See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Sept. 7–11.
The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Sept. 7–11.
The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
Thailand has asked 49 data centers under construction to pause voluntarily while more than 117 pending projects face an approval freeze.
The post Thailand Asks 49 Data Centers to Pause as New Power and Water Rules Loom appeared first on TechRepublic.
Thailand has asked 49 data centers under construction to pause voluntarily while more than 117 pending projects face an approval freeze.
The post Thailand Asks 49 Data Centers to Pause as New Power and Water Rules Loom appeared first on TechRepublic.
Helion Energy, in its hard-charging pursuit of fusion energy, has opened an office in downtown Seattle as its headcount swells to 800 employees.
The company already occupies five buildings in Everett, Wash., where it’s headquartered, plus operations in the central Washington town of Malaga, where Helion is building what it hopes could be the world’s first commercial fusion plant.
“Who would have thought it when we founded the company in 2013 with only five of us,” said CEO and co-founder David Kirtley in a GeekWire interview, marveling at the growth.
In June, Helion announced $465 million in new funding, bringing its total capital raised to more than $1.5 billion and its valuation to 10 times that figure.
The company is racing to master fusion, which produces energy by smashing together light atoms — essentially replicating the process that powers the sun and stars. No one has been able to create a commercially viable amount of energy from fusion here on Earth, though notable progress is being made by research institutions and private companies.
The planet is increasingly hungry for abundant, clean power as data centers gobble energy and transportation, buildings and industrial processes shift toward electrification.
That has helped spike interest in fusion, and the sector globally has raised $14.24 billion since 2021, according to the Fusion Industry Association, with multiple companies predicting they’ll succeed in producing sufficient energy in the next five to 10 years. Helion has one of the most ambitious targets, aiming to reach that mark in two years.
The company is No. 1 on the GeekWire 200, a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.
The company’s Seattle office is 15,631 square feet in the 8th + Olive building, in a space formerly occupied by Airbnb. The move comes as Seattle pushes to bring businesses back into its core: The city’s urban neighborhoods had an office vacancy rate of 28.2% in the second quarter of this year, with downtown alone at 34.9%, according to Kidder Mathews research.
Kirtley said they’re hiring and the goal is to have 100 employees downtown working on business and operations, recruiting and finance.
Back in Everett, teams are running tests on the company’s prototype fusion device, named Polaris, and working to get a smaller fusion machine called Tiny Merge online. The startup is also ramping up a facility for assembly work where employees and automated systems will manufacture energy-carrying capacitors, semiconductor modules and other hardware. The facility is currently producing initial test pieces.
The Malaga site will be home to the Orion facility and will include three buildings: an office building, already complete and in use; a building for final assembly of components shipped from Everett, also finished; and the generator building, which will house the 50-megawatt Orion generator and associated power electronics. So far the beams are up for the last building, with the goal of getting it “weather tight” before winter, Kirtley said.
Helion is charging ahead with Orion and building its manufacturing capabilities while continuing to tackle the physics challenges of producing energy from fusion.
The plant must be operational in two years to meet Helion’s contract with Microsoft to provide energy for a nearby data center.
The University of Washington on Thursday celebrated the opening of a public-access battery manufacturing lab that aims to propel energy innovation.
The new lab — the first of its kind on the West Coast — is housed within the UW’s Clean Energy Testbeds, a site that has helped launch multiple battery startups.
The expanded facility for researchers and entrepreneurs comes as battery demand surges, particularly for large deployments supporting solar energy and grid operations. Over the past three years, U.S. utility-scale battery storage capacity has grown at an average annual rate of about 70%, according to federal data. Other key applications include batteries for defense and transportation.
While China and other Asian nations overwhelmingly dominate the global supply of batteries, there is still room for U.S. companies to grow, particularly in developing new technologies, said Dan Schwartz, founding director of the Clean Energy Institute, which operates the Testbeds.
“We want to be part of the new chemistries that can serve new markets,” he said.
Those innovations include batteries using sodium or potassium ions, or replacing graphite with silicon-carbon materials in traditional lithium-ion batteries.
The new 1,600-square-foot lab was created by repurposing storage space inside the current 15,000-square-foot testbed facility, located east of the UW’s main Seattle campus. The $7.5 million capital project was completed in February and funded by the state’s Climate Commitment Act, which also supports additional facility staff.
The lab is focused on building pouch cells, a format that offers more flexibility than traditional cylindrical cells used in consumer goods. The metallic pouch, which resembles a Pop-Tart package, enables users to create and test both small-scale experimental cells and larger prototypes for wide-ranging applications.
The facility features a dry room equipped to mix electrode slurries, coat electrodes and assemble components inside plastic-lined aluminum pouches, alongside a room with tools to test battery performance. UW experts are on-hand to help.
Seattle startup Emerald Battery Labs produced its first pouch cells in the new facility. The company is developing sodium-ion batteries, which use cheaper raw materials, offer longer lifespans and pose fewer fire risks compared to lithium-ion alternatives.
