In 2015, countries worldwide signed the Paris Agreement, aiming to keep the global temperature rise “well below 2°C” and limit this increase to 1.5°C.

To meet these targets, there are limits to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that can be emitted. These are called carbon budgets. Every year we emit more CO₂, these budgets shrink. (That’s because total warming is roughly proportional to cumulative CO₂.)

In the chart, you can see estimates for how much CO₂ the world can emit — from the start of next year — while staying below different levels of warming. This is based on having a 50% likelihood of staying below it; if we wanted to guarantee that we didn’t pass these temperatures, our budget would be much smaller.

To get a sense of perspective, we’ve compared each budget with the projected amount of CO₂ that the world is expected to emit in 2025. This tells us how many years we have left if emissions stay at their current levels.

At current emission rates, the 1.5°C budget would run out around 2030. It seems implausible that global emissions will fall quickly enough to avoid this.

The 2°C budget would last until mid-century. By taking action on climate change, we buy ourselves more time and can avoid this level of warming.

This is based on the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project. See how emissions are changing in your country.

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Electricity is getting more expensive — and Americans are getting worried.

Just look at last week’s election, when Democratic candidates who put a spotlight on energy affordability won key races in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia.

Fortunately, state and local lawmakers, including those just elected, have the authority to do something about this increasingly urgent problem. Here are three immediate steps they can take to save consumers money on their power bills.

Cut runaway utility profit rates

State regulators can lower skyrocketing electric bills practically overnight by reducing utility profit rates. Investor-owned utilities earn a guaranteed profit on every dollar they spend. State public utilities commissions set these profit rates, and right now they’re way higher than they used to be.

Former utility executive Mark Ellis estimates the average American household overpays utilities by $300 per year, because the companies extract 3 to 7 cents more on every dollar of investment than they ought to.

Utilities consistently try to scare regulators off from lowering their excessive profits, claiming service quality will decrease or costs will actually rise — but there’s little evidence that doing so will negatively impact consumers.

We know that utilities can maintain high-quality service with lower profit rates because they’ve done it before. Recent research by RMI shows that utilities still received enough capital to build new infrastructure when profits were more reasonable in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Returning profit rates to those lower levels can also more than offset any increases in borrowing costs that might result from impacts to credit ratings.

Pay utilities for performance

Lawmakers can save consumers billions by adjusting incentives to pay utilities for performance rather than construction.

Under current rules, utilities profit significantly more from building new infrastructure than from investing in energy efficiency or cheaper upgrades to existing poles and wires. Most analyses of high electricity prices find that utility spending on transmission and distribution infrastructure is a main or major culprit.

The more utilities build, the more they profit, so they build a lot. Every grid problem looks like a nail to a utility that can use a gold-plated hammer to ​“solve” it — and consumers get bent out of shape as a result.

Customers in New York saved big when, in 2013, the state directed utility Con Edison to prioritize reducing energy demand via efficiency initiatives and solar panel installations. The investment successfully put off a $1 billion substation upgrade, saving New Yorkers $500 million in profits not paid to utility shareholders on top of $800 million in avoided hardware upgrades.

We could significantly reduce electricity use with energy-efficiency investments that routinely cost less than the fossil-fuel power generation favored by most utilities.

Instead, utility grid spending has exploded in recent years, outpacing inflation and electricity sales combined, according to the Energy Information Administration. And for each dollar of capital utilities invest in infrastructure, they’ll extract as much as 50 cents back in profits from customers over the life of the pole, transformer, or equipment.

A few states have comprehensive programs requiring utilities to prioritize cost-effectiveness rather than construction, but only Hawaii has discarded the conventional wisdom connecting utility profits to spending. State legislators can act now to align utility profit motives with performance, or at least efficient investment, and lower electricity bills in the process.

Unblock local power and storage

Local solar and batteries make electricity right where people use it, and more of each saves everyone money. Models suggest that dramatically scaling up energy resources like rooftop solar and batteries, and coordinating them with tools like smart thermostats, could cut future grid costs by half a trillion dollars.

But state and local laws, and utilities’ own policies around crucial processes like connecting to the grid, are mostly written to block and slow down small-scale clean energy.

