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Illinois could soon follow in the footsteps of Utah and Virginia with a law allowing plug-in solar arrays, often called “balcony solar.”
A bill that would make it simpler to install plug-in solar passed out of the state legislature’s Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee on March 12. It’s now scheduled for a hearing in the full Senate, and a House committee on utilities is also considering the bill. Advocates are hopeful that the measure will pass both Democratic-controlled chambers this legislative session, which runs through the end of May, and then be signed by the state’s Democratic governor, JB Pritzker.
People are already plugging in these kinds of off-the-shelf small solar arrays to help power their homes, experts say. But legislation would ensure that more people can access the cost-saving clean power. Illinois’ bill would mandate that utilities allow people to plug in solar systems of up to 1,200 watts, without interconnection agreements, fees, or other barriers. That’s about enough energy to run a refrigerator and a few other appliances.
In Illinois, such units could save households up to $400 a year, according to an analysis by the advocacy group Solar United Neighbors, which notes that plug-in solar currently costs about $3 per watt, or about $2,000 for a typical model. Advocates predict that the cost will come down quickly if more states pass plug-in solar laws and the market expands.
More than two dozen other states are considering such bills. The concept has enjoyed bipartisan support across the country, with Utah’s Republican-dominated legislature passing the first law in March 2025. The Virginia legislature passed its law by a unanimous vote on March 11. Illinois’ red-state neighbors — Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri — have also introduced bills.
The momentum comes as affordability concerns mount nationwide. Electricity prices have spiked in many parts of the country, driven by factors including extreme weather and wildfires, natural gas price fluctuations, and the cost of infrastructure to get power where it’s needed. In Illinois, customers are seeing their bills rise sharply because of increasing electricity demand that is driven in part by data centers.
Illinois’ plug-in solar measure would go a step further than most by stipulating that homeowners’ associations and landlords could not enact rules, fees, or insurance requirements around arrays of 391 watts or less, proponents say. This would ensure that renters and condominium owners could take advantage of the option.
Despite the fast-growing enthusiasm for plug-in solar, some bills, like one in Wyoming, have failed. Utilities have raised safety concerns, such as danger to lineworkers if the arrays don’t shut off during power outages and continue sending electricity onto the grid, or a home’s electric system becoming overloaded.
Plug-in solar proponents note that safety concerns can be managed, especially through legislation that requires specific certification, as the Illinois bill does.
“This is a disruptive technology to the American market, and all disruptive technologies are good for the consumer and bad for the power structures,” said Cora Stryker, who co-founded the nonprofit organization Bright Saver last year to sell affordable plug-in solar kits. “We believe these are strategic efforts to confuse legislators and the public, but the real motivation is the threat to the business models of very powerful entities.”
The Illinois bill would mandate that plug-in solar systems not send any electricity into the home when the larger grid has an outage. That means the panels wouldn’t help during a blackout unless paired with a battery, but they would avoid harming lineworkers. Arrays that are commercially available already typically include such safeguards as part of the built-in microinverter.
The Illinois bill would also require that plug-in units be certified by UL Solutions (formerly Underwriters Laboratories) or an equivalent entity.
Hannah Birnbaum, co-founder and chief of advocacy at the nonprofit Permit Power, which focuses on reducing the bureaucracy involved in getting rooftop solar, said that it’s crucial to pass laws that include these sorts of safety provisions. Otherwise, people will continue to install unregulated systems, she said.
In California, for example, customers are already “quietly” using portable solar panels — even though the state has yet to pass the plug-in solar bill it’s considering.
“The real risk is inaction,” Stryker said. “Now there’s so much enthusiasm for plug-in solar, people are buying whatever systems they can get. It’s a regulatory gray area.”
In Illinois, utilities have thus far not raised opposition. ComEd spokesperson David O’Dowd said the utility does not have a position on the bill. Ameren did not respond to a request for comment.
Should the bill pass in Illinois, it would add to the state’s already robust incentive program encouraging residents, businesses, churches, schools, and other nonprofits to get rooftop solar. Clean energy advocates say plug-in solar provides a more affordable and convenient option, and one that’s accessible to both renters and those whose homes aren’t conducive to rooftop solar.
“It’s an untapped resource” in meeting larger clean-energy goals, according to Nick Johnson, an associate professor of sustainability and economics at Principia College in southwestern Illinois. Johnson was among over 100 residents who filed witness slips with the legislature in support of the bill.
“It’s a drop in the bucket for what we need, but every little bit helps,” he added.
In Germany, more than a million households have plug-in solar — a fact often underscored by advocates trying to popularize the technology in the U.S., where it’s still in the early stages. Even in Utah, only a few thousand households have plugged in the devices since they became legal.
Advocates expect the systems will take off once more states make it simpler for people to adopt them.
For her part, Kavi Chintam, Illinois campaign manager for the advocacy group Vote Solar, said she plans to put a plug-in solar array in her yard after the law passes. Her mother wants a solar array on her balcony, to power her TV.
“At a time when electricity prices are rising and rising, it gives an option for people to shave off some of that cost,” Chintam said. “There is something really empowering about seeing a panel you installed on your home. As the market expands, there will be more opportunities for people just to see these things out and about.”
See more from Canary Media’s “Chart of the Week” column.
Clean energy is on a tear. In China and India, it’s growing so fast it’s starting to unseat king coal. In the European Union, solar and wind now produce more electricity than do all fossil fuels combined. Even in the U.S., amid the Trump administration’s attacks on clean energy, nearly all new power capacity comes from renewables and batteries.
But who, exactly, is making all of the solar panels, wind turbines, battery packs, and electric vehicles enabling this transition?
In a word: China. Let’s look at the latest numbers from the Clean Investment Monitor by Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Right now, over 90% of the world’s solar manufacturing capacity is in China. So is 83% of the planet’s battery production capacity, and nearly three-quarters of wind technology manufacturing capacity. China’s grip on the EV sector almost looks measly in comparison, at just two-thirds.
