in early 2026.
Pila’s 1.6-kilowatt-hour batteries retail for $1,299, which is more than what you’d spend for another portable battery with roughly equivalent storage capacity. But unlike the typical portable backup battery, Pila’s sleek, briefcase-sized units are designed to be a constant companion for key home appliances. Set-up is simple: Just plug the battery into a standard wall outlet and connect the equipment you want backed up.
Take a refrigerator — one of the most important things to keep powered when the electricity goes out. Ashman recalled seeing thousands of them on New Orleans street curbs following Hurricane Katrina, abandoned after multiday power outages left them filled with spoiled food.
One Pila battery can power a typical refrigerator for 32 hours, or double that for customers that tack on an “expansion pack.” It also comes with wireless sensors that can be placed inside a fridge to monitor internal temperatures and with on-board sensors that can detect signs of incipient failure of refrigerator compressors from fluctuations in electricity use.
Pila’s batteries don’t just provide value to their owners during blackouts; the devices are also functional when the grid is up and running. They can be programmed to store energy when it’s cheap — say, during midday hours when grid prices are low or rooftop solar is abundant — and deploy that power during afternoon or evening hours, when households often pay higher rates for electricity from utilities.
These are the kinds of features that come standard with large, high-end home batteries like the Tesla Powerwall, sonnenCore+, Enphase IQ, and FranklinWH. But a typical Powerwall costs between $12,000 and $16,000 to buy and install — and the vast majority of them are in owner-occupied single-family homes that went through fairly extensive permitting and utility interconnection processes.
Pila batteries, by contrast, are what Ashman describes as “permissionless” energy infrastructure.
“You don’t ask for permission to put in a new refrigerator,” he said. “Why does this have to be any different?”
That puts Pila in a category of “do-it-yourself” energy systems that are gaining traction around the world.
Take balcony solar systems, which now power more than a million households in Germany and are starting to take off in other European countries. These portable panels generate only a fraction of what rooftop solar systems can provide, but they cost a lot less and can simply plug into an outlet — a much simpler process than getting a professionally installed rooftop array.
Yet balcony solar hasn’t caught on in the U.S., where electrical codes put strict limits on devices that send power back into household circuits. For now, Pila’s software is configured to only allow power to flow from wall sockets into its batteries, not vice versa, Ashman emphasized.
However, as more states pass laws promoting DIY solar and as electrical codes evolve to allow intelligently controlled devices to safely deliver power through wall sockets into household circuits, Pila Mesh batteries can flip to serve that task, Ashman said.
The do-it-yourself design also makes Pila batteries suitable for renters and people living in multifamily housing, who are largely locked out of the solar and battery market today, he said — a frustration Ashman himself has experienced as a renter in New York City.
Consumers want to be able to adopt batteries, solar panels, EV chargers, and the latest all-electric appliances as they see fit, said Andrew Krause, CEO of Northern Pacific Power Systems, a California-based contractor that specializes in solar and battery installations. He’s involved in the Agile Electrification coalition, a group of companies and researchers working to overcome barriers to people electrifying their homes.
“It’s important not to view these things as standalone assets, because as standalone assets they’re marginal. A Pila battery on the grid looks like a vacuum cleaner,” Krause said. “But I’m buying a Pila battery because I have solar on my roof, and I’m trying to handle certain end-use loads that will benefit from a battery and solar, and for which I don’t want to overcommit for a whole-home battery system.”
“It’s just a fractional Powerwall,” he said.
That ethos is appealing to Mackey Saturday, an investor at R7 Partners, which led this week’s investment in Pila. He splits his time between a New York City apartment and a home in Nosara, Costa Rica — and he’d like to have more flexible options for backup power in both places.
“In Costa Rica, while power is readily available, it’s consistently on and off,” he said. “If you want to keep your critical appliances available — not resetting clocks, not having food waste, not having your internet die — that’s hugely valuable.”
Meanwhile, “in New York we have pretty reliable energy,” he said. “But we also have some pretty challenging weather as of late,” like the June heat wave that forced utilities and government officials to issue emergency alerts asking people to conserve energy.
Someday, when Pila’s batteries get the OK to send electricity back to the grid, they could help relieve pressure on the power system, Ashman said.
Ashman highlighted numerous features that could allow Pila batteries to work together as virtual power plants, starting with the wireless mesh network built into each system. The network runs on a 900-megahertz band and allows the batteries to communicate through the walls of a home or even “a 200-unit New York City skyscraper,” he said.
Each battery also contains a cellular modem along with WiFi connections to ensure that individual and meshed batteries have multiple ways to stay in contact with their owners, building managers, or utility control centers, Ashman said. That kind of redundancy is a must-have for eventual use as a grid asset, he added.
Pila is in preliminary discussions with utilities on this front, although it isn’t naming any names. But Ashman noted that the startup presented alongside other providers of plug-and-play home-energy tech, like CraftStrom Solar, at a September pitchfest hosted by the California utility Pacific Gas and Electric.
U.S. utilities have a decidedly mixed track record in terms of how they treat customers installing rooftop solar and backup batteries. Across the country, utilities have campaigned to claw back net-metering incentives for consumers who send solar energy back to the grid, seeing that framework as a threat to electricity sales and a risk to the power system’s stability.
But utility regulators and policymakers are increasingly eager to use these distributed technologies to avoid expensive upgrades to the grid. As electricity demand grows and these cost pressures become more acute, the appeal of systems like Pila’s could grow even larger.
“We’re firm believers that batteries will be inside everything,” Ashman said, echoing a conviction shared by an increasing number of startups, especially in the induction-stove sector. “But we need those batteries to be smart. Having an unintelligent battery in everything might be good for backup, but it doesn’t help solve broader problems in the home or for energy.”
In January, the coastal California town of Moss Landing witnessed the most destructive battery fire in U.S. history. Now, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has signed SB 283, a law designed to prevent a repeat of the disaster by strengthening statewide fire safety standards for grid battery installations.
Batteries have become an integral part of California’s push to clean up its electricity system. But the Moss Landing conflagration jolted the state as it burned for several days, provoked evacuations of surrounding communities, and destroyed an old power-plant hall that electricity company Vistra had packed full of lithium-ion batteries in 2020. That disaster has since become a symbol of the apparent risks of adopting large-scale batteries, popping up in conversations about proposed battery projects around the country.
In the years since Moss Landing came online, though, the grid battery industry has moved on from that type of design. These days, most every project places batteries in individual containers spaced out across an open field, which minimizes the chances of a fire spreading between them.
Even with those advances in grid battery designs, state Sen. John Laird saw an opportunity to tighten state requirements in light of what happened in January, and he authored SB 283 to do just that.
“Moss Landing was approved through local planning processes — the state was not involved,” said Laird, a Democrat who represents Moss Landing and much of California’s central coast. “What this bill was designed to do was provide guidance from the state.”
Instead of leaving everything up to local jurisdictions — which may be reviewing a large battery project for the first time — the law requires developers to collaborate with first responders on emergency-response plans. Battery developers must now meet with fire authorities during the design phase, and then bring them in to inspect fire-suppression systems prior to launching commercial operations.