It’s up to lawmakers to enact policies that remove those barriers by, for example, simplifying and automating permitting and zoning requirements, allowing non-utility ownership of solar projects, and fairly compensating solar owners through net metering. They’ll have to overcome vehement opposition from utilities, which see these kinds of policies as endangering their profits and allocate their lobbying dollars accordingly.

Addressing affordability

Electricity prices are rising at more than twice the rate of inflation. The Trump administration’s obstruction of clean energy and commitment to fossil fuels, particularly coal, are expected to make bills climb even further. Data-center development won’t help either. Most Americans feel this trend happening, and they are concerned.

It’s time to get a handle on the problem.

We’re all tired of paying more for electricity. We can pay less if state legislators and utility regulators seize the moment and act in the interest of consumers — rather than the shareholders of utility companies.

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Representatives from all over the world are currently meeting on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Belem, Brazil, to try and advance the global transition away from fossil fuels.

The occasion is this year’s annual United Nations climate summit, known as COP30. One decade ago, the conference produced the landmark Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels.

Today, that 1.5°C target is essentially impossible to meet, and the world is nowhere near on track to achieve the U.N.’s goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Even keeping warming below 2°C is a long shot. New estimates from the Rhodium Group suggest we’re on track for between 2°C and 3.7°C of warming by the end of the century, with 2.8°C being the average outcome. Those figures would exacerbate extreme weather that has already worsened in recent years with far less warming.

It’s a bleak picture. But here’s the other way of looking at it, one emphasized by Bill Gates in a controversial treatise on climate released ahead of COP30: Today’s worst-case warming forecasts are far less bad than what was once predicted. Before the Paris Agreement was set, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecast global temperatures would rise by 2.5°C to 7.8°C by 2100.

The reason warming is now on a better — if not good — trajectory comes down to the remarkable rise of renewable energy.

Solar, wind, and batteries have gotten extremely cheap. Alongside natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, these clean sources have surged onto the grid in recent years and helped displace fossil fuels. Rhodium forecasts that at our current rate, global power-sector emissions will fall by more than half by 2050. Because the power sector is currently the world’s second-largest source of greenhouse gases, per the research group, that could be enough to bend the curve on overall emissions.

Despite this progress, the line of actual, recorded emissions continues to tick up. This year’s COP comes amid global backpedaling on climate commitments and countless calls for a new, affordability-focused approach to the energy transition that proponents say is more pragmatic. The U.S. government, meanwhile, declined to even send a delegation to the event. (Trump administration officials had no problem carving out time to hawk natural gas to the European Union in Athens, Greece, last week.)

These headwinds underscore an important fact: A sustained decline in planet-warming pollution remains only a possibility, one that is likelier now than it was before but still not guaranteed.

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Back in May of 2021, Ford’s F-150 Lightning debuted with star-spangled flair. Then-President Joe Biden visited Ford’s sparkling new Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan, where the company displayed the truck in front of a giant American flag alongside its gas-powered siblings. And after declaring that ​“the future of the auto industry is electric,” Biden even took the Lightning for a zippy test drive.

The picture is decidedly less bright today. A factory fire has forced Ford to pause production of the groundbreaking truck — and The Wall Street Journal reports that the company is considering halting production of the Lightning altogether after years of sluggish sales.

It’s not just the Lightning that has stalled. Electric trucks as a category have sputtered, largely due to their cost. A standard gas-powered F-150 starts at just shy of $40,000, while a Lightning with the lowest trim package starts at $55,000. Charging at home can help EV drivers recoup that cost difference, but it’s hard to ignore the initial sticker shock — especially given that federal EV incentives are now dead under President Donald Trump’s July budget law.

Politics may also be to blame. While the gas-powered Ford F-150 is among the most popular vehicles in counties that voted for Trump in 2020, the president’s repeated railing against EVs, coupled with Biden’s early endorsement, has put electric cars at the center of America’s polarized politics.

Still, even the Cybertruck, which carries a very different political connotation, isn’t doing so hot. Tesla sold just under 40,000 Cybertrucks last year in the U.S., while Ford sold about 33,500 Lightnings.

Consumers simply seem a lot more interested in electric sedans and SUVs than electric trucks. Even with sales supercharged as consumers raced to tap expiring EV tax credits, Americans purchased just about 60,000 electric pickup trucks through the third quarter of this year, but bought more than 900,000 electric SUVs, sedans, and sports cars.

