Massachusetts has become the third state in as many months to slap new restrictions on data center development.

Donald Trump is presiding over an unexpected clean energy boom, as rising electricity demand spurs investment in new capacity despite the US administration’s efforts to thwart a solar and wind rollout.

Clean energy additions will rise by a record 45 gigawatts this year, according to S&P Global Energy—equivalent to the average electricity demand of Turkey. The increase is roughly 25 percent higher than the record set in 2024.

The US president’s war in Iran, which has driven up global energy prices, along with surging power demand from AI data centers and developers’ rush to capitalize on expiring tax credits, are driving the cleantech boom, said analysts. Trump’s administration has also been pragmatic in the face of its energy needs.

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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:

• Drill a borehole: The team will drill a narrow hole a safe distance from active vent fields that will go about 200 feet into the seafloor to tap hydrothermal fluid.
• Harness the heat: Hydrothermal fluid flows into a generator, heating a closed-loop refrigerant through titanium tubes until it boils and spins a turbine.
• Reset: Naturally cold seawater cools the refrigerant back into a liquid state to repeat the cycle. The warmed water is released to the seafloor.
• Move energy: The deployment next month will send performance data back to shore via Ocean Observatories Initiative’s Regional Cabled Array, operated by the University of Washington. Permanent installations will move electricity through undersea cables.
• Control the process: Underwater, remotely controlled electronics are housed in oil-filled, pressure-balanced chambers to handle deep-ocean conditions.

“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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