Copper’s Charlie 2.0, to be manufactured by appliance giant Miele, comes with a battery that lets homes ditch the fossil fumes without an expensive electric upgrade.

On Thursday, Copper, creator of the first induction stove with a built-in battery, launched the next generation of its superefficient electric range: the Charlie 2.0.

The plug-and-play appliance is designed to make it easier to ditch fossil-fueled cooking, and the Charlie 2.0 is more powerful than its predecessor, making meals quicker to cook, according to the Berkeley, California–based startup. Each of the new version’s four burners can draw 3,000 watts, a 7% improvement, and its oven preheats to 350 degrees Fahrenheit in about four minutes — that’s more than four times quicker than many gas ovens.

Plus, the new model can be plugged into both 120-volt and 240-volt outlets, unlike classic Charlie’s 120-volt limit. The update will make Copper’s product a better fit for a wider range of homes, according to Sam Calisch, the company’s CEO and co-founder.

The 50-employee startup, which has raised $38 million to date, also announced on Thursday that global appliance maker Miele will manufacture the Charlie 2.0 at its first U.S. plant in Opelika, Alabama. The factory already churns out Miele ranges and ovens.

“We love [Miele’s] commitment to quality,” said Mitchell Heinrich, Copper’s vice president of product. The new partnership ​“gives us the opportunity to really learn from the best out there.”

This is the first time that Miele, established in Germany in 1899 and winner of multiple design awards, has produced another brand’s appliance, according to Copper.

“The US is a strategically important growth market for Miele,” Uwe Brunkhorst, senior vice president of business for its cooking unit, said in a statement. ​“Our partnership with Copper now adds new technology capabilities … creating opportunities for new products and future business areas.”

Plenty of reasons are motivating households to put fossil gas in the past. Gas stoves pollute the air with toxic carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and carcinogens that harm health, especially kids’. Induction, which heats pans directly with electromagnetism rather than flames, is faster, safer to use, and easier to clean. A growing number of renowned chefs, from Samin Nosrat, author of the award-winning cookbook ​“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” to Christopher Kimball, culinary media magnate of Milk Street, are choosing induction to whip up their mouthwatering dishes.

But switching from gas to conventional electric systems can be costly. Whereas a gas stove typically hooks up to a gas line and plugs into a 120-volt outlet, an electric induction or resistance range usually plugs into a 240-volt socket, because of its higher power needs. Adding the outlet would require an electrician. An induction stove can even trigger an electrical service upgrade — a gut punch of an expense that can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $30,000.

To sidestep that electrification hurdle and help the more than 40 million households cooking with gas make the switch, startups Copper, Impulse Labs, and Electra Research have incorporated batteries into their induction stoves, which can sip power from a 120-volt outlet and provide the bursts of energy needed for cooking. While the Charlie 2.0 starts at $6,799, thousands more than a top-rated non-battery induction stove, its simpler installation can make it the cheaper option. Its 5-kilowatt-hour battery also helps in a power outage; per Copper, it’s got enough energy to scramble more than 300 eggs.

Copper says it has sold thousands of units and has partner installers in several major cities. Earlier this month, the startup launched its first retail partnership with Royal Green Appliance. And last year, New York authorities contracted Copper as part of a $32 million initiative to design, test, and install 10,000 plug-in stoves in New York City public housing, pending a successful 100-unit pilot slated to start next year.

“We’re continuing to install Charlie in homes and multifamily buildings across the country,” Calisch said. ​“And the new Charlie is purpose-built to meet that growing demand with more power, performance, and flexibility.”

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The Amazon-backed firm is aiming to build up to 144 of its novel Xe-100 reactors as the U.S. government seeks to revitalize an industry beset by rising costs.

The federal government has thrown its weight into reviving America’s long-stagnant nuclear industry, and X-energy’s first-of-a-kind reactor project is among the biggest beneficiaries so far.

The U.S. Department of Energy last month said it would award $1 billion to X-energy, an Amazon-backed advanced nuclear startup working to bring four novel 80-megawatt electric reactors online at a Dow Chemical facility in Seadrift, Texas, in the early 2030s.

The award nearly doubles the federal government’s commitment to X-energy, following a $1.2 billion investment in early 2021. Both tranches were structured as 50-50 cost-sharing agreements under the DOE’s Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, launched in 2020 to commercialize next-generation nuclear technologies.

X-energy’s Seadrift project now enjoys a level of federal funding that rivals any other advanced nuclear development in the nation. The Bill Gates–backed TerraPower’s commercial demonstration project in Wyoming, which broke ground earlier this year, has also been awarded up to $2 billion in cost-sharing funds through the ARDP.

The X-energy project does not yet have a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, though it received a key environmental approval in May and expects the regulator to green-light reactor construction in early 2027. Only TerraPower and the Google-backed startup Kairos Power currently have NRC construction permits.

Nuclear energy has struggled in recent decades in America, but surging energy demand and a desire by some states and companies to secure carbon-free electricity have revitalized the industry. Tens of billions of dollars in public and private funding are now flowing into a crop of startups looking to build advanced reactors — as well as efforts to restart or build new large-scale reactors like the 96 America already has.

