Woodwell researchers studying methane-consuming microbes in Maine's forests, India's renewable energy curtailment crisis tied to grid bottlenecks, why European climate tech struggles to scale past Series B funding compared to the US, and how extreme heat is forcing Europe's infrastructure sector toward climate adaptation over decarbonization. The episode also features Financial Times reporter Martha Muir discussing soaring US clean power PPA prices driven by AI data center demand and expiring federal tax credits.
In the woods of Maine, searching for an answer to a ticking climate bomb – The Boston Globe
One-third of India's new renewable energy capacity faces curtailment – PV Magazine
Why Europe Still Struggles to Scale Its Homegrown Climate Tech - Heatmap News
Europe's next climate adaptation boom isn't solar panels — it's asphalt - Reuters
US clean power prices set to soar as AI demand coincides with subsidy cuts – Financial Times
Hey everybody and welcome to a fresh edition of This Week in Cleantech, your favorite 15-minute-ish roundup of some of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy each week. Today we're taping for Friday, July 10th, 2026. If you don't know my voice by now, I'm Factor This Content Director Paul Gherky. I typically say right now that I'm joined, as always, by Cleantech commentator Mike Casey, but not this week. He left me high and dry.
Mike Casey would tell you some story about how he took the Clarion private jet somewhere to a remote island to put his toes in the sand. But I won't bore you with made up stories like that. Dude's on vacation. I don't know what he's doing. Probably some jujitsu stuff with some pals of hills. No idea. He'll be back for next week. In the meantime, you've got to listen to me talk to myself. We do have a special guest on the horn. In a few minutes, you're gonna hear from Martha Muir from the Financial Times. She's joining the show to discuss a piece that we want to share with all of you this week.
As always, we appreciate hearing from the viewers and the listeners that make this show possible. If it wasn't for you guys, we probably would have given it up like a year ago. We want to get your opinions on the show. If you've got two cents to spare, you can reach us. Just email us at the special email address that my boy Mike Casey set up for this show. It's Twick TWIC at tigercom with twoms dot us.
If this is your first time listening to this week in Cleantech, we take five of the biggest stories in climate and clean energy and distill them down into a digestible format for a generation that no longer reads. I don't know if you saw that more than fifty percent of Americans have placed a bet in the last year, and less than twenty percent have read a book. Kind of hurts my feelings a little bit. I read a book last night, but I've got an eight month old at home, so it's little different and they're hardcovered so that you can't tear up the pages. Anyway, our first soft cover story this week.
By Sabrina Shankman from the Boston Globe. It's titled In the Woods of Maine, Searching for an Answer to a Ticking Climate Bomb. In this one, researchers at Woodwell Climate Research Center discussed how they're studying microbes in Maine's Howland Research Forest that consume methane. They're hoping to find ways to speed up how fast the planet naturally breaks that gas down. Methane accounts for about 30% of global warming. It's 80 times more potent than CO2.
But it only lingers in the atmosphere for a little over a decade. There's a new bipartisan bill, the Methane Removal Research and Innovation Act, that would fund federal research into methane removal strategies, and that would include these microbes. Scientists working on it are still in the early stages. They're testing where these microbes live, where they're the most active, how they can identify which do the best work. Global methane levels have been climbing.
Despite the 2021 Global Methane Pledge, which was signed by nearly 160 countries, committed to cut emissions 30% below 2020 levels by 2030, which is quickly sneaking up on us. One of the biggest wildcards is Arctic permafrost. I say that often. It holds massive stores of trapped methane that could be released as it thaws, and it's thawing. Researchers elsewhere, including a team studying West African forests, are exploring similar tree microbe methane reduction.
With an eye toward using it in commercial planting.
Our second story this week is from Uma Gupta from PV Magazine, titled One Third of India's New Renewable Energy Capacity Faces Curtailment. They've got an ERCOT situation in India right now. I was just at an event, the Infocast Transmission and Interconnection Summit. We were talking about ERCOT's connect and manage approach to interconnection. Connect is fun. It's when you get to the manage part that people start to get a little frustrated.
And that's what this story is about here. About a third of India's 54.8 gigawatts of recently commissioned renewable capacity is being evacuated through a temporary grid access route, according to ratings agency ICRA, with curtailment hitting 50 to 60% during prime solar generation hours. Solar curtailment, if you're unfamiliar, is worst in the country's western states, while southern India sees minimal curtailment typically even at peak solar hours.
There's a 107-gigawatt pipeline of solar, wind, hybrid, hydro, pump storage, and thermal projects slated to connect to the interstate transmission system there between now and 2031. ICRA, for what it's worth, says transmission projects are facing land acquisition fights, right-of-way disputes, regulatory delays, a lot of the stuff we see here stateside. Only 12% of projects commissioned through competitive bidding actually hit their scheduled completion date. The median delay is more than 10 months.
