Climate

Special mud helps XGS Energy get more power out of geothermal wells

Climate /

Young geothermal energy wells can be like budding prodigies, each brimming with potential to outshine their peers. But like people, most decline with age. In California, for example, the amount of electricity generated by geothermal power plants declined by 15% between 2001 and 2018, partly because existing wells degraded. “The history of geothermal has been […]

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Porsche invests in battery startup South 8 to boost cold-weather EV performance

Climate /

All cars suffer when the mercury drops, but electric vehicles suffer more than most as heaters draw more power and batteries charge more slowly as the liquid electrolyte inside thickens. Drivers in Chicago found this out the hard way last January after many Teslas failed to charge during a deep freeze. One startup, South 8

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ETF Partners raises €284M for climate startups that will be effective quickly — not 20 years down the road

Climate /

While many climate investors focus their efforts on breakthrough, deep-tech solutions, Patrick Sheehan at ETF Partners has other ideas. “I’ve actually got nothing against carbon capture and storage, apart from the fact it’s probably going to be commercialized too late,” he told TechCrunch. Instead, Sheehan and his colleagues are diving into more software-centric companies that

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Forget EVs: Why Bedrock Materials is targeting gas-powered cars for its first sodium-ion batteries

Climate /

Spencer Gore has a battery startup. But he doesn’t want his batteries to end up in electric vehicles, at least not yet.  “There are a lot of interesting downmarket segments of automotive that are underserved today that are faster to get into than, say, the traction battery in EVs,” he told TechCrunch. Take the traditional

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Quilt heat pump sports sleek design from veterans of Apple, Tesla, and Nest

Climate /

Heating and air conditioning is usually pretty boring stuff, performed by appliance-like boxes with uninspired designs, from sheet metal outdoor units to cheap plastic indoor mini-splits. Not Quilt. The heat pump startup unveiled its first products on Wednesday, and they sport the sort of sleek and intuitive designs you’d expect from veterans of Apple, Nest,

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Berlin-based trawa raises €10M to use AI to make buying renewable energy easier for SMEs

Climate /

The brutal invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022 took businesses that depended on oil and gas energy by surprise. Suddenly, renewable energy became crucial to survival. But how best to buy it? That was the germination of the idea behind trawa, a Berlin-based renewable energy supplier that recently raised €10 million in a seed

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Alora Baby aims to push baby gear away from the ‘landfill economy’

Climate /

Fast consumption and waste generation run rampant in all industries, but it’s particularly true around baby equipment. Tiny humans get big fast, and parents might be nervous to buy used items (“Is that high chair really sanitized?”) and are often too stressed out to think about what to do with the equipment the little tyke

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Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team

Climate /

At the start of the year, Tesla’s Supercharger team was tasked with the impossible. “We were on an exponential path,” a former team member told TechCrunch, adding that the new targets were “super-duper crazy.” Despite the bottlenecks that such expectations can create, “every time they upped the metric, we met it.” Then, one day in

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