“We wouldn’t have started this company in Seattle if not for the Testbeds,” said Kjell Schroder, co-founder and CTO of Emerald Battery Labs, in a statement. He added that the facility allows the startup to iterate and produce demo cells “for a range of potential applications without major capital expenditure.”
The UW announced plans for the lab in October 2024 with an expected summer 2025 launch. Permitting challenges and long lead times for high-demand tools delayed the opening until early 2026, Schwartz said.
The entire Clean Energy Testbeds was originally slated to relocate to a new building called Brightwork, but ground was never broken and the project was quietly scuttled.
Schwartz said the new lab is booked out for the coming months. Other companies using the space include a California startup called Project K Energy that’s pursuing potassium-ion batteries. The Testbeds also partners with academic institutions such as Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, Wash., to offer battery fabrication workshops.
Schwartz sees potential for the facility to support specialized, high-value applications with Pacific Northwest ties, including aviation, data centers and electric semi-trucks.
When it comes to clean energy, “batteries are just winning,” Schwartz said. “And the question is, who’s going to win in all the sectors that batteries are transforming?”
I pulled a classic Seattle move while test riding an e-bike from Rivian spinout Also last week. It was straight out of the sketch comedy series “Almost Live” and the Ballard Driving Academy: I left my turn signal on.
A turn signal is about the lowest tech feature on the TM-B e-bike (Transcendent Mobility Bike), a Class 3 software-defined machine built around what Also calls its “Dream Ride” system.
The bike feels more like an EV than any two-wheeled commuter I’ve ever ridden. From the digital control portal to the immediate acceleration and regenerative braking, the TM-B is designed to treat hardware as software — relying on a pedal-by-wire powertrain.
While an enclosed belt drive delivers power from the central electric motor to the rear wheel, there is no mechanical chain or physical link connecting your pedals to the drivetrain. Instead, your pedaling acts as a digital controller, telling the motor software how much power to send to the back wheel while generating synthetic gear resistance under your feet.
Also is running a pop-up station at outdoor retailer Evo’s flagship store in Wallingford, where riders can book test spins through the end of the year. Seattle is one of 10 initial launch markets nationwide, giving commuters a chance to put the bike through its paces.
The local pop-up isn’t just a coincidence; it sits directly across from Also’s new office location on Northlake Way. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company, spun out of EV maker Rivian with a $1 billion valuation, is tapping into Seattle tech and retail talent with a commercial outpost and future retail hub run by REI vet Ben Steele.
Amy Hattemer, Also’s Seattle market manager, walked me through how the TM-B works and what powers it before I set off on a ride through the neighborhood and along the Burke-Gilman Trail.
Here’s a quick look at the core specs for the high-tech bike:
Beyond performance, security is where the bike’s EV heritage really shines through software. The TM-B is built around an integrated digital locking system that disables the entire vehicle at the push of a button — locking down the motor drivetrain, top frame release, and battery compartment, while electronically immobilizing the rear wheel to prevent someone from rolling it away.
When the accompanying mobile app launches, riders will be able to unlock the bike hands-free via smartphone proximity Bluetooth, program custom PIN codes, or use NFC cards. The app will also enable full GPS location tracking, real-time tamper alerts, and digital family key sharing — turning what would normally be a target for bike thieves into a bricked, trackable piece of hardware if left unattended on a city street.
For my ride, I left Evo and took off into Wallingford headed for the University District. The off-the-line power is immediately noticeable and practically dumped me off the seat when I first engaged the thumb throttle.
Thanks to 180 Nm of torque available instantly at the rear wheel — roughly double the pulling power of top-tier cargo bikes — pressing the throttle gets you moving quickly without pedaling. Hattemer called this capability a key safety feature for clearing intersections ahead of right-turning cars.
“It is very powerful,” Hattemer said. “It’s kind of like Mario Kart real life hitting a mushroom, which is pretty great.”
I put the motor to the test by taking the steepest routes I could find, powering up hills in Wallingford before cutting over toward Gas Works Park to zip to the top of the grassy mound. Hattemer noted that in high assist modes, the software flattens out steep inclines so “it will just feel like you were still flat,” and the TM-B delivered on that promise.
Cruising downhill with a combination of pedal assist and throttle, I topped out at 28 mph of exhilarating speed. The regen braking did a nice job of slowing everything down.
Beyond the speed and torque, what sets the TM-B apart from other e-bikes is how tightly controlled that power is through software. Unlike older e-bikes where riders could clip a wire or dig into settings menus to bypass factory governors, Also’s Class 3 limit of 28 mph is hard-coded into the vehicle’s firmware. The company is also planning over-the-air updates that will introduce parental control modes — allowing owners to cap top speeds at 15 mph for younger family members or trail riding.
Back at the test station, Hattemer demonstrated how the bike’s modularity works off the road. Pushing a single eject button releases the top frame, allowing riders to swap between a solo commuter setup, a bench seat, or a heavy-duty cargo rack in about three seconds. Because each frame is digitally serialized to the owner’s account, a single bike body can easily be shared across family members of vastly different heights by swapping top frames and adjusting the seat post.
