Clean Energy

The UK's Reaction Engines has announced the details of a joint venture to create its compact, lightweight ammonia reactor intended to decarbonize difficult sectors like shipping and off-grid energy generation – and surprisingly, also aviation.

Washington startup Helion Energy says its seventh-gen Polaris prototype will be the world's first fusion generator to demonstrate net electricity production, as early as 2024, and it's roped in a record-breaking funding round to get it built and running.

California company Radiant has secured funding to develop a compact, portable, "low-cost" one-megawatt nuclear micro-reactor that fits in a shipping container, powers about 1,000 homes and uses a helium coolant instead of water.

A colossal US$22 billion infrastructure project will send Australian sunshine more than 3,100 miles to Singapore, via high-voltage undersea cables. Opening in 2027, it'll be the largest solar farm and battery storage facility in history.

Blue hydrogen isn't a step forward for the climate, says a new report out of Cornell and Stanford Universities. Indeed, it's worse than simply burning gas or coal in many applications – so it's not an acceptable transition phase in the race to zero.

Well-respected Austrian solar energy company Fronius has broken ground on its first customer green hydrogen hub, giving us a good look at what it'll take to run a fleet of vehicles on green hydrogen produced entirely on-site using solar panels.

Mining giant Rio Tinto has announced plans to install a pilot version of Heliogen's high-temperature "solar refinery" at a Californian boron mine, supplying clean energy as well as heat for industrial processes, with operations set to start in 2022.

Bill Gates's next-level nuclear power station is small, cheap, efficient and fast to build. It also has a built-in, on-demand energy storage system 10 times bigger than the biggest grid-scale batteries. Thanks to a DoE grant, it will open before 2030.

BP and Chevron have led a US$40 million investment round for a Canadian startup that claims to have developed a unique way to extract energy from geothermal heat on demand, using an unpowered looping fluid design that's already prototyped in Alberta.

Oil giant Shell is planning the biggest wind-to-hydrogen project in Europe, a colossal 10-gigawatt offshore wind farm in the North Sea feeding a massive electrolysis plant on dry land that'll pump out a million tonnes of clean H2 a year by 2040.

Spanish company Quaternium has destroyed its own record for gasoline-electric drone endurance with a 10-hour, 14-minute flight. But how does that stack up against hydrogen and batteries, and what are the implications for the emerging eVTOL market?

A Scottish company called Gravitricity has now broken ground on a demonstrator facility for a creative new system that stores energy in the form of “gravity” by lifting and dropping huge weights.