That requirement “codifies an industry best practice to ensure early outreach to the fire department” or other relevant authorities, noted Nick Petrakis, director of engineering at Energy Safety Response Group, a firm that works with battery owners on crafting their emergency-response plans.
An earlier draft of the law would have required California to adopt the National Fire Protection Association’s standards for battery safety. As it happened, the Office of the State Fire Marshal did so back in March, so SB 283 didn’t need to force the issue.
The final text does call for the fire marshal, in the next building code update, to “review and consider proposing provisions that restrict the location of energy storage systems to dedicated-use noncombustible buildings or outdoor installations.” That could lead to an effective ban on projects like Moss Landing that insert batteries into existing structures.
This law isn’t the only state action afoot on this topic. The California Public Utilities Commission updated its own battery standards in March and will monitor compliance. That regulatory body is leading an investigation into the cause of the Moss Landing fire. No official determination has been released yet, but the public can expect the PUC to share its findings when they are complete, Laird said.
California leaders see a safe, sustainable grid storage industry as crucial to reaching the state’s long-term climate goals, because the battery plants facilitate the ongoing buildout of clean energy generation.
In 2020, the year Moss Landing came online, the state had mere hundreds of megawatts of batteries hooked up to help the grid. This year, the state surpassed 15,000 megawatts of installed batteries, and it’s aiming for 52,000 megawatts by 2045. The battery fleet is already helping prevent shortages during summer heat waves and cutting into fossil-gas consumption during evening hours, pushing down the cost of energy at those times.
Energy storage trade groups, eager to maintain the pace of the battery buildout, welcomed the new guidance from SB 283 rather than resisting the imposition of new regulations.
The national group American Clean Power, which advocates for the battery industry among others, spoke favorably of the bill’s potential impact. “SB 283 strengthens safety protocols with support from firefighters, electricians, industry, and utilities — ensuring California can continue leading this growing clean energy sector,” the group wrote in a June fact sheet.
“The latest standards for this technology have proven extremely effective,” said Alex Jackson, executive director of American Clean Power’s California branch, in an emailed statement. “Every state should give local officials the tools and the authority to ensure those standards are in place.”
The California Energy Storage Alliance similarly said it was “proud to support this bill” and praised Newsom for signing it.
Responsible developers already work closely with local emergency-response teams, so the new requirements won’t increase their workload appreciably. Many battery firms worry about how the few battery fires that do happen reflect poorly on the industry as a whole; communities debating whether to allow a battery in their proximity might not appreciate the differences in safety between a Moss Landing–era plant and the state of the art today. In that sense, the fact that California has enhanced its battery safety laws could serve the industry better than an absence of new regulations.
“Everybody’s realistic about how serious the Moss Landing fire was,” Laird said. “The whole industry rests on public confidence that they’re not at risk next to a huge battery storage facility, and the industry wants to help in that assurance.”
Data centers are creating problems for the congested, overburdened U.S. power grid. One company thinks it can crowdsource the solution.
California-based Voltus operates “virtual power plants” across North America, controlling the amount of electricity that participating homes and businesses consume or send to the grid via resources like rooftop solar and batteries.
Last month, the firm unveiled its “bring your own capacity” plan. Put simply, the idea is for data center operators to pay other utility customers to reduce their power use when electricity demand peaks, a move that would diminish strain on the system without disrupting computing processes at data centers.
The proposal comes as the nationwide boom in data center construction pushes electricity demand — and prices — to new heights. These conditions are putting pressure on data center developers, utilities, regulators, and regional grid operators to find ways to enable rapid construction that don’t break the grid, or customers’ wallets.
That’s where the bring-your-own-capacity concept could fill the gaps, said Dana Guernsey, Voltus’ CEO and cofounder.
The approach benefits utilities and their customers because it’s a lot cheaper to reduce energy use than it is to build new power plants and infrastructure. And it benefits data centers by offering a much faster route to getting a grid interconnection, as developers wouldn’t have to wait years for utilities to bring new power generation online.
“The hyperscalers and data center developers are eager to fund this,” Guernsey told Canary Media. “It’s more affordable, it’s faster, and it’s an investment back into the communities.”
Voltus is in a good position to spearhead this work, she said. As a virtual power plant operator, it already aggregates backup batteries, electric vehicles, smart appliances, and other fast-responding technologies to provide on-demand relief to the grid. Voltus was recently dubbed the top company in this sector by analytics firm Wood Mackenzie, and after several years of rapid growth, it now has more than 7.5 gigawatts of scattered “demand response” capacity under management.
In general, virtual power plants, or VPPs, could meet 10% to 20% of U.S. peak grid needs in the coming years and save utility customers roughly $10 billion in annual costs, according to a U.S. Department of Energy analysis released in January. Voltus’ new plan is to harness the power of VPPs to help specifically with the data-center-driven electricity crunch — a creative idea with big potential, if the company can convince utilities to play ball.
Voltus already has one developer on board to participate in its bring-your-own-capacity plan: Cloverleaf Infrastructure, which builds gigawatt-scale data centers.
“The right way to serve data center load quickly, at scale, and less expensively and more sustainably, is to leverage the existing resources on the grid as efficiently as possible,” said Brian Janous, Cloverleaf’s chief commercial officer.
Data centers, which are facing yearslong wait times to connect to the grid, are considering every available option. In Wisconsin, Cloverleaf is planning a flagship data center project that could draw up to 3.5 gigawatts of power from the grid when it’s fully built at the end of 2030. Cloverleaf has worked with utility We Energies and its parent company, WEC Energy Group, to develop a tariff that will put the onus on Cloverleaf to pay for the new resources the utility is building to meet its facility’s energy needs.
While specifics on that deal remain confidential, Janous noted that it could include demand response and VPP resources.
“The conversation we’ve been having with utilities is, we want to connect fast. If you tell us, ‘You have to come back in seven years, after the completion of my latest gas-fired power plant,’ I’ll go somewhere else,” he said. But if Cloverleaf can work with a company like Voltus to supply the necessary energy capacity within months, a utility may be able to connect a data center faster.
Guernsey highlighted other examples of data centers bringing their own capacity to utilities. In August, Google announced agreements with Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to reduce the peak loads of data centers in their territories.
Most of the attention on those deals focused on Google’s commitment to shift its computing workloads to reduce peak grid demand — a novel approach to data center power flexibility that tackles the electricity consumption of the massive racks of servers within the facilities’ walls.
But part of Google’s deal with Indiana Michigan Power includes transferring credits for a portion of carbon-free energy Google has contracted to serve its data centers in the region to help the utility meet its capacity requirements. In this case, the tech giant offered up its renewable-energy resources to cover its data centers’ power use, but Google could have leveraged VPPs for that purpose just as easily, Guernsey said.
Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid-edge research for Wood Mackenzie, agreed that VPPs are theoretically a faster and cheaper means of achieving data center flexibility compared to the alternatives.
Most tech companies haven’t done the hard work that Google has done over the past decade or so to enable flexible computing, he said. Data center developers will face cost and air-quality challenges in using their ubiquitous diesel-fueled backup generators for on-site power. And they may be loath to invest in more expensive options like on-site solar, batteries, and gas-fired generators and microturbines — the “build-your-own-power plants” model some developers are pursuing.
