Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.

Tech Brew

Climate Tech

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

 the first half of this year as China’s 

 in renewables continued. But there is a domestic bright spot—or, rather, hot spot—that could give the US a leg up: 

Tim Latimer, the CEO of geothermal developer 

, said at an NYC Climate Week event this week that the US should lean into geothermal production because doing so would be irreplicable by China. While China can drive down the cost of solar and wind energy and battery equipment, geothermal is location-based.

“One thing that makes geothermal a little bit different than solar or battery installation is the percent of the project cost that’s actually on-site value at work is really high,” Latimer said at an event hosted by venture capital firm SOSV. “We put a hole into the ground, which by definition, you get into right there at that spot.”

Fervo’s geothermal developing method is an “extension” of oil and gas drilling techniques, a sector that Latimer said the US has a “multi-decade enduring cost advantage” that’s “very difficult to replicate” in China.

“[Geothermal is] a very niche industry, but it’s right here in the US. And with the right investments, at the right speed, that can be that way forever,” Latimer said.

With geothermal’s center of gravity being in the US, Latimer said that Fervo’s goal is to become “the biggest electricity company in the world,” and do so within the next 15 years.

“What we are going to end up doing is creating a more reliable energy grid, unlocking economic development, control the cost of electricity for consumers going forward,” Latimer said. “Oh, and by the way, it’s also is going to address the carbon emissions problem and climate problem.”

Fervo CEO Tim Latimer and SOSV's Duncan Turner onstage during NYC Climate Week in 2025.

Fervo CEO says geothermal is the US answer to Chinese renewable dominance

Tim Latimer spoke at an NYC Climate Week event about the company’s repurposing of oil and gas technology.

The Trump administration appears to be deviating from the all-of-the-above energy strategy that 

During National Clean Energy Week, Brittany Kelm, a former Shell policy advisor who now works as a senior policy advisor for the administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, told renewables industry attendees that the council will “run to the ground anything [they] need for [their] company’s specific projects.”

That is, if those projects are oil, gas, or nuclear energy. When Tech Brew asked Kelm why the administration had lengthened permitting timelines for proposed solar and wind projects on federal lands by requiring Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to execute an “elevated review” of all such projects, she said that the administration’s focus is on oil, gas, and nuclear power.

“It’s down to prioritizing [the] baseload power directive of President Trump…We wake up every day with no question of what our priority objectives are,” Kelm said. “That has just been a focus of permitting for those specific energies, which are oil and gas—obviously inclusive of pipelines—the nuclear side, and the permitting for such on federal lands.”

An approach that excludes solar and wind runs perpendicular to the ideology of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a nonprofit that encourages Republican support for clean energy. In an interview with Tech Brew, CEO Heather Reams said “we need to make sure that we’re treating all of these energies, these technologies, the same way.” Reams is also the chair of National Clean Energy Week.

“What you do for one kind of industry you do for everybody,” Reams said. “We’re wanting the government to be more of a fair arbitrator.”

This isn’t the first time that clean energy conservatives have taken issue with the Trump administration’s energy strategy at National Clean Energy Week. During 

, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), said that Trump’s halting of construction on clean energy projects is “counterproductive” and “unfair.”

“The federal government is again departing from that all-of-the-above approach, particularly for wind and solar,” Murkowski said. “The worst thing that we can do is take the resources off the table.”

Image of Brittany Kelm, a former Shell policy advisor who now works as a senior policy advisor for the Trump administration’s National Energy Dominance Council, onstage during National Clean Energy Week in September 2025

Trump’s National Energy Dominance Council splits from all-of-the-above energy strategy

A senior policy advisor said during National Clean Energy Week that the administration's priorities are oil, gas, and nuclear. 

In the nationwide treasure hunt to secure more geothermal power, some developers have pivoted from siphoning energy out of traditional geothermal wells to creating geothermal wells in parts of the country where they exist deeper under the surface. But where other developers zig, Zanskar zags.

