A growing group of Israeli startups believes hydrogen could be part of the answer.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and it’s available in water and in the air. It’s the building block of life. But producing it cleanly is difficult and expensive. Saudi Arabia has invested in green hydrogen but for the most part it is not financially viable. It was like biogas in the early days – more expensive than fossil fuels.

Most hydrogen today is made from natural gas, which releases carbon emissions. So-called “green hydrogen” is created using renewable electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but the process remains costly. That’s where some new Israeli innovation is stepping in.

H2Pro Wants to Reinvent Electrolysis

Caesarea-based H2Pro has become one of Israel’s most closely watched hydrogen companies. Founded on research from the Technion (Israel’s version of MIT), the startup is developing a membrane-free process called Decoupled Water Electrolysis (DWE). Instead of generating hydrogen and oxygen simultaneously, H2Pro separates the reactions into different stages. The company says this could reduce costs, improve safety, and allow systems to work more easily with intermittent solar and wind power. When it comes to membrane tech, Israel is a leader having developed earliest technologies in desalination to solve major freshwater problems.

The company has attracted backing from major investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate fund founded by Bill Gates, along with industrial partners such as Sumitomo, ArcelorMittal, and Temasek, a multi-billion dollar company that owns Singapore airlines. H2Pro has raised more than $100 million USD and is moving from pilot projects toward commercial-scale deployments.

Taking Israeli Hydrogen Abroad

One of the most interesting developments is happening far from Israel.

This year H2Pro partnered with Doral Hydrogen on a solar-powered hydrogen project in Spain designed to run entirely off-grid. The first phase combines solar power with a 5-megawatt hydrogen system and is intended to demonstrate that hydrogen production can operate directly from renewable energy without batteries or grid backup.

If successful, the model could be attractive for sunny regions across the Middle East and North Africa where solar resources are abundant.

Why Hydrogen Matters

Hydrogen is unlikely to replace every gasoline car or home heating system. Batteries coupled with solar power panels, geothermal energy collection systems or wind energy trubines, are often more efficient for those jobs. But hydrogen has advantages where batteries struggle: steel manufacturing, fertilizer production, shipping, aviation fuels, seasonal energy storage, and industrial heat.

The challenge here is cost.

For years, the hydrogen industry has chased the goal of producing green hydrogen for about $1 per kilogram. Israeli startups are increasingly focused on making that target realistic through new electrolyzer designs, lower-cost materials, and systems that can operate flexibly alongside renewable energy.

Israel became a global cybersecurity hub. Then it helped reshape irrigation technology. Hydrogen may be one of the country’s next major climate-tech bets.

The post Israeli Hydrogen Startup H2Pro Are Trying to Solve Clean Energy’s Hardest Problem appeared first on Green Prophet.

For years, Green Prophet has followed the strange, persistent dream of harvesting energy from roads. Back in the early 2010s, Israel experimented with piezoelectric roads in Tel Aviv, when Innowwatech tested whether pressure from passing cars could generate electricity. Then in 2020 a pilot happened with Electreon and Dan Bus company and we haven’t had an update since.

Similar ideas appeared in Italy, California, and South Korea. Most never scaled beyond pilot projects because the technology struggled with durability, efficiency, or economics. There is cost of laying down new infrastructure, stopping traffic, and dealing with snow, rain and intense heat.

Now an Austrian startup called REPS says it has solved part of that equation.

This week the company announced a $23.6 million equity financing round to scale what it calls the Road Energy Production System (REPS), a “road power plant” that captures kinetic energy from vehicles and converts it into electricity.

Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, the system, according to materials the company sent Green Prophet, does not depend on sunshine, cloud cover, or wind speed. Instead it harvests energy already being wasted every day when trucks brake, slow down, or roll through heavy infrastructure zones.

“Roads are everywhere. Traffic is everywhere. What was previously wasted energy can now be transformed into clean electricity through REPS,” said Alfons Huber, founder and CEO of REPS. The old dream of piezoelectric roads is coming true.