“We don’t think that’s going to be faster or cheaper or more sustainable,” Janous said of the latter model. “We think the better approach is to work with companies like Voltus on how to bring more available resources into the mix.”
Demand-response programs and VPPs can also counteract utility customers’ rising power bills, since these initiatives financially compensate the individuals who allow their energy use to be managed.
“You’re paying homeowners and business owners to be part of the solution to accommodate data centers,” Hertz-Shargel said. “They’re already facing large and growing bill increases, not just because of large loads but because of utility investments, costs of climate change. This is a way to offset that.”
It won’t be easy to turn these ideas into reality.
Utilities and regional grid operators consider demand response and VPPs primarily as a tool for managing existing grid stresses, but are far less eager to allow VPPs to substitute for building more traditional power plants and upgrading the grid. It’s always a tall order to get utilities to do something for the first time, but especially so when dealing with data centers, which can require a small city’s worth of electricity for their operations.
Guernsey conceded these challenges to Voltus’ plan. “Most of the deals we’re discussing start in 2027 or 2028 time frame,” she said. “We’re just running as fast as we can to keep up. We’re growing at a clip of about a gigawatt a year across North America. … In particular regions where data centers are getting built, we usually respond with, ‘We can get a couple hundred megawatts in a given territory within that time.’”
One of Voltus’ key early targets is PJM Interconnection, a grid operator responsible for the transmission system and energy markets serving Washington, D.C., and 13 states from Virginia to Illinois. Electricity bills are spiking for the region’s more than 65 million residents — primarily due to data centers. Similar pressures are pushing up costs across the Midwest, and in data center hotspots like Georgia and Texas.
Johannes Pfeifenberger, a grid-planning expert and principal with The Brattle Group, has argued for years that grid operators need to embrace VPPs and other innovations to deal with rising demand. Among those options, “a VPP is very attractive, whether it’s storage, or controlled EV charging, or heating and air conditioning controls,” he said.
But putting this solution into practice will require grid operators to restructure the rules by which VPPs can directly reduce a data center’s impact on the system, he said. PJM and the Southwest Power Pool, which serves 14 Midwest and Great Plains states, are starting to take on these challenges, but their efforts remain a work in progress.
Data centers may also be limited by the capacity of the power lines and substations at the points they’re seeking to connect to the grid, he said. VPPs that consist of customers scattered across a grid operator’s territory can’t relieve those specific stresses, although other options could, such as data centers colocating at spots with ample grid capacity and building their own generation to fill those gaps, he said.
Guernsey agreed that Voltus’ bring-your-own-capacity construct “can only be a solution when capacity is the problem. If the data center is creating an acute distribution level constraint or requires a substation upgrade, that’s a different type of problem.”
Janous thinks data center developers are willing to pay even more than the currently inflated prices for energy if it means they can move faster. Grid operators just have to be willing to allow them to cut deals with companies like Voltus to go do it.
“Our view from our side is that the market is still undervaluing capacity relative to the willingness to pay for a data center to go faster,” he said.
In the face of those pressures, allowing data centers and VPP providers to bring their own capacity is the kind of fast-track effort that could actually succeed at the speed needed, Guernsey said. And it’s a way to make sure that big developers — rather than ordinary consumers — are the ones paying for the energy capacity that data centers require.
Electric vehicle sales just hit an all-time high in the U.S. — but don’t expect the boom to last long.
For every 10 cars that automakers sold from July through September, one was an EV, according to fresh data from Cox Automotive. In other words, nearly 440,000 new battery-powered vehicles hit the nation’s roads during the third quarter of 2025. The previous single-quarter record, set in the final three months of last year, isn’t even in the same ballpark.
But the sales surge has a catch. Buyers flocked to EVs last quarter because it was their final opportunity to take advantage of a $7,500 federal tax credit that disappeared at the end of September under President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The incentive was previously slated to last until 2033.
Under these conditions, “the all-time sales and share records in Q3 were all but certain,” Cox wrote in a blog post accompanying the data. This quarter, by contrast, the company expects EV sales to “drop notably.”
Still, the U.S. electric vehicle market isn’t dead in the water without the tax credit. Already, automakers that have invested huge sums in the EV transition are making changes to try and keep sales going in America. Hyundai, for example, announced in early October that it will cut the price of its popular Ioniq 5 EV by nearly $10,000 next year. One week later, General Motors unveiled a $29,000 version of its Chevy Bolt.
Some state and local governments are taking action, too: Colorado boosted the discounts it offers for both new and used EVs. Burlington, Vermont, launched a similar program.
Meanwhile, the country’s public EV charging network is growing steadily, and the Trump administration is moving ahead with a $5 billion Biden-era program to build out charging infrastructure.
It’s clear, as Cox points out, that electrified vehicles are the future of transportation. Indeed, some countries are already living in that era: In Norway, more than eight in 10 new cars sold are fully electric. The roadblocks set up by the Trump administration might delay progress in the U.S., but it can’t stave off the inevitable.
The United Nations agency that governs global shipping has voted to delay the adoption of its landmark decarbonization strategy by one year, following intense opposition from the Trump administration.
The Friday decision by the International Maritime Organization in London casts uncertainty over the future of the Net-Zero Framework, which would have been the world’s first binding emissions target for an entire industry.
“Today’s delay in adopting the [framework] is a missed opportunity,” Natacha Stamatiou, who leads the Environmental Defense Fund’s global shipping work, said in a statement to Canary Media. “Every delay means that innovation will struggle to scale, inequities will deepen, and the transition to clean shipping will become harder and more costly.”
International shipping is responsible for about 3% of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. Climate pollution from diesel-guzzling vessels — which haul virtually everything we buy and use — is projected to soar in the coming decades if nothing changes.
The Net-Zero Framework would require large ships to progressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible by 2050. The strategy, which leans on a carbon tax, would force ships to swap out dirty fuels with cleaner alternatives, such as e-methanol or green ammonia, and adopt other energy-saving technologies like wind-assisted propulsion.
The delayed vote puts that progress on ice — and represents a stunning reversal from where negotiations sat just a few weeks ago.
In April, over 60 countries in the IMO, including Brazil, China, and India, agreed to put the framework to a vote in October. In the months leading up to this week, diplomats, environmental groups, and even industry organizations said they expected relatively smooth sailing toward approval.
However, on Oct. 10, ahead of the negotiations, the Trump administration issued a statement forcefully opposing an international environmental agreement, claiming it “unduly or unfairly burdens the United States.” U.S. officials also began calling and writing to countries that supported the measure, threatening to impose tariffs, withdraw visa rights, and take other retaliatory measures, The Guardian reported on Wednesday.
On Friday, the final day of talks, the U.S., Singapore, Liberia, and Saudi Arabia all called on IMO to postpone adoption of the climate rules. The motion to delay was ultimately put forward by Singapore and called to a vote by Saudi Arabia. While 49 countries voted against the delay, 57 were in favor. Twenty-one nations abstained.
Without a clear framework in place, progress toward decarbonizing shipping will remain slow going. Efforts to kickstart alternative, lower-carbon fuels have emerged in recent years, but shipping companies and fuel producers have been hesitant to invest at a meaningful scale without a clear directive from the IMO.
