France’s Parliament adopted a bill on Tuesday that dismantles the monopoly Électricité de France has held over the country’s hydropower market for decades, according to Bloomberg. The law converts EDF’s hydropower concessions into permits and requires the state-owned utility to auction 6 gigawatts of capacity each year under the supervision of France’s energy regulator, CRE. EDF […]
The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX engineer, has raised $22mn to chase that always-on demand with geothermal, […]
Helion has become the first company in the world licensed to operate a fusion power plant. On 16 June, the Washington-based firm said it had received two licences from the state’s Department of Health, clearing a regulatory bar no fusion company has reached before. It is a real milestone. It is also a regulatory one, […]
Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed an executive order on Friday establishing a “higher bar for data center development” in the state. The order is effective immediately. It follows months of community outrage over the Stratos Project, a 40,000-acre hyperscale data centre campus backed by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary that could reach 9 gigawatts of […]
ChargePoint and Powers Parts, a national distributor of electric vehicle components and fleet replacement parts, have announced a partnership to sell ChargePoint charging hardware, software, and fleet management services directly to transit agencies across North America. The deal targets operators running E2 and ZX5 electric buses built by PhoenixEV, the company that acquired Proterra’s transit bus […]
ContourGlobal, the independent power producer backed by KKR, has inaugurated a nearly $500 million solar-and-storage facility in Chile’s Atacama desert that stores daytime solar energy and delivers it after sundown. The Victor Jara hybrid plant combines 231 megawatt-peak of photovoltaic capacity with 1.3 gigawatt-hours of battery storage, capable of delivering 200 megawatts of power for […]
Luxome
SolarSquare, an Indian rooftop solar startup, is in advanced talks to raise $55 million to $60 million at a valuation between $450 million and $500 million, TechCrunch reports. B Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners are set to co-lead the Series C round. The deal would more than double SolarSquare’s valuation from 18 months ago. Lightspeed […]
In 1985, the best computer a reasonably affluent American could buy was the IBM PC AT, which cost $19,400 in today’s money. Today, a Tecno Spark Go costs $30 in a Nairobi market stall and runs a processor billions of times faster. No other good in history has experienced a cost decline on that scale. […]
The SpaceX IPO prospectus, filed on Wednesday, contains a vision for terawatt-scale space-based solar power. It also reveals, through what it does not say, that Elon Musk’s AI company xAI is running its data centres on unregulated natural gas turbines, with plans to buy $2.8 billion more. Tesla, the company Musk built on the promise […]