The Utah-based geothermal developer uses AI to discover overlooked energy in geothermal wells that were previously thought to be tapped out, and thus far the company’s found success. Earlier this year, Zanskar announced it had used its AI models and new drilling techniques to harvest more power from a geothermal field in New Mexico that had been abandoned by the rest of the industry. In an interview with Tech Brew, co-founder and CTO Joel Edwards said Zanskar’s AI models have found more conventional geothermal hotspots in three years than the entire industry has been able to in the last three decades.

Edwards said the company predicts where geothermal resources are located and teams go out to test the areas for underground heat. Data pertaining to the area—whether it’s a hotspot or not—is then fed into an AI model, alongside datasets on rock types, fault lines, and the planet’s gravitational field. Eventually, the model creates a digital twin of earth’s geothermal system, learns how to identify geothermal characteristics, and can understand layers of physical data that can be tough for humans to grok.

“Our regional models are now better than humans,” Edwards told us. “Our models are now predicting where the hotspots are, and our field teams are out testing those predictions.”

And that tipping point, when the AI became better than humans at predicting where geothermal resources are located, happened in the last year, Zanskar co-founder and CEO Carl Hoiland told Tech Brew.

Because Zanskar is focused on traditional geothermal wells, or hot springs, the developer’s focus is in the western US. Hoiland said the magnitude of energy Zanskar will be able to access will mean the market will move “demand to where the cheap energy is, rather than the other way around.”

“As these sites get bigger, you can just bring a data center to that site,” Hoiland said. “Conventional [geothermal] should not be overlooked. There’s enough there to meet all of the future growth in energy demand.”

Zanskar is using AI to get more out of existing geothermal hot spots

The developer trains AI models on geothermal hot spot data, and AI directs humans to physical sites.

Extreme weather is becoming a more frequent part of day-to-day life, and long-range forecasting can help governments and businesses alike prepare for severe weather.

Planette’s subscribers are usually businesses with physical assets that might be environmentally vulnerable. But now, the company is working with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences to forecast extreme weather using AI and quantum computing algorithms.

In an interview with Tech Brew, Planette CEO Hansi Singh said the company trains AI on existing models of Earth, like those used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, that contain the physics of how the ocean and atmosphere interact with each other. Then, its AI is able to forecast extreme weather up to six months in advance.

“If you invest in the training [the AI], then the actual inference where you produce the forecast, either daily or weekly, is super, super, super cheap,” Singh said. “That is the advantage of the AI, because you can learn the physics, but you can run it extremely efficiently.”

Through the company’s partnership with NASA, Singh said they’re working on QubitCast, which will forecast “one-off events”—like extreme weather—using “quantum algorithms that are even more efficient” than AI algorithms.

“That analysis would really help increase the time horizon over which you can see that an extreme event has a certain probability of occurring,” Singh said. “My goal is to make it so that every agency, every business that has some environmental vulnerability is looking at forecasts like this, knows what’s ahead, and is preparing adequately.”

QubitCast is still in the research and development stage, as is another AI forecasting model the company is working on with the National Science Foundation. Singh said she’s excited about the progress on both projects, especially because they’re focused on adapting to the effects of the climate crisis.

“Depending on how fast we get our act together—or don’t get our act together in terms of the energy transition—that adaptation is going to be huge and expensive and potentially painful,” she said. “To minimize that painfulness, we really need to be investing in adaptation technologies.”

How Planette helps NASA use quantum principles for weather forecasting

The long-range weather forecasting company trains AI on existing physics-based models of Earth.

Solar power leasing models are a tale as old as time: Companies install panels on a customer’s property, but the installer owns the system, which the customer pays them for. But solar and microgrid company SolMicroGrid has created a program that turns the traditional playbook on its head.

Through its new “energy-as-a-service” structure, SolMicroGrid is setting out to purchase existing solar arrays and microgrid systems from commercial and industrial owners and sell the energy generated back to them.

CEO Kirk Edelman told Tech Brew that the program offers owners of solar infrastructure a way to benefit from low cost energy, while letting go of the responsibility of system upkeep.

“[Customers] may not be paying enough attention to [their solar panels], and maybe they’re not operating as well today as they did when they were first installed. Maybe you’re not seeing the same output,” Edelman said. “We can come in and write a check and buy your grid or your array from you, and then we can either fix it and maintain it and try to get it back to what you originally thought you bought, or we can enhance it.”

