California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels

Gree Energy helps food processors in Indonesia overcome the financial barriers to installing anaerobic wastewater treatment plants. These plants turn methane emissions into biogas to be used as electricity or thermal energy. The company plans the builds, finds uses for the biogas, and establishes revenue to fund the projects.

The renewable energy technology company Minesto developed tidal kites that generate electricity from ocean tides. The machines are attached to the seabed and pushed through the water in a figure 8 pattern. The movement spins a turbine that generates electricity.

Three startups in Houston are using a technique similar to fracking, a practice used in the oil and gas industry, to store renewable energy without batteries. They use excess renewable energy to pump pressurized water into manmade caverns underground. When energy is needed, they open the caverns, sending the water back to the surface to turn a turbine and generate power.

Eversource Energy, a utility company in Massachusetts, installed a networked geothermal system that provides heat for residential and commercial buildings across the city of Framingham. The connected system allows excess heat from one building to be redirected to another that needs it. It’s the first of its kind in the United States.

A utility company in Framingham, Massachusetts, worked with climate advocates to build a unique geothermal heating and cooling project that spans a whole neighborhood. A group of residential and commercial buildings share the infrastructure necessary to harness stable underground temperatures for heating and cooling, which reduces their greenhouse gas emissions and energy bills.

Thermal storage technologies are lowering businesses’ energy costs and carbon emissions while reducing strain on the grid during peak times. Two hotels in California implemented a system that makes ice when energy demand is low and uses the ice during peak demand times to cool the building.

The startup Pipedream Labs is running small, electric vehicles in tunnels under Peachtree Corners, Georgia, to make last-mile deliveries for local restaurants. The aim is to reduce emissions, traffic, and delivery costs for businesses.

Marine carbon capture, a term for various methods that trap carbon deep in the ocean, can help mitigate climate change by reducing the amount of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Startups around the U.S. are advancing helpful technologies.

Two Texas-based companies are 3D printing homes in an effort to combat the housing crisis and produce fewer emissions than a typical home construction. The companies lay the foundation and rebar for support. Then, a machine with a robotic arm builds up the walls by printing layers of a cement-like material.

In Gateshead, England, Lanchester Wines keeps its storage warehouse at a stable temperature year-round using geothermal heat from an abandoned coal mine nearby. The water that naturally floods the mine is geothermally heated below ground, then a heat pump system pulls that water to the surface to transfer that heat to the warehouse.