This Week in Cleantech (10/30/2026) - Can this battery clean up industrial heat?

Hello everybody and welcome to another round of this week in CleanTech. That old thing, that's still around. Oh yeah, it is, buddy. Your favorite 15-minute roundup of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week is back this week after two weeks away.

You could say we were dressed as a ghost for the Halloween season the last couple of weeks. All apologies. Uh life gets in the way sometimes, but we're happy to do a show for this Friday, October 30th, 2026. A spook tacular edition of This Week in Clean Tech.

Oh my God. Well, we're not going to do Halloween stuff. Did you not script it? Do I have to ad lib it all?

You have not been a dad for more than a year, and you're already hucking dad jokes. I was born for this, brother. We're fired up to have a long-sought guest in waiting, Brad Plumer from the New York Times. We got a New York Times correspondent on the program.

We've had just a few more. Stop talking this down. Yeah, you're negotiating against ourselves. Hey, listen.

Well, you said we were waiting for the guy for a long time. I didn't realize he showed up and then left us in the lurch for a couple of years. That's kind of a different equation. Hey, hey, listen.

Today it's Brad Plumer. Next week it'll be the Pope. Just think positive, dude. We talk White Sox baseball if we get them.

Uh I'm fact in this content director, Paul Gurky, joined as always by Cleantech Commentator Mike Casey of TigerCom. Uh Mike, what's new? Hey, uh I first I want to apologize to the audience for the two-week hiatus. Uh, without the gory details, I'll just say that work and life get a vote.

Um, I do want to give a shout out to Maggie Glenn. She is Jupiter Power's Director of Communications and Public Affairs. But a fun fact, she started listening to us when she was riding with your predecessor, John Engel, working for Clarity. Yeah, man.

The fact that she didn't run Screaming for the Hills outside Austin, where she lives and works when she was free of John says a lot about our star power, wouldn't you say, Paul Gherky? I just want to ask her which one of us she prefers because we're our styles are slightly different. She says she says data, by the way, just so you know. I'm glad you're still taking the informal poll.

Way in anytime on this program, data centers or data centers. Text Mike at anyway, we appreciate hearing from you guys. If you want to make your opinions part of the show, we'll always take your two cents. Just shoot us an email.

Twictwick at tigercom with two Ms.us. As always, we got five stories loaded in the hopper. Let's start with the first one.

Mike, what are we covering this week? Simon Monday, Financial Times, what the coming copper crunch means for the global economy. I got that alliteration out quite well, I would say. It's in solar panels, EVs, data centers, the high-tech military gear governments are trying to buy.

Demand is taking off. So great time to get over there and rip that copper out if you still can. But a new Bloomberg NEF report warns of massive long-term copper shortages starting very soon, about 2028. Supply falling 8% short of demand in 2035, and then precipitously short by 2050.

The IEA has issued some similar warnings. The CEO of a major copper producer, Tech, went even further, predicting a shortfall of about 30% by 2035. If you're in the copper market, prices, as you may have noticed, are climbing. Records of $14,875 per ton were hit on the London metal exchange last month.

That's up 76% in less than two years. The Strait of Hormuz crisis has made things worse. No duh. Cutting Middle Eastern supplies of sulfur, which is used to extract copper.

Mike, your thoughts on this? All right. So the Tech CEO noted it can take six months to build a data center and 15 years to discover, permit, and build a new mine. Many of the existing mines have been running for decades, and the ore quality is getting worse.

So the challenge to hold production steady. Investment in new mines has largely been flat over the past couple of decades. Woodmack, our friends over there, they say this is due to risk-averse investors trying to squeeze more money at what they have or merge mining operations. Some of the richest untapped deposits are in places that are political no-go zones like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Chinese mining companies are showing more interest there, but not at the scale needed to close the global gap. Paul story number two. Let's get out of the mines and up to the rooftop. Second story this week from Jocelyn Temperley over at BBC is titled, It's Offensively Cheap How Solar Power is Quietly Becoming Bigger Than Nuclear.