China’s lead is explained by several factors. For one, the country itself uses way more clean energy tech than does any other, due not only to its massive population but also Beijing’s concerted effort to make the nation more self-sufficient on energy. Last year, more than half of the solar and wind installed worldwide plugged into China’s grid. The country dominates global EV adoption, too.
But China also exports enormous amounts of these technologies. The country’s expansion of manufacturing to meet its own domestic energy goals has allowed it to produce super-cheap solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, and EVs. That’s made clean energy more attractive to buyers in other countries.
But China’s investment in these factories is contracting, hard. Last year, it invested $60 billion in cleantech manufacturing overall — less than half of what it put in the year before. In 2023, it spent $50 billion on clean energy manufacturing in a single quarter. Investment in clean energy manufacturing has been sluggish in the U.S. and Europe, too, for what it’s worth, but it’s not crashing at anywhere near the same rate.
China is pulling back for a pretty intuitive reason. It’s already built more clean energy manufacturing capacity than the world wants to use at the moment. The Clean Investment Monitor team expects this mismatch to get even worse by 2030, so as it stands, it makes little sense for China to continue speeding ahead on new factory construction.
Overall, the clean-energy manufacturing picture could look a bit different by the end of this decade — but only by a little. Even with the U.S., Europe, India, and others expected to make some headway in the battery and EV markets, China’s lead ultimately isn’t expected to go anywhere.
Breaker boxes can be a hidden stumbling block for households looking to go electric. Many of these devices are too small to support the electrical needs of a home plus the addition of an EV charger, a heat pump, and other power-hungry appliances. But upgrading them can take lots of time and money.
Smart electrical panels — smartphone-controllable versions of the electromechanical devices found in most homes — could help solve this problem. While more expensive up front than the old-school gear they’re replacing, smart panels don’t require complicated utility upgrades — and they may be able to save homes and businesses money in the long run.
Leading smart-panel startup Span and major electrical-equipment manufacturer Eaton just announced a strategic partnership to try to boost adoption of the devices. Eaton will also make a $75 million investment in the San Francisco–based startup, which has now raised a total of nearly half a billion, including a $176 million Series C last month.
Eaton, which reported $27.4 billion in revenue last year, will tap its extensive distributor and installer networks to promote Span’s devices. These range from sleek, iPhone-shaped electrical panels aimed at high-end homes with complex electrical-management needs to devices designed for smaller homes, multifamily buildings, and small commercial properties.
Eaton also makes its own version of smart controls in the form of digital circuit breakers, which are the individual devices that plug into slots in standard electrical panels to prevent household circuits from overloading. Those AbleEdge devices are used in control systems from home battery vendors including Tesla and Lunar Energy, and are a core building block of Eaton’s “home as a grid” business strategy, Paul Ryan, vice president and general manager of the company’s energy transition business, told Canary Media.
“Homes are becoming more electrified. EV adoption continues to increase. That all puts a stress on the home and on the grid,” he said. “We have to manage our power more effectively.”
Homeowners who want to electrify may need to upgrade their electrical panels or pay for even more expensive utility-grid upgrades. Instead, smart panels and circuit breakers can actively shift and throttle appliances — like EV chargers and clothes dryers — to keep loads within safe limits, saving tens of thousands of dollars per home, Ryan said.
The smart panels can also generate savings if they’re used to manage the flow of power from rooftop solar panels, batteries, and backup generators on household circuits, he said. Currently, that job is performed using complicated combinations of traditional electrical gear.
These potential benefits have driven a wave of companies to invest in the sector. Along with Eaton and fellow electrical-equipment manufacturers Schneider Electric and Leviton, these include startups like Lumin and vendors of solar energy systems, batteries, and backup generators like FranklinWH, Generac, and Savant.
Span’s smart electrical panel was one of the first to hit the market in 2019, and the first to earn certification under the UL 3141 power control systems standard offered by Underwriters Laboratories, the premier standards-setting body for electrical equipment. Before Eaton, the company had also picked up partners including leading U.S. residential solar and battery installer Sunrun, utility smart meter and communications giant Landis+Gyr, and major U.S. homebuilder PulteGroup.
Span CEO Arch Rao told Canary Media that the startup will continue to operate independently while co-branding its smart panels under the Eaton label.
“They’ve come onboard not just as an investor but as a key partner for scaling our products in the market, particularly in the residential ecosystem,” Rao said. “We’re able to support electrification of all types of existing homes with main-panel replacement, subpanels, load controls, EV charging, and heat pump integration.”
Just as important, Ryan said, Eaton has “expansive manufacturing capabilities and a very strong supply chain. We’ll be collaborating together to help drive down the cost of these solutions and make it more affordable.”
That last point addresses the big question mark for smart panels and circuit breakers: cost. Span’s marquee smart panel retails for about $3,500, well above the $1,000 to $2,500 all-in cost of installing a traditional electrical panel.
In general, digitally enabled panels and circuit breakers cost roughly twice as much as old-fashioned electromechanical equipment does. The price differential has been a barrier to more widespread adoption of these kinds of products, which have already seen one major contender exit the market. Schneider Electric, the French electrical-equipment giant that competes with Eaton in global markets, recently discontinued its Schneider Pulse smart panel.
Other technologies could well offer a cheaper route to doing what smart electrical panels do, according to Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid edge at research firm Wood Mackenzie. In a 2024 opinion piece, he highlighted options ranging from next-generation utility smart meters to controls embedded in EV chargers, batteries, and electric appliances themselves.
“Low-cost smart meters with plenty of compute [capacity] are being deployed at scale today,” Hertz-Shargel told Canary Media in an interview this month. “The question is, do we need more dedicated energy hardware in the home? The lowest-cost solution will always rely on software. It seems a smart meter and an EV charger, or a battery, are the only devices you need.”
Rao pushed back on that proposition. While individual devices can throttle their power use, smart panels offer a more holistic way to oversee and control a home’s overall power demands, he said.
And utility smart meters are “not purpose-built for avoiding a service upgrade, or for adding new electrical loads to your home, most of which require not just sensing, but real-time controls,” Rao added.