“I am barely 5-foot-4, and my husband is 6-foot-2, and so we can actually share a bike,” Hattemer said. “So I could have a small top frame, and you could have a large one. So multiple people can use this bike.”
Stripping off the top frame and battery also sheds roughly 25 pounds from the 80-pound bike — a huge practical touch for anyone trying to hoist a heavy commuter onto a standard car rack.
For a city built on steep hills and unpredictable weather, the TM-B makes a compelling case for the future of urban commuting. It isn’t just a high-end e-bike; it’s a fully software-defined vehicle platform — and a sign that Rivian’s automotive DNA has successfully made the jump to two wheels.
Also, a fast-growing electric micromobility startup born out of Rivian in Silicon Valley, has quietly pulled into Seattle and planted a flag at the epicenter of the city’s bike culture with an office on the north end of Lake Union.
The 17,459-square-foot space at 1300 N. Northlake Way — which previously housed military-grade autonomous vehicle startup Overland AI — is situated directly along the Burke-Gilman Trail at the busy intersection of the Fremont and Wallingford neighborhoods. The headquarters for Brooks Running and the flagship store for outdoor retailer Evo are right across the street.
Ben Steele, Also’s chief commercial officer, is heading up the office. A nine-year veteran of REI, he was attracted to Also’s mission-based vision for the future of micromobility. He’s been tasked with building out the startup’s business operations, marketing, and customer functions from scratch.
First he had to find a dynamic office space. He called the location the hottest spot in the No. 1 bike commuting city in America.
“If you do the heat map in Strava for bike commuting, that is the white-hot spot,” Steele told GeekWire during a tour of the office. “When we said where do we want to be, we want to be where our customers are, where they’re working, where they’re living, where they’re shopping. And we want to be where bike commuters are. And this is that hot spot.”
Founded inside electric vehicle maker Rivian more than three years ago as a special projects group, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Also officially spun out as an independent company in March 2025. The startup is focused on developing software-defined micromobility solutions designed to replace car trips and last-mile commercial delivery, backed by partnerships with Amazon and DoorDash.
Also was co-founded by Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe alongside Chris Yu, Rivian’s former vice president of future programs, who serves as Also’s president. The startup has already commanded major investor backing, achieving a $1 billion unicorn valuation following its spinout to fund vehicle development and scale its commercial operations.
The Seattle space officially opened in April and is currently home to 38 employees, with capacity to grow to around 60 on a second floor featuring sweeping views of Lake Union and the downtown skyline.
Also employs roughly 350 people globally across Palo Alto, Seattle, and a new commercial team in Ghent, Belgium. The hybrid Seattle office requires employees in three days a week — though Steele notes cross-functional visits regularly push daily headcount past 50. The company has drawn talent from Seattle-area giants like REI, Brooks, Rad Power Bikes, Sonos, and Amazon.
Steele pointed to the city’s unique intersection of cycling culture, software technology, and deep consumer retail roots as the primary draw for building a major presence outside Silicon Valley.
“If you think about retail and commercial talent, innovative companies like Nordstrom and Amazon and Starbucks and yes, REI, the talent pool that we have to draw from for this part of the business, this is really the sweet spot to do it,” Steele said.
On the ground floor of the building, Also plans to build out its very first dedicated retail store and customer service bay, complete with space for a co-working or food and beverage partner. Steele called the layout a deliberate move to keep the commercial team grounded in real-world rider interactions.
“The theory is, we want our team really living that experience with our customers,” Steele said. “To have our retail and our office together really means we’re not theorizing about what does that experience look like with our customers. We’re living it every day.”
In the meantime, local riders can try Also’s flagship e-bike, the TM-B, across the street through a pop-up at Evo. Seattle is one of 10 initial U.S. markets where mobile sales teams are conducting test spins out of dedicated vans, coffee shops, and partner locations like Evo and Rivian spaces. Nationwide, the company has already surpassed 10,000 test rides for the high-tech bike, which starts at $3,500.
Beyond personal e-bikes, Also is setting its sights on transforming commercial delivery — a push anchored by a high-profile multi-year collaboration with Amazon, headquartered just across the lake in South Lake Union.
The partnership, announced last fall, centers on a customized pedal-assist e-cargo quad (the TM-Q) designed to navigate dense city centers and operate within dedicated bike lanes. Also plans to roll out prototype units with Amazon in two cities later this year before broader expansion in 2027.
“If you think about a city like Paris, where they’ve closed a lot of Paris down to cars, you can use a vehicle like that to get into the city,” Steele said, pointing out that the quad leverages automotive-grade technology to carry heavy delivery loads up steep hills without the high maintenance of traditional bike chains and derailleurs.
The company is also collaborating with DoorDash to test autonomous last-mile delivery using smaller form-factor vehicles capable of traveling up to 30 mph on streets, hopping curbs, and navigating sidewalks directly to a customer’s front door.