The agency estimates India needs about $52 billion in transmission investment through 2032, plus a bunch of new lines and substation capacity every year to keep pace with their target of non-fossil fuel generation. India keeps setting bigger and bigger renewable targets, but the wires to move that power, much like here in the United States, are not keeping up. And every year they fall further behind, more clean electrons just fired back into the ground.
Our third story this week is from Katie Brigham from Heatmap News titled Why Europe Still Struggles to Scale Its Homegrown Climate Tech. European climate-focused funds raised 61 billion bucks last year, blowing past the 37 billion or so that was raised in the US. But almost all of that money goes to infrastructure and private equity backing mature technologies. The gap shows up at Series B. Only 15% of European climate tech companies that raised a seed round from 2010 to 2020 actually made it to a Series B versus about a quarter in the United States.
The backlog of European companies stuck waiting to raise a Series B grew from 220 back in 2020 to 533 by the middle of last year. The US closed 29 climate funds of $500 million or more, Europe closed just 11. US pension funds, they allocate about 2% of assets to venture capital. EU pension funds allocate way less, like a hundred times less. Europe is testing some fixes right now. In Germany, the EU Champions Initiative, they're targeting about 15 billion euros there. There's another new scale-up fund in Europe managed by EQT as well.
We'll get back to that at a later date as the story permits. In the meantime, story number four of this week.
It's by Gavin McGuire from over at Reuters. Europe's next climate adaptation boom is not solar panels, it's asphalt, Gavin says. In this story, he discusses a recent European heat wave that pushed temperatures past forty degrees Celsius. It's about a hundred degrees or so. I know it was really hot in France, over a hundred degrees for a stretch there. And I can't even imagine what it must have been like for them without the prevalence of air conditioners like we have here in the United States. It buckled roads, it warped rail tracks, it knocked out traffic lights, there were a whole bunch of canceled services across the continent. It was a big deal. The UN Economic Commission for Europe says transport infrastructure across the region is increasingly exposed to those sorts of things, pavement deterioration, radial deformation, thermal stress as extreme heat becomes more and more common, particularly in the summer months.
McGuire argues the next infrastructure spending cycle might have to shift away from decarbonization toward adaptation, keeping our roads, rails, and grids functional in this hotter climate. On the road side, the fix is a bit tougher. Road materials that hotter regions have used for years, like Total Energies, which makes a heat resistant binder built to keep pavement from rutting and cracking, and Shell, one of the world's largest suppliers of bitumen, which recently expanded its own line for tougher conditions. Rail suppliers include Vossloh, Pandrol, and Vostalpine railway systems, not a word I've ever pronounced before. They could benefit as operators replace equipment built for cooler climates with some more heat resistant stuff. And for the grid and materials companies, Prysmian, Nexans, NKT, Heidelberg materials, Holcim, Sika, they all stand to gain from the demand for heat-resistant cables, concrete, and other construction materials. I will bore you with my voice no longer. Time to bring in another one. Finally.
We've made it to our guest segment this week. I could have just skimmed through those stories and gone right to the guest and had ten minutes with Martha. Would the listeners have really cared? We'll find out in a moment. If you haven't read her story this week, Martha Muir penned something in the Financial Times titled US Clean Power Prices Set to Soar as AI demand coincides with subsidy cuts. As always, we recommend you, the listener or viewer, go out and read the piece yourself. We're pro reading on this show, but if you haven't done it yet, we brought Martha in to give us a little preview.
Paul Gerke: Martha, what's the big takeaway from those who haven't had a chance to check out your piece in the Financial Times?
Martha Muir: Yeah, the big takeaway is that the prices of clean energy PPAs are just going to skyrocket over the next few years from about 40 to 120 percent depending on where you are in the country. And there are a few main drivers of that. The biggest one is that, as everyone knows, Donald Trump gave solar wind developers the worst Fourth of July present ever because projects which begin construction after that are not eligible for the Biden era tax credits. At the same time, there is huge, huge demand for electricity and it's growing all the time as your listeners will be aware due to data centers and electrification. So demand for these clean energy PPAs is skyrocketing especially from folks like hyperscalers who have very very deep pockets and can afford to pay very very high prices which means that clean energy buyers who aren't hyperscalers are being a bit squeezed.
Paul Gerke: That's a really interesting point. In my conversations about all of this, it seemed to be a mad dash to take advantage of those legacy IRA era subsidies for solar and wind in particular before they were scuttled by the one year anniversary of the one big beautiful bill. Despite that, it seemed like there was a pretty heavy pipeline of projects that were pushing along, with the understanding that once we cleared that July fourth hurdle, things were gonna get a little stickier.
In your reporting, Martha, did you see that pinch in the pipeline now that we're clear of those legacy credits and we have to work with the less lucrative PTCs?
Martha Muir: Yeah, exactly. So you're right. Developers over the past year have been trying to push out the projects which were going to clear the 4th of July deadline. But now we're looking at the projects which probably aren't and, you know, the price is just going to go up because previously they were getting 30% off production costs. But it's important to note that Trump is not the only issue. Trump's cuts to tax credits are not the only issue that developers have because a lot of industry folks say, well, actually we can manage the tax credits rolling off because this is just a correction to what the price should have been. The thing that's also really pushing up prices is supply chain costs because everyone's also competing for the same transformers, labour, long interconnection timelines. So if you take all of this together you just have massive upward pressure on prices.