Span has been working with a number of utilities, including Pacific Gas & Electric in California, that are interested in using its technology in concert with smart meters and grid control platforms for the additional home device-management flexibility it offers, he noted.
Span and Eaton also plan to launch “joint solutions” that combine both companies’ technologies in the second half of this year. “There are obviously a lot of interesting opportunities for technology partnerships,” Rao said, though he declined to provide details.
Lots of Americans are electrifying their cars and homes, enticed by the prospect of lower bills, cleaner air, and less planet-warming pollution. But all that new electric equipment creates a serious challenge: It requires bigger, better infrastructure to manage the increased flow of electrons, from the electrical panels in individual buildings to the transformers and power lines that make up the grid at large.
Pacific Gas & Electric, California’s largest utility, is testing a one-two punch of technologies that could let it and customers sidestep those expensive upgrades. The first are devices from smart-electrical-panel startup Span, which plug into utility meters and control when and how a home uses power, avoiding the need for higher-capacity panels. The second are the latest digital controls from smart-meter vendor Itron, which can ensure that the collective power demands of multiple customers don’t push local grid transformers beyond their limits.
Working in concert, these technologies could help individual customers avoid thousands of dollars of upgrade costs to electrify their homes, said Quinn Nakayama, PG&E’s senior director of grid research innovation and development. And if deployed at scale, they could allow the utility to delay billions of dollars in grid upgrades, which should help reduce rates for all its customers, he said.
To be clear, PG&E isn’t promising those results right away. The pilot with Span will start by installing the company’s meter-connected devices at PG&E employees’ homes in the coming months, with a larger rollout to volunteer customers envisioned for 2027, Nakayama said. And PG&E will upgrade existing smart meters with Itron’s technology at about 1,000 homes this year; if they’re cost-effective, the utility may seek to incorporate the capability in hundreds of thousands of customers’ meters through 2030.
“Our service planners, when they interconnect new loads, always have to imagine the worst-case scenario,” Nakayama said. “This enables us to give them the tools and the assurances that those worst-case scenarios will never occur.”
PG&E isn’t the only utility looking for ways to meet growing electricity demand without blowing out its grid budget. Utility rates are on the rise across the U.S., in large part because of the increasing cost of maintaining and upgrading the poles, wires, and substations that deliver power to customers. But PG&E is under particular scrutiny from lawmakers, given its steep electricity rate hikes over the past decade.
Utilities also want to sell more power across their wires. The more they can expand capacity for EVs, heat pumps, and other power-using devices, the more money they can bring in to cover the cost of new infrastructure. This, in turn, eases upward rate pressure for customers at large.
One way utilities could sell more power over existing wires is by tapping the capacity of virtual power plants — collections of rooftop solar and battery systems, EV chargers, appliances, and thermostats that can be controlled collaboratively to reduce grid strain. In recent years, PG&E has run multiple VPP pilots with EV chargers, and it launched a project with Span, Sunrun, and other vendors in 2025 to test how smart electrical panels and solar-charged batteries that customers have already installed could relieve local grid constraints.
However, utilities are loath to rely on novel technologies to replace tried-and-true grid upgrades. If a VPP doesn’t work, for example, local transformers or neighborhood substations can overheat and break down under increased stress. That’s why PG&E’s latest experiment is covering its bases with devices that can control excess power use both at the home and on the grid.
To moderate home energy use, PG&E is using Span’s latest smart-electrical-panel device, which is designed to plug directly into utility meters. The Span device can actively monitor and control household circuits powering air conditioners, refrigerators, and clothes dryers, as well as EV chargers, heat pumps, and other more advanced energy systems.
Adding a major new power draw to a home, like an EV charger, often requires an electrical panel upgrade, which can cost thousands of dollars and add weeks to months to an installation. It can also trigger an upgrade to the local grid, which can take months to complete and cost anywhere from several thousand dollars for replacing a transformer on an overhead power line to around $50,000 for digging up and replacing underground service transformers and power lines.
“Nobody wants to pay that,” Nakayama said.
But those upgrades are predicated on the assumption that the new EV chargers will be drawing maximum power at the same time that all the other homes in the neighborhood are maxing out their electricity use, stressing their shared grid infrastructure. That’s usually during hot summer afternoons and evenings when air conditioners are running full tilt.
Span’s tech allows PG&E to offer those customers an alternative, Nakayama said: Let the smart device curb grid stress by reducing charging speeds during those peak hours. Most EVs require only several hours to recharge their batteries, giving them time to ease off on charging for a while yet still fill up overnight.
“I think most people are OK if their car charges a little bit slower, as long as it charges by 6 in the morning,” he said. That’s called managed charging, a concept that utilities across the country are exploring as they prepare to handle millions of new EVs coming online over the ensuing decades.
Span’s software also lets customers set other parameters to keep their total household electricity use below those limits, like delaying clothes dryers until later at night or easing off on air conditioning, Nakayama said. These kinds of technological solutions are going to be important for the more than 600,000 of PG&E’s roughly 5.5 million customers that the utility expects to need some kind of electrical service upgrade in the next 10 years to meet state electrification goals.
Span CEO Arch Rao said the company is working with other utilities interested in using its equipment for similar purposes. “A lot of the technical validation work has already been completed,” he said. “It’s now about customer recruitment and enrollment.”
So that takes care of individual homes. But how can PG&E ensure those controls are actually relieving local grid stress? That’s where Itron’s smart meter technology comes in, Nakayama said — or more specifically, Itron’s latest chipsets, which can be plugged into the smart meters that PG&E has already installed.
Like traditional utility meters, smart meters track a home’s electricity usage. But they use onboard computers and wireless networks to upload those readings to utilities, rather than requiring employees to come by to check the readings once a month. U.S. utilities have deployed nearly 120 million of these smart meters over the past two decades.
In utility parlance, smart meters are known as “advanced metering infrastructure,” or AMI. Older “AMI 1.0” technology can do some advanced tasks, like detect power outages and communicate via wireless networks with other meters and the utility. But it lacks the computing power and real-time capabilities to do more complex things, like actively communicate with and control devices in homes and businesses.