Shipping companies, for their part, had said they welcomed the certainty that a global, finalized net-zero standard would provide — particularly as the European Union presses ahead with its own ship-emission rules. A coalition of major shipping industry groups said in an Oct. 9 statement that without an international strategy, a patchwork of separate regulations could bog down the industry in costs without advancing decarbonization.
“This delay unfortunately continues the business uncertainty that hampers investment for private sector actors that are ready and eager for this energy transition to accelerate,” said Ingrid Irigoyen, president and CEO of the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance.
The Net-Zero Framework is the product of the IMO’s now decade-long attempt to institute a climate strategy.
While the details are still being sorted out, the basic idea behind the regulation is as follows: Every year, shipping companies must calculate their “GHG fuel intensity” — the emissions per unit of energy used, on a lifecycle basis — the results of which determine their next steps. Ships that don’t meet IMO’s fuel-intensity standards must buy “remedial units” to cover their compliance gap; the dirtiest ships must pay an additional penalty to IMO for every metric ton of CO2 above the established threshold.
Had the strategy passed, the global fuel standard and carbon-pricing mechanism would have taken effect in 2027, and ships would have needed to start reporting their GHG fuel intensity in 2028. That timeline will now be revised.
There’s no clear deadline yet for when the group will reconvene and conduct a final vote to officially adopt the framework. The IMO will hold a technical meeting to discuss the design of the framework next week.
But experts and advocates warned that there is no more time to delay.
“This is catastrophic for confidence, and therefore also for the equitable and ambitious decarbonisation we need,” Tristan Smith, professor of energy and transport at University College London, said in a statement. “We will now have to double-down on other means to drive shipping GHG reduction and energy transition. Climate science tells us that the challenge of decarbonisation does not go away, it gets harder.”
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
During a recent visit to a Long Island power station, U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright criticized Biden-era policies that supported the development of renewable energy sources.
“There was a lot of that money allocated under the Biden administration that was to encourage business and utilities to … spend money to make electricity more expensive and less reliable,” Wright said during a press conference.
The next day, the Trump administration announced the termination of 321 awards, claiming $7.5 billion in cuts for clean-energy projects. Inside Climate News recently reported that many of these awards were already past their end date.
Empire Clean Cities, which promotes the advancement of alternative fuels and alternative-fuel vehicles to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, was among the organizations that had its funds cut.
The Manhattan-based nonprofit will lose more than 90% of the funds for its $1.7 million award. So far, Empire Clean Cities had received only $162,631 of its award for a project designed to reduce emissions in Hunts Point in the Bronx, according to federal spending data. Largely due to truck traffic, this neighborhood has an annual child asthma hospitalization rate double the citywide average.
“It’s where folks live and work, and so they see every day the impact of truck traffic emissions on their air quality, on their health,” said Joy Gardner, the executive director of Empire Clean Cities. “This was a real opportunity to make a drastic change in just the general quality of life.”
Hunts Point attracts a high volume of freight traffic partly due to its proximity to food centers, including the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. The city estimates that the center distributes around 4.5 billion pounds of food every year.
Empire Clean Cities is on the cusp of publishing an electrification plan for Hunts Point, with engagement from local businesses, communities, and city agencies. The plan would offer a pathway to electrification for vehicles operating in the neighborhood—and subsequently help alleviate the health issues many residents face.
Though Gardner said the plan is likely to still be published, other aspects of the plan could be delayed or may not happen at all. The nonprofit planned to install six fast-charging electric ports in the neighborhoods, for personal and freight vehicles, according to Gardner.
Empire Clean Cities also planned to provide technical assistance to businesses looking to electrify their truck fleets and information sessions for community members who might want to buy an electric vehicle. According to federal spending data, the nonprofit would “undertake an extensive suite of community outreach activities designed to break down the knowledge barriers preventing [electric vehicle] adoption in the neighborhood.”
“It’s really disappointing not to be able to take this over the finish line, especially with just a year left on the grant,” said Gardner. “We would have been able to do a tremendous amount with that.”
In a statement about the grant cancellations, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said, “These cuts directly impact local businesses and major companies, putting workers out of jobs, shuttering factories, and slowing our state’s economic progress.”
In response to questions from Inside Climate News, Ken Lovett, Hochul’s senior communications advisor on energy and environment, wrote that the announcement “came as no surprise given the Trump administration’s full-on assault on clean energy.”
The Trump administration announced the termination of 321 grants on Oct. 2. An Inside Climate News analysis of federal government spending data for the awards found that only 188 were still active, according to their stated end dates, at the end of September.
ICN subtracted money already sent to recipients from the sums obligated to be spent, calculating a total of $4.87 billion in cuts, roughly two-thirds of the dollar amount announced by the Department of Energy.
For recipients based in New York state, 20 awards were still active when the Trump administration announced the cuts. After accounting for the money already distributed, the state lost out on about $146 million.
But for Hochul, the grant cuts seem to be just the latest setback to her plans to deliver on the state’s lofty climate goals and address energy concerns. She has recently admitted that New York is unlikely to meet its climate targets, drawing the ire of many residents.
Hochul says she remains committed to reducing emissions in the state and has invested considerable funds toward that goal. She recently allocated $1 billion to clean-energy projects and emissions-reduction efforts and has directed the state-owned utility, the New York Power Authority, to build at least one new nuclear plant by 2040.
At a Brooklyn church in early September, the advocacy group Public Power NY hosted a People’s Hearing for Public Renewables, where officials, environmentalists, and a few dozen New York residents discussed the state’s renewable-energy plans and expressed disappointment with Hochul’s progress.
“We have a movement behind us that is fighting for something better,” said state Sen. Jabari Brisport, a Democrat who represents a district in Brooklyn. “We have a governor who wants to drag her feet.”
New York’s Climate Act requires the state to achieve a 40% reduction from 1990 levels in economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and an 85% reduction by 2050. The act also requires that 70% of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030.
Residents were advocating for the New York Power Authority to build 15 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030, which they view as necessary to meet the state’s goal of net-zero emissions from the electricity grid by 2040. Currently, the utility plans to build 7 gigawatts of renewable energy, despite state law requiring it to fill all gaps in electricity generation left by the private sector.
“Hurricane Ida completely destroyed my district,” said former Democratic U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman, whose district included White Plains and Yonkers. “We need a governor with human-centered leadership … and if not, we need a new governor.”
Much of the focus on achieving these climate goals has been on electrifying building heating and cooling with heat pumps and moving away from gas systems. In 2023, the state passed the All-Electric Building Act, which mandated that most buildings use electric appliances, and the all-electric standard was written into the state building code in July.
The legislation effectively requires most new buildings to be completely electric — so no gas heating or cooking. A similar law was passed in New York City in 2021.
At a recent press conference, Wright, the federal energy secretary, alluded to the “many productive dialogues” he has had with the governor, and said that two proposed gas pipelines, which would pass through the state and which state officials have rejected in the past, were “already planned” and would “lower the cost of heating.”
There has been speculation, fueled by a May post on X by Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, that Hochul “would move forward on critical pipeline capacity.” The implication was that this was a trade-off for allowing the Empire Wind offshore wind project south of Long Island in the Atlantic Ocean to proceed after the administration halted construction.