But there might be a path forward for the electric truck yet, says Art Wheaton, an expert on transportation industries at Cornell University: small and cheap.

“Changing policies, lower demand, and higher costs have made electric trucks a harder sell,” he said. ​“Canceling the Lightning and replacing with a much lower-cost, smaller electric truck makes long-term sense given the current policies towards electric vehicles.”

More big energy stories

A tale of two gas bans

Massachusetts and New York may be neighbors, but they’re seemingly heading in different directions when it comes to transitioning their buildings off of fossil fuels.

Back in 2022, Massachusetts created a pilot program that let 10 municipalities prohibit fossil-fuel hookups in new buildings and major renovations. Advocates tell Canary Media’s Sarah Shemkus that the program is already lowering energy bills and reducing emissions — and lawmakers are considering new legislation to bring another 10 cities and towns into the fold.

New York has also made big commitments to clean up its buildings, including enacting rules this summer that would require all-electric appliances in most new construction. But last week, 19 Democratic state lawmakers sent a letter to Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul urging her to postpone implementation of the All-Electric Buildings Act. And on Wednesday, the state agreed, pausing the rules from taking effect at the end of this year.

COP30 kicks off with a focus on climate resilience

Leaders and advocates from around the world gathered in Brazil this week for the beginning of the United Nations’ COP30 climate summit. The Trump administration didn’t send a formal delegation, but that was OK with many diplomats — and with California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the president a ​“wrecking ball” to climate action during one panel.

Digs at the U.S. were aplenty during the first days of the conference, as were discussions of the need to ramp up climate adaptation and resilience work as extreme weather events grow more frequent and more intense. Jamaica, for example, is facing as much as $7 billion in damages — a third of its gross domestic product — after last month’s Hurricane Melissa. But in the storm’s aftermath, Jamaica has also shown how resilience efforts pay off. The island has deployed more than 60 megawatts of rooftop solar power since 2015, and many solar-equipped homes became neighborhood hubs in the wake of Melissa’s destruction.

Clean energy news to know this week

Fighting for climate funds: Clean-energy groups and the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, sue the Trump administration over $7.5 billion in cuts to climate-related projects in Democratic-led states. (New York Times)

Stretching coal shutdowns: The Trump administration is poised to order two Colorado coal power plants to stay open past their planned retirements this year, even as the costs of keeping a Michigan coal facility open skyrocket. (Canary Media)

Pacific petrol: The Trump administration considers opening California coastal waters to offshore oil drilling for the first time in four decades, drawing pushback from advocates and Gov. Newsom. (Washington Post)

More supply, more demand: The International Energy Agency says the world is on track to build more renewable-energy projects in the next five years than it has over the last 40 — but rising demand means the world will keep relying on fossil fuels, particularly gas, for years to come. (The Guardian, Associated Press)

Pipeline ​“betrayal”: New York and New Jersey issue the state-level approvals needed for a previously rejected natural-gas pipeline to move forward, leaving environmental advocates feeling ​“betrayed” but still determined to fight the project. (Inside Climate News)

Government restart: President Trump signs a funding bill that will reopen the government, sending furloughed federal employees back to work. (E&E News)

RGGI retreat: Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro signs a budget bill that includes a provision to leave the Northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-invest program. (Inside Climate News)

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New York just slammed the brakes on rules that would’ve prohibited fossil fuels in new homes and businesses.

The Empire State was on the precipice of fully enacting the All-Electric Buildings Act that Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed in 2023. The first-in-the-nation standard requires most new buildings to install efficient, electric appliances such as heat pumps instead of health-harming gas, propane, and fuel-oil systems. Regulators finalized the rules in July; they were set to take effect Dec. 31.

But on Wednesday, the state agreed to not enforce the zero-emissions standard until the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals makes its decision on a two-year-old lawsuit challenging the All-Electric Buildings Act. Climate-advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice expects that’ll delay the landmark building code until at least the fall of 2026, as oral arguments have yet to be scheduled.

The legislation ​“was a promise that New York would stop locking families into expensive, polluting fossil-fuel systems and start building for the future,” said Democratic Assemblymember Gabriella Romero on a Thursday call with reporters. ​“Delaying this law is a total betrayal of that promise.”