For the nuclear renaissance to truly arrive, however, these new projects need to be completed on a reasonable timeline and at a reasonable cost. Blown deadlines and blown budgets have dogged the industry, and in 2023 contributed to the dissolution of the first small-modular reactor project with an NRC-approved design.

In early 2023, before it had fully engaged with Dow or selected Seadrift for its commercial debut, X-energy estimated the cost of completing the full ARDP scope between $4.75 billion and $5.75 billion.

X-energy has not publicly updated its cost estimates since then, though the federal funding of up to $2.1 billion implies at least $4.2 billion will be spent on the project. In securities filings this year, however, it said that it faces the same broad inflationary and trade-related pressures that have pushed up costs for natural gas, renewables, and other types of energy infrastructure.

CEO J. Clay Sell told investors and stock analysts on an Aug. 13 earnings call that he expected the government to contribute more funding as needed.

“I’m confident to the extent more dollars will be required, they will be provided by our partners at the Department of Energy and Commerce,” he said. ​“We’ll see where the number ends up.”

Andrew Kleiman, an energy transition research analyst with Wood Mackenzie, said there’s no indication yet that X-energy’s final project costs will be substantially higher than its 2023 estimate.

As of June 30, the DOE had reimbursed X-energy for about $546 million in spending under the ARDP agreement.

The agreement covers the design and licensing of the Xe-100, its standard plant; design, licensing, and construction of TX-1, its first commercial fuel-fabrication facility near Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; and construction of its first commercial plant at Dow’s Texas site. The company remains on track to open TX-1 in the first half of 2028, it said last month.

Unlike conventional reactors, which use water to control the nuclear reaction and transfer heat for power generation, high-temperature gas reactors like the Xe-100 use graphite to control the reaction and helium or another inert gas to transfer heat. The Xe-100 also uses a special type of uranium-based fuel, called TRISO, that is expensive but designed to withstand the superhot conditions in the reactor core.

The Xe-100’s high operating temperatures and stability make it ideal for providing both heat and power to industrial operations like Dow’s Seadrift petrochemical plant. If built, the Seadrift reactors will replace Dow’s aging steam and power generation assets, reducing the facility’s annual greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 440,000 metric tons.

The chemicals giant is expected to make a final investment decision on the project in 2028 at the earliest.

“Dow’s partnership with X-energy is not purely financially motivated,” Kleiman said in an email, pointing out that the firm aims to reduce its annual emissions by 5 million metric tons from 2020 levels by 2030. Backing out of the project and instead using fossil-fueled alternatives ​“would require the company to take a step backward in reaching its sustainability goals.”

X-energy’s original ARDP partner was Energy Northwest, a Washington electric utility. In 2023, it backed out of the arrangement as Dow stepped up.

“As an at-cost developer and provider of electricity to public power utilities, Energy Northwest does not have the significant development capital on hand to initiate this project without a committed off-taker, compared to a company such as Dow,” it said at the time.

Energy Northwest eventually found that offtaker in Amazon, which is bankrolling up to 12 Xe-100s at a central Washington site controlled by the utility. That project is at an earlier stage of development than Seadrift.

In total, X-energy’s commitments with Dow, Amazon, and the United Kingdom–based energy company Centrica call for as many as 144 Xe-100 reactors built worldwide, the company said in a securities filing last month.

X-energy’s current cost estimates cover the Seadrift project and the company’s TX-1 fuel facility, making it hard to know exactly how much one reactor would cost and at what price it could deliver power.

Estimates are more readily available for other advanced reactor designs. Wood Mackenzie expects the Tennessee Valley Authority and GE Vernova Hitachi to spend more than $14,000 per kilowatt to bring a 300-MW electric BWRX-300 reactor online in Tennessee early next decade, Kleiman said. (The federal government is chipping in for that project, too, and the NRC is ​“approaching a decision” on the development.)

Wind and solar developers spent well under $2,000 per kilowatt to bring utility-scale projects online in 2022, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, though their costs have risen in recent years.

X-energy’s initial reactor is likely to be more expensive than the BWRX-300. The Xe-100’s underlying high-temperature gas technology has limited operational history and relies on costly TRISO fuel, whereas the BWRX-300 is ​“an evolution of GE’s conventional [reactor], which makes up one-third of operating U.S. nuclear fleet and utilizes conventional fuel which is already licensed, produced at scale and has an established supply chain,” Kleiman said.

Ontario Power Generation is expected to bring the world’s first BWRX-300 online in 2030.

It’s inevitable that the first commercial advanced nuclear reactors will be more expensive to deploy than more mature power-generation technologies — and costlier than the next iterations of those same reactors.

That’s why Judi Greenwald, president and CEO of the Nuclear Innovation Alliance, said the best way to drive down the cost of nuclear development is to build more of the same design. The second AP-1000 reactor at Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle cost about 30% less than the first, she noted.

“There is a huge difference between these early-mover projects and what’s going to happen when we get to ​‘nth-of-a-kind.’… It’s expected that early-mover projects are going to have higher costs,” she said.