Within a month, two previously rejected gas pipelines — the Constitution pipeline and the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline, or NESE — entered the regulatory process once again. Hochul has denied that she made a deal with the White House, but the Trump administration has said that she “caved” and agreed to allow the pipeline construction, according to Politico’s E&E News.
The Constitution pipeline, which the state rejected in 2016, would run from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale fracking sites to upstate New York. The NESE pipeline would extend an existing pipeline, building off the coast of New Jersey and Staten Island to eventually connect with existing pipes in Queens, and add gas infrastructure to Pennsylvania. The state has rejected it three times.
In July, National Grid, the gas utility that serves Staten Island, Long Island, and parts of Brooklyn and Queens, added the NESE pipeline to its long-term gas plan as an addendum.
The utility has to file a long-term gas plan as a result of a dispute with former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D). The heart of the 2019 dispute was, ironically, an earlier proposal for the NESE pipeline, which the Department of Environmental Conservation had rejected due to its potential impacts on water quality.
The rejection led to a standoff between the utility and state officials, with National Grid refusing to connect customers to gas lines. The dispute only ended because Cuomo threatened to suspend the utility’s license to operate in the state. In the end, National Grid agreed to periodically file a long-term gas plan for review by the state’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utility rates.
While reviewing the utility’s plan for the future last month, members of the Public Service Commission found that the NESE project would help the state meet the energy needs of its residents and businesses, particularly in the wake of Winter Storm Elliott in 2022. A report by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission found that some areas of New York were at extreme risk of experiencing gas shutoffs at one point during the storm.
But many New Yorkers were dismayed by the commission’s choice, which has no regulatory authority over the pipeline, but which many believe could signal to the Department of Environmental Conservation that the pipeline is necessary and that it should approve its water permit.
“We are in a week-by-week, hour-by-hour, fight to hold [Hochul] off and keep her from approving this thing,” Pete Sikora, the climate and inequality campaigns director with New York Communities for Change, said about the fight to stop the NESE pipeline.
Several public officials, including Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella (R) and U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D), spoke out against the pipeline, as did the city of New York. Water-quality concerns and fears of substantial rate increases abound.
“The governor is willing to put the law off to the side in order to appease fossil-fuel interests, big private business interests … and for New York families to foot the bill for that,” said Kim Fraczek, the executive director of Sane Energy, a nonprofit organization that is advocating for the replacement of gas infrastructure with renewable energy. “Our costs will only increase, and that’s for ratepayers and for businesses.”
A report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy-research think tank, estimated that the pipeline would cost $1.25 billion — almost $200 million more than what National Grid had said — due to construction inflation. Even if National Grid’s figures are correct, ratepayers would suffer a substantial monthly increase.
National Grid has predicted that the pipeline will cost ratepayers an additional $7.50 per month if approved. But it has also argued that the pipeline could help lower electricity bills by reducing the price of natural gas, which powers many of the state’s electricity plants.
Hochul is also experiencing pressure from the other side of the aisle. Energy Secretary Wright recently criticized the state’s Climate Act, which requires the state to have a net-zero-emissions electricity grid by 2040, calling it “totally nuts.”
“The longer and more aggressively [net-zero] is pursued, the more you elevate your energy prices and impoverish your citizens,” Wright told journalists at the press conference in Long Island earlier this month. “Let’s build more energy infrastructure to drive down the cost of energy here in New York state, across New England, and across our country.”
Whether the Climate Act drives the state’s high energy prices remains a subject of debate. A recent Public Service Commission report found that cost recovery for Climate Act measures accounted for anywhere from 5% to 9.5% of a residential customer’s monthly electric bill — but consistently 2% or less of their gas bill — in 2024.
Another factor contributing to higher rates has been large-scale improvements in gas infrastructure. Last year, residents in downstate New York experienced rate hikes when National Grid began a $5 billion system upgrade, which included replacing “leak-prone” pipes across the region.
Roasting coffee requires high temperatures — up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit for as much as 20 minutes per batch. Today, the vast majority of that heat is generated by fossil fuels. Most of the world’s coffee is roasted in gas-burning machines that emit carbon dioxide and require elaborate venting and afterburner equipment.
Ricardo Lopez, CEO of Bellwether Coffee, has spent the past 12 years fine-tuning a more climate-friendly, electricity-powered alternative, one that, crucially, cuts down on some of the costs and complexities of other electric roasters.
“Our goal is to make a sustainable industry through coffee,” he said. For Bellwether, that includes working with small farms to source beans grown with environmentally friendly practices.
But Lopez, a former data-center construction manager, knows that making a new technology competitive in a crowded field takes more than good intentions. “You have to have a better product,” he said. “As long as you have a better product that’s more affordable from a cost standpoint, it can spread.”
Achieving that has taken quite a bit of ingenuity. For starters, Bellwether’s system doesn’t require the industrial-scale voltages that many European-made electric coffee roasters do. The company’s appliances run on the 240-volt or 208-volt current available in commercial buildings.
The machines also use closed-loop heat recovery to capture and filter the smoke and particulate matter that the roasting process produces, avoiding the ventilation, ductwork, and energy-intensive “afterburner” systems needed to clean up exhaust.
That makes the Berkeley, California-based company’s technology suitable for ordinary retailers. Bellwether refrigerator-sized or countertop-sized roasters are now in cafes and coffee shops in 40 U.S. states and more than a dozen countries.
“Distributed roasting means that every coffee shop can become a roaster,” Lopez said during a recent tour of Bellwether’s headquarters, which featured a sampling of some of the specialty blends sourced from farms the company works with.
That said, making the switch to roasting coffee beans in house isn’t cheap. Bellwether’s latest countertop roasters sell for $22,000, or $27,000 for its “continuous roasting” variant. This sounds like a lot, until you realize that a high-end espresso machine is about the same price, Lopez said.
And the savings from buying raw coffee beans for about $5 to $6 per pound rather than roasted beans at about $12 to $14 per pound add up quickly. Bellwether has a calculator to help determine how long it takes to recoup the up-front cost of its roasters — typical customers pay off their machines in two to 12 months, depending on the volume of coffee they roast, Lopez said. The company offers financing deals with monthly payments that can put most buyers at a cash-flow break-even point within the first month, he noted.
Bellwether’s electric roasters also appeal to large-scale roasting facilities seeking to make small-batch, high-end blends for an increasingly sophisticated coffee-drinking public. One example: the Hero collection from Red Bay Coffee, one of two Oakland, California-based industrial coffee roasters using the startup’s machines.
The closed-loop, electric roasting process is more energy efficient than traditional fossil-gas roasting — about 2 to 3 cents of energy spent per pound of roasted output, compared to about 10 cents per pound, Lopez said.
And, of course, the whole process is less emissions-intensive than relying on fossil gas to produce coffee. Roasting accounts for up to 15% of the coffee industry’s carbon footprint, and a Bellwether roaster cuts about 87% of the carbon footprint of traditional roasting, said Jonathan Bass, the company’s executive vice president of marketing and communications. That’s a significant reduction in what admittedly is a relatively slender slice of the industry’s overall climate impact, which is heavily tied to land use and deforestation.
But those emissions reductions are the end-of-day bonus to a fundamentally economic proposition, Lopez said.