Also enters the market as Seattle’s e-bike landscape undergoes a major shift. The city was once ground zero for breakout success Rad Power Bikes, which helped pioneer consumer e-bikes before suffering a steep post-pandemic downturn that culminated in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and an asset sale early this year.
Steele, who watched Rad’s trajectory from his time leading retail operations at REI, noted that Also is taking explicit notes from the broader e-bike industry’s past missteps. Rather than treating their machines like standard bicycles with added batteries, Also is focusing heavily on custom, automotive-grade hardware and software-defined integration — while staying intentionally lean on retail overhead.
“Building the best e-bike is not our mission,” Steele said. “Building the future of micromobility is our mission. And the first thing we’re building is the best e-bike.”
That philosophy directly shapes how Also plans to roll out its physical footprint. With customer orders now converting and initial Launch Edition bikes shipping over the coming weeks, Steele says the startup is taking an adaptable approach rather than rushing to sign leases on traditional retail store networks.
In addition to fixed hubs like the North Lake Union location, Also is launching a national “test spin tour” using mobile vans to bring 10 bikes and dedicated staff to 20 cities across six weeks.
“I don’t want to be beholden to a single model,” Steele said of the expansion plans. “The thing I wanted to not do is say let’s go build 10 stores and then see if that’s right. Long-term vision is to be really adaptable and really agile with how we do it, and to have what’s the right solution in each market versus a single model that we try to drop in everywhere.”
For Steele, bringing Also to Seattle isn’t just about opening an outpost or testing hardware — it’s about actively shaping the daily routine of local commuters along the lake.
“We want this to be a part of that vibrancy of the neighborhood, not just a place you go by,” Steele said.
That civic integration hits close to home for Steele, who lives near the University of Washington and instead of sitting in his car on Montlake, commutes down the Burke-Gilman Trail on an Also e-bike every morning.
“I arrive at work less stressed out on the Burke-Gilman Trail,” Steele said. “I’m living the product benefit every day. It’s pretty awesome.”
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A decade or two on the road will drain an EV battery’s range and hobble its acceleration. But while it peters out for daily commutes, that battery still has a lot of juice left.
A cohort of battery entrepreneurs is giving these units a second life, powering off-grid communities, industrial sites and energy-hungry data centers. Industry leaders — British Columbia’s Moment Energy and Redwood Materials in Nevada — are rapidly scaling up as the supply of aging batteries surges.
This summer, Moment moved into its 100,000-square-foot Megafactory 1 near Vancouver, converting a shell into its new HQ and manufacturing space in six weeks. It’s also building a Texas Gigafactory expected to open in January.
Redwood is likewise ramping up after unveiling the world’s largest used-EV battery system in June 2025: A 63-megawatt-hour solar and battery installation powering a Nevada data center run by AI infrastructure company Crusoe.
Absent reuse, these batteries end up in landfills or recycling shredders.
“Why recycle this battery prematurely when there’s over 95% life left?” asked Eddy Chiang, CEO and co-founder of Moment. When the batteries get recycled, some companies send the material to China for refinement, exporting valuable raw materials.
The market’s potential is massive. Chiang estimates that the used batteries available today could match Denver’s electricity use 20 times over — and 90 times over in four years.
So why pull an EV battery that still has 80% or more of its life left? Think Christmas lights, says Chiang.
Particularly with lights sold in the past, “if one light bulb burnt out, the whole string burns out,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening in the battery pack. The actual failure mode for EVs is actually due to a single cell failure, like that light bulb.”
EV battery packs contain hundreds or thousands of cells that are grouped into modules, which are housed in large metal shells affixed under the vehicle’s floorboard. The cells can be similar to the AA batteries in consumer electronics, while others are larger blocks or pouches.
When Moment receives used batteries, it first runs diagnostics to test their performance. Then it breaks down the packs into modules, and racks them in cooled shipping containers. Moment uses proprietary software to redirect energy away from weak cells to healthy ones to extend battery life.
The company’s largest storage system is called Luna, delivering up to 1 megawatt hour of energy, which is enough electricity to power roughly 49 Seattle households for 24 hours. It’s preparing to launch a new model, but keeping the details under wraps.
Moment customers range from God’s Pocket Resort, an eco-lodge on a tiny Canadian island where its system slashed the use of diesel generators, to Vancouver International Airport, which avoided up to $20 million in grid upgrades to power fast chargers for its EV fleet, Chiang said. “Instead, they bought a couple of our batteries.”
Redwood Materials began nearly a decade ago as a battery recycler led by former Tesla executives. But in recent years, they recognized a missed opportunity.
“We had a group of people standing around watching our recycling operation, looking at these giant battery packs that we’re going to so much effort to disassemble, and just wondering, ‘Can we do more with these before we shred them?'” said Colin Campbell, Redwood’s chief technology officer.
Now 95% of the EV batteries Redwood receives are reused rather than recycled. And despite its Tesla roots, the startup accepts batteries from any automaker and has created a “universal translator” that manages battery packs with different voltages, power and chemistry.