“We have to get to the point where we’re doing order books” for multiple reactors in sequence, Greenwald said.

X-energy has certainly built out a meaningful order book. Now, it needs to deliver on the reactors.

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Bus operator First Student and utility Con Edison are advancing a $9 million pilot that offers a cleaner commute for students and a power boost to the urban grid.

NEW YORK CITY — School districts nationwide are grappling with record diesel prices this fall as they resume shuttling students back and forth. But filling up isn’t a problem for some of the newest buses in New York City. That’s because these 10 long, yellow vehicles plug into the electric grid.

On a clear, sunny morning in mid-September, the gleaming battery-powered buses were parked at a depot in East New York, a residential neighborhood on the outer edges of Brooklyn. First Student, a school services transportation provider, and the utility Con Edison were there to mark the completion of the initial phase of their $9 million pilot project.

The ongoing initiative is meant to show how the city can replace thousands of its polluting diesel buses with cleaner models — and do so in a way that benefits the stressed-out urban grid, not overwhelms it.

“This is about how we’re going to make this cost-effective so that every student in [NYC] can eventually enjoy an emissions-free ride,” Kevin Matthews, First Student’s head of electrification, said at the depot.

The buses were lined up beside rows of high-powered charging cabinets. Slender silver conduits ran from the chargers along the tops of red concrete barriers, leading to a blue metal container that houses the system’s electrical boards and cabling. Unlike other EV-charging stations, which involve digging trenches to bury electrical equipment, the East New York system is built aboveground.

First Student developed the design out of necessity, Matthews told me. From where we stood, the primary jet-fuel line for the nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport ran right beneath our feet, meaning that digging was out of the question, he said.

But the non-trenching approach turned out to be worth it. The team estimates it saved nearly 20% in project costs and accelerated the project’s timeline by a month, compared to what would’ve been required for installing infrastructure belowground. Matthews likened the system to Lego bricks: Whenever more charging capacity is needed, the company can add more modules.

Forty additional battery-powered buses will be delivered to East New York between now and June, according to First Student. The second phase of its project with Con Ed is also underway, which includes plans for the buses to demonstrate vehicle-to-grid capabilities and send power to the grid in ways that reduce electricity costs and boost reliability.

“That will help make the grid more resilient,” said Vicki Kuo, Con Ed’s senior vice president of customer energy solutions.

“There’s a lot of flexibility in these new tools, whether it’s a vehicle or storage or solar,” she added. ​“We need everything.”

Con Ed forecasts that electric buses, trucks, and other commercial vehicles will add over 100 megawatts of electricity demand by 2030. Being able to tap their spare battery capacity could be particularly valuable during summer — especially as residents crank up their air conditioners amid the increasingly hot and humid weather. (Meanwhile, larger stand-alone battery projects are struggling to advance in New York, owing to what critics say are Con Ed’s onerous and costly regulations.)

The utility is part of another electric school-bus project in the South Bronx, which now includes 23 dual-port chargers to power 45 new vehicles. In both the South Bronx and East New York, residents have disproportionately high rates of asthma and other respiratory conditions, in large part because of elevated tailpipe pollution in their communities.

At the East New York depot, two of the buses have 3-kilowatt solar arrays on their roofs that can supply power to the bus batteries and the depot’s larger battery unit. First Student is considering outfitting more buses with panels, as well as installing a 500-kW rooftop solar system and a 2-MW battery at the site. The bus chargers are already equipped with hardware and software that allow the company to discharge extra power to Con Ed’s system.

“Our goal is to create additional vehicle-to-grid capability, facility-to-grid capability, up to 10 megawatts over the next couple years,” said John Kenning, CEO and president of Cincinnati-based First Student.

Across the United States, more than 8,500 electric school buses were operating as of June 2026, up 66% from the same time last year, according to the World Resources Institute. The organization attributed the growth to schools’ persistent concerns about the effects of harmful diesel exhaust on vulnerable students, as well as the availability of state and federal funding programs.

Statewide zero-emission vehicle mandates are also a key driver for the nascent electric-bus market, though New York lawmakers recently pushed back deadlines by five years. Local school districts and bus companies now have until 2040 to comply with New York’s all-electric school bus mandate, and until 2032 to ensure that all new school bus purchases are zero-emission.

Lawmakers were responding to concerns from the state’s school transportation associations, which argued that districts needed more time to overcome several major hurdles, including how to pay for electric buses — which still cost more up front than diesel buses, even if battery-powered models are cheaper to operate and maintain in the long run.

First Student, for its part, received about $2 million in funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s incentive programs to help pay for six new buses and to retrofit four diesel buses to run on battery power in East New York.

“Purchasing an electric vehicle is only one piece of the puzzle, albeit a very large piece,” Joy Gardner, executive director of the nonprofit Empire Clean Cities, said from the depot. But schools ​“also have to navigate charging, utility coordination, routes and operations, limited available space, infrastructure costs, and funding applications — all without interrupting the essential services they provide.”

“That’s what makes real-world deployments like this so valuable,” she added. ​“They create examples that help inform other fleets and projects.”

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