Around 15 years ago, Green Prophet covered piezoelectric energy systems embedded beneath roads and sidewalks. The theory was elegant: when vehicles drive over specially designed materials, the pressure creates small electrical charges. Multiply that by thousands of cars a day and suddenly highways become power stations.

Israel was among the early experimenters. Tel Aviv explored pilot systems designed to capture the vibrations and weight of passing traffic. Similar trials emerged in Europe and Asia. The promise was enormous — roads that could light street lamps, power nearby infrastructure, or feed electricity back into the grid.

But the technology faced serious obstacles. Many piezoelectric systems produced only tiny amounts of electricity. Others wore down under heavy truck traffic. Some became too expensive to maintain once exposed to rain, heat, road salt, and constant vibration.

REPS argues that previous attempts failed because the converters themselves were inefficient and fragile. The company says its system “delivers 254x higher efficiency than the next-best alternative currently on the market.”

That is a bold claim, though one that will likely need long-term independent validation as deployments scale.

Hamburg becomes the first test case

The company’s first commercial installation has been running at the Port of Hamburg since November 2025. According to REPS, more than 115,000 trucks have already crossed the system, generating over 6,700 kWh of electricity.

The idea is simple in principle: Instead of laying entirely new roads, REPS installs modular systems directly into existing infrastructure, particularly in places where vehicles already slow down naturally: port entrances, loading areas, logistics hubs, toll areas, curves, or steep approaches.

In other words, the system works best where momentum is already being lost to braking traffic: “Where vehicles have to brake anyway, clean energy is recovered and can be used directly where we need it,” said Justin Karnbach, CEO of Hamburger Container Service GmbH.

That makes ports especially attractive. Heavy trucks create large mechanical forces, traffic patterns are predictable, and energy demand is concentrated nearby.

The bigger story may not be about roads alone: It is about retrofitting infrastructure rather than rebuilding it.

Most cities cannot afford to tear up roads entirely to create futuristic smart infrastructure. But modular systems that can be inserted into existing roads could potentially make energy harvesting more realistic financially.

REPS says a large rollout across Hamburg’s port roads could generate around 10 GWh annually, while a hypothetical deployment across Dubai could recover roughly 3.2 TWh per year.

Those projections remain theoretical for now. But the interest is real. The company says it is already in discussions with more than 90 port-related organizations across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America.

One reason road-energy systems have struggled historically is climate. In northern countries, snow, ice, freeze-thaw cycles, and road salt can destroy delicate infrastructure beneath pavement. Any mechanical system embedded in roads must survive enormous pressure, moisture, corrosion, and temperature swings.

Ports like Hamburg are useful proving grounds precisely because they face harsh winters and heavy industrial traffic simultaneously.

Desert climates present a different challenge. Roads in places like Dubai or Saudi Arabia endure relentless UV radiation and extreme surface temperatures that can soften asphalt and stress electronics. That is why REPS’ emphasis on durability matters almost as much as efficiency. The company says its technology was designed to operate under “heavy traffic conditions for more than 20 years.”

If that proves true, the implications could be significant for Gulf countries already investing heavily in smart-city infrastructure.

Unlike solar farms, which require large land areas and cleaning regimes in dusty environments, road-harvesting systems could potentially piggyback on infrastructure cities already maintain.

Beyond the gold-plated supercar era of Dubai

There is also something symbolically interesting happening here. For years, Gulf car culture often revolved around spectacle: gold-plated Lamborghinis, chrome-wrapped Mercedes-Benz SUVs, fleets of exotic supercars baking beneath Dubai sun with cheetahs riding shotgun.

Now some of the same regions are becoming laboratories for infrastructure-scale sustainability experiments. Instead of merely celebrating traffic, the question becomes: can traffic itself produce value?

That shift mirrors broader changes happening across the Middle East, where governments are investing in energy transition projects, AI-driven infrastructure, desalination technology, and climate adaptation systems.

The road itself may be becoming part of the power grid.