Campbell touts the conversion of the EV devices to stationary storage as straightforward.
In its simplest terms, Redwood’s energy storage sites are “an electric vehicle parking lot with the wheels removed,” he said. “So it’s just literally the battery that was in the car. There’s lots of them arranged in a grid together and plugged in.”
That plug-and-play approach solved major headaches for Crusoe. By pairing repurposed EV batteries with solar power for its new AI data center in Nevada, Crusoe bypassed multi-year grid-connection delays, saved money and avoided emissions from diesel generators.
Scott Williams, vice president of energy at Crusoe, said the solution has worked well for his company, which builds data centers and offers its own AI cloud services.
“We’ve signaled to Redwood that we’re going to grow with them,” Williams said, including “multiple gigawatt hours paired with our modular units, which is super exciting.”
Despite the momentum, the sector faces headwinds. Communities have resisted large battery projects due to fire concerns, sparked by high-profile incidents like California’s Moss Landing fire.
The companies emphasize that EV batteries are built to survive high-speed crashes, making them inherently safer than standard stationary battery storage. The Moss Landing fire involved older, non-EV batteries in a very different setup than the startups are using. Additionally, Moment’s systems hold extensive UL safety certifications and Redwood has passed a UL fire-safety test.
Another industry hurdle is competition. Overbuilt recycling capacity — plus U.S. and European mandates requiring recycled content in new batteries — creates competition for used EV packs.
Yet from a climate perspective, repurposing is vital. Batteries are almost always “the most carbon-intensive component” in any electronic device, said Grayson Shor, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Battery Collaborative and co-founder of the startup Buckstop.
Repurposed EV systems can extend that initial carbon investment by providing clean power for 20 to 30 years and meet urgent energy demand.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Where are we going to get electricity?'” Campbell says. “And we have a really excellent option already here.”
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Matt Allen wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue a career at McKinstry, the Seattle-based company his grandfather co-founded in 1960. The business started with plumbing and piping, evolving into a construction and energy services firm with national reach.
But after joining in 2012, Allen began appreciating the impact McKinstry has helping customers find affordable, planet-friendly solutions for their operations.
It could be as simple as replacing an old, natural gas boiler with a high-efficiency heat pump, Allen said, “but you feel like you’re part of that customer’s journey, and our societal journey, to get to a carbon-free environment.”
Now serving as McKinstry’s chief client officer, Allen shared his thoughts with GeekWire about sustainability. His quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
What’s your biggest worry when it comes to solving climate change?
With all the expansion in energy consumption and the race for compute, I worry about maintaining our progress around decarbonization. And having a young son, I do worry about rising temperatures and what the world is going to look like for young people. However, I am encouraged to see a continued emphasis in decarbonization action across industries. On the data center side, the hyperscalers that we work with are evolving their designs to focus on sustainability as much as possible.
What gives you hope for the planet?
Human ingenuity has been able to innovate our way through challenging spots. Western Washington is a big hotbed for clean nuclear solutions, deep geothermal, and some of these new, emerging clean energy generation technologies. When enough brain power is focused on those pieces, combined with capital infusion, progress is made. I think there is a lot of motivation to increase clean energy generation through innovative solutions. That gives me hope.
If you could invent one sustainability solution overnight, what would it be?
Clean nuclear fusion. If you could accelerate Helion, Zap or Avalanche, that would be great. Or deep geothermal — Fervo Energy, for example, is developing a commercial project down in Utah. If we could snap our fingers and get some of those technologies to market, you could rapidly accelerate people’s willingness to electrify systems and connect to a clean grid. A lot of this comes back to having a clean grid, so when we’re doing electrification projects at a building level, the building owners can have confidence in having energy availability to reduce their carbon footprint.
What’s an underrated solution that deserves more attention?
Operations — that’s a big focus for us, finding optimized ways to operate buildings and turn down systems when appropriate. We joke that everyone talks about first cost when they’re building or doing a retrofit, but they don’t talk about the ongoing operation and maintenance costs. If we can find more efficient ways to operate buildings, that reduces strain on the grid and reduces overall energy consumption while providing real savings for our clients.
What’s one metric you watch obsessively?
We rigorously track greenhouse gas emissions. Our baseline started in 2019, around the time we signed the Amazon Climate Pledge, which has a net zero target of 2040. We hope to hit net zero sooner. We’re also tracking a couple of different measures. One is GHG emissions on a per-revenue basis. So, as we’re growing our revenue, are we still taking a bite out of emissions? We also track it on a per-FTE-employee basis. Those two measures hold us accountable as an institution to make sure we’re not taking our eye off the ball moving toward net zero.
The scope of the climate challenge is daunting — how do you approach this work?
For the work we do for customers, or even the work we do internally to reduce our own carbon footprint in our business operations, you just take it quarter by quarter, project by project — focus on doing a good job for your customers, bring things in on time and on budget, and help strategize with them on the most cost-effective ways to do things.