What's in that story, Mike? Yeah, for the LinkedIn bros all over LinkedIn. We're very sorry about this story, but I have to say that I love that solar is giving such an offense. A decade ago, solar made up 1% of the world's power.

This year, 10%. Take a clear position ahead of nuclear power. According to Ember data, solar edged passed nuclear globally in 2025 and over 12 months through September 26. It produced 13% more energy than nukes.

So just put this in perspective, nukes, roughly flat since 2000. Solar, 2,700-fold growth, meeting three-quarters of the growth in global electricity demand last year. Even the normally pro renewables IEA keeps underestimating its growth. You know who's getting it right?

The clean tech bulls like Kevin Smith of Cypress Creek Energy, Jigger Shaw, and Steve Vaverick. A panel costs well under 100 bucks. It can generate power for 30 or 40 years. Maybe that's why Ember's co-founder called it offensively cheap, Paul.

U.S. is actually number two now in install capacity. There's been a lot of strong growth in states that Trump won in 2024, ironically enough.

We now have enough solar to power more than a third of American households. Some of the fastest growth is coming from places with unreliable grids and pricey diesel fuel, like in Pakistan, where solar went from under 2% of electricity back in 2019 to 24% today, mostly paid for by the people. Batteries are making a big difference too. I'm sure you've heard a lot about those, and we'll be talking about them more later in this episode.

In California, solar plus storage covered more than a quarter of demand during the 7 to 9 PM evening peak in the first half of this year. And you may have heard about some new options on the way, like balcony solar making its way through uh legislatures in the United States and spreading fast in Europe as well. Mike, story number three. Joanne Muller and Axios, why EVs aren't power powering America's electric grid yet, Paul?

Well, it's complicated, man. There's like, you know, bidirectional cables and stuff. It's like a whole thing. Back to you.

No, I'm kidding. Uh so for years, EVs have been pitched as a way to back up the grid, uh, charging when power is cheap and plentiful, and then you know, uh discharging back when it's not. Data centers in manufacturing driving uh demand up. We talk about it in every single episode.

Millions of parked EVs could help utilities avoid shortages in a big way. Those are big honking batteries in those things. But vehicle to grid tech V2G is still catching on here in the States. Expensive equipment that I joked about in the beginning, complicated utility rules, and some skeptical drivers have left it more or less stuck over the last couple of years.

Ford thinks its new Fathom Electric Pickup, which is coming next year, uh starting under $30,000, might change that. It's got a built-in inverter which converts battery power into electricity that a home can use, so you don't need any external equipment. Uh Ford, which is actually uh really early on this V2G stuff, estimates the home charging and backup hardware will run about uh $2,100, which is down from about $5,200 for its current system, although final prices aren't out yet.

Mike, I'm a big V2G guy. I see the potential there. It's just a matter of uh of getting it across the finish line. The technology is really not the inhibitor anymore.

It's the markets, the utilities, and EV growth in the U.S., if you had to ask me. What are your thoughts on this?

So, first, I want to say this this makes me get want to get one of these trucks. I mean pickup truck at this point in my life, but uh this is pretty cool. So Ford estimate estimates that owners could save 30 to 60 bucks a month by charging when rates are low or empowering their homes when rates are high. PG ⁇ E, the big utility out in California, says drivers and its pilot could potentially earn $600 a season, sending power back during demand spikes.

But adoption is tiny. PG ⁇ E has 19, that's one fewer than 20 eligible EV models of its pilot program, and fewer than 70 customers signed up. The head of PGE's V2G program notes that part of the problem is every bidirectional charger is wired differently, so utilities have a tough time plugging them all into the grid in paperwork, like an electrician's affidavit is scaring people off, even with up to 4K in equipment incentives on the table. But you know what PGE's problem is?

They don't have a killer comms firm on the payroll. Oh, there you go. I remember when they did the first pilot for B2G, there were three trucks enrolled in it uh out in Baltimore Gas and Electric Territory. Three.