Many road-energy concepts have looked promising in pilot phases only to stall under maintenance costs or real-world economics. But REPS is entering the market at a moment when cities and ports are under pressure to decarbonize rapidly without waiting decades for massive infrastructure rebuilds.

The company believes roads could become decentralized energy assets: “We spent six years developing the technology. Now the scaling phase begins,” said Huber.

Green Prophet has watched these ideas evolve for almost 20 years — from piezoelectric experiments in Tel Aviv to kinetic sidewalks that glow in Europe to now industrial-scale road harvesting in Hamburg.

But for the first time, the road-to-electricity concept appears to be moving beyond the science fair stage and into commercial freight infrastructure.

The post Collecting kinetic energy from roads; REPS turns traffic into a power plant appeared first on Green Prophet.

AI may unintentionally become the economic engine that finally modernizes America’s aging grid. California is experiencing a massive AI data center boom, ranking 3rd in the U.S. with 227 operating centers and 54 more in development as of April 2026, according to Stanford.

AI is triggering a new energy panic in America. Across the US states of California, Virginia, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, residents are pushing back against the explosive growth of data centers powering artificial intelligence. People are worried about rising electricity bills, water use, backup diesel generators, massive transmission lines, and entire landscapes being transformed into server farms. They worry about the expansion and the business around it and believe that AI data centers will exploit the land, and give back little to the people in the communities.

The energy demand from AI is unlike anything the internet economy has seen before. Goldman Sachs estimates data center electricity demand could rise more than 160% by 2030. Utilities that spent years planning for flat electricity growth are suddenly scrambling to build power generation again. In places like Northern Virginia, now nicknamed “Data Center Alley,” local resistance has become fierce. Residents complain about noise, visual pollution, water consumption, and fears that ordinary households will subsidize the AI boom through higher utility costs.

But there’s another side to the story that should be getting attention instead of fear. Renewable energy projects like SunZia — the giant new wind and transmission project connecting New Mexico wind power to California — may show how the AI boom could also accelerate the renewable energy transition.

SunZia is enormous:

• 3.5 gigawatts of wind energy
• a 550-mile high-voltage transmission line
• enough electricity for roughly 3 million people
• one of the largest renewable infrastructure projects in North American history.

And it’s arriving at exactly the right moment. The question is how does it scale without becoming an out of date boondoggle like the Ivanpah solar energy project? We interviewed Moshe Luz, one of the executives and founders of the company who has ideas up for grabs.

California already produces huge amounts of daytime solar energy, but AI workloads continue around the clock. Solar fades in the evening just as electricity demand rises. So the innovation doesn’t need to come in adding more solar panels, it’s the need for better battery storage and nighttime renewables. Wind, wave, and geothermal might help.

SunZia’s New Mexico wind profile helps solve that problem because wind often strengthens later in the day and overnight. Instead of relying entirely on natural gas plants after sunset, California can increasingly balance its grid using distant wind resources combined with battery storage.

The project is already beginning to send electricity into California while final testing continues. SunZia is not alone.

Across the American West, a quiet clean-energy arms race is emerging around AI infrastructure.

In California’s Kern County, the Edwards & Sanborn project combines nearly 900 megawatts of solar with one of the world’s largest battery systems. In Nevada, the Gemini Solar project near Las Vegas pairs utility-scale solar with giant batteries designed to stabilize evening demand.

Texas has become perhaps the most radical experiment of all. Massive wind farms, sprawling solar installations, and grid-scale batteries are now increasingly handling short demand spikes that were once served by gas “peaker” plants. Texas leads America in wind energy, boasting over 30,000 MW of capacity from over 150 wind farms as of 2020, often supplying over 20% of the state’s electricity.

Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft are investing in enhanced geothermal energy projects in Nevada and Utah. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal can run 24 hours a day, making it attractive for AI-driven electricity demand that never sleeps.

The bigger shift underway is that AI may unintentionally become the economic engine that finally modernizes America’s aging grid.

For decades, utilities hesitated to build large transmission systems because electricity demand grew slowly. Now AI companies, cloud providers, and electrification trends are forcing states to rethink energy infrastructure entirely.