Enter Itron’s latest “AMI 2.0” technology. If AMI 1.0 is like a flip phone, AMI 2.0 is more like a modern smartphone, capable of uploading applications that can undertake the novel tasks that PG&E is now exploring.
In other words, “the meter is no longer just a meter — it’s a controller,” said Nick Tumilowicz, head of Itron’s distributed energy management solutions business. The company’s AMI 2.0 technology has already been controlling Level 2 EV chargers at hundreds of PG&E customers’ homes through a pilot project launched in late 2024, he said. Itron has used the same technology to manage school bus charging in New York City and Tesla Powerwall batteries for Colorado utility Xcel Energy.
Smart meters can also do something that in-home devices can’t, Nakayama said: communicate with all the other meters in the neighborhood to check how their shared electrical loads are impacting the transformers they’re connected to.
All those meters are linked in a wireless network and “speak the same language,” he said. Once an AMI 2.0 meter is connected, “it has the ability to say to its surrounding AMI 1.0 meters, ‘We’re all on the same service transformer,’” he said. “And it can do simple math, and figure out what that service transformer limit is,” as well as determine much demand the transformer faces from homes.
The tech then feeds that data back to the EV chargers and electrical panels that are linked to the AMI 2.0 meter, he said. For instance, if other nearby homes are using more power than usual and stressing the local transformer, PG&E could direct those smart panels and EV chargers to throttle power.
Finding ways for neighborhoods to electrify without crushing the grid will require a lot more solutions like these, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, global head of grid edge at research firm Wood Mackenzie.
“There is so much risk — and so much opportunity — on the distribution system. If electrification happens in an unmanaged way, it will be extremely expensive,” he said.
On the other hand, utilities have to make sure the technologies they’re deploying don’t add more costs than the benefits they deliver, Hertz-Shargel said. For example, PG&E’s new pilots are funded through state grants, and the utility will need to prove their cost-effectiveness before asking regulators to let it charge customers at large to deploy them more broadly as part of a rate case.
That evidence is particularly challenging to come up with when trying to avoid upgrades to the low-voltage network that brings power directly to houses, since most utilities don’t have solid details on that part of the grid.
“The problem is that utilities don’t have good data on these assets below the substation,” Hertz-Shargel said. “These devices need to not only solve the thermal overload problem but provide the ground-truth data to prove that they’re solving the problem — such as that the transformer stayed well below its power rating.” If that evidence is lacking, these technologies will be a harder sell to planning teams, he said.
“It’s smart for PG&E to try these different solutions,” Hertz-Shargel said. “I think the ones that survive will be the ones that are most cost-effective.”
Base Power, the Texas-based home-battery juggernaut, just revealed how it’s spending some of the $1 billion it raised in October. The startup’s plan is to build one of the nation’s largest fleets of home batteries, for a cooperative utility outside Dallas–Fort Worth.
Cleantech startups and advocates alike keep promising that small-scale energy devices such as residential batteries and thermostats can be coordinated and operated like traditional power plants. But in practice, it’s been harder for companies to build enough aggregated capacity, with high enough reliability, to truly match the performance that utilities are used to at their large-scale gas power plants. The new Base Power project tackles this challenge head-on.
Base Power will work to install 100 megawatts of home battery capacity in the territory of member-owned utility Denton County Electric Cooperative, known as CoServ, over the next two years. Crucially, that scale equates to the output of a natural-gas-fired peaker plant, a class of smaller conventional power plants that fire up when demand is highest. While building a new gas peaker could take around five years of permitting and construction, Base Power can deliver the capacity in two years by striking deals with homeowners and installing each system in a day, said Tim Pianta, the company’s head of utility partnerships.
“The whole business is oriented around, How do we get dispatchable megawatts on the grid really quickly to drive down grid and power supply costs? And I think this is a really good application of that,” he said.
In partnership with CoServ, Base Power will pitch the utility’s customer-owners on whole-home backup power for an installation fee starting at $695 and a monthly $19 subscription. That’s a slim fraction of the cost to buy a big enough battery on the open market, which could easily run to $15,000 or $20,000. Base Power can afford to offer that bargain because it retains ownership of the batteries and will call on them to fulfill a grid capacity contract for the utility.
On the utility side, this contract should offer the fastest path to adding capacity affordably, Pianta said. While CoServ could purchase power from the wholesale market managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas or build its own peaker plants, the battery fleet gives the utility the option to buy power when it is cheap and deliver it when prices are high. Lowering the amount of power CoServ has to ship in during peak times also reduces the utility’s transmission costs, he added.
In short, this deal is an affordability play for CoServ — the third-largest electric coop in the U.S., serving 330,000 electric meters — at a time when average U.S. electricity costs are rising faster than inflation (and gasoline and natural gas prices have also spiked, at least temporarily, following the U.S. attacks on Iran).
“That’s a core value proposition for them: driving down costs of their power supply. And then, in tandem with that,” Pianta said, is “the ability to offer members dramatically more affordable resiliency than they would otherwise be able to get.”
Base Power launched in 2023 with a similar offering in parts of Texas where customers can choose their retail electricity provider; the startup sells cheap backup power and a cheap electricity subscription, then dispatches the batteries in ERCOT to recoup the cost of installation. The company then launched a parallel business packaging this concept for utilities in parts of Texas where customers have just one local retailer to pick from. The CoServ collaboration marks the fifth of these deals, and the largest — all five total 180 megawatts.
First, though, Base Power must deliver on this ambitious promise. For the CoServ deal, Base Power sales associates will have to convince some 5,000 homeowners to pay for backup power. Even with a low price, that entails a significant ground game, and will depend on the level of customer interest in battery backup.
Pianta noted that CoServ “already has a very reliable system, so they have very few outages.” That compliment may be constructive for maintaining a strong partnership with the utility, but it runs against the usual marketing playbook for home backup — evoking the risk of being left in the dark by utility failures. This tension is playing out around the country in places where battery vendors have opted to sell their wares in partnership with utilities, instead of running insurgent marketing against them.