Edelman also told Tech Brew that SolMicroGrid can buy systems from building developers.

The program was born out of an issue that Edelman said he witnessed in the solar industry that went unsolved. Many companies don’t want to take on the “asymmetrical risk” of securing the capital expense to own and operate a large portfolio of solar infrastructure.

SolMicroGrid can take on that risk because it’s a Morgan Stanley portfolio company, but there’s a tradeoff.

“I need to recover my capital, recover my operating expenses, and get a return,” Edelman said of the energy-as-a-service structure. “So you do have to sign up for an extended period of time, and that’s something we put out there right up front so that there’s no misunderstanding.”

Ideal customers for the arrangement, Edelman said, are owners of multiple solar arrays and systems that SolMicroGrid can buy and use to enter into a power purchase agreement with the previous owner.

“When you have capital like we have, it pays for us to have as many operating projects as possible,” Edelman told Tech Brew.

A solar power system being installed and a building.

SolMicroGrid launches program to buy existing solar power systems 

The first-of-its-kind program allows owners of solar panels to sell them to SolMicroGrid while still using their power. 

Patrick Kulp

For the past couple years, certain ocean freighters hauling cars around the world have had small cameras perched on board. The devices diligently scan the watery expanse, looking for bobbing bits of plastic waste.

It’s part of a deal between Hyundai’s shipping arm and a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, which is placing its custom debris-detecting smart cameras on vessels. Now, the organization is linking up with Amazon Web Services as it seeks to build that data into an AI-powered platform that tracks and predicts the movement of ocean plastic around the world.

While The Ocean Cleanup has spent much of its decade-plus existence building tools to pull trash out of oceans and the rivers that flow into them, it can be hard to know where to place that equipment to maximize its efficiency. Contrary to how it might sound, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other similar sites are not giant islands of plastics that might be easily scooped up, Riccardo Farina, The Ocean Cleanup’s head of partnerships funding, said.

“[That] would make our job way easier,” Farina told Tech Brew. “But actually, it’s more like a soup of plastic, where plastic is very widespread over the area. And the challenge is to identify what we call hotspot areas—areas with the highest concentrations of plastic.”

Through its AWS partnership, the group will now have access to more AI capabilities, drones, flotation devices, and internet-of-things tech that will help it better track plastics, the group said in an announcement. The org will combine data from this project with data from the ship cameras and other in-house sources, as well as publicly available information, like weather patterns and current flows, to steer plastic-collection ships toward hotspots, Farina said.

“We have developed a system that has been proven to be continuously capable of harvesting large amounts of plastic from the ocean,” Farina said. “That’s the hardware solution. Now we’re focusing our efforts to improve the software.”

A new marine life detection system will help reduce the need for protected species observers, who watch for creatures near its cleanup operations 24 hours a day, the announcement said.

“When we harvest plastic, we also want to ensure we do not harm, in any way, marine life species,” Farina said. “We’re looking at building an AI platform with AWS, which will be automatized as much as possible…so we can allocate more resources to plastic harvesting.”

The Ocean Cleanup, which employs about 200 people, claims to have removed 64 million pounds of trash from rivers and oceans as of July of this year. It was founded with the ambitious mission to remove 90% of global plastic pollution by 2040—and “

 from entering the environment again.” You can see a dashboard of the cleanup operations 

“Technology has always been at the heart of The Ocean Cleanup,” Farina said. “The goal was the need to understand the problem, use data and science, then develop a technology that can solve it. So technology has always been, and will continue to be, at the heart of our operations.”

How this nonprofit is using AI to clean up ocean plastics

The Ocean Cleanup wants to build a new AI platform to track and predict marine waste.

TBR-Solar power audio embed

The solar industry is disappointed: After months of 

 Congress to preserve clean energy tax credits for solar power, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which President Trump signed last month, phases out tax credits for investment in and production of solar power.

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act granted subsidies for solar projects that started construction before 2033. Under Trump’s budget bill, those credits will only be available for projects that commence construction within the next year or are in service before the end of 2027.

Brendan Bell, COO and managing director of clean energy firm Aligned Climate Capital, told Tech Brew that the policy changes are bad for the climate and the US economy.

“All of the manufacturing that had come to the US to support these new rules—which was creating jobs in places that haven’t had jobs in a long time, creating an economic industrial base here in the US—that’s gone,” he said. “If there’s anything that is most disastrous about this, it is, there is no longer a reason to have a solar manufacturing plant in the United States.”

But that doesn’t mean solar won’t bounce back. Solar installers, developers, and investors told Tech Brew that the industry will go through a period of transition in which consumers and businesses face a lot of uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to receive those sunsetting tax credits, and power prices will rise. But once the dust settles, they said, solar will be able to survive without subsidies.

“Every developer who you’ve signed a contract with is going to come back and say ‘I need you to pay more for your power,’ because of tax credits,” Bell said. “But people will transition to a different world, and it just means that consumers, whether you’re [a business] or you’re a homeowner, you’re going to pay more for power.”

For now, Bell said Aligned will move forward with projects already in motion and work to “get ahead of the [foreign entity of concern] requirements,” a provision in the new law that restricts clean energy projects from using equipment from foreign entities, like China.

“Our contracts will just build in adjustments,” Bell said. “If you get the tax credits, it’s this price. If it’s not, it’s this price.”

However, developers (and the people paying them) won’t know if they’ll be able to receive tax credits because they don’t control when a solar power system is placed in service—utilities do. As for residential solar, Absolute Solar CEO Rob Kaercher 

 in the spring that some clients were pausing or canceling solar projects because they were worried that the tax credits would disappear. Now, he said, clients are confused about the phase-out process.

“There’s just unease about what [we can] trust,” Kaercher said of his clients. “Regardless of incentives or underlying policy, when you obscure what’s going on and make it difficult to follow, that uncertainty just hurts industries across the board.”

Absolute Solar is currently “extremely busy and booked out” with all types of solar projects, but Kaercher said he expects most of its projects will be commercial or nonprofit installations next year, given that the residential clean energy credit is only available until the end of 2025.

“It’s more prioritizing or benefiting larger industry, utility-scale projects,” Kaercher said, which “leaves your average person with less tools and less ability to invest in their own future and combat ever-rising rates.”

The loss of a continued solar boom will also hurt the grid, Kaercher said, as residential solar helps 

 the energy demand curve that strains the grid and leads to outages.

Though the tax credits are being phased out, many states still allow net metering, an energy billing policy that discounts the electricity bills of commercial or residential consumers whose solar energy systems send power back to the grid. And according to Steve Hamile, COO of Nevada solar provider Sol-Up, net metering is more important than tax credits when it comes to making solar energy systems affordable. Because of that, Hamile told Tech Brew he’d always wanted the tax credits to phase out—just not as fast as they will now.

“We’ve been a strong believer that subsidies need to sunset over time,” Hamile said. “We just feel that it should have sunset [at] a slower pace.”

 don’t have net-metering rules, and utilities aren’t required to provide compensation for consumers with solar energy systems. Solar in those states and areas, Hamile said, will be most affected by the elimination of the tax credits.

Hamile isn’t alone in wanting to see the solar industry stand on its own without subsidies: Jorge Vargas, CEO of solar development and financing company Aspen Power, told Tech Brew that the tax credits are being phased out too quickly.

“[The US’s] competitive edge was the fact that we made our infrastructure decisions over 10, 20-year spans—which is the right thing to do. But now this administration chose to change that, and in a very hasty and poorly drafted way,” Vargas said. “That’s what the biggest impact is: [the disruptive] way that we’re going to do this.”

Vargas also said he expects the solar industry to get a boost from another type of incentive: some “big, beautiful PPAs”—power purchase agreements—with companies looking to lock down energy prices before they start to rise.

“We’re ready to embrace what’s next. And in a world where power prices increase, we have a product that can compete,” Vargas said. “We will emerge from this.”

A house with solar panels on the roof over $100 bill next to the US capital building