We do the same thing internally, creating a glide pattern. There is no magic bullet, so you take it one piece at a time. A good example for us is our biggest carbon emitter — our vehicle fleet. We have 600 service vans and another 300 utility trucks out on the road, and we track our progress toward electrifying that fleet. We’re 10 or 15% of the way through, and every time a vehicle needs to be replaced, we replace it with an electric one.
What impact do you hope your work has in 20 years?
I just hope that there isn’t an existential climate crisis, that we’ve taken collective action — whether it’s the Paris Climate Accord or some other macro commitment — and come together as a society to ensure we’ve left the campsite in a better place than we found it and that our world remains a habitable, thriving, healthy environment for the next generation to live in.
Next month, Endurance Energy will send Adélie — a 100-kilowatt geothermal generator named for a penguin — to an undersea volcano off the Oregon coast, tapping hydrothermal fluids that can reach 750 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s the Seattle startup’s fifth deployment onto the ocean floor, part of founder and CEO Andrew Redd‘s bet that the technology can one day electrify entire cities.
“Addressing the clean power problem is a way to make significant, scalable impact,” Redd said. “It’s a fundamental of human life — people need power.”
Endurance is part of a broader race to harness geothermal energy — heat from water or steam under the Earth’s crust, converted into electricity. But while companies such as Fervo and Sage Geosystems focus on terrestrial sites, Endurance is the first commercial venture pursuing undersea sources.
Redd left an engineering role at SpaceX to launch his company in January 2025. Endurance’s headquarters sit on the north shore of Seattle’s Lake Union, in a building that once housed seafood processing, just down from Ivar’s Salmon House.
“There was a big crab on the wall. There were pinup pictures from the fishermen that would sleep out back,” recalled Nate Rodland, Endurance’s chief operating officer.
This summer, the team expanded across the street into a 25,000-square-foot concrete facility — it’s cavernous, like a parking garage with ultrahigh ceilings — where giant white tents now house separate R&D and manufacturing operations.
The space is bustling with employees assembling components ahead of the Sept. 7 pilot demonstration.
“Everyone is incredibly multidisciplinary. The challenge is incredibly multidisciplinary. That’s what makes it so fun and exciting,” said Redd, watching his team at work. He pointed to the company’s thermal fluids analyst, for example, who at that moment was assembling electronics enclosures.
The team’s roughly three-dozen members include 12 SpaceX alumni, plus veterans of fusion startup Helion Energy and space venture Blue Origin.
Here’s how the Endurance system works:
“We kind of joke that everything we do is just heating, cooling and pumping,” said Aditi Bhatt, chief of staff, as she pointed out earlier prototype devices housed in Endurance’s original building.
Each unit is named for a sea creature, moving up the food chain as the generators grow — krill, silverfish, and eventually an orca pod. Adélie’s generating capacity would be enough to power a small neighborhood of homes.
The company touts the environmental sustainability of its system, which has a small physical footprint, creates limited noise, releases no toxic chemicals and emits no carbon.
Endurance has done four prototype deployments, reaching a depth of about 2 miles and temperatures up to 726 degrees Fahrenheit. The company has previously visited the Pacific Northwest’s Juan de Fuca Ridge, the Mariana Trough, the East Pacific Rise off Mexico, and the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific Ocean.
While the startup has made rapid progress, the strategy faces real challenges: high pressure and corrosive conditions, mineral scaling inside devices, and the risk of costly repairs to seafloor machinery. And though many population centers sit near shorelines, the systems will still need expensive subsea cables to carry power over potentially long distances.
But the potential to tap a limitless source of around-the-clock, carbon-free electricity is attractive, and the company has raised $63 million from investors.
The next device, at megawatt scale, will power Endurance’s first commercial pilot, with the Kingdom of Tonga. Work on that begins as soon as Adélie is deployed, with the goal of shipping next year.
The pace aligns with Redd’s experience at SpaceX.
“I remember many times working on the next rocket before the previous one had actually launched, just because of how much you learned from the process of building something,” he said, adding that the team is inspired by their mission.
“The sooner we can get clean, low-cost power on the grid, the more people we’re able to help,” Redd said. “So we’re really driving with intensity.”
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Waymo has added one mo’ type of vehicle to its fleet in the Seattle area, where the company has been testing for the launch of its autonomous taxi service sometime down the road.
GeekWire spotted a boxy baby blue Ojai in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer store in the Ballard neighborhood on Friday morning. A driver inside confirmed the cute little van with an array of cameras on the front, back and top was indeed one of the company’s newest vehicles.
Waymo first announced in May that the Ojai (pronounced oh-hi) was rolling out in initial cities like Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The purpose-built electric Ojai is developed in partnership with Chinese automaker Zeekr and assembled in Mesa, Ariz. It joins the electric Jaguar I-Pace SUV that is a frequent sight on roads around Seattle and the Eastside where testing with a driver first started last September.