This being Texas, memories of the deadly Winter Storm Uri in 2021, which precipitated a systemwide collapse of natural gas and electricity supply, could motivate residents to sign up. The small investment and monthly fee could be an enticing insurance policy for Texans who harbor a healthy skepticism of politicians’ efforts to fortify the state energy system in the wake of that disaster (and the often-politicized response has left plenty of room for skepticism).
Pianta said Base Power will hit the 100-megawatt deployment target by leaning on its vertically integrated business model, in which the company designs, builds, sells, installs, and maintains its batteries, rather than outsourcing those functions.
“Base has been building up for a long time now, both the supply capacity to deliver that type of resource and the deployments engine to develop that local capacity really quickly,” Pianta said. The company is ramping up manufacturing in the former Austin American-Statesman building, and it has reached an installation pace of more than 60 customers per day, for a total of 300 megawatt-hours in operation.
The contract also protects CoServ customers, stipulating that the utility pays only for the capacity that Base Power actually delivers, Pianta said. This aligns incentives between the utility and the startup, giving the latter good reason to move swiftly on installing its batteries.
Longer term, the project will serve as a large-scale test case for decentralized batteries as an effective competitor to traditional fossil-fueled power plants. CoServ leadership thought this would be a good deal for serving its customers’ electricity demand, but the price point for that 100 megawatts matters only if the batteries work en masse. That’s why Base Power retains control and ownership of the batteries: It doesn’t have to worry about homeowners using the batteries in ways that undermine their availability when the utility wants them to discharge.
Beyond the efficacy of the battery network, Base Power must prove its overarching business case: Does paying all the money to build an in-house battery empire pay off in the end? Can the home battery market support a corporate newcomer with a $4 billion valuation and major investment from Silicon Valley royalty like Andreessen Horowitz? The only way to settle those questions is to install a lot more batteries.
One of the most promising low-carbon cement startups, Sublime Systems, has hit a major roadblock in its efforts to scale up production.
The startup said this week that it had laid off about two-thirds of its workforce, having already paused construction in December on its forthcoming commercial-scale facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The actions were in response to the Trump administration clawing back an $87 million award last year from the Department of Energy’s now mostly gutted Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.
The grant, which was meant to help Sublime build the Holyoke manufacturing plant, was swept up in the administration’s broader rollback of billions of dollars in previously awarded funding for projects that curb carbon emissions from industrial facilities.
Ever since then, “the company has faced compounding challenges in assembling the capital stack required to scale our operations,” a Sublime spokesperson said on Thursday in an email to Canary Media. Sublime said its project had been expected to create hundreds of direct and indirect jobs in the region.
Sublime, an MIT spinout, has raised over $200 million in total funding, including the federal grant. The six-year-old company is part of a bigger global push to develop novel ways of making cement, without producing planet-warming pollution in the process.
Traditional cement — which is mixed with sand, gravel, and water to form concrete — is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all cement is made today by heating carbon-rich limestone in fossil-fuel-burning kilns as hot as molten lava.
Sublime’s approach is very different. It involves electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. In March 2024, the Biden administration awarded Sublime and other producers a collective $1.5 billion to slash the carbon impact of cement, as part of a larger $6 billion investment in industrial decarbonization projects.
Before this week’s layoffs, Sublime employed as many as 90 people, and it was making progress around proving its technology and securing key customers, including Microsoft.
Last summer, Sublime completed a “pilot pour” of its low-carbon cement at a data center campus in northern Virginia owned by Stack Infrastructure. And in May, Microsoft signed a binding deal to purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement products — enough to build roughly 30 professional football stadiums — from the startup’s forthcoming manufacturing facilities.
This week’s setback casts doubt on Sublime’s ability to supply Microsoft with that cement, as Bloomberg first reported. The tech giant declined to comment directly on how Sublime’s layoffs might affect Microsoft’s own goals to reduce carbon emissions from infrastructure projects.
However, Microsoft “remains committed to advancing low‑carbon building materials and continues to work with Sublime and a range of partners to support our long‑term sustainability goals,” a spokesperson said by email.
Microsoft has also invested in the clean-cement startup Fortera to support construction of that firm’s 400,000-ton-per-year facility. And it’s partnering with RMI and the Center for Green Market Activation to develop a system enabling companies to purchase “environmental attribute certificates” that represent the emissions reductions provided by cleaner cement and concrete — without actually buying the physical product.
Sublime said it continues to see “strong customer demand and industry backing” and is sticking to its goal of building the first electrochemical cement plants in the United States and Europe by 2030. The startup added that it remains in talks with the Department of Energy to try to restore its award and resume construction on its Holyoke facility.
“Sublime remains strong and well-positioned to continue to attract capital, commercialize its technology and meet market demand,” the company said.
China is accelerating its efforts to clean up heavy industry, allocating money for the first time last year to help hard-to-decarbonize sectors increase the use of fuels such as green hydrogen. The push comes as the country continues building more solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear reactors and expanding its grid faster than anywhere else in the world.
Those two trends are converging to spur the greening of aluminum in particular — a commodity that requires so much power to manufacture that it’s nicknamed “congealed electricity.”
Aluminum production hit a record high last year in China as demand for the alloy, which is used in virtually every kind of electrical application, soared in tandem with the country’s data center boom, according to numbers the National Bureau of Statistics released in January. Prices of the globally traded commodity have spiked by nearly 35% in the past year, meaning that aluminum produced with clean electricity, which comes with a green premium, is more competitive.
At the same time, Beijing’s latest policies to steer its world-leading aluminum smelters away from coal are just taking effect. While the most recent national statistics showed steel production at a seven-year low — a result of the shift away from housing construction — analysts say the surging demand for aluminum could speed up the pace of that industry’s transformation.