Anyway, what were you saying? Sorry, I cut you off. I was that was the most gross uh self-promotional plug I've done in two years on this show. Yeah, I caught it.

Yeah, I think that I think the listeners did too. I wonder if someone will take you up on it. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. All right, story four this week.

It's Casey Crownhart from MIT Technology Review titled How Solid State Transformers Could Help Power the AI boom. Maybe I should have given your cell phone number out earlier when I had the opportunity. Mike, you'd be fielding some business calls instead of reading about story four. I'm not Venmoing you a finder's feed.

Just just let's just get that straight. My rate is low. Go on. Before we knew we could land Brad Plumer in a star power, we were we were trying to get Casey Cronhart back on the show.

Uh she's jealous plumer. Just letting you know your second choice. Just welcome to the show, second fiddle. We'll be talking to you shortly.

Sit tight. Dude, wait a, wait a, wait a roll at the welcome Matt, right? So Casey is under the weather this week. We hope she feels better, but she wrote a good story how solid state transformers can help power the AI boom.

Um so transformers, they're one of the most important and least noticed parts of the grid. They step voltage up so electricity can travel long distances without losing as much power as heat, then step it back down so it can be used in homes and businesses. The basic design has not changed much in a century. It's mostly specialized steel and miles of copper wire, which makes them big and bulky and expensive to replace.

So stylid street transformers add power electronics, which are semiconductors and convert and control electricity, and it lets the magnetic core shrink a lot. Some models are about one-tenth the size of a conventional transformer with the same capacity. And they can take over the jobs of inverters and rectifiers of devices that switch power between AC and DC, so you need less equipment overall. New York Power Authority, an electric power research institute, recently tested a one megawatt solid state transformer built in a North Carolina state lab.

Under realistic utility conditions, it was about 98% efficient compared to 96% for conventional equipment. That sounds small, but it cuts power losses roughly in half, Paul Gurke. I thought about writing just a whole thing about like Optimus Prime and other transformers in this section instead of reading about the article. And then I realized the show's just not built for long-form jokes like that.

And so I got to get back to business. One of the companies doing this work, Heron Power, they raised a whole bunch of money back in February, 140 million bucks. They're building a hundred million dollar factory out in California that's going to start production next year. They're trying to reach 40 gigawatts worth of transformers a year by 2029.

The trade-off here, though, is that transformers with power electronics inside them can fail in more ways than the old school transformers. It sort of makes sense, right? Uh Heron's answer is a modular design. So if one small part of it goes down, the rest can keep running while that part gets swapped out.

And timing is huge here, Mike. We talk about the power demand uh in the United States, energy demand in the United States uh rapidly increasing, and wait times for conventional transformers, which are used in so many different types of projects, are extending out to like five years right now. Equipment makers have put about three billion dollars into U.S.

transformer manufacturing, but we just can't build them fast enough, quite literally. All right, without any further ado, our last story of the show. Drumroll, baby, Brad Plumer, two years in the hunt. We have him on the show.

We're fired up. He's uh from this place you might have heard of called the New York Times. A new kind of battery's taken off. This one stores blistering heat.

Brad Plumer, what is your blistering summary on this blistering story? Well, thanks so much for having me. So uh this idea, some people call it heat batteries, thermal batteries, thermal storage. I don't feel like we've really uh settled on a good term, which uh can make it a little frustrating for journalists.

Uh this idea has been kicking around for quite some time. And this company I wrote about, Antora, I first started talking to them, geez, maybe two years ago. Uh, you know, thought it was super interesting. Basically, the idea is you take, there are all sorts of places in the country where you get uh these periods of very low electricity prices.

Uh, maybe because it's midday and there are a lot of solar panels uh, you know, in operation, or there are pockets of the country where there's a lot of wind, but there's not enough transmission to carry it around the country. So you have this very cheap electricity, if anyone can figure out how to harness it. So one idea that um a number of companies, including Antura, have come up with is uh use that electricity when it's cheap and heat something up. Uh so in Antura's case, they took these carbon blocks.

Other people, uh Rondo Energy is a big uh company in this space. They're just heating up bricks. Um and you can heat them up, they store heat for long time days, and you can uh use that heat. Um, you know, these things get very, very hot, thousands of degrees, uh, to create steam for industrial purposes.

And lots of industries need heat, lots of industries need steam. Uh, so it's kind of a cool idea to uh to solve two problems at once. One, the intermittency of renewable energy, you know, it's not always available and sometimes it's available when you don't need it. And then two, um, heat is such a big uh portion of the energy world that we often don't talk about.

Um, you know, I was I was surprised to learn that uh, you know, most companies they burn uh coal or gas to make industrial heat for everything from potato chips, you know, glas making glass, melting iron ore. Uh and this actually creates more emissions than all the world's passenger cars combined. So, you know, if you can if you can find ways to access uh cheap renewable electricity and turn it into heat, you can solve a lot of problems. And so, you know, when I first heard this concept a couple of years ago, I thought, wow, that's really cool.

But you know, let's keep talking. Get back to me when you've built something, because I want to see this up and running. And so, you know, I went to South Dakota to go visit Antora. They have built this huge battery, uh, heat battery, and they are now delivering steam to an ethanol plant.

Uh, so you can actually see it in action. And uh, you know, I realize not everyone uh in the clean energy world, you you know, people have different views about ethanol, but uh, you know, what I found is this is kind of a proof of concept for this idea. Uh, and there are lots of places that need steam, lots of industries. Uh, so it's it's a cool idea.

It's in operation, it seems to be working, and I I decide to go write about it. I think it's interesting, Brad. Go ahead. Sorry, Mike.

I want you to know, Paul Gurky, we're at 15-minute mark, and Michael Perona is gonna breathe down our neck. So get you a question, my friend. I'm glad you added that interjection to tack another 15 seconds onto the show instead of just letting me ask the question that I had very cleanly come in to ask. Anyway, Brad, um, when we talk about long-duration energy storage, I'm always fascinated about the ways that people think about storing energy and for how long it can be stored.

The applications and the scaling is always the part that it gets sticky, where it's like, okay, this does work. It is a cool concept. You saw it for yourself, you can attest to it. And there are instances where it might be useful, but but really, and how many and can it reach scale?

What's your take on it on the sort of footprint that this type of storage might have in the US or similar types to it? So that was my biggest question. Like, is this a very cool, you know, what's happening in South Dakota where they're getting this pocket of cheap electricity because they have a lot of curtailed wind, and there was a company that happened to need uh heat for some idiosyncratic reasons. But like, is this a special case where it's you know a one-off?

Um, so fortunately, uh, smart people than me at the national, God, what's it called now? The National Laboratory of the Rockies used to be Edrel. Uh, they actually looked at this. They were like, okay, this works if, you know, you can find enough electricity that's cheap enough and the battery costs are low enough, and you can compete with natural gas, which is very cheap in the US.

And they found, you know, uh under the right conditions, yeah, this could scale up a lot in the US. Uh, you know, they estimate at the high end uh could potentially provide up to a third of um industrial heat in the US. Uh some of the companies involved had some quibbles. They thought it was higher.

Um, the big kind of uh thing that needs to change that the researchers wrote about is right now in many parts of the country, it's not actually possible to just take electricity when it's cheap and charge up. You know, utility tariffs might charge you the average price for all hours of electricity. So in this case, Antora worked with a local utility to to kind of write a specialized tariff that allows them to just take the the cheapest hours of electricity. Um, and you know, they're hoping they can spread that across the country, but that is a sort of policy barrier that they're facing.

Brad, two quick questions. One, is there a look ahead on the ability to produce not just heat and steam, but electricity? So electricity to heat back to electricity, and two, any sense of like total pollution savings nationwide, worldwide? Uh so I I I kind of backed it.

The second question, yes. Uh so uh industrial heat is about 10% of global emissions. Um, and I think it's about 10% of US emissions. So significant, you know, globally that's more than all the cars that are out there.

It's more than planes, uh, maybe cars and planes combined. Um so you know, in the US, if you could replace one-third of that, that's what, three, four percent of US emissions. I mean, it's it's both small and that would be a a big deal. Uh, you know, every little thing adds up.

Uh, it may have more potential elsewhere in the world where natural gas is not as cheap as in the US, but you know, potentially knock out a big chunk of global emissions. Um, on the electricity side, this was something that was new to me. I had not seen really written about much. Uh, that a lot of investors in this technology are very excited about the um about the uh application for data centers.

Basically, these uh heat batteries produce steam, you know, they they're hooked up to a heat generator, it can or a steam generator can produce steam. You could, in theory, just hook that up to a steam turbine and produce electricity. Uh so it's inefficient to do it that way. You're basically taking electricity, storing it as heat, which is you know pretty pretty efficient, more than 90% efficient, but then running it through a steam turbine, which is not that efficient, let's say, or 40%.

I'm I'm guessing here. Um to turn back to electricity. So it doesn't seem great, but again, if these if you can build these batteries cheaply enough, if you can build them quickly enough, I mean a lot of them are just uh I'm oversimplifying, but piles of bricks or piles of you know carbon blocks that you can find the materials all over the place. You know, some people told me you can imagine that being attractive uh to a lot of people, that this is a much simpler way to do things and quicker uh than waiting years and years and years for a gas turbine.

Um so we'll see. I haven't, you know, we haven't seen data centers powered by this yet, but that seems to be the hope and why a lot of these companies can raise a fair amount of money right now because everyone's uh you know going crazy for AI. Um and then the last thing I'll say that was kind of surprising to me. A few years ago, Tesla did one of these master plans where they're kind of looking at the future of the world, and you know, solar power is going to be big, uh, lithium-ion batteries are going to be big.

And in one of their analyses, they found that, you know, if the world was going to get really serious about decarbonizing, we would need trillions and trillions of dollars worth of heat batteries or thermal storage of some sort. You know, they did identify a specific company or a specific technology, but that concept of storing heat for later uh is something we'll need. So it, you know, at least has the potential to be something that's very big. Well, we're just about out of time.

We need to go to our clean tacker of the week. You know, they're doing this in reverse. They're doing it with cold storage and put this show on ice. Bam!

I thought you were, I was just hoping you were gonna have that transition. Dad, jokes continue. Clean tech of the week, everybody. Drum roll, please.

This time around, it's Andrew Red, founder of Endurance Energy, former SpaceX engineer. Just tested the world's first subsea geothermal power plant in an active underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon. And I work from home. It only produced net positive power for 8.

7 seconds, but that's still pretty damn cool. Enough to prove that it works. Endurance is now planning its first commercial project in Tonga. Congratulations, Andrew, and uh enjoy all those flight miles, my friend.

Yeah, uh, and Brad, we can't let you off because I keep piling on my co-host. Is it data or data? Oh, geez. Uh he probably said it a second ago.

I think I say data. Oh I mispronounce all sorts of things. So don't take my word for it. Girky.

A ringing endorsement from my side of the fence, Brad. Thank you. Girky, you and Claire Hudson of the Wall Street Journal are on an island to yourself. It's it's shameful.

All right. We want to, but you know who's not ashamed is Brian Mendis, our wonderful producer, nor Claire Quirin, nor Alex Peterson, who help us gather these stories. Thanks for your help, guys. And thank you, the listener, the viewer, for popping into this episode of This Week in Clean Tech.

Thanks, uh, special thanks to Casey Crownhart, uh, who said she was gonna be on the show and then got sick. I hope you're feeling better. Double shout out to Brad for stepping into Pitch Hit. Great to have you on.

If you enjoyed something from you uh from the show today, please subscribe, leave a little feedback, share a story suggestion if you like. We mentioned the email at the top of the show. You can also read every article we talk about each week. There are links in the episode description, as well as where this thing lives in the post on factorthist.

com. Until next time, be good, people.