Putting the all-electric building code on ice is an abrupt about-face for the administration. On Oct. 1, the state filed a brief saying that New Yorkers would ​“suffer irreparable harm if the Code amendments are delayed from taking effect,” because it would allow new buildings to depend on fossil-fuel equipment that would generate greenhouse gases and local air pollution for decades to come. That, in turn, would drive up the health, agriculture, and broader economy costs imposed by worsening climate catastrophes.

But just over one month later, Hochul signaled openness to pausing the law after a group of 19 Democratic state legislators raised concerns about its affordability and impact on the grid. Multiple studies have found that the grid has ample room for all-electric new buildings, and making them the default would benefit the planet and people’s pocketbooks.

Hochul’s office has positioned the delay as a pragmatic step that could expedite implementation of the rule in the long term. By voluntarily pausing the law, Hochul may be trying to avoid a potentially multiyear holdup should the case reach the U.S. Supreme Court and get on its ​“shadow docket.” That emergency process is typically less transparent than the court’s usual decision-making protocol.

“The Governor remains committed to the all-electric-buildings law and believes this action will help the State defend it, as well as reduce regulatory uncertainty for developers during this period of litigation,” Ken Lovett, energy and environment spokesperson for Hochul, told Canary Media. She’s ​“resolved to providing more affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for New Yorkers.”

Earthjustice argues that there’s no reason to expect that the groups challenging the law would’ve been able to hamper its implementation if the state hadn’t made the concession itself.

The plaintiffs in the case — including the New York State Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders, and National Propane Gas Association — allege that the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act preempts the all-electric buildings law. That same reasoning was used to overturn Berkeley, California’s pioneering gas ban. In July, New York prevailed when a federal district judge in the state rejected the argument.

Similar lawsuits are playing out in courts around the country, including a challenge to New York City’s own all-electric-buildings standard, which has been in effect since 2024.

Hochul’s decision to slow-roll building electrification is part of her administration’s realpolitik embrace of fossil fuels. Last Friday, New York regulators signed off on a Trump-backed underwater gas pipeline, after having denied the requisite permits three times before. The same day, her administration announced a deal to allow a gas plant that mainly powers cryptocurrency mining to keep operating for at least five years. She also has yet to sign a bill that repeals gas-hookup subsidies. Legislators passed it in June.

Hochul justified recent moves by saying the state needs to ​“govern in reality.”

“We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans, including our New York delegation, which is why we have adopted an all-of-the-above approach,” she said last week in a statement.

Democratic Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha said she’s deeply concerned about the administration’s trajectory. Reducing the lethal and expensive harms born of the climate crisis ​“is not an optional goal,” she said. ​“Really, we’re talking about a disruption to our economy if we don’t act — in the same way the pandemic disrupted our economy.”

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DALLAS — Past gnarly live oaks, behind a barbecue joint and a brewery in a suburb north of Dallas, a white-washed brick commercial building extruded its own wispy cloud into the Texas sunlight.

Inside, the startup Skyven Technologies was running a mechanical apparatus dubbed Arcturus, which turns waste heat into industrial-grade steam. It’s so new that I was the first outsider to see the contraption up close — signing my name in slot No. 1 in the log book. But, soon, Skyven will show it off to manufacturers who want to save money on energy bills while cutting their carbon emissions.

Industrial heat causes about 20% of global carbon emissions, per a McKinsey analysis. Very high-temperature processes, like melting ores for steelmaking, are tough to replicate without fossil fuels. But, in Skyven’s analysis, about half of those industrial heat emissions come from making steam, usually in boilers that burn gas or other fuels. Skyven, and a growing cadre of startups, are designing clean, electric, hyper-efficient heat pumps to take over that task.

They have their work cut out for them: Right now, the U.S. is home to about 39,000 industrial boilers, according to Richard Hart, a decarbonization expert at the think tank American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. The steam they generate is used to sterilize injectable drugs, turn pulp into paper, pasteurize milk, cure lumber, and more.

Boilers are reliable and not particularly expensive — and in the U.S., natural gas is cheap — so it’s hard for cleaner alternatives to compete. ACEEE, which tracks announcements of new industrial clean-heat projects, namely heat pumps or thermal batteries, currently registers just 19 completed installations nationwide.