“I do expect green aluminum production to pick up, even as other commodities retrench,” said Xinyi Shen, the head of the China team at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, a Finnish nonprofit that tracks Chinese heavy industry. “In China, aluminum decarbonization is progressing … showing stronger policy momentum than steel at the moment.”
There are limits to how quickly the shift can take place. China has for the past decade maintained a cap on aluminum production to prevent smelters from oversupplying and destabilizing the power grid. New production to meet surging demand is quickly approaching that limit, according to a December analysis from the bank ING. But already, the industry is starting to reorient production toward decarbonization.
One way China’s aluminum industry is going green is through recycling. Producing secondary aluminum requires only about 5% of the energy needed to produce primary aluminum, meaning that carbon emissions are typically up to at least 80% lower. Between 2015 and 2024, China’s recycled aluminum output grew by about 6.25% per year, reaching nearly 11 million metric tons in 2024. In March 2025, Beijing set a target of more than 15 million tons of recycled aluminum by 2027.
“This pathway is already cost-competitive and relatively insulated from power-price volatility, so it’s likely to keep expanding even in a softer macro environment,” Shen said.
The other way is by transitioning existing smelters to using clean power. Since nearly 70% of primary aluminum production relies on coal-fired or natural-gas-fired power plants, the sector produces about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The rest is largely powered from hydroelectric dams, next to which older smelters were traditionally sited.
The power-intensive smelting process involves blasting a molten bath of cryolite with an electrical current that separates out dissolved aluminum and yields a molten metal that can be cast into ingots, billets, or bars. In China, where most of the world’s aluminum is produced, the vast majority of that electricity has historically come from coal. Under its new regulations, Beijing wants most of the power that smelters consume to come from renewables.
Last year, aluminum became the first energy-intensive industrial sector subject to a new renewable power mandate requiring green electricity to supply 70% of smelters’ electrons, up from just over 25%.
“Compliance is expected to be met increasingly through green power contracts and renewable-energy certificates, partly in response to both China’s domestic climate goals and emerging international green trade standards,” Shen said.
China has begun shifting its smelting capacity to provinces with excess hydropower or room for wind and solar arrays to offset coal- and gas-fired production.
Even before Beijing mandated that aluminum producers use more renewable power, smelters were already “looking at moving to hydro-rich regions” such as Yunnan province, David Fishman, a Shanghai-based analyst who tracks the Chinese electrical industry at the Lantau Group consultancy, wrote in a thread on X last month.
Wind and solar trailed behind hydropower, nuclear, and coal in the list of the lowest retail power prices in China, Fishman wrote. But he said that buying renewable energy credits was just as valid a solution if those certificates come from vetted, reputable sources in places with expanding production, such as Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang. Still, he noted, relocating to renewables-rich regions “isn’t just about cheap power.”
“It’s also about reducing uncertainty around long-term compliance with rising clean power quotas, which is becoming a C-suite level strategic variable,” Fishman wrote. “This is as true [if] you’re moving the smelter to Yunnan (for all its hydropower) or Xinjiang (where you’re going to have to pursue a wind/solar solution).”
A big open question is whether Chinese companies will start operating new smelters in other countries, and whether those facilities will be powered with renewable electricity, said Seaver Wang, the director of the climate and energy team at the Breakthrough Institute, a research nonprofit in California.
“The next big story in global aluminum is whether Chinese firms start developing overseas, particularly in Indonesia and Vietnam,” Wang said, noting that Indonesian advocates he’d spoken to feared that the facilities would use coal. “With aluminum capacity in China capped, where is the industry spilling over into?”
Rising demand globally for lower-carbon products is spurring on Chinese industry. That’s particularly true now that the European Union’s carbon tariff — the first in the world — took effect in January. Brussels is considering establishing a way to selectively exempt industries from the levies. But the bloc has so far vowed to keep requiring importers to buy carbon certificates to offset the emissions produced during manufacturing.
The China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association rolled out updated rules last year for the certification and trading of “green electricity aluminum,” in a move Shen said was “intended to ensure that low-carbon aluminum carries recognized commercial value in the market, rather than being merely a reporting label.”
Last summer, a Chinese steelmaker scheduled its debut shipment of green steel to a buyer in Italy, carving out the start of a supply chain that would comply with the EU’s carbon tariff. In November, top steel trade associations in Europe and China agreed to work together to create uniform standards for what qualifies as green.
If China’s experience with solar panels and batteries — in which its efforts to meet domestic demand led to a flood of cheap exports — is any indicator, the global market could soon have an influx of green aluminum.
When rockets blast off Earth, they rely on tiny metal powders to help propel them into space. Now, an emerging group of startups and scientists is hoping to harness these particles for something more terrestrial: producing carbon-free energy for factories.
Powdered iron can be combusted in industrial boilers to supply the hot water and steam needed to produce everything from beer and baby formula to paper and plastic resins — without directly emitting carbon dioxide. The concept is about a decade old, but companies are just starting to make serious inroads to put the technology into practice.
Last week, the Dutch startup Renewable Iron Fuel Technology, or Rift, said it raised almost 114 million euros ($131 million) in private financing and public grants to develop its first commercial project, making it a front-runner in the space. Rift already operates two pilot units in the Netherlands. With the new investment, the firm plans to build a fuel-production plant and deploy its boilers in about 10 industrial facilities in Europe, the first of which is set to fire up in 2029.
“This represents a concrete step toward decarbonizing industrial heat at scale,” said Mark Verhagen, CEO of the Eindhoven-based Rift.
Around the world, most factories burn fossil fuels to get the heat they need for industrial processes, which is why the sector accounts for more than one-third of energy-related CO2 pollution globally. Rift estimates that its current system can reduce emissions by almost 80%, on a life-cycle basis, when compared with those of a fossil-gas-fired boiler.
The startup is seeking to scale at a pressing time in the European Union, where manufacturers are facing tighter restrictions on emissions and new policies aimed at shifting factories toward cleaner heat sources. The region is also grappling with ballooning gas prices caused by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine — and now the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran.