Zeekr is the premium electric vehicle brand owned by Geely Holding Group — the Chinese automotive titan behind Volvo, Polestar, and Lotus. Originally designed at Geely’s research center in Gothenburg, Sweden, the base vehicle platform is customized specifically for autonomous ride-hailing before Waymo equips it with its self-driving tech stack.
The Ojai features Waymo’s 6th-generation autonomous hardware stack, which reduces sensor costs while improving performance in complex road and weather conditions, according to the company. The San Francisco Examiner reported that the updated sensor array has 13 cameras and four lidar sensors, compared with 29 cameras and five lidar sensors in the previous version.
The inside of the Ojai looks especially roomy, which Waymo calls “a living room on wheels,” featuring elevator-like doors and a low step and flat floor that apparently make it easier to get in and out. Three LED screens are customizable for temperature, music and more.
Alphabet-owned Waymo began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. In 2022, Google tested cars in Bellevue and Kirkland for six months to better understand operations in rainy weather.
Before Waymo can officially pull human safety drivers out of the front seat for paid rides in the region, Washington state lawmakers will need to establish a dedicated regulatory framework.
Earlier this year, state Sen. Matt Boehnke introduced SB 6243, which aimed to establish statewide operational and safety guidelines for commercial autonomous vehicle networks. The measure failed to pass out of committee during the 2026 legislative session.
Waymo says it has facilitated more than 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities. Beyond the initial markets announced in May, Waymo said it planned to roll Ojai out to Denver, Las Vegas and San Diego, before going wider to everyone later this year.
The sun is setting on Washington state’s aging diesel-powered ferry fleet as work begins on new hybrid-electric vessels.
Eastern Shipbuilding Group in Panama City, Fla., has started building the state’s first new ferry since the Suquamish launched in 2018. The hybrid ferries will use batteries and diesel engines to cut emissions, with the first vessel scheduled for delivery in 2030. Eastern will complete the second and third ferries in 2031 and 2032.
Washington State Ferries is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases among state agencies. In 2018, then-Gov. Jay Inslee signed an executive order to begin electrifying the fleet.
The state has since developed a long-term plan to deploy 16 new hybrid ferries and convert six existing boats into plug-in vessels by 2040.
In 2019, the state struck a deal with Vigor, a Seattle shipyard, to build up to five hybrid-electric ferries, with the first due within three years. Negotiations between Washington State Ferries and Vigor over price and contract terms broke down, and the state ultimately relaunched a competitive bid for the project.
The three 160-car ferries under contract with Eastern will cost $714.5 million to build, plus additional costs for owner-furnished equipment, construction management, crew training, and risk contingencies. All told, the total price tag is $1.15 billion.
The Wenatchee, a 202-car ferry converted to hybrid-electric by Vigor, began sailing the Seattle-Bainbridge route last summer, making it the largest battery-powered ferry in North America. Two additional Jumbo Mark II-class ferries await conversion, but the state’s supplemental transportation budget adopted in March did not fund their upgrades.
The system has 21 vessels, 11 of which are more than 40 years old. State leaders say 26 ferries will eventually be needed. Washington operates the largest ferry system in the U.S., which transported more than 20.1 million passengers last year.
Construction began in Florida with a ceremonial steel-cutting event early Wednesday. Gov. Bob Ferguson did not attend because of Washington’s wildfires but recognized the milestone.
“In the past decade, we lost four ferries to retirement,” Ferguson said in a statement. “Today signifies a critical step in rebuilding our fleet with modern vessels that will allow us to provide more dependable service.”
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Most climate news these days is grim. But at a rooftop happy hour during Pacific Northwest Climate Week, the mood in Seattle was upbeat — and not out of wishful thinking or environmental altruism. The hope was rooted in business fundamentals.
“We actually have all the tools right now to decarbonize,” said Mike Dieterich, an executive with Decarb Advisory. “We just need to focus on how to scale what’s working.”
Beneath the enthusiasm, however, investors and founders were clear about where capital should and shouldn’t flow. While pushing back against a wave of “tourist cash” chasing AI data centers and nuclear startups, attendees argued that profitable climate innovation often sits in essential infrastructure: grid upgrades, EVs, next-generation solar and ag-tech.
Karin Kidder, executive director of E8, a climate-focused angel-investing organization, is buoyed by the commitment from her group’s increasing membership. While decreased federal support and global politics are straining sustainability companies, “on an individual level, people are stepping up,” she said.
The annual climate tech event spanned Seattle, Portland and two Vancouvers — one in Washington, the other in British Columbia — with 313 events and nearly 7,000 participants.
GeekWire pulled attendees at the kickoff happy hour aside to ask about the most overhyped and underappreciated technologies, as well as what made them optimistic about the planet’s climate prospects, and what worried them.
Here’s what we heard.
“Data center solutions are probably overhyped at this point,” said Jonathan Azoff, co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm SNØCAP. “There’s a million of them, and they’re all trying to cash grab the big AI race.”
