A San Francisco nonprofit has published a detailed road map of the experiments, studies, and infrastructure that it says would be needed to make informed decisions about the use of solar geoengineering, MIT Technology Review can reveal.

Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. 

But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.

Reflective, a research organization that funds studies on solar geoengineering, has today attempted to fill that gap with the release of its SAI Research Roadmap.

“Our mission is to equip the world with the data and tools required for informed decision-making about sunlight reflection fast enough to matter,” says Dakota Gruener, the organization’s cofounder and chief executive. “Our sense is the world may need to make very consequential decisions on timelines far shorter than our research system is prepared for.”

The hope is the exercise will guide scientific efforts and encourage philanthropies or government agencies to fund high-priority work and “responsibly accelerate research,” says Gruener.

If all the work is done in a coordinated way, it would take about a decade and cost around $370 million—and if it’s not, it would require roughly 20 years and nearly $1.4 billion, the report estimates.

While Gruener stresses that Reflective doesn’t advocate using this form of solar geoengineering, the report does make the case for conducting outdoor experiments, which would release successively larger amounts of sulfur dioxide (or materials that would convert into it) in the stratosphere to observe what happens.

That is a controversial standpoint. Since 2002, hundreds of academics have signed an open letter calling for a ban on outdoor experiments and an “international non-use agreement,” arguing that such a powerful technology could never be governed in a globally equitable way. And some signatories argue that more studies can never address one of the biggest questions about using solar geoengineering: Who gets to do it.  

“The first-order questions, from my perspective, are not technical,” Aarti Gupta, co-initiator of the non-use initiative and professor of global environmental governance at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, told me in a recent on-stage interview. 

“The core question is: Who would control a planet-altering technology like stratospheric aerosol injection? Who would develop it, and who would deploy it, and to what end? To serve what purposes, and whose purposes? Those questions are very fundamental, because this planet-altering technology will have winners and losers.”

‘Fast enough to matter’

Since Gruener incorporated Reflective in late 2023, the nonprofit has quickly become an important  player in solar geoengineering research. It has now raised more than $20 million from a number of prominent charities and individuals, and it’s provided around $4 million to several dozen research groups. Reflective has also undertaken a handful of its own projects to promote research, including the development of an open-source solar geoengineering simulator and an online hub for collaborative research.

Earlier this year, Reflective released its SAI Uncertainties database, which identified a long list of scientific unknowns and  engineering obstacles that would need to be addressed before even a small-scale solar geoengineering effort could move ahead. (I wrote about the specific scenario and the unknowns in this earlier piece.)

Some of the biggest uncertainties involve what gas or particles would make the most sense to use and what would happen once they were released in the dry stratosphere. It’s not clear, for example, whether they’d spread out in a way that maximizes the reflectivity—or clump together and quickly fall out into the troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere. 

The road map builds upon the database, highlighting the path to addressing most of those questions. 

The road map

The initial phase in Reflective’s road map, labeled “foundational knowledge,” includes additional computer simulation studies and lab experiments designed to shed light on the potential impacts on different regions, ecosystems, and phenomena, including ocean circulation patterns, ice sheets, and crop yields. 

The report also notes the need to begin developing more observational tools during this phase to improve understanding of the baseline conditions of the stratosphere—and, in turn, our ability to assess any effects from the eventual release of materials.

This first stage would last two to three years and cost $30 million to $75 million, though some of the analysis and observational work would continue into subsequent phases. 

The next stage would include using modified aircraft to release 10 metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, four times over the course of two seasons. The full research stage could take four to eight years and cost $70 million to $150 million, the report says. The work during it may reduce uncertainty about the “cooling efficacy” of solar geoengineering, or how much the planet would cool per ton of sulfur released, by about 25%.

The experiments during the next phase would step those levels up dramatically, releasing 25,000 tons of sulfur dioxide over the course of one season, at least once but possibly twice. That research stage, which includes other work as well, would last four to 11 years, run $270 million to $1.1 billion, and decrease efficacy uncertainty by around 66%, according to the road map.

The final phase of research would be ongoing monitoring of full-scale solar geoengineering, if the world goes ahead with it. The goal would be to gather real-life data on the technology in action, update estimates of the effects in models, and spot any “unexpected or undesired consequences.”

Gruener says that the road map is intended as a Version 1, meant to be “concrete enough for people to argue with.” But Reflective intends to update the plan as it receives additional reactions from researchers and other observers, and it will invite such feedback through a mechanism on the site.

She also notes that there are firm “stage gates,” set up between the latter stages—in other words, research shouldn’t proceed to the next phase if the experiments suggest that the releases don’t have the hoped-for impact, show worrisome downsides, or fail to resolve crucial uncertainties.

“Our road map has these gates precisely because there may be points where the answer is ‘You should stop,’” she says.

Termination shock

Most observers I spoke to about the report agree that these studies could reduce uncertainty about the effectiveness of solar geoengineering and our technical ability to carry it out. 

But highlighting the scientific importance of outdoor experiments won’t necessarily make them any easier to move ahead with. Several earlier proposals to carry out such experiments, including Harvard’s SCoPEx and the UK-based SPICE project, were ultimately halted amid opposition from environmentalists or policymakers.

In addition, not everyone agