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Tech Brew

Green Tech

Tricia Crimmins

techbrew.com

Geothermal’s status as the darling of renewable energy is heating up.

The emerging baseload energy source retained its clean energy tax credits via President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, bringing geothermal growth to an “

.” In the months since, geothermal residential heating company Dandelion Energy and developer Fervo Energy both introduced policies to propel industry expansion.

Though mostly supportive of geothermal, the OBBBA’s tax credit changes forced residential geothermal companies to pivot a bit. The bill sunsetted the 25D clean energy home improvement tax credit, which can be applied to systems like Dandelion’s, but allowed residential geothermal heating systems to be leased.

“It’s a big loss to not be able to just offer that [25D] tax credit,” Dandelion’s CTO and co-founder, Kathy Hannun, told Tech Brew this summer. “With a lease, we can still give homeowners a mechanism for monetizing that tax credit.”

Ever since the bill’s signing on July 4, the industry has been racing to set up leasing programs, and Dandelion recently announced plans to partner with Upstream Lease to offer leased residential systems. Dan Yates, Dandelion’s CEO, told us that the program is a win-win-win—for builders, home buyers, and Upstream.

After home builders purchase Dandelion’s geothermal heating systems—which are subsidized through the federal tax credit and may be eligible for further discounts from state, local, and utility incentives—they install the system and sell it to Upstream. Then, when builders sell the home to buyers, the cost of the leased system is minimal—Yates said as low as $10 a month—because its up-front cost was discounted.

“It’s a de minimis lease amount” for homeowners, Yates said. “They’re paying 10 bucks a month for the system, and they’re saving $30 a month in avoided energy costs.”

If the Upstream lease sounds a lot like residential solar leasing, that’s because Dandelion modeled the new program after it.

“Rooftop solar really took off when leasing was available, and we see a similar opportunity here,” Yates said. Solar leasing made the residential renewable infrastructure “

And by Dandelion’s calculations, leasing residential geothermal systems is well worth it: Yates said it could unlock a billion-dollar market for the company.

 that growth happens responsibly.” Its “Geothermal Sustainable Development Pact,” released last week, sets out 37 principles spanning community engagement, labor practices, land and water conservation, seismic risk, and emissions management.

“The geothermal industry is expanding rapidly into next-generation technologies and new hydrothermal resources,” the pact states. “Existing regulations may have inconsistent performance expectations for geothermal developers and operators.”

Written in conjunction with the Sierra Club, the pact’s commitments focus on environmentalism: solely using energy generation technologies with “near zero” carbon emissions to power projects; amending any projects that could harm or kill endangered species and/or ecosystems; protecting drinking water that comes into contact with geothermal systems or equipment; and properly cleaning up after project completion.

Fervo also included commitments about hiring locally for developments, a practice that CEO Tim Latimer said has been integral to the success of the company’s 

 in Utah. In an open letter, Latimer said that the pact “reflects a shared belief that energy growth should never come at the expense of the people or places that make it possible.”

“Many of these commitments go well beyond today’s regulatory requirements,” Latimer wrote. “As geothermal grows, we’ll continue working with partners to raise the bar and ensure these standards remain the benchmark for responsible development.”

A Dandelion residential heating system being installed.

Geothermal developers lay groundwork for industry’s expansion

With a leg up from federal tax credits, geothermal giants Fervo and Dandelion debuted new policies to foster growth.

At Aurora Energy Research’s NYC forum this week, analyst Julia Hoos said the quiet part out loud: Once the effects of solar and wind tax credits being phased out take hold and the 

 stalls, “there is a real fear that [the renewable energy industry is] standing in front of a cliff in about 2028 or 2030.”

President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act “has reversed the momentum that the Inflation Reduction Act injected into the energy transition,” Hoos, the head of USA East research at Aurora, told the audience on Tuesday. “But we also have to contextualize that we’re starting from a place of momentum like we’ve never had before.”

Thus, her prediction is that renewables will continue to be built in the US and that “those projects are going to benefit from higher revenues that can offset their higher costs.” But the most successful renewable projects will be strategic in their placement and benefit to the grid.

“Profitability is going to be less of a given,” Hoos said. “That increases the importance of understanding how much additional renewables or batteries a particular market can absorb.”

 can help particular markets make and use extra clean power, but once a location is saturated with renewables and storage, Hoos suggested investors need to “pivot geographies and technologies.”

“Batteries are exceptionally well-positioned over the next couple of years to take advantage of the new opportunities from load growth,” Hoos said. “However, the economics do change. Given how long it takes to build projects in the US right now, successful investment means speeding to where the puck is going and preparing for the aftermath.”

Hoos said renewables will go from something that’s inexpensive to build and can aid in any power market to a specific asset that can boost the efficacy of markets with specific conditions.

“Opportunities are going to be there on the other side,” she said. “We just have to know where to find them.”

Clean energy’s future requires economic and locational strategy, Aurora analyst says

The energy research firm’s NYC forum included guidance on how renewables can prosper.

From the outside, the New Energy music festival looked like any other outdoor concert: A big tent housed a modest-sized stage and sound equipment, while another offered guests food and beverage options.

But the power that fueled the festival didn’t come from a diesel generator, which is standard for outdoor events—it came from four batteries juiced up at a solar-powered EV charger outside New York City that were then transported to Governor’s Island, where the event was staged.

New Energy was an extension of a conference hosted by the DER Task Force called “DERVOS”—a play on the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland—that was held on the island the day before. (DER stands for “distributed energy resources.”)

James McGinniss, one of the event’s organizers and the CEO of clean power company David Energy, told Tech Brew that New Energy was about building public trust around solar power and battery storage, and showing concert-goers that clean energy systems are dependable. 

“The whole thinking is if we can just put this on display,” McGinniss said, “we want the general public to come to these shows and just grok that it works.”

The four batteries that DER Task Force used for the event were originally manufactured by Moxion, a portable battery startup. Even though the company went bankrupt last year, the batteries still work and were rented out to event organizers by an equipment rental company.

Psychedelic rock band Gift playing New Energy Fest next to a portable battery.

Two batteries powered the event’s main stage inside a repurposed nearby chapel, which hosted New York-based acts like electronic artist Eartheater, rapper Junglepussy, and DJ Doss. The third battery was hooked up to the food and beverage tent, and a handful of Bluetti portable power stations were on hand for attendees to charge their phones. A fourth fully charged battery sat idle as backup power.

Two portable batteries at New Energy Fest.

This is the third party DERVOS has thrown at the end of its annual New York conference, and this year’s setup is its largest yet: Two years ago, they used a Ford F-150 Lightning to power the after-party, and last year they threw “Brooklyn’s first solar + battery powered concert” using portable batteries. In the future, McGinniss said he hopes to have solar arrays on-site and even more guests in attendance.

“There’s actually an economic model around having deployable solar and storage that can be a generator,” he said. “If we can grow this up to a 10,000-person festival over the next couple years on Governor’s Island, then it can inspire the work of others to be like, ‘Oh, wow, they’re not using diesel generators. Maybe we don’t have to, either.’”

New Energy Fest attracted a few different groups of people: Those who showed up for the music; the “DER-pilled,” a term DER Task Force uses to refer to folks who are enthusiastic about distributed energy; and people who were interested in the performances in addition to how the event was powered. Ric Leichtung, the founder of creative agency AdHoc Projects who booked the performers for the festival, told Tech Brew that in doing so they prioritized “artists who care about the environment, who care about where their energy comes from.”

One attendee, Nicholas Birkhead, told Tech Brew he was excited about the festival because it introduces the general public to clean energy at a time when the Trump administration is focusing on 

. Birkhead is an energy fellow at Carbon Reform, a climate tech company, and said he spent hundreds of dollars to attend DERVOS (mostly on a hotel room).

“It’s a lot of money for me, but it’s what I can really contribute in this moment to play some small part in making this happen,” he said. “It’s really important, in my opinion, for the clean energy people to lean in as hard as they can.”

A sign for New Energy Fest on Governor's Island, NY.

New Energy music festival wants to make solar-powered concerts the norm

How four solar-powered batteries fueled a concert in NYC last weekend.

When it comes to satisfying skyrocketing energy demand caused by forthcoming data centers and increasing electrification, some US 

 have doubted that solar and wind power are up to the job. But during the first half of this year, renewable energy met—and exceeded—the increase in energy demand globally for the first time ever.

The milestone was reflected in a report from Ember, an energy think tank, released earlier this month, which relies on data from 88 countries that make up 93% of global energy demand. In the same vein, renewable energy generation also overtook coal generation “for the first time on record,” leading to lower emissions in some countries.

“We are greedy people, and we use more and more electricity. And if you need more fossil [fuels] to meet this growth, you will generate more emissions,” one of the report’s authors, Ember Senior Electricity Analyst Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, told Tech Brew. “But if you meet new demand with clean sources, you stop adding—and maybe you start cutting down—emissions.”

Power sector emissions fell slightly in both China and India, but Wiatros-Motyka said that the renewables fulfilling new demand and overtaking coal globally were “driven by huge changes in China.” The country added 55% of the world’s new solar generation, the report said, and continued to bring down solar panel pricing, resulting in steady exports of the technology to other countries.

 earlier this year, China’s solar dominance is the result of government policies supportive of green tech. Without policy support and strategy, Wiatros-Motyka said, it’s difficult for renewable sources to outpace coal. Such is the case in the US, where renewable energy growth did not meet new demand, coal production increased and even replaced natural gas in some areas, and emissions rose, the report showed.

“Different countries move with different speeds,” Wiatros-Motyka said. “It takes time to have the right policy, to plan for it, to integrate sources.”

And policy around renewables has been disjointed in the US: Just a few years after the Biden administration granted subsidies for solar and wind energy generation and investment under the Inflation Reduction Act, the current administration piloted the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, which 

Still, outside the US, renewables are setting global records.

“We have lots of news now of doom and gloom,” Wiatros-Motyka said. “This is something to celebrate.”

Image representing renewable energy and sustainability.

Renewables met rise in global energy demand for first time ever, Ember report shows

The report from energy think tank Ember also showed renewables overtaking coal for the first time.

Renewables met rise in global energy demand for first time ever, report shows

Higher-ups at US nuclear fusion and geothermal companies have a message to the federal government: Invest in emerging renewables so they can scale up in the US—not China.

 are on the precipice of being major sources of domestic renewable energy, and both are considered “baseload”—meaning they’re always on and not dependent on weather or other factors. In public statements and in interviews with Tech Brew, executives from both industries have said that for the US to dominate nuclear fusion and geothermal, the federal government needs to back them.

“The role of the federal government right now primarily should be supporting and incentivizing the private sector here in the US to make sure that we’re building out the full [nuclear] fusion economy,” Jackie Siebens, VP of public affairs for Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion company, told Tech Brew. “So that we aren’t—to be blunt—making the same mistakes we’ve made in the past with other technologies like solar, batteries, semiconductors, where we invent here in the US, and then we don’t scale here in the US, and so the factories end up getting built overseas.”

And most overseas production of clean tech takes place in China, which has taken over the green economy. The country’s government has given “unwavering” support, as The Washington Post 

, to solar, wind, and EV and energy storage batteries, as well as granting subsidies to green tech industries. Case in point: More than two-thirds of all global green tech 

 last year was in China, and an author of a BloombergNEF report on the data told Tech Brew that there’s “no end in sight” to its dominance.

It’s China’s preeminence that Tim Latimer, the CEO of geothermal developer Fervo Energy, was referring to when he said “it’s going to be very hard at this point in time to pull the center of gravity on solar panel manufacturing [and] battery manufacturing back to the United States” at an NYC Climate Week 

“[Drilling technology] is one of the few areas where the US has built a multi-decade enduring cost advantage in a hardware sector in a way that’s very difficult to replicate, and I think we should learn from that. I think it’s one of the reasons why we should be leaning into geothermal more,” Latimer said. “It’s a very nascent industry, but it’s right here in the US, and with the right investments, at the right speed, that can be that way forever.”

What nuclear fusion and geothermal aim to learn from solar’s mistakes

Executives from nuclear fusion and geothermal companies say the US needs to be the leader for both industries.

Community solar is in need of some serious teamwork to get installations back on track.

According to a new report from Wood Mackenzie and the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA), installations of community solar—solar infrastructure shared by subscribers who, in turn, receive energy credits—fell by 36% in the first half of 2025. And headwinds are likely to remain: The report noted President Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill 

 solar tax credits and “fundamentally altered” the community solar market, causing “slowing growth” in states that install community solar the most.


“The early expiration of the [Investment Tax Credit] will only add to this difficulty given the window for any new projects to secure tax credits is so small,” Caitlin Connelly, a Wood Mackenzie senior analyst, said in the report.

Both New York and Maine have seen booms in community solar installations in the last five years. But high interconnection costs have decelerated the community solar market in New York, and Maine recently passed legislation that makes community solar ineligible for net-metering, the billing policy it relies on. Even though “corporate demand for community solar remains high,” promising state markets in Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey “remain stalled” between program iterations, the Wood Mackenzie report said.

“This report makes clear the challenges ahead—from federal uncertainty to interconnection delays and program caps—that must be addressed to realize the full potential of community solar and deliver the resilient, affordable power communities are asking for,” CCSA CEO Jeff Cramer told Wood Mackenzie.

In August, Tech Brew spoke with Cramer about community solar legislation in states with Republican-majority legislatures that might contribute to community solar reaching that potential.

And there are a few: Ohio’s state legislature is considering bipartisan community solar bills that would help the state power its incoming data centers, and Michigan’s state legislature is weighing the “MAGA Solar Act” to establish a market-driven community energy program. (In this instance, MAGA stands for “Maximizing American Grid Affordability.”) Last year, Alaska passed a law allowing people to subscribe to community solar programs that aren’t on their property.

Even though Cramer is skeptical of state Republicans’ motives for introducing community solar legislation, he told us that the sheer volume of Republican-led solar bills sends a clear message.