Rift’s approach replaces gas with iron, a highly energy-dense and abundant element that is ground down to resemble sand.
The startup begins by putting iron powder in a specialized boiler, then injecting air and making a little spark that yields a big flame. As the iron burns, it produces heat that can be used directly for manufacturing or district-heating networks. To start, Rift is focused on supplying medium-temperature heat, of around 250 degrees Celsius (482 degrees Fahrenheit).
“The only product that remains are the ashes,” Verhagen said.
Rift will initially use a small amount of virgin iron powder, sourced from industrial suppliers. But the goal is to continually recycle the ashes — which are pure iron oxide — to make new fuel. When combined with low-carbon hydrogen, iron oxide splits into water and iron powder, the latter of which will be returned to the boiler.
As a technology, iron fuel has plenty of hurdles to overcome before it can replace gas in factories. Researchers are still improving the iron-combustion process and the techniques for collecting iron oxide. Companies need to build up supply chains for sourcing and recycling iron powder. And using green hydrogen — the kind made with renewable energy — for fuel production remains challenging, given that supplies are limited and costly.
Developers also need to bring down their production costs in order to compete with the incumbent fossil fuels. Rift, for its part, is working to improve its economic performance with the buildout of its first commercial project, Verhagen noted. The company says it can currently deliver iron fuel for a price of 140 euros per metric ton.
The investment round announced on March 3 includes more than 83 million euros in Series B funding, led by the Dutch pension fund PGGM, as well as a grant of nearly 31 million euros from the EU’s Innovation Fund. Rift had previously raised 11 million euros from investors in 2024, which enabled it to conduct durability tests at its two pilot projects.
“We have closely followed Rift’s development and see strong potential for tangible industrial impact,” Tim van den Brule, investment director at PGGM Infrastructure, said in a press release. “Many industrial innovations stall in the transition from demonstration to realization,” he added, which is why the firm is providing Rift with capital “through to execution.”
Rift is not alone in this fledgling field. Other players include the Dutch startup Iron+ and the Canadian firms Altiro Energy, FeX Energy, and GH Power, along with Ferron Energy in Australia and Fenix Energy in France.
The companies can all trace their roots to early research efforts led by Philip de Goey from Eindhoven University of Technology and Jeff Bergthorson from Montreal’s McGill University. The professors were inspired to pursue metal fuels for energy purposes after observing how powders burned at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. In particular, they saw iron powder as an appealing alternative to gaseous hydrogen fuel — which has been held up as a more direct replacement for fossil gas but is difficult to store and transport.
In 2020, Eindhoven researchers and students, including Verhagen, built their first 100-kilowatt iron fuel boiler at a nearby brewery. That year, Rift spun out of the student team, with support from the Bill Gates–led Breakthrough Energy Fellows program. The startup later launched a 1-megawatt system that provides heating to some 500 homes in the Dutch city of Helmond; it operates another pilot unit at a cleantech park in Arnhem.
In 2025, Rift signed its first customer contract with the Dutch firm Kingspan Unidek, which makes building insulation and plans to install an iron-fueled boiler at one of its plants.
Verhagen said that, as well as with slotting into existing operations like Kingspan’s, the technology could also work alongside other types of clean-heat solutions that are gaining momentum globally, such as thermal batteries, which store electricity to provide on-demand heat, and highly efficient industrial heat pumps.
Iron fuel could serve as the “baseload” source that supplements electrified technologies, or that kicks in when electricity prices are high or otherwise constrained. “We see that there’s a unique fit” for Rift’s system, he said.
Green-steel startup Boston Metal has suffered a major setback following an industrial accident at its facility in Brazil.
The Massachusetts-based company announced it will lay off 71 people in the U.S. after the incident at its Brazilian plant last month thwarted a key funding deal, Boston Business Journal first reported. The turn of events was “sudden, dramatic, and unexpected,” company sources told the news outlet.
Boston Metal is among the handful of well-funded startups advancing newer and cleaner ways of making steel — a process that traditionally relies on polluting, coal-fueled furnaces. Since spinning out of MIT in 2013, the company has raised over $400 million from a range of investors, including global steel giant ArcelorMittal, the venture-capital arm of oil giant Saudi Aramco, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund.
On Jan. 30, Boston Metal experienced an “unforeseen critical equipment failure” in its manufacturing facility in Brazil, the company told Canary Media in a statement on Monday. Although the incident was “fully contained, with no injuries or environmental impact,” the equipment damage prevented Boston Metal from hitting an operational milestone that was tied to a pending financing transaction.
“As a result, we lost access to committed capital essential to supporting our operations in both Brazil and the U.S.,” the company said, forcing the need to reduce its American workforce. Before the accident, Boston Metal employed over 300 professionals in the United States and Brazil.
Globally, steel production accounts for between 7% and 9% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. The bulk of that pollution comes from heating coal to transform iron ore into iron, which is turned into higher-strength steel in a separate furnace. While companies like Stegra and SSAB, both in Sweden, are looking to replace coal with green hydrogen in the ironmaking stage, Boston Metal is attempting to reinvent this process entirely.
The startup is developing a novel approach called “molten oxide electrolysis,” which involves using electric current to heat iron ore to around 1,600 degrees Celsius to drive chemical reactions, without emitting any carbon dioxide. The resulting material then cools into blocks of steel.
Last March, Boston Metal said it had moved one step closer to commercializing its technology after successfully producing steel from its industrial-size system in the Boston suburb of Woburn. The accomplishment “de-risks our technology and validates scalability to achieve commercial production,” the company said in a press release.
Yet as Boston Metal works to refine its green-steel system, it has also been pursuing projects in Brazil that it hopes could become a reliable source of revenue in the nearer term.
Boston Metal’s same molten oxide electrolysis process can be used to extract high-value metals such as niobium, chromium, and manganese from mine-waste tailings. That could reduce the need for other companies to pull those materials directly from the earth.
Adam Rauwerdink, Boston Metal’s senior vice president of business development, told Canary Media last June that the company was initially focusing on extracting and selling niobium — a valuable alloying element used in steel production — to start bringing in money. At the time, niobium sold for about $82 per kilogram (about $74,000 per ton), while steel went for roughly $900 per ton.