Skyven tackles the tricky economics by focusing on energy savings. The startup installs Arcturus at no cost to the customer, alongside existing gas boilers. The heat pump taps into the factory’s waste heat, which helps it reach high temperatures with far more efficiency than older technologies. Skyven and the customer split the savings from making cheaper electric steam, but if electricity prices spike, Skyven temporarily switches back to the gas boiler to avoid higher costs.

“What we want to do as a business is make industrial manufacturing in the U.S. and worldwide a lot more efficient, by being the leader in upcycling industrial heat and reusing it without having to create it anew,” Skyven founder and CEO Arun Gupta told me.

For now, the steam produced in Skyven’s site near Dallas floats harmlessly into the sky. But with contracts signed and real-world data to share, Skyven is mobilizing for a wave of factory deployments in the years to come.

A first look at Skyven’s industrial heat pump

Arcturus is not something you can pull out of a box fully formed, but a room-sized network of interlocking pipes, chambers, and appliances.

Gupta and Jim Saccone, Skyven’s senior vice president of global sales, handed me earplugs and led me into the clamorous, sun-washed room where the machinery whirred. In one corner sat a conventional gas boiler and a water heater, which acts as a stand-in for the waste source Arcturus will harness in factories.

Arcturus uses a heat exchanger to transfer energy from whatever the source is to a loop of water. While I observed it, relatively cool water from Arcturus hit the heat exchanger and rose from around 67˚C (153˚F) to 92˚C (198˚F). That heated water flows through shiny steel piping into a thick metal vacuum chamber, which lowers the boiling point and swiftly ​“flashes” the water into steam.

That low-pressure steam then travels through a series of four compressors, all noisily spinning at roughly 15,000 revolutions per minute. Each compressor ratchets up the temperature and pressure of the steam until it hits the target zone, which can be tailored to the needs of each factory.

“Because we make this steam with waste heat that was otherwise going to get dumped, and then just use compressors to compress that steam, that’s much less energy than using the energy to make the steam but not having any compressors,” Gupta said.

The demonstration unit generates 105˚C (221˚F) steam, which runs back through a pipe into the ​“customer” side of the room. In a real customer setting, Arcturus could sit up to half a mile from the factory where it delivers steam, if space is limited. For now, the vapor just vents through the roof.

The demo system produces up to 1 megawatt of thermal output. Skyven has already signed deals in the 10- to 15-megawatt-thermal range — these will have a similar footprint, Gupta said, but use bigger pipes and compressors. The technology can heat steam all the way to 215˚C (419˚F) if needed; that’s unusually high for industrial heat pumps, which typically reach around 170˚C (338˚F).

Since Skyven is producing real heat now, it has established an empirical baseline for its operating efficiency. The term of art here is ​“coefficient of performance,” which measures how much energy is produced per unit of energy consumed.

Gas boilers score 0.83, Saccone said, losing some energy along the way. Electric resistance boilers, a commercially mature electric heat technology, hit close to 1, a near-complete transfer of energy into heat. Startup AtmosZero recently installed an air-source industrial heat pump at New Belgium Brewing in Colorado that can reach 165˚C (329˚F); that device sports a COP of around 2.

Skyven’s average measured COP for its pilot is 6.5, but Gupta said he aims to raise it to 8 within the next three months. This isn’t a fixed value: It depends on factors like how hot the waste source is and how hot the steam needs to get. The demo site nonetheless establishes a real-world high water mark of how efficient Arcturus can be.

“The higher that [COP] value goes, the less important the spark gap is going to turn out to be,” said Hart, referring to the gap between power and gas prices. If, for example, a unit of electricity costs twice the equivalent in gas, but produces six or eight times the heat, then the heat pump is cheaper to run than a gas boiler.

The accidental heat pump

Gupta didn’t set out to invent an industrial heat pump.

He had been working at Texas Instruments’ digital-light-projection business, designing the chips that run most every digital movie-theater projector. He wanted to do something good for the world and was concerned about climate change. ​“So, I was skimming ARPA-E research papers, as one does,” Gupta recalled, as we noshed on burgers up the road from Skyven headquarters.

The Department of Energy’s ARPA-E funds research on potentially transformative technologies. That archive was where he hit on the challenge of clean industrial heat; he figured, with his expertise manipulating light, he could make a better solar-powered heat source.

