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This Week in Cleantech (10/30/2026) - Can this battery clean up industrial heat?

October 30, 2026 · 23 min

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This Week in Cleantech is a weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in clean energy and climate featuring Paul Gerke of Factor This and Tigercomm’s Mike Casey.

This week's episode features special guest Brad Plumer from The New York Times, who discusses a new type of battery that can store heat for industrial processes.

This week’s “Cleantecher of the Week” is Andrew Redd, founder of Endurance Energy. The former SpaceX engineer just tested the world’s first subsea geothermal power plant at an active underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon. It only produced net-positive power for 8.7 seconds, but that was enough to prove it works, and Endurance is now planning its first commercial project in Tonga. Congratulations, Andrew!

This Week in Cleantech — October 30, 2026

  1. What the coming copper crunch means for the global economy — Financial Times
  2. ‘It’s offensively cheap’: How solar power is quietly becoming bigger than nuclear — BBC
  3. Why EVs aren’t powering America’s electric grid yet — Axios
  4. How solid-state transformers could help power the AI boom — MIT Technology Review
  5. A New Kind of Battery Is Taking Off. This One Stores Blistering Heat. — The New York Times

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