Inside the Icelandic plant turning CO2 into rocks

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.

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.

Climeworks is focusing on pulling carbon dioxide directly out of the air to store or reuse in some capacity as a way to lower global greenhouse gas emissions. The Swiss company has 16 plants around Europe, with their biggest one in Switzerland that removes 900 tons of carbon dioxide a year that is then sold to Coca-Cola Co. to put in soft drinks or to local industrial greenhouses for plant growth. Scaling the operations to capture more carbon is costly, but the startup recently raised $76 million from investors.

The shareholder activism nonprofit The Accountability Board is holding fast food companies accountable to making progress toward their climate commitments by filing proposals asking for action, which all shareholders who own a certain percentage of companies are able to do.

After being known as a polluted mining town, politicians, scientists, industry officials, and residents of Sudbury, Ontario, were able to come together to restore its land. After 40 years and $33.5 million, they are about halfway through recovering about 200,000 acres of land. So far, they’ve been successful at restoring air quality, neutralizing soil to allow for replanting, and restocking lakes with fish. While some locals think the mining companies should have done more, the collaborative spirit could be a model for other communities looking to improve the environment.

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.

Brick-making businesses in Uttar Pradesh, India, are switching from coal to solar panels to power their kilns. The swap allows them to meet more than their electricity needs, also supplying energy to their employees’ huts, while reducing emissions.

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.

Artificial intelligence tools are helping the solar energy company Solstice better serve community solar subscribers and make projects more inclusive for low-income households. The tools use data to predict when subscribers might be facing problems that will likely lead to them leaving the project, such as delays or billing confusion, and vet subscribers based on whether they are likely to pay their bills instead of using their credit scores.