Gupta founded Skyven in 2013. At first he just tinkered in his Dallas garage, for a while confined to a wheelchair by a calamitous motorcycle accident. Eventually, he moved to the Dallas Makerspace and raised pre-seed financing for his concept. But the sheer amount of insulated plumbing needed to distribute the solar thermal heat wrecked his project economics.

“I made the mistake of a classic technical founder, in that I had a technology that I thought solved the market problem, but I didn’t really validate the market problem,” he explained. Still, he didn’t want to give up on his goal.

“At the time, no one knew anything about industrial heat,” Gupta said. The cleantech industry had spawned plenty of companies that could sell solar electricity to commercial customers, but hardly any solutions for heating needs at factories.

So Skyven reoriented around developing and financing energy-efficient upgrades for industrial heat using the best available technologies. The startup raised seed funding for this tech-agnostic model and landed a breakthrough deal with California Dairies, Inc., the largest dairy co-op in the Golden State.

The mission was to reduce gas combustion, saving money and carbon emissions, at major dairies in Turlock and Visalia. Skyven did this by deploying three types of equipment at each site: solar thermal to generate clean heat, smart steam traps to monitor steam loss in the existing system, and apparatuses to recover heat from boilers.

Skyven bundled $9 million in grants from the California Energy Commission with utility incentives from Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co., and landed project financing from Kyotherm, a French lender for clean-heat projects. With that combined funding, Skyven installed the equipment at no up-front cost to the dairies, and then as the facilities reduced their gas consumption, split the cost savings with them. The dairies could see a metered readout of the avoided gas combustion, and they paid Skyven an agreed-upon portion of it.

Installation wrapped up in 2023. The interventions, still operating under 10-year service contracts, are cutting 7,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually by avoiding over 110,000 million British thermal units of natural-gas combustion, more than originally anticipated. But Skyven concluded that the commercially available solar thermal panels weren’t a competitive source for heat, reporting to the California Energy Commission that a steam-generating heat pump would be ​“a more effective decarbonization solution with a wider appeal.”

Around that time, Gupta said, Skyven was scoping out a deal for an ethanol company in the Midwest. The team came across a bare-bones case study from a European ethanol plant that had built something called an ​“open cycle mechanical vapor recompression” device — machinery that takes waste heat, compresses and heats it, then recirculates it into the plant.

The problem was, outside of that European plant’s in-house engineering team, ​“there’s really no one in the world that knows how to implement this,” Gupta said. Skyven tried hiring a third-party engineering firm to draw up designs for the Midwestern customer, but that proved unsatisfactory. ​“We then said, ​‘Okay, what if we built that experience and expertise and essentially invented this system in house?’”

Having learned from his early missteps, Gupta first vetted the idea with a slew of potential customers, who responded enthusiastically. Then Skyven stopped its tech-agnostic deals and staffed up on engineers, drawing on millions of dollars of revenue from the dairy projects. The company’s task, Gupta said, was to take existing steam compressors and adapt them into a heat pump that can be easily inserted into ​“an actual manufacturing facility with all the intricacies and challenges.”

Now that process has concluded, as evidenced by the steam billowing into the blue Texas sky. And Skyven did all that having raised just $11 million in outside investment and having generated real revenues, quite the outlier for Silicon Valley-backed cleantech.

Financing to deploy heat pumps at scale

A functional, highly efficient industrial heat pump is just table stakes. For Skyven to succeed, it must fight an uphill battle convincing big, old companies to bet on new technology. That’s why the startup designed its product and deal structure to minimize risk for the customer.

Arcturus can be assembled without interrupting factory operations, so customers don’t have to sacrifice production time to get the benefits of clean heat. Then Skyven schedules the steam and water connections to coincide with the plant’s regular maintenance shutdown. If that’s not possible, workers can perform a ​“hot tie-in” to connect Arcturus without stopping factory operations.

Skyven only runs the heat pump when it’s less expensive than using the legacy heat source. This entails real-time algorithmic calculations based on the price of electricity, the price of gas, and the COP. Company software toggles back to the original gas boiler in moments when power prices surge; if Arcturus is running, it’s got to be saving money compared to burning gas, with a target of at least a 30% reduction in cost.

This arrangement means that factories don’t have to pony up millions of dollars up front to decarbonize their heat.

“You can spend your dollars on stuff that’s core, like expanding production or improving quality or rolling out a new product line, and you can still hit your sustainability goals,” Gupta said.