“Our customers love the fact that this is the most environmentally friendly way to roast coffee, and love to communicate that to their customers. But most of them wouldn’t be able to do it if not for the quality benefits or the economics,” he said. “You’re able to take one of your highest expenses and cut it in half while having a better, fresher product that’s environmentally friendly because it’s no longer dependent on natural gas.”
Electric coffee roasters have served as niche products for small-scale craft roasters for years now. But companies like Bellwether and others in North America and Europe are scaling them up.
Bellwether’s technology has evolved over the years. Its early coffee roasters were cobbled together with steel plating and wooden two-by-fours, Lopez said during the August tour of the company’s headquarters and manufacturing space in West Berkeley. More improvements have followed since its first commercial models rolled out in 2018, including a steep cut in their initial price of about $60,000.
Bellwether has put particular effort into honing its roaster’s closed-loop heat-recovery system, which retains much of the warmth that gas-fired roasters lose in their exhaust, Lopez said. Capturing heat that would otherwise be wasted also helps control for the variables of temperature and humidity that can make it hard to achieve consistent roasting quality, he said.
Plus, Bellwether has fine-tuned the “set-and-forget” software controls that allow busy employees to program precise outputs for each batch of green coffee beans being put through the roaster, Lopez said. “The freshness and consistency of the roasting has so much impact on the quality,” he said.
Just ask Keba Konte, founder of Red Bay Coffee. The photographer-turned-entrepreneur started roasting coffee in his garage and moved into a warehouse that has housed successively larger gas-fired coffee roasting machines, including his current one capable of roasting 120 kilograms of coffee beans per batch.
In 2023, Red Bay won a $643,000 grant from the California Energy Commission to defray the cost of installing eight Bellwether machines. The undertaking did require some wiring upgrades, Konte said — but that’s a lot less onerous than designing and installing the gas lines, vents, and other infrastructure required for his gas-fired roasters.
The Bellwether machines also “allowed us to engage in another segment of the market,” he said. “We work with farmers, and our team is super-interested in these experimental coffees. … There are so many interesting things happening in the industry right now.”
It’s hard to dedicate a batch run of Red Bay’s 120-kilogram roaster to these more experimental blends. With the Bellwether roasters, “we were able to distinguish ourselves by introducing some of these small lots,” including ones from former employees who’ve struck out on their own, he said.
Konte is also exploring how Bellwether’s technology could help the company expand to new markets. Rachel Konte, his wife and Red Bay cofounder, was born in Denmark, and the couple has been looking for opportunities to expand into that country. Denmark currently charges luxury taxes on gourmet coffee imports, which made the plan infeasible.
But “if we have a Bellwether sitting there, and we import the same raw green coffee that we have here, that’s sort of a production thing — and so now, that’s just industrial ingredients. There’s no barrier,” he said. “And then the machines, because they’re already preprogrammed — we have our master roaster here making adjustments based on age of coffee, based on humidity, etc. — we can be producing our coffee, branded, in that country.”
Coffee roasting isn’t the only industry that could deploy smaller-scale, lower-carbon technologies to decentralize production. Companies are developing factory-built, electricity-powered modular systems to purify iron for steelmaking, synthesize industrial chemicals, and produce ammonia fertilizer.
Food and beverage production is a particularly appealing target, given that nearly all of the industry’s current fossil-fueled heating needs are for relatively low-temperature processes well suited to electric heat pumps, electric boilers, waste-heat recovery systems, and other lower-emissions options.
Nancy Pfund, founder and managing partner of investment firm DBL Partners, one of the lead investors in Bellwether’s $40 million Series B funding round in 2019, said mass-produced technologies like these have the potential to quickly drive down costs, similar to what has happened with solar panels and lithium-ion batteries.
“The greatest way to increase the impact of sustainable technologies is to make them, one, affordable enough to be widely adopted, not niche, and two, to achieve greater quality than approaches that are more harmful to the environment,” Pfund said.
In the case of cafes and restaurants, “that allows them to pay employees more, or pay their rents,” she said. In the case of coffee-roasting facilities, it’s “affordably reducing air pollution in communities. All of that wonderful, good stuff — and you have this amazingly delicious cup of coffee.”
The Department of Energy has closed a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for transmission upgrades in the middle of the country — a move that comes as the Trump administration slashes funding for other grid improvements, including a separate transmission megaproject in the Midwest.
The financing from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office will go to a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to overhaul around 5,000 miles of power lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. The agency called the deal “the first closed loan guarantee” under a new “Energy Dominance Financing Program” established by President Donald Trump’s landmark tax law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Despite the Energy Dominance branding, the loan guarantee was originally announced in mid-January by the Biden administration as part of a broader $22.4 billion push to strengthen the grid using LPO funding. The Trump administration has now finalized that loan in a rare example of continuity between the administrations on energy policy.
In a statement, the Energy Department said that “all electric utilities receiving an EDF loan must provide assurance to DOE that financial benefits from the financing will be passed on to the customers of that utility.” A spokesperson for the agency did not immediately respond to Canary Media’s email requesting comment on how those assurances will be monitored and enforced.
“The President has been clear: America must reverse course from the energy subtraction agenda of past administrations and strengthen our electrical grid,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a press release. “This loan guarantee will not only help modernize the grid and expand transmission capacity but will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base.”
The United States needs more transmission lines to upgrade the aging grid, create room for additional power generation, and increase reliability by making it easier to share electrons across regions. Much of the U.S. grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s, and about 70% of existing transmission lines are over 25 years old and approaching the end of their typical life cycle.
Despite this, the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office canceled a $4.9 billion loan guarantee in July to finance construction of the Grain Belt Express, a major transmission project more than a decade in the works and designed to channel power from wind and solar farms in the Great Plains to cities in more densely populated eastern states.
The termination came a week after Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, told The New York Times that he had made a personal appeal to Trump to block the project.
“He said, ‘Well, let’s just resolve this now,’” Hawley told the newspaper. “So he got Chris Wright on the line right there.”
Hawley’s hostility to the Grain Belt Express followed a playbook that has long been deployed by actors across the political spectrum to block transmission projects, amplifying not-in-my-backyard opponents’ anger over seizures of land through eminent domain. In this case, Missouri farmers balked at the transmission route running through their land without, in their view, providing enough direct benefits.
A similar dynamic tanked construction of the 700-mile-long transmission project that Clean Line Energy Partners wanted to build to connect wind farms in Oklahoma to energy users in Tennessee nearly a decade ago, as chronicled in journalist Russell Gold’s book, “Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy.” In Maine, meanwhile, environmental groups teamed up with fossil-fuel companies to pass a 2021 referendum banning construction of a power line connecting New England’s electricity-starved grid to Quebec’s almost-entirely carbon-free hydroelectric system.
The Trump administration has slashed far more than just the Grain Belt Express’ funding. Since taking office, Trump has yanked billions in Biden-era loans and grants for clean-energy projects and clawed back incentives for the sector in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. One of the few projects to receive steady funding under Trump’s Loan Programs Office has been nuclear developer Holtec International’s bid to restart the Palisades plant in Michigan, which aims to come back online before the end of the year.