Azoff and others acknowledged that AI data centers, with their carbon-intensive building materials and huge energy demands, need innovation. But the concern is that some entrepreneurs are rushing into the space with half-baked, undifferentiated ideas that draw outsized dollars.
“They’re solving big problems for hyperscalers, and it’s worth a lot of money to [the tech giants],” said Yi Jean Chow, investment partner with Clean Energy Ventures. “So there are definitely investment opportunities there, but overhyped and high valuations for sure.”
Susan Su, partner at the venture capital firm Toba Capital and founder of the Climate Money podcast and Substack, also cautioned that data centers are stoking interest in costly nuclear fission and fusion energy. Customers and investors “think that nuclear is just going to be the end-all, be-all to power demand, and in reality it’s … taking the most time, costing the most money,” Su said.
That said, Azoff was excited to invest in an even riskier, more controversial form of nuclear — something called muon-catalyzed fusion. If the company, called LazeraH, were to succeed, “I can look back at and say this was my mark on clean energy,” he said.
Companies in climate, sustainability and clean energy technologies are succeeding because they’re more affordable and perform better.
“People are choosing climate solutions, climate products, not because of the climate value, but because they offer other value propositions, too,” Chow said.
That includes the economics of electric vehicles, said Duncan Logan, co-founder and CEO of 9Zero, a climate innovation hub with Seattle and San Francisco locations. EVs are a “cheaper, better, faster way to move around” compared to combustion engine vehicles, he said.
Logan contrasted the U.S. with China, which is adopting electric semis, buses and scooters at lower costs. “We are falling so far behind,” he said. “So it’s a competitive thing.”
Longstanding climate-tech workhorses like solar, ag-tech and green construction are no longer shiny new sectors, but they’re still undergoing innovative breakthroughs.
Su said Chinese solar is becoming more expensive, and there are increasing opportunities for U.S.-made solutions beyond traditional photovoltaic panels. The emerging standard for solar is “silicon perovskite tandems” — a solution that stacks a thin layer of perovskite on a traditional silicon solar cell to capture much more sunlight. That transition, she said, “completely levels and reopens the playing field for new players to come in.”
Logan called out robotic farming devices, such as weed-zapping and rock-moving machines. Dieterich pointed to the use of AI to efficiently design sustainable buildings.
“We can build zero-carbon buildings at the same price point as code-built buildings,” he said. “So [AI] would allow us to do that faster and probably even cheaper.”
The electrical grid is the linchpin for many areas of clean energy deployment, and opportunities to address that long-overlooked infrastructure can be game changing.
“We need to triple our grid by 2050, and for the first time, we now have people with large bags of money showing up to get the power now,” said Ben Shwab Eidelson, co-founder and partner of Stepchange Ventures and co-host of the Stepchange Show podcast. That influx of resources can create a “magic moment.”
Darian Parrish, founder of PwrOn, a Seattle startup developing portable clean power, is eager to see more batteries paired with grid operations, but worries about overblown safety concerns when the impacts of burning oil, gas and coal are more dangerous in many regards.
“Do you want a bunch of fire risk from fossil fuels and the inhalation of all those chemicals and exhaust, or do you want a lesser risk [from batteries] that might be hyperbolic in the media at the moment, but actually net safer?” Parrish said.
Kidder highlighted a company called It’s Electric that provides EV charging by plugging into buildings with excess energy available, bypassing the wait for additional grid capacity.
Climate-friendly technologies that outperform polluting solutions are catching on and adoption is expanding. But human actions pulling in that direction are still essential.
“Technology alone will not, and was never going to save us,” said Su, of Toba Capital. “Only we can do that, and we have to do that through policy, through collective action, through awareness, and through behavior change. And those things are really hard. In many ways, they’re much harder to crack than nuclear fusion.”
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Stepping off the light rail in downtown Bellevue, Wash., is about to come with a free ride.
Visit Bellevue announced this week that it’s launching a free electric shuttle pilot program on Aug. 3 to help riders on Sound Transit’s 2 line continue their journey to other downtown destinations.
The new service is funded by Amazon and Visit Bellevue in partnership with Circuit, the City of Bellevue and Sound Transit. The pilot will run through December as an extension of the BellHop program, an on-demand electric shuttle service that started in the city in 2023.
The shuttle program will service riders at Bellevue’s downtown light rail station with two Volkswagen ID. BUZZ electric vans. Passengers can board at a designated pickup spot and request a drop-off location within the roughly 4-mile service area — no reservation or mobile app is required.
Riders looking to return to the light rail station can use the BellHop service by booking an on-demand ride via the Ride Circuit app.
Amazon employs roughly 14,000 corporate workers in Bellevue. The opening this spring of the Link light rail Crosslake Connection across Lake Washington was viewed as a vital new transportation option for tech workers commuting between Seattle and Eastside campuses.
“We see tremendous value in programs that improve access to public transit, support sustainable mobility, and connect people with local businesses and destinations,” Keri Pravitz, manager of Community Engagement for Amazon in Bellevue, said in a statement.
The new shuttle will operate Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. See a map of the service area below.
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