Facilities teams that partner with Skyven can even tell their bosses that they’ll reduce their future operating budgets through the savings from electric heat, Saccone said.

Skyven is able to offer no-money-down steam with the ongoing financial support of Kyotherm, which financed the waste-heat collectors Skyven put into the two California dairies. Now, Kyotherm has signed an agreement whereby Skyven pitches Arcturus installations, and Kyotherm agrees to finance ones that clear its performance thresholds.

“You cannot give a blank check; you need to look at each different project,” said Remi Cuer, Kyotherm’s investment and business development director.

Kyotherm expects high single-digit internal rates of return; that’s more than solar or wind farms would pay, because emerging heat tech carries more risk. But assuming Skyven keeps bringing attractive projects, it can expect project financing for quite some time. Cuer declined to name a specific cap on the agreement but suggested his firm could fund a few hundred million dollars of Skyven installations.

Financiers usually run away from new technology until several of their peers have vetted it. But Kyotherm wasn’t afraid to back Skyven despite the newness of Arcturus. Cuer attributed that assurance to having seen how the team worked on the dairy installations. The Dallas-area pilot project is ​“really important for us,” he added, so his team can review the logs of COP, uptime, and other key metrics.

“It’s a market, heat pumps, where there are a lot of [original equipment manufacturers] and perhaps, currently, not enough project developers,” Cuer mused.

DOE yanks grant, so Skyven cuts costs

Until a few months ago, Skyven had a surefire tool for getting its first customer-oriented Arcturus installations done: It had won $145 million from the DOE, part of a $6 billion Biden-era effort to decarbonize heavy industry.

The Trump administration canceled Skyven’s fully contracted grants along with many others in a legally dubious effort to roll back binding federal commitments for clean energy.

“The loss of certainty on the $6 billion from the DOE’s Industrial Demonstrations Program is a challenge for the recipients. They are all considering next steps,” Hart said. But even where the money is gone, the knowledge and corporate buy-in required to win those grants lives on. The grantees ​“had to really think about how to do this technically, how to bring the right partners together, get the plants excited about the idea, and do all of that due diligence as part of their submissions,” Hart said.

Most other companies losing those grants boast far greater balance sheets, like Kraft Heinz and Diageo. Skyven, a much smaller company, is pursuing an internal appeal within DOE, and not currently seeking legal recourse, Gupta said.

“The cancellation of the funds has not killed the projects,” Gupta said. ​“They are actually all still moving forward, they’re just moving forward a lot slower.”

The plan had been to build a slew of them and learn from the results to drive costs down. Instead, Skyven slowrolled development to grind out system-cost reductions, so the projects would still make financial sense without government support. This effort went surprisingly well, Gupta reported, and pushed costs 40% lower in just a few months.

Skyven once again has had to zig and zag, improbably emerging stronger from the turbulence.

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Massachusetts lawmakers have advanced an energy-affordability bill that opponents say would undo years of work on policies to fight climate change and promote energy efficiency, all without actually saving consumers much money.

“The bill is retreating from a couple of decades of climate progress in Massachusetts,” said Larry Chretien, executive director of the nonprofit Green Energy Consumers Alliance.

The legislation, which a House committee approved 7 to 0 on Wednesday, would make the state’s 2030 emissions target nonbinding, slash funding for energy-efficiency programming, reinstate incentives for high-efficiency gas heating systems, and limit climate and clean-energy initiatives that impact customers’ utility bills. It would also prevent projects in cities and towns with natural-gas bans from claiming energy-efficiency incentives for all-electric construction.

The bill’s author — Democratic state Rep. Mark Cusack, the House chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy — has said these steps are necessary to get ballooning energy bills under control. Critics of the proposal, however, say this approach would trade minimal short-term savings for environmental damage and much higher costs down the road.

“We want good energy-affordability legislation. This is not that,” said Amy Boyd Rabin, vice president of policy for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. ​“The claim that climate policies are the thing making prices rise is just not based in fact.”

Electricity prices in Massachusetts have been trending upwards for a decade and are among the highest in the country. In May, Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, unveiled energy-affordability legislation aimed at saving consumers around $10 billion over the next 10 years. A hearing on the bill took place in June, but it has not advanced any further.