Ironically, the same technology many fear could overheat the planet may also become one of the biggest drivers of renewable energy investment in modern history.

There are tradeoffs.

Projects like SunZia still face lawsuits from Indigenous groups who argue transmission corridors damage sacred landscapes and fragile ecosystems. It’s difficult to get ecological assessments across state lines. Renewable energy itself is now colliding with difficult questions about land use, mining prime materials, water, and who benefits from “green growth.”

The post AI data centers are triggering panic, instead of cleantech opportunities appeared first on Green Prophet.

A vast and largely untapped lithium reserve may be hiding beneath one of North America’s oldest landscapes, the Appalachian Mountains, offering a surprising twist in the global race for clean energy materials. According to new findings from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as much as 2.5 million tons of lithium could be buried across the region, stretching from the Carolinas up through New England.

For a world scrambling to electrify everything from cars to power grids, that number is staggering. At current consumption levels, this reserve could replace more than 300 years of US lithium imports, which is used in the energy sector for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, future Tesla freight trucks, in battery storage systems and in laptops.

Scientists estimate it could supply enough material for millions of grid-scale batteries or tens of millions of electric vehicles; these are technologies essential for transitioning away from fossil fuels.

What makes this discovery particularly compelling is its origin story. The Appalachian Mountains formed roughly 480 million years ago during ancient continental collisions that created intense heat and pressure deep underground. These conditions gave rise to pegmatites which are coarse-grained rocks known to host lithium-rich minerals such as spodumene and lepidolite, widely used in modern battery production.

Researchers have identified up to 18 lithium-rich districts along the mountain chain. Some areas are already known, like the Carolina tin-spodumene belt, while others such as deposits in Maine, contain massive crystals and show strong potential for future extraction. The study also divided the region into three “domains,” with one standing out as especially promising due to its high likelihood of undiscovered deposits.

But while the scale of the resource is exciting, the path forward we know will not be simple. It took Sunzia years to get approvals for their wind turbines mapped out. Indiginous tribes, animal rights organisations, ecologists.  Mining lithium, especially in ecologically sensitive and densely populated regions like the Appalachians, raises serious environmental questions. No one wants mining in their backyard or running close to their streams or groundwater. Water use, land disruption, and the impact on local communities will all need to be weighed carefully against the benefits of domestic supply.

Lithium is entering our food chain with untold future consequences. Lithium batteries are a growing source of pollution in the US.

There’s also a broader geopolitical angle. Today, China dominates much of the global lithium processing and battery supply chain. A significant US discovery could shift that balance once and for all, strengthening domestic energy security and reducing reliance on foreign sources.

Up until now this is just a promise and a bargaining card the US can wager in future car manufacturing and energy negotiations. For now, the Appalachian Mountains, the ones John Denver sang about, and known for coal and timber, may be quietly holding the keys to a cleaner energy future.

Meanwhile Afghanistan is holding a large reserve of lithium.

The post Appalachian lithium could supply America with EV batteries for 300 years appeared first on Green Prophet.

Unlike solar power on Earth, which is limited by night cycles, weather, and seasons, the Moon offers something close to uninterrupted exposure to the Sun. By placing solar infrastructure in orbit or along the lunar surface, engineers could generate continuous clean energy at a scale that may exceed global electricity demand,  the Japanese scientists say.

The concept relies on wireless power transmission, converting solar energy into microwaves or lasers and beaming it to receiving stations on Earth. While this might sound like science fiction, the underlying technologies are already being tested in smaller applications.

If successful, a lunar solar ring could solve one of renewable energy’s biggest challenges: intermittency. Instead of relying on storage systems or backup fossil fuels, power would flow steadily, day and night.

Related: America’s biggest renewable energy station SunZia just went online

But the challenges are immense. Building infrastructure on the Moon would require breakthroughs in space transport, robotics, and materials engineering. Costs would be astronomical, and questions remain about efficiency, safety, and geopolitical control of such a system.

