12 start-ups tackling the energy transition

Gurgaon-based ReNew was the first Indian renewable company to list on Nasdaq, raising $1.2bn through a special-purpose acquisition company deal. ReNew has a portfolio of 15.6GW of clean energy generation as India races to hit a target of installing 500GW of renewable capacity by 2030.

Greenko, another of India’s huge wind and solar producers, has an installed capacity of 7.5GW and is expanding into green ammonia, signing a deal with Malaysia’s Petronas last October. 

US solar and storage developer Intersect Power operates in California and Texas, and is looking to both build out more renewable generation and provide more clean energy to data centres.

Commonwealth is one of the most high profile start-ups chasing the dream of recreating the nuclear fusion that happens in the sun.

Unlike nuclear fission, when atoms are split, fusion does not produce significant radioactive waste, making it a potential source of safe, nearly limitless carbon-free electricity.

Backed by Italian oil major Eni, Commonwealth attracted nearly $2bn in funding from investors including Tiger Global and Bill Gates, and said it had reached a pivotal milestone in March for its magnet technology. 

TerraPower is a next-generation nuclear power plant under construction in Wyoming. The company was founded by Bill Gates, who said this month that he would “put in billions more”.

TerraPower has started construction on a sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming, and plans to couple it with a molten salt energy storage system, providing built-in gigawatt-scale energy storage.

TAE is a nuclear fusion start-up, backed by Google and Chevron, that was spun out of the University of California, Irvine in the 1990s. It uses a proprietary reactor design that fuses a hydrogen proton with boron, which it believes is safer than other fusion methods.

The UK’s largest household energy supplier is rolling out solar panels and batteries for homes, as well as its Kraken energy management platform. It became profitable earlier this year and has recently entered the US renewables market for the first time with the acquisition of two solar farms: one in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania.

After announcing a deal to buy Renu Energy in North Carolina earlier this year, California-based Swell now sells and installs solar panel and battery units across the US. Swell’s business involves aggregating those home batteries into “virtual power plants” that can be used by utilities to bolster the grid.

Washington, DC-based Arcadia connects homes with its community solar farms, allowing people to use solar power without having to install their own panels. It has more than 2GW of solar energy under management, with more than 200,000 homes and 2,500 organisations connected to solar farms.

Sweden’s answer to the battery gigafactories of the US and Asia is critical to Europe’s hopes of building its own electric vehicle supply chain. However, the company has said it is reviewing its plans to build a new factory in Borlange in central Sweden and carmaker BMW recently cancelled a €2bn contract for batteries.

South Korean battery maker SK On signed an $11bn deal with Ford in 2021 to help electrify the carmaker’s fleet, but has run into problems as the market for electric vehicles has slowed down. More recently, it has said that Europe is too reliant on Chinese made batteries.

This battery recycling start-up established by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel aims to reduce the need to mine lithium by reusing the materials in existing batteries. Its factory in Nevada is processing the equivalent of 250,000 dead electric vehicle batteries a year into the raw materials to make new batteries.