“A number of Republicans, whether they’re in Congress or at the state level in state legislatures, are realizing that the only way that they’re going to get new projects built…is by pairing up with distributed local storage and solar,” he said.

Correction 10/15/25: This story has been updated to correct the framing of the decrease of H1 2025 community solar installations in the second paragraph.

A solar power system being installed and a building.

Community solar needs state-level help to bounce back after federal cuts, report says

Wood Mackenzie found that community solar installations decreased by more than a third this year.

TBR-Nuclear fusion-audio embed

The nuclear future for zoomers will look different than it did for boomers.

Older generations were born into a world of nuclear fission, a form of nuclear energy that creates power by splitting atoms, releases radioactive waste, and is fueled by non-renewable sources like uranium and plutonium. But 80 years later, the US is on the precipice of energy generation from nuclear fusion, the other type of nuclear energy.

Fusion creates power by fusing two atoms into one, making the result larger than the sum of its parts. The process is fueled by tritium and deuterium, a hydrogen isotope found in seawater, and creates more energy than nuclear fission. Fusion also creates less radiation and can’t lead to a nuclear meltdown like the fission catastrophes that occurred at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine) or Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

So why didn’t the US generate power from this safer, renewable form of nuclear energy in the first place? Because fusion technology wasn’t advanced enough to produce reliable results until recently. Now, nuclear fusion companies are urging the federal government to help this technology scale as fast as possible to make sure the US takes advantage of what could be a 

“As we continue to scale, it’s the beginning of a chapter where fusion is starting to be able to replace fission,” Greg Piefer, CEO of nuclear fusion company Shine Technologies, told Tech Brew.

 much more than the US government in fusion. So we do need to make sure that we don’t lose that race,” he added.

The technological advances that have helped fusion pivot from existing solely in the scientific world to being commercially viable vary from company to company. For Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a Massachusetts-based nuclear fusion company, those advances include building a smaller version of a tokamak—a machine that uses magnets to create fusion energy—to make it economically competitive with other forms of energy.

Jennifer Ganten, Commonwealth’s chief global affairs officer, told Tech Brew that once the company was able to derisk its technology, the money followed.

“Capital markets have recognized [fusion’s technological advances] and they see the tremendous upside of what could be a trillion-dollar industry supplying clean, firm baseload power that doesn’t have to be reliant on natural resources,” Ganten said. “Fusion is not an ‘if.’ It’s turning into a ‘when.’”

According to PitchBook, 129 fusion startups have collectively raised almost $14 billion in venture capital investments to date, and this year has been fusion’s most prosperous: There have been 47 fusion deals thus far in 2025, with more than $4 billion invested, sailing past even the booming VC year of 2021, when investors poured just over $3 billion into 31 startups in the space.

The current Trump administration has also floated fusion as an answer to the country’s AI energy demand problem. Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building one of the world’s first nuclear fusion power plants in Virginia, which has one of the highest densities of data centers. Ganten said the company plans to break ground on the site, which is a lease with Dominion Energy, in 2028.

“We did a joint development agreement with them that is not a financial transaction, but more a knowledge transfer transaction,” she said. “Teach us how to put power in the grid and be a power plant, and they learn a lot about fusion in the meantime.”

Helion, a nuclear fusion company based in Washington, is also building one of the world’s first fusion power plants. Helion uses deuterium and helium-3 as fuel and creates fusion in “very short pulses” repeatedly, rather through a sustained effort over an extended period of time, Helion VP of Public Affairs Jackie Siebens told Tech Brew. The company 

 on its power plant in Washington over the summer.

“We’re involved in conversations about the massive [energy] demand from things like AI and data centers and all that, but also our vision is to bring reliable, affordable, clean energy to the world,” Siebens said. “We envision driving the cost of clean electricity down, far below what most people thought was possible.”

In order for fusion to help meet some US energy demand, it needs to be scaled up domestically, Siebens said. But at the moment, Helion is “overly dependent” on China for many of its material needs.

There are “many vendors here in the US that we are hoping to see scale up production so that as we deploy our first plant, we turn ‘first of a kind’ into ‘first of many,’” Siebens said. “But at the end of the day, they have to be incentivized to scale up that production.”

That’s why she’s “thrilled” about the possibility of fusion components being eligible for the 45X Advanced Manufacturing Tax Credit via the Fusion Advanced Manufacturing Parity Act, bipartisan legislation introduced in the House of Representatives last month.

“We just don’t want to end up in a situation where we invent here [but] we don’t scale it here,” Siebens said. “Whoever actually leads in scaling this technology is going to have the strategic advantage of the century. And we want to make sure we don’t miss out on that.”

Illustration of nuclear fusion with a nuclei radiating energy