Still, the proposal reflects a growing shift in thinking. As energy demand rises and climate pressures intensify, researchers are beginning to look beyond Earth-bound solutions. Space-based solar power, once dismissed as impractical, is being reconsidered as part of a long-term energy strategy.

The Moon, long a symbol of exploration, could become something else entirely: a power station for a planet in transition.

Whether this vision becomes reality or remains speculative, it signals something important. The future of clean energy may not just be about improving what we have on Earth—but about expanding where we look for it.

The post Japan wants to build a solar panel ring around the moon appeared first on Green Prophet.

Professor Ji-Soo Jang, in collaboration with Professor Taekwang Yoon of Ajou University and Professor Hansel Kim of Chungbuk National University, has developed a novel energy device that generates electricity during the process of capturing greenhouse gases.

The research team introduced a new concept device termed the Gas Capture and Electricity Generator (GCEG), which produces electrical power as greenhouse gases are adsorbed from the atmosphere. This innovation goes beyond conventional approaches that merely capture greenhouse gases, transforming them into a usable energy resource.

Professor Ji-Soo Jang stated, “This research demonstrates that greenhouse gases are not merely pollutants to be managed, but can serve as a new energy resource. We aim to further develop this technology into an environmental platform that not only achieves carbon neutrality but also generates energy.”

Amid growing global efforts to address climate change, carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies have gained attention. However, existing CCUS systems typically require substantial energy input for gas collection and processing.

To overcome this limitation, the research team proposed a fundamentally new mechanism that directly converts the physicochemical energy generated during gas adsorption on electrode surfaces into electrical energy.

The developed GCEG device consists of an asymmetric structure combining carbon-based electrodes with hydrogel materials. When greenhouse gases such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) or carbon dioxide (CO₂) are adsorbed, charge redistribution and ion migration occur within the device, enabling continuous direct current (DC) power generation without any external power source. In essence, atmospheric pollutants act as the “fuel” for electricity generation, simultaneously purifying the environment while supplying energy.

This technology is expected to be widely applicable in self-powered smart environmental sensors, battery-free IoT systems, and industrial facilities where large volumes of emissions are generated. In such settings, it could enable simultaneous energy harvesting and carbon reduction. In particular, its integration into distributed energy systems is anticipated to accelerate the realization of carbon neutrality.

The research findings were published in Energy & Environmental Science, one of the world’s leading journals in materials science.

There are a few adjacent spaces and players working toward similar goals, though not always in exactly the same way.

Carbon capture and utilization startups like CarbonCure, Climeworks, and LanzaTech are not generating electricity from CO₂, but they are treating emissions as a resource, turning them into concrete, fuels, or chemicals. The philosophy is similar: carbon is not just waste.

Several academic groups, including teams at MIT, Stanford, and across Europe, are working on electrochemical carbon capture using electro-swing adsorption. These systems use electricity to capture and release CO₂ more efficiently, though they are not fully self-powered like GCEG.

There is also a growing field of micro-energy harvesting—technologies that generate small amounts of power from heat differences, humidity, motion, or chemical gradients. The GCEG fits into this category, but with a twist: the “fuel” is pollution itself.

Other experimental systems generate electricity from moisture in the air or from ion movement. These rely on similar physical principles, using natural gradients, but are not specifically designed to capture greenhouse gases.

The post Korean researchers create battery from greenhouse gases appeared first on Green Prophet.

After nearly two decades of planning, delays, and persistence, the largest renewable energy project in America’s history has begun generating electricity. (Ivanpah could have been a success were it not for politics). The SunZia Wind project is now sending vast amounts of wind power from New Mexico to California, marking a major milestone in the country’s transition to clean energy.

At full scale, SunZia is enormous. The project includes 916 wind turbines and a 3.5-gigawatt capacity, enough to supply electricity to around 3 million people across California and Arizona. Power travels along a 550-mile transmission line, which is an essential piece of infrastructure that connects remote wind resources to urban demand.

