Last month, the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) issued its first loan for clean-energy tech since 2014, when “Happy” by Pharrell Williams was annoying everyone at the top of the Billboard 100.

The LPO, which is tasked with financing emerging technologies that are ready to scale, guaranteed a loan of $504.4 million to the Advanced Clean Energy Storage (ACES) project in Utah that will convert renewable energy to hydrogen and store it in two massive salt caverns to support the power grid in the Western US.

Why it matters: While batteries can store renewable energy for hours at a time, hydrogen provides months-long storage that can save excess wind and solar energy produced in low-demand periods, like the spring and fall, and deploy it when there is more need for heating or cooling homes, for example.

ACES would be the largest green hydrogen facility in the world, nearly doubling the entire global capacity for clean-hydrogen production.

Looking ahead

“By funding this project, there’s probably 12 more salt domes around the West that people are looking to replicate this project into, and those projects may end up using fully commercial debt,” LPO director Jigar Shah told us. “But it’s going to happen because we did the first deal to catalyze the space.”

ACES is working with Intermountain Power Agency (IPA), which plans to convert a nearby coal-fueled power plant into one that uses gas turbines to generate electricity from a mix of natural gas and hydrogen. IPA expects to begin fueling this power plant with 30% hydrogen and 70% natural gas in 2025, transitioning to 100% hydrogen no later than 2045.

Read more about this green hydrogen project here.—GD

Check out Morning Brew’s hit podcast Business Casual, where host Nora Ali peels back the professional sheen to bring you convos with people you know—and some you’ll wanna know. Check out a few of our latest episodes:

• How Vita Coco Out-Hustled the Competition
• How Freshly Stands Out in the Crowded Meal Service Marketplace
• The Business Behind UNICEF & Solving Humanitarian Crises

Despite economic turbulence, investors have been busy this month—especially in tech for sectors like biopharma and agriculture. Here are some of the big-budget funding rounds that caught our eye.

Sensor tech: Echodyne, a Seattle-based radar startup, raised $135 million in financing, co-led by Bill Gates. The company’s sensors are designed to help machines better perceive their surroundings, especially for government, defense, and commercial applications. And radar tech has been on the rise over the past year.

Biotech: Resilience, a San Diego-based biotech manufacturing company founded in 2020, raised a $625 million Series D this month. It specializes in complex medicines like vaccines, cell therapies, and other therapeutics.

• Mineralys Therapeutics—another biotech company founded in 2020—raised a $118 million Series B this month, co-led by RA Capital Management. And Owkin, a medical AI startup specializing in drug discovery, raised $80 million ahead of a drug-trial partnership with pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb.

EVs: Electrify America, an EV charging company, closed a $450 million funding round, with investors including Siemens and the Volkswagen Group. The Virginia-based firm plans to use the new cash to expand its infrastructure, ideally reaching 1,800 charging stations in the US and Canada by 2026.

Agtech: Little Leaf Farms, a Massachusetts-based agtech startup, closed a $300 million financing round this month. The company plans to use the money to expand its hydroponics operations and make its greenhouse-grown lettuce available to more than half the US population by 2026.—HF

Stat: Methane is 4x more sensitive to global warming than previously thought, a new study shows.

Quote: “We hired very seasoned and experienced executives from the battery business. We’re really gearing up to become one of the bigger battery-cell producers.”—Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess to Bloomberg, as the automaker breaks ground on its first battery plant

Read: How Microsoft and Google, amid controversy, are using emotion-detection AI.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• AI is using the text of online job postings to predict salaries.
• The DOT outlined plans to build a bullet train between NYC and SF by 2030.
• A robotic pasta chef in Tokyo can cook up to 90 meals an hour.
• Drones are replacing fireworks in Fourth of July light shows.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why startups are deploying biochar as a carbon-removal method
• A speedrun through the last six months of emerging tech
• ‘The cloud is not a cloud’: The carbon footprint of digital technologies is vast