The Indian electric vehicle company EVage just raised a $28 million seed round aimed to help the firm build delivery trucks for companies including Amazon's partner in the country.
Driving the news: The U.S.-based, mobility-focused VC firm RedBlue Capital led the funding round, and its aimed at enabling EVage to complete a factory outside of Delhi, the announcement states.
President Biden's plan to tap Sarah Bloom Raskin as top banking regulator at the Federal Reserve could intensify the central bank's already growing focus on climate change.
Catch up fast: The news broke Thursday night that Biden will nominate Raskin, a Duke University law professor, for the powerful role of vice chair for supervision.
An unsettling part of the human condition today is that the year you were born will most likely be the coolest year of your life, globally speaking.
By the numbers: Newly released climate data from NOAA, NASA and Berkeley Earth show that the planet has had an unbroken streak of 45 years of warmer than average temperatures.
Climate disasters in 2021 affected millions of lives, caused billions of dollars in economic loss across the world and brought into stark reality the perils of higher temperatures and climate change in general.
The big picture: Early data has ranked 2021 as the sixth warmest year on record. Climatologists have warned that increased surface temperatures make floods, droughts, heat and cold waves, wildfires and tropical storms and hurricanes more common and intense.
The Biden administration's push to bolster scientific integrity policies across federal agencies yielded its first report this week, but a co-chair of the report's panel is facing her own questions from the scientific community about a recent research integrity ethics breach.
Why it matters: The report could help address political interference or other methods of undermining science used to draw public health, environmental and technology policies.
The Biden administration is expanding efforts to speed clean electricity expansion with its existing powers, but faces big obstacles to meeting its climate goals without far more help from Congress.
Why it matters: President Biden has set a goal of reaching 100% carbon-free power by 2035 and cutting economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions — that is, power, transport, industry, etc. — in half by 2030.
A powerful House committee next week will convene a hearing on the energy use of digital cryptocurrency mining.
Why it matters: The Jan. 20 Energy and Commerce Committee hearing highlights growing concern about carbon emissions linked to bitcoin and other currencies, even as the sector vows to get greener.
The energy storage heavyweight Fluence and the solid-state battery startup QuantumScape Thursday morning announced a multiyear agreement to test and deploy QuantumScape lithium-metal tech in stationary applications.
Why it matters: Storage growth is important to enabling high levels of renewables penetration and also helps aid grid reliability. Solid-state battery tech holds the promise of higher energy density and other benefits.
Electric vehicles will soon have "bidirectional" or two-way batteries that can turn cars into useful sources of power for your home, worksite or even another car.
Why it matters: One of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption is the lack of charging infrastructure.
But if you think of your car as a source of energy — not just a consumer of it — that whole calculus begins to change, says Reilly Brennan, a transportation investor at Trucks Venture Capital.