The impact is already being felt. California has broken its wind generation record multiple times in recent weeks as SunZia begins feeding electricity into the grid. It’s a glimpse of what a renewable-powered future could look like when large-scale infrastructure finally comes online. Can we start saying goodbye to Saudi Aramco and Arabian Gulf oil?

Related: There are the major wind farms in the Middle East

Probably not for a while. As much as we create, the gurd eats more. Electricity demand in the western United States is surging, driven by population growth, electrification, and the rapid expansion of data centers used for crypto currency mining and artificial intelligence. SunZia arrives at a moment when utilities are under pressure to deliver more power, without increasing emissions.

SunZia not only cuts carbon pollution but it also help replace natural gas plants, particularly in communities already burdened by pollution.

One of SunZia’s unique advantages is when it generates power. Unlike solar, which peaks during the day, wind production often increases at night, precisely when California relies more heavily on fossil fuels. That makes SunZia a strategic complement to the state’s existing renewable mix.

The road to completion has not been simple. First proposed in 2006, the project faced years of permitting challenges, including concerns from environmental groups, Native American tribes, and the US military. Routing changes and ongoing legal discussions reflect the complexity of building infrastructure at this scale.

Still, SunZia represents something bigger than a single project. It shows that the United States is entering a new phase of the energy transition, one where renewable energy is not just about generation, but about moving power across long distances at scale.

About SunZia

SunZia Wind and Transmission is owned and developed by Pattern Energy, one of the largest renewable energy companies in the United States, led by CEO Hunter Armistead and President Kristina Lund, who oversee the project’s strategy, execution, and integration into the US grid.

Originally advanced by SouthWestern Power Group and New Mexico’s Renewable Energy Transmission Authority, the project has grown into the largest clean energy infrastructure build in US history, with total costs estimated between $8.8 billion and $11 billion.

Financing was secured through a major green loan syndicate including global banks such as BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, ING, Natixis, Société Générale, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Wells Fargo, with key administrative roles held by Deutsche Bank.

Industrial partners and suppliers include turbine manufacturers GE Vernova and Vestas, which delivered and installed hundreds of turbines across the project. SunZia has created thousands of construction and engineering jobs across New Mexico and Arizona, while generating long-term economic benefits through land leases, tax revenues, and infrastructure investment, positioning it as a cornerstone project in scaling renewable energy across the American West.

The post SunZia comes online and America’s 11B, and largest renewable project begins wind power appeared first on Green Prophet.

As missiles fly and oil traders panic, one thing is becoming brutally clear: a world powered by more renewables is a world less exposed to political violence, fuel blackmail by Iran and Saudi Aramco, and petro-instability that have long haunted the Middle East.

According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), a UN-like energy body based in Abu Dhabi, the world added a record 692 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power capacity in 2025, bringing the global total to 5,149 GW.

Renewables made up 85.6% of all new power capacity added worldwide, while fossil fuel and other non-renewable additions continued to shrink in relative importance. That matters far beyond climate, I believe.

When countries generate more of their own electricity from solar, wind, hydro and bioenergy, they become less vulnerable to oil and gas chokepoints, tanker wars, Red Sea Houthi pirates, Iranian mullahs, price spikes, and the geopolitics of regimes and armed movements that have historically benefited from fossil fuel dependence. Renewables do not solve extremism on their own, but they do weaken the leverage of fuel-dependent systems that have helped finance instability across the region.

“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”

IRENA, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, is the world’s leading intergovernmental agency for the renewable energy transition. It has 171 members and additional countries in accession, and serves as a technical and policy hub for governments trying to decarbonize while improving energy security. Abu Dhabi is its permanent headquarters.

The biggest gains in 2025 came from solar power, which added 511 GW, followed by wind at 159 GW. Together, those two technologies accounted for 96.8% of all new renewable additions globally.

Asia dominated, contributing 74.2% of all new renewable capacity, with 513.3 GW added. China remained the giant, especially in solar, wind, and hydropower, according to IRENA. This doesn’t mean they are a green economy however, because as China grows so does its dependence on fossil fuels. They are not regulated in any way for carbon emissions and tend to do what they want while the rest of the world plants trees and trades carbon credits.

India also posted strong wind and hydro gains. In Africa, renewable capacity rose by 15.9%, its fastest jump yet, led by Ethiopia, South Africa, and Egypt. The Middle East recorded its highest annual growth too, rising 28.9%, led by Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud knows they cannot survive on oil alone in the future. They have also been investing in green hydrogen.

The map is wildly uneven. Europe now holds 934 GW in total renewable capacity, while Central America and the Caribbean remain stuck at just 21 GW. That imbalance is not just unfair; it is also dangerous. Countries with low renewable penetration remain more exposed to imported fuel shocks, debt, and fragile grids.

The world’s next focus should be obvious: grid expansion, battery storage solutions, off-grid solar, and finance for poorer countries. It is not enough to install panels in China as its economy keeps building endless factories and call it a transition.

“This not only indicates market preference but also makes a strong case for renewable energy resilience with brutal clarity,” La Camera said. And in a world where oil routes can still trigger global panic overnight, resilience is no longer a climate luxury, it is national security.

The post Renewables hit 5,149 GW in 2025 as the world edges away from oil shocks and fossil-fueled conflict appeared first on Green Prophet.

For centuries people living in hot climates have tried to cool buildings without electricity. Long before air conditioning, architecture itself acted as the cooling system. It’s called using passive energy. In Iran, for example, traditional homes used wind catchers, known as badgirs, tall towers that captured breezes and funneled cooler air down into homes. These passive ventilation systems have been used for thousands of years across the Middle East and can naturally cool buildings by directing airflow and expelling hot air.

In hot climates like the Middle East and North Africa, homes were also designed around inner courtyards with pools and shaded gardens, allowing for privacy, but also for cool air to circulate through thick mud-brick walls and shaded spaces during the day. In some cases, underground spaces connected to aqueducts or water channels were used to further cool incoming air before it entered the building.

Modern sustainable architecture has tried to rediscover these ancient ideas. Over the years we have covered everything from white roof paint that reflects sunlight to experimental passive cooling materials designed to reduce air-conditioning demand.

Now an Israeli startup says it may have taken the idea a step further: cooling surfaces using sunlight itself.

SolCold, a climate-tech company based in Ness Ziona, Israel, has developed a nanotechnology coating that actively cools surfaces when exposed to sunlight. The company was founded in 2016 by Yaron Shenhav and Dr. Yaron Shenhav (co-founder and CEO), based on research originating at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The coating can be applied to buildings, vehicles, shipping containers and even fabrics. When sunlight hits the material, it triggers a physical process that reflects most solar radiation, converts absorbed heat energy into light, and releases heat through radiative cooling. Sort of the way you cool down after you pop into the water and then stand in the air.

Unlike traditional reflective coatings or “cool roof” paints, which simply bounce sunlight away, SolCold’s technology actively removes heat from the surface. In direct sunlight, coated objects can become cooler than the surrounding air.

The hotter the environment and the stronger the sun, the stronger the cooling effect. In laboratory tests the coating has demonstrated temperature reductions of up to about 20°C below ambient conditions.

The company says the technology could significantly reduce air-conditioning demand in buildings, cut energy use in refrigerated shipping containers, and help lower the urban heat island effect that traps heat in cities.

SolCold has raised several million dollars in venture funding, with investors including the Israel Innovation Authority and private climate-tech investors, and has conducted dozens of pilot projects with global automotive and industrial companies, testing the coating on vehicles and equipment exposed to intense sunlight. Major global manufacturers have reportedly tested the technology for use on vehicles and industrial equipment exposed to heat.

The company is entering a growing field of passive cooling and reflective materials, competing with technologies such as cool roof coatings from companies like Cool Roof Rating Council partners, radiative cooling materials developed at Stanford and MIT, and reflective paints such as those commercialized by PPG and other building-materials manufacturers.