The administration also in early October announced a list of billions of dollars more in clean-energy funding cuts targeted primarily at blue states — a list that included 26 grants from the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, most of which are meant to expand the grid and boost its reliability.
Still, the latest transmission loan — along with the federal government’s AI Action Plan released in July — could signal that the administration is starting to acknowledge the importance of reinforcing the grid, said Thomas Hochman, director of the infrastructure and energy policy program at the right-leaning think tank Foundation for American Innovation.
“From the AI Action Plan to this latest loan, it’s great to see signs of this administration recognizing the centrality of the grid to AI and China competition,” he said.
LOVELAND, Colo. — For a moment, I held in my hand the cool heart of a heat pump.
I was standing inside the cavernous facility where the startup AtmosZero is building its novel steam-producing heat pumps. The all-electric technology is meant to replace the gas-burning boilers that factories rely on to make everything from Cheez Whiz to notepaper to beer. I visited the 83,000-square-foot plant on a sunny September morning to learn how AtmosZero is working to make industrial heat — but without the planet-warming carbon emissions.
The grapefruit-sized component I grasped, called a compressor wheel, helps to produce the heat that’s needed to make steam with AtmosZero’s tech, Todd Bandhauer, the startup’s chief technology officer and cofounder, explained from the factory floor.
AtmosZero opened the facility, once a mothballed Hewlett-Packard electronics plant, earlier this year to begin commercial production of its Boiler 2.0, a machine the size of a shipping container that can be hoisted by crane and plunked inside another factory.
The company has big ambitions for its electrified solution. In the United States, around 40% of the fossil fuels that factories consume is burned in boilers to make steam for processes including sterilizing equipment, breaking down wood chips for papermaking, and cooking, curing, pasteurizing, and drying food.
“Steam is the most important working fluid, both in industry and the built environment,” said Addison Stark, the startup’s CEO and cofounder. “The boiler is what drove the Industrial Revolution.”
AtmosZero spun out of Bandhauer’s research at Colorado State University in 2021, and it has since raised nearly $30 million from investors and $3.2 million from the Department of Energy to realize its steam-heat dreams. In June, the startup finished installing a 650-kilowatt pilot unit at the New Belgium brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. At the Loveland facility, the company is working to build and deliver its first commercial heat pumps by around 2026.
The factory floor was quiet when I visited last month, with custom-made parts in open boxes or on pallets awaiting assembly. But Stark said he sees the facility getting much busier as the company works to fill demand from potential buyers, who face increasing pressure from state regulators and their own customers to slash gas-related pollution.
“I want to see electrification [across] industry and actually get ourselves on track to get to the emissions reductions that we all want to see in this century,” Stark said. In his view, “The only path to that is steam decarbonization.”
Industrial heat accounts for about 13% of U.S. energy-related carbon emissions. Much of that comes from burning fossil fuels in boilers to produce steam, though a small fraction of factories have adopted electric-resistance boilers instead. These machines can at most be 100% efficient, meaning that all the energy that goes into the boiler comes out as heat.
Heat pumps, by contrast, move heat instead of making it. The appliances use electricity and a refrigerant to gather thermal energy from someplace else — say, the open air or a water pipe — and concentrate it using a compressor to deliver the heat where it’s needed. This process can be 300% to 400% efficient or higher.
AtmosZero and a handful of other manufacturers are developing new heat pumps that will allow the technology to replace an even larger share of gas-fired boilers in factories.
Existing heat-pump models can churn out heat up to about 160 degrees Celsius (320 degrees Fahrenheit) — hot enough to cover roughly 44% of industrial process-heat energy, according to a 2022 report by nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, or ACEEE. New designs are expected to reach up to 200˚C (392˚F), addressing about 55% of factory heat needs.
“Being able to meet more than [half of] of industrial heat demand with a single technology is really impactful,” said Ruth Checknoff, senior project and research director at the Renewable Thermal Collaborative, a coalition of organizations working to decarbonize process heat and buildings.
At the AtmosZero factory, Bandhauer broke down how the Boiler 2.0 delivers more than hot air.
The compressor wheel I held had precisely sculpted blades that swept out in a tight spiral. When secured in the heat pump, a motor spins the wheel at up to 30,000 rotations per minute, throwing heat-carrying vapor against the equipment’s chamber walls. That increases the pressure, making the vapor hotter. AtmosZero’s heat pump utilizes two of these compression cycles, a kind of one-two punch, to ramp up the temperature enough to boil water.
Then, voila: You have steam as hot as 165˚C (329˚F).
Still, for all the apparent benefits, industrial heat pumps on the market today have struggled to gain widespread adoption. To start, they’re more expensive to install than gas boilers, which can last for decades — limiting the business case for replacing them. In the United States, fossil gas has historically been cheap enough in many places that a boiler has cost less to run than a heat pump, even though the latter uses a fraction of the energy.
States like California, Colorado, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania are adopting policies to help address these hurdles. That includes incentives for manufacturers to invest in tech that slashes emissions, air-quality regulations that limit pollution from their operations, and cheap financing for capital-intensive decarbonization projects. Advocates are also pushing states and utilities to work together to set more favorable electricity rates for factories.
Despite the technology’s high price tag, heat pumps can deliver significant savings on factory owners’ utility bills, according to ACEEE. A heat pump’s payback time — the amount it takes to recoup savings equal to the added installation cost — can be just a handful of years.
“We should invest time and energy into making sure that we have the right policies and enabling conditions to deploy [heat pumps] at scale,” Checknoff said.
AtmosZero isn’t the only company making steam-producing heat pumps. Other manufacturers — including GEA, Karman Industries, Heaten, Piller Blowers and Compressors, and Skyven Technologies — are proving out the tech, and some are starting to install their own machines in factories in the U.S. and Europe.
These systems often supplement existing fossil-fueled boilers by capturing a plant’s excess heat that would otherwise be wasted. That approach helps maximize a heat pump’s efficiency: Since the waste heat is already toasty, it’s easier for the tech to turn that into even higher-temperature heat for making steam.
Customers often want to actively harness this throwaway warmth to keep electric bills as low as possible, Checknoff said. But because every facility is different, installing a heat pump to slurp up that thermal energy can be costly and cumbersome.
AtmosZero is aiming for economies of scale, similar to how solar panels and home heat pumps are mass-manufactured and deployed in a modular way. “We want to bring that to the steam boiler,” Stark said during my visit.
The startup’s heat pump can be installed in a day, requiring only hookups to electricity and water lines and the factory’s control system. It’s as simple as replacing an old gas boiler with a new one, he said. And at New Belgium’s brewery, putting in the pilot heat pump this spring didn’t disrupt operations.
“They were able to continue to brew beer,” Bandhauer added.
AtmosZero’s product does have a key trade-off: It’s not as efficient as heat pumps that competitors install to harness waste heat. Those systems produce more heat with the same amount of energy. That ability is measured with what’s called the coefficient of performance, or COP. Whereas other companies’ installations might render a COP of seven or more, AtmosZero’s heat pump has a COP of up to roughly two.
But the Boiler 2.0 is cheaper to install, costing about one-tenth to one-fifth the expense of integrating a waste-heat system, Stark said. He estimated that the savings on the installation costs should enable AtmosZero’s projects to pencil out financially in five years or less.