Paul Gerke: Yeah, the interconnection timelines in particular, there was some recent data that came out that I was reading a couple of weeks ago that said the median interconnection time for a utility scale project in the US right now is north of sixty months as of last year. That is a long time for anyone to sit on millions and millions of dollars in development and trying to figure out where that's all gonna go.
In your reporting, Martha, I'm curious, did you see, and you kind of mentioned this a little bit, this divide that seems to be manifesting between the haves and the have nots. These hyperscalers have such deep pockets that I feel like we all want to leverage them as best we can to bolster our grid in this time of electricity demand increase. But at the same time, they're very clearly pushing out a lot of the smaller, even legacy players, because they just cannot compete in terms of scale and dollars and cents.
Martha Muir: Yeah, so this is one front of a kind of conflict that's happening between data centers and non data centers industry because the latter will tell you that competition for land and resources is pushing them out because, as you said, the hyperscalers have such deep pockets. And this one place where it's showing up again is clean energy PPAs, because if you're like a big industrial, you might want to buy them to match your fossil fuel energy use or as a hedge against power prices. And this is just another field of battle where, you know, if you're a solar and wind developer, you might prefer to sell to a hyperscaler because they just had such deep pockets and there's not much left for everyone else.
Paul Gerke: Seems reasonable to think that the state would then take care of us and then you get taken care of, you know.
Last question for you before we let you go, Martha. I've been having this conversation with a couple of the friends in the policy space that seem to have a pretty strong idea, but I'm curious for your take. Do you think that ultimately, someday down the road, clean energy subsidies like what were in the IRA return? Because they call it the solar coaster for a reason, right? In the US, it's up, down, up, down subsidies. New subsidy, this country's banned. You can't get products from here. We gotta shift to here. Production's starting here. And it just seems to be this game of catch up and chase. I've talked to some of the industry that seem to think we are better off in the long run without the subsidies, but others still think that there's going to be such demand that they're going to become something that gets back on the table if and when Democrats resume power in the US.
Martha Muir: Yeah, you know, it's really hard to say because there are obviously some movements already towards, like there's been some legislation introduced, which I don't think the person who created that legislation really intends or thinks that it's going to be passed. But, you know, cutting what was a big pillar of Biden's legacy is obviously something that the Democrats and people in the renewables folks are very sore about. But you know, a lot of people think that the industry can make it without tax credits because even without them, solar and in some ways wind is still very economically competitive. And it's interesting that even without the tax credits, solar is still going to be the leading source of any energy additions through 2030. And so I can see a world where the industry says, you know what, let's learn to live without these, because I think what is damaging, more damaging than not having the tax credits is the constant uncertainty while these bills are being written and when you wait for the fine writing about how the terms are going to be. And so I think maybe a world where people know what they're dealing with is one that will be preferable rather than the constant back and forth.
Paul Gerke: Yeah, I agree. I think certainty is a lot easier to price. And it's worth noting that the technology that makes the most out of solar and wind, as in battery energy storage, is becoming cheaper. And their subsidies were untouched in the IRA. Those continue through 2030. So a lot of folks that want to pair batteries with those existing solar and wind operations will still be able to dip into those tax credits. And I think maybe that's the space to keep our eye on as we move forward. Once we get past 2030, are those subsidies gone, or do we still see the value in bolstering the grid with batteries? Down where our friend Ryan is in ERCOT, Texas, they've been doing that a ton and the grid has fundamentally changed. PJM, for example, does not have a ton of batteries, and they're in a hot mess right now. Not to get on my battery pedestal. But thank you so much, Martha. We really appreciate you popping by this week in Cleantech this week. We're about out of time on the show. Don't go anywhere just yet. We've got one last segment.
As always, our Cleantecher of the Week. Drumroll, please. It's Dr. Bill Ho, CEO of GRST. Their company makes a PFAS-free water-soluble battery binder. That's a mouthful, I'm sure Mike Casey wrote for me himself. Conventional binder relies on forever chemicals, a thing Casey doesn't like, and toxic solvents to help process that stuff. GRST's version dissolves in water, makes recycling to high purity black mass simpler and cheaper. Congratulations, Dr. Bill Ho, our Cleantecher of the Week.
All right, everybody, we're about out of time. One last shout out to our terrific producer, Brian Mendez, as well as Alex Petersen and Clare Quirin who helped make this show possible. And a big thank you to Martha Muir, who had a piece in the Financial Times that we still encourage you go and read, for stopping by the show to share some insights with us. If you enjoyed what you heard or saw on this week in Cleantech, please subscribe. Leave us a little feedback or even share a story suggestion to the email we mentioned at the top of the show. As always, you can check out the articles we discuss each week. There are links in the episode description, as well as where this lives on factorthis.com. Until next time, people, be good.