Its first product named “Glacier 110,” is an opaque, white solid film with a thickness of 350 µm, an area density of 0.3 kg/m_2, and is highly durable, lasting for ten years in high-performance applications. The material’s optimal cooling power is 70W/m₂ – 170 W/m₂ at noon in summertime. It can be used on buses to keep occupants cool, for instance.

Glacier 110 has four layers: a smart filter that lets 1% of heat pass through it, an anti-stokes layer, a radiative cooling layer, and a mirror layer. The coating maintains a low ambient temperature throughout its entire architecture.

The main benefits of the company’s innovative products include zero electricity and fuel consumption and zero carbon emissions. Used in clothing, it protects the health of the wearer.

If the technology scales commercially, coatings that turn sunlight into cooling power could offer a modern, high-tech counterpart to the ancient passive cooling systems that shaped desert architecture for centuries.

The post SolCold wants to cool buildings using sunlight appeared first on Green Prophet.

When I was a kid my Grade 4 teacher said that in the future energy will be free. We’ll have found a way to make energy from water and salt, with no byproducts. Fast forward 40 years: news in the last year suggests we are closer to both hydrogen fusion and storing energy with salt.

Batteries made from salt which can store energy from renewable energy plants may sound like science fiction, but a new grid-scale deployment in the United States suggests the technology is moving closer to reality. It solves a major problem when harvesting solar, wind or geothermal energy. When the grid can’t use the excess energy it needs to be stored, or go to waste. The holy grail in renewable energy are robust batteries that can work without expensive and rare earth metals like lithium.

The news hook comes from a recent announcement by US energy storage company Peak Energy, which is working with RWE Americas to deploy a new sodium-ion battery system for grid storage. The project is designed to store renewable electricity from solar and wind and release it when demand rises.

Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries use sodium, or salt, one of the most abundant elements on Earth and a key component of common salt. Instead of lithium ions moving between electrodes during charging and discharging, sodium ions perform the same function.

The chemistry is similar to lithium batteries, but the materials are far cheaper and easier to source. In its announcement, the company highlighted the cost advantage of the technology.

“Peak Energy’s sodium-ion battery system uses a passively cooled architecture that eliminates the need for complex thermal management systems.”

The design of the system also removes some of the most expensive components found in conventional battery installations.

Energy storage has become one of the biggest bottlenecks for renewable power. Solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity only when conditions are right, which means grids need large batteries to store excess power for later use.

Today most large storage projects rely on lithium batteries, which depend on global supply chains for lithium, cobalt and nickel. Sodium batteries could reduce those costs dramatically because sodium is widely available in seawater and common minerals.

For utilities trying to scale renewable power, the difference could be significant. If sodium-ion systems prove reliable at grid scale, they could provide cheaper, safer storage for solar and wind, making renewable electricity more affordable for power systems around the world.

Peak Energy has raised about $65 million in venture funding since launching in 2023. The company was founded by Landon Mossburg, former president of Northvolt North America and a Tesla manufacturing veteran, together with Liam Maddock, a former operations executive at Zipline who previously held supply-chain roles at Tesla, Apple and Lyft.

Their team includes engineers and battery specialists from companies such as Tesla, Northvolt and SunPower. The company’s $10 million seed round was led by US venture firm Eclipse Ventures with participation from TDK Ventures in Japan, while its $55 million Series A was led by Xora Innovation, a Singapore-based deep-tech fund backed by Temasek.

Additional investors include Doral Energy-Tech Ventures in Israel, Tishman Speyer in the United States and other global energy-tech funds.

The company is entering a rapidly emerging sodium-ion battery race, competing with major Chinese manufacturers such as CATL, BYD, and HiNa Battery, as well as Western players including Northvolt in Sweden, Faradion in the United Kingdom and US grid-storage developer Natron Energy. Unlike lithium batteries, sodium-ion systems rely on abundant salt-based materials, which could make large-scale renewable energy storage significantly cheaper if the technology scales successfully.

Looking to invest in our sustainable future? Check out Peak Energy.

The post Batteries from salt? New grid projects suggest the idea is becoming real appeared first on Green Prophet.