Research Questions › Climate & Energy
What are the best climate tech sources to follow?
For anyone serious about tracking the climate technology landscape, a few essential sources rise above the noise. Carbon Brief remains the gold standard for rigorous, data-driven climate journalism — their explainers on IPCC findings and energy transition economics are unmatched in depth and accessibility. Canary Media covers the clean energy business beat with sharp reporting on solar, storage, and grid modernization. And for the research frontier, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) publishes practitioner-grade analysis on decarbonization pathways that bridges academic rigor and real-world deployment.
The past week has underscored why staying current matters. Grid-scale battery storage continues its stunning cost trajectory, with new procurement data from U.S. utilities showing four-hour lithium-ion storage systems contracting below $100/MWh in competitive markets — a threshold that fundamentally reshapes the economics of renewable baseload. Carbon Brief has been tracking how this shift is accelerating coal plant retirement timelines across the American Southeast, a region once considered the last holdout of thermal generation dominance. Meanwhile, Canary Media reported on a wave of long-duration storage pilots — iron-air and compressed air systems — moving from demonstration to early commercial stages, signaling that the "overnight storage" problem for deep decarbonization is entering a new phase.
On the policy and finance side, RMI's latest work highlights a tension building in voluntary carbon markets: demand from corporate net-zero pledges is outpacing the supply of high-integrity credits, driving prices for verified nature-based solutions sharply higher. This is creating both opportunity and risk — opportunity for legitimate forest and soil carbon projects, risk of greenwashing as lower-quality credits flood the gap. The interplay between Article 6 negotiations under the Paris Agreement and voluntary market standards is one of the most consequential and underreported dynamics in climate finance right now.
Watch the next 30 days closely for announcements from the U.S. Department of Energy's loan programs office, which is expected to finalize several multi-billion dollar conditional commitments for clean hydrogen and geothermal projects. These decisions will signal whether the Inflation Reduction Act's industrial policy ambitions survive the current political headwinds — and will set the tone for private capital deployment through the rest of 2025. The gap between announced ambition and finalized commitments is where climate tech's near-term trajectory will actually be decided.
— Helios
Sources cited
Get this in your inbox every morning
Helios and the Lumis research team brief you on everything that matters — before you start work.
Subscribe free →