At his desk inside the AtmosZero factory, a young engineer named Mason Mollenhauer pulled up on his computer screen a rendering of the 650-kilowatt heat pump installed at New Belgium’s Fort Collins brewery. The appliance sends the AtmosZero team, about 30 people in all, a steady stream of data.
New Belgium, the famed maker of Fat Tire Ale, is using the steam to boil wort, a sugary liquid, with bitter hops to create the libation’s flavor and aroma profile before it’s fermented into beer. When running at full capacity, AtmosZero’s heat pump is able to provide about 30% to 40% of the brewery’s steam needs.
The AtmosZero team has been carefully monitoring the New Belgium installation’s performance since June, and they’ve been able to apply lessons from the pilot project to improve their product, Bandhauer said.
While AtmosZero’s first heat-pump unit was stuffed with equipment, the latest version is roomier. The streamlined model has fewer parts, reducing costs and making it easier to service, Bandhauer said. The team is also finessing the design of its crucial compressor wheels.
Michaela Eagan, a spokesperson for New Belgium, said the brewer is focused on evaluating how the heat pump performs and hasn’t committed to any future orders.
But AtmosZero is in talks with dozens of other potential customers and is anticipating demand through 2027, Stark said. Currently, the startup’s plant contains one crane-assisted heat-pump assembly bay; that’ll grow to four. Whereas the first Boiler 2.0 took roughly three months to build, AtmosZero could be cranking out 120 to 240 heat pumps per year by 2030, he estimated.
So far, the company has primarily targeted factories for its product. But AtmosZero is also branching out into steam for other big buildings. In September, New York awarded the startup $500,000 through the Empire Technology Prize to install two of its heat pumps at the Midtown Hilton hotel in Manhattan, a project that’s still in negotiation, Stark said.
After touring the factory floor, we sat down in a nearby taproom. I asked Stark how he felt about what he and his cofounder Bandhauer were building. “Neither of us were wanting to be founders,” Stark said. “It’s a hard thing to reinvent the boiler.”
Yet “it’s rare to find an opportunity to have such a positive impact [on carbon emissions] and be profitable,” he added. “Todd and I and our whole company see that opportunity.”
A clarification was made on Oct. 16, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that the money AtmosZero received to install heat pumps at the Midtown Hilton is through the Empire Technology Prize, a combination of private-sector and state funding.
A new law in Ohio will fast-track energy projects in places that are hard to argue with: former coal mines and brownfields.
But how much the legislation benefits clean energy will depend on the final rules for its implementation, which the state is working out now.
House Bill 15, which took effect Aug. 14, lets the state’s Department of Development designate such properties as “priority investment areas” at the request of a local government.
The law aims to boost energy production to meet growing demand from data centers and increasing electrification, while applying competitive pressure to rein in power prices.
Targeting former coal mines and brownfields as priority investment areas furthers that goal while encouraging the productive use of land after mining, manufacturing, or other industrial activity ends. Buyers are often wary of acquiring these properties due to the risk of lingering pollution.
The new law could also help developers sidestep the bitter land-use battles that have bogged down other clean-energy projects in Ohio, particularly those looking to use farmland.
Priority areas might “otherwise not see these investments, which can breathe new life into communities, improve energy reliability, provide tax revenue, and lower electricity costs,” said Diane Cherry, deputy director of MAREC Action, a clean-energy industry group.
Ohio has more than 567,000 acres of mine lands and about 50,000 acres of brownfields that are potentially suitable for renewable-energy development, according to a 2024 report from The Nature Conservancy. Federal funding to clean up abandoned mine lands has continued so far under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, so yet more sites may become available. Overall, remediating documented hazards at Ohio’s abandoned mine lands is estimated to cost nearly $586 million, said spokesperson Karina Cheung at the state Department of Natural Resources.
But two Ohio agencies still need to finalize rules before companies can start building energy projects in these underutilized spaces and benefiting from the new law.
The Department of Development has not yet proposed standards for approving requests to designate priority investment areas, said spokesperson Mason Waldvogel. However, in late August, the Ohio Power Siting Board proposed rules to implement HB 15, and the public comment period just closed.
Under the law, approved priority investment areas will get a five-year tax exemption for equipment used to transport electricity or natural gas. The sites will also be eligible for grants of up to $10 million for cleanup and construction preparation.
HB 15 also calls for accelerated regulatory permit review of proposed energy projects in priority investment areas. The Power Siting Board will have 45 days to determine if a permit application is complete, plus another 45 days to make a decision on it.
Those timelines are shorter than the approximately five months HB 15 allows for standard projects. And it’s substantially faster than recent projects where it took the board more than a year to grant or deny applications after they were filed.
Advocates and industry groups generally applaud the new law but want tweaks to the Power Siting Board’s proposed rules.
A big concern is making sure the board will allow wind and solar developments on mine lands and brownfields throughout Ohio, regardless of which county they’re in. Roughly one-third of Ohio’s 88 counties ban wind, solar, or both in all or a significant part of their jurisdiction. This authority was granted to them by a 2021 law, Senate Bill 52.
However, the language and legislative history of HB 15 make clear that it “was meant to be technology-neutral,” said Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate for The Nature Conservancy.
HB 15 even states that its terms for permitting energy projects in priority investment areas apply “notwithstanding” some other parts of Ohio law.
“That clause is meant to bypass some of the typical Ohio Power Siting Board procedures — including the procedures for siting in restricted areas” under SB 52, wrote Bill Stanley, Ohio director for The Nature Conservancy, in comments filed with the board.
But the exemption provided by the “notwithstanding” clause is narrow, Mellino added, because local government authorities must ask for a priority investment area designation. That means, for example, that in a county with a solar and wind ban in place, officials would need to choose to request that a former coal mine or brownfield become a priority investment area.
The Nature Conservancy has asked the Power Siting Board to add language making it crystal-clear that renewable-energy projects can be built on any land marked a priority investment area — even if a solar and wind ban otherwise exists in a county.
Industry groups are pushing for additional clarifications to make sure the Power Siting Board meets the permitting deadlines set by the new law, both for expedited and standard projects.
For example, Open Road Renewables, which builds large-scale solar and battery storage, said in comments that, in order to align with HB 15, the board’s rules should require energy developers to notify the public of an application when it is filed, rather than after it is deemed complete.
Separate comments from the American Clean Power Association, MAREC Action, and the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio ask for tweaks to provisions regarding notices on public hearings and for clarifications on application fees. The board should also promptly issue certificates for projects that are automatically approved, say comments by Robert Brundrett, president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.
The Department of Development hopes to finish draft standards and invite public comments on them soon, Waldvogel said. Meanwhile, the department has received its first request to designate a priority investment area. The ask comes from Jefferson County’s board of commissioners, which did not specify the type of energy that may be built in the area.
That request deals with land where FirstEnergy’s former Sammis coal plant is undergoing demolition, as well as the Hollow Rock Landfill, which received waste from the site. HB 15 gives the department 90 days to act on designation requests.
The Ohio Power Siting Board, for its part, is expected to finalize its rules within the next couple of months. Ultimately, said Cherry of MAREC Action, the law “clears the path for developers to bring energy projects online quickly and affordably, something Ohio’s consumers and businesses desperately need.”
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