Prior to last month’s accident, Boston Metal said it had already restructured its business to concentrate on advancing its operations in critical metals. “There is strong near-term demand for critical metals, while the cost and complexity of developing molten oxide electrolysis [for steel] have outpaced what our current revenue and available capital can support,” the company said in this week’s statement.
Boston Metal’s Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil, built and began operating a pilot facility in the state of Minas Gerais in 2023. Last year, it completed construction on an industrial critical-metals plant, and the subsidiary was set to start “generating revenue with industrial-scale production” this year, according to a company fact sheet.
Though Boston Metal says it will press ahead with its high-value metals strategy, it’s unclear how the industrial accident in Brazil will affect that production timeline or impact Boston Metal’s broader expansion plans in the United States. The announcement of layoffs in Massachusetts comes shortly after the office of Democratic Gov. Maura Healey awarded Boston Metal over $950,000 in capital grants to upgrade its Woburn operations — public backing that was reportedly expected to lead to local job growth.
“In the coming months, our priority will be restoring operations in Brazil and scaling the critical metals business in Brazil, the U.S., and internationally,” the company said.
Form Energy invented a novel iron-air battery to store clean energy for much longer timeframes than conventional lithium-ion batteries can. The startup is still constructing its first commercial project, in Minnesota, but today revealed it has clinched a potentially game-changing follow-up in the same state to support a Google data center.
The utility Xcel Energy will install 300 megawatts of Form’s batteries in Pine Island, Minnesota. It’s a big battery installation for the Midwest, but developers have built several grid storage plants elsewhere with more megawatt capacity. What shoots this project into the energy-storage stratosphere is that it will dispatch energy for up to 100 hours straight — enough to pump clean energy through multiday weather patterns that would limit renewable production. That unique capability means the Pine Island Form plant, fully charged, will hold 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, an astonishing amount for the grid as we know it.
The deal is also notable in that it proves Form has found commercial traction even before its first installation for a utility customer is complete. That outcome was possible because Xcel has seen Form develop its technology for years, said Form CEO Mateo Jaramillo, who co-founded the firm in 2017.
“Xcel in particular has been with us through every step of the journey — when the chemistry was in a very small bucket, essentially, to complete deployed systems,” Jaramillo said. “They saw the challenging things that we worked through. They saw us solve hard problems. They saw us come out the other side.”
The arrangement also offers one of the clearest examples yet of how tech giants could power their data centers with clean energy without raising costs for regular customers, if those companies care to try.
Under the agreement, Google will pay Xcel to build 1.4 gigawatts of wind and 200 megawatts of solar. Those resources make cheap, clean power, but they can’t match a data center’s 24/7 operating profile. That’s where the Form batteries come in: They can charge up whenever renewable production exceeds momentary demand and then deliver on-demand power for more than four days.
For anyone still concerned about climate change, that’s an enticing vision at a time when the titans of AI seem happy to toss clean energy out the window. Amazon and Meta have readily endorsed major fossil-gas-plant construction to power their AI sites. Just this week, SoftBank subsidiary SB Energy, which has been an avid clean energy developer, teamed up with the Trump White House to propose the biggest fossil-gas power plant in the world to help fuel the AI computing build-out. Other companies have turned to less efficient, smaller-scale fossil-fueled generators to hack together enough power for their data center plans, as chronicled by analyst Michael Thomas.
Xcel, which provides electricity to nearly 4 million people across eight states, also took great care in its statement to describe the data center not as serving the general AI arms race, but as one that “will support core services — including Workspace, Search, YouTube and Maps — that people, communities and businesses use every day.”
The companies also took steps to protect Xcel’s other customers from price impacts to serve the data center: “Google will cover any new grid infrastructure costs associated with the project and has planned carefully with Xcel Energy to ensure electricity in the area remains reliable and affordable for all of Xcel Energy’s customers,” the utility noted.
This arrangement lets Xcel pitch the data center as something that actually helps the broader Minnesota community: It will bring investment, construction jobs, and higher clean-energy generation — all without increasing electricity bills at a time when they’re rising fast in much of the country.
Potentially transformative new battery technologies tend to get trapped in yearslong cycles of small-scale pilots and demonstrations, before utilities feel comfortable spending their customers’ dollars on the new thing. Some caution is warranted, as far more novel battery startups have gone bankrupt than have built at multi-megawatt scale. And again, even Form has yet to finish its first commercial installation.
In this case, however, Google is picking up the (still undisclosed) bill. If the batteries don’t work as advertised, that could frustrate Google’s carbon accounting, but Xcel customers would not be on the hook.
Form demonstrated its capabilities with internal installations that Xcel could examine, Jaramillo noted. The startup has also been honing its production quality at its factory in the former steel town of Weirton, West Virginia — a process that required making 60 miles of electrode materials, he noted.
“They don’t treat us like mom and give us cookies when we feel bad — they hold us to a very high standard,” Jaramillo said of Xcel. “And we want them to feel good about the product, that it’s safe, that it’s reliable, that it scales.”
Form expects to start delivering batteries to the utility in 2028. That year, the Weirton factory is supposed to reach 500 megawatts of annual production capacity, so the Pine Island project will represent a major share of Form’s manufacturing operations. Xcel expects the clean energy installations to come online in phases from 2028 to 2031.
Meanwhile, its initial project in Minnesota — which was supposed to come online in 2023 — is now set to finish installation this year.
The nascent long-duration storage sector has needed eager patrons to give the technology a shot. Form clinched its first, much smaller contracts with vertically integrated utilities that could take a more holistic long-term planning view than the fast-paced competitive power markets allow for. Now, the data center build-out brings potential customers with mountains of cash and a burning desire to move quickly — an ideal pairing for Form, which has a factory and a need to prove its worth
An update was made on Feb. 25, 2026: New information about Xcel Energy’s timeline for building the clean energy projects was added.
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