Cusack’s rival bill includes many of the same elements as the governor’s proposal but takes a far harsher approach to efficiency spending and climate goals. The bill still has a long way to go to become law. It would need to clear the Senate committee and be approved by both the House and the Senate, which would require support from many legislators who have previously voted for the priorities it undermines. Then Healey would need to sign it.

Still, in a state that has long been a leader in energy efficiency and climate action, the fact that the bill has gained any traction reflects the increasingly popular idea that decarbonization is at odds with affordability. This adversarial notion has gained currency in the past year as politicians and policymakers throughout the region — and the country — scramble for ways to address rising power prices. These claims, however, are simply incorrect, say climate advocates. They argue the cost of energy-delivery infrastructure and the rising price of natural gas are what’s really driving up utility bills.

Climate, energy, and consumer advocates are particularly concerned about the bill’s attempt to scale back and rework Mass Save, the state’s energy-efficiency program, which is funded by a small charge on consumers’ utility bills.

The legislation calls for cutting Mass Save’s current three-year budget from $4.5 billion to $4.17 billion, and capping spending for future triennial plans at $4 billion. These savings would, in theory, be achieved by tightening the program’s scope to focus on weatherization and lowering energy use. Mass Save would no longer be allowed to consider whether an incentive would promote decarbonization or electrification when assessing its benefits, which could put rebates for equipment such as heat pumps or home batteries at risk, advocates said.

“It essentially does eviscerate Mass Save,” Chretien said.

The charge that funds the energy-efficiency program currently makes up about 7% to 8% of the per-kilowatt-hour electricity rate from major utilities Eversource and National Grid. Reducing Mass Save’s budget by 11% would only lower that number slightly.

At the same time, Mass Save cuts costs for consumers. Those who take advantage of the incentives can save thousands of dollars on new appliances or home improvements that can then create ongoing savings by reducing energy demand. By lowering power demand, the programming also helps reduce the need to expand the grid, producing additional savings for everyone. Mass Save generated a total of $2.8 billion in benefits for participants and nonparticipants in 2024, the program administrators report.

The bill also calls for eliminating Mass Save incentives for all-electric projects built in cities and towns that are part of Massachusetts’ pilot program allowing some municipalities to ban fossil fuels in new construction.

Reducing incentives for efficient electric appliances leaves people paying more for energy-hungry systems, critics point out — even as both electricity and natural-gas prices are expected to keep rising.

“The best you could say is that it is going after short-term affordability at the expense of long-term affordability,” said Kyle Murray, Massachusetts program director for climate-action nonprofit Acadia Center. ​“Unfortunately, because it misunderstands the actual drivers of cost, it will drive up costs for ratepayers.”

Advocates also question the logic behind the plan to make the state’s 2030 climate goals nonbinding. Cusack argues the move is necessary to prevent lawsuits against the state, should it not meet its targets, especially in the light of obstacles being thrown up by the Trump administration. Murray, however, finds this contention unconvincing: The likelihood of a successful lawsuit is too low to justify unravelling years of climate progress, he said.

Despite the bill’s success in the House committee, opponents could still defeat it by making their case to legislators, Boyd Rabin said. And there are a lot of opponents to speak up, she said, including not just climate activists but groups concerned with municipal operations, economic development, and equity.

“I am yet to have a conversation with anyone who supports it,” she said. ​“I would hope legislators would listen to what they’re hearing.”

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Have global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions gone up or down this year?

The latest projections from the Global Carbon Project give us some insight. Their researchers and analysts do invaluable work in estimating greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, helping us understand how the situation is evolving.

Today, they published their latest “carbon budget”. The chart shows their historical estimates, as well as their projections for 2025.

They project that this year, emissions from fossil sources — that is, from fossil fuels and industrial processes — will increase by around 1%. Emissions from all three fuels — coal, oil, and gas — are expected to increase. Meanwhile, emissions from land-use change have decreased due to fewer extreme wildfires and reduced deforestation in South America.

This reduction in land use may offset the increase from fossil fuels, resulting in a global total similar to last year. Note that estimates for land-use emissions are much less certain than for fossil fuels.

While many countries have made progress in reducing emissions, global fossil emissions continue to rise. To tackle climate change, they need to peak and rapidly decrease in the coming years and decades.

This is based on the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project. Explore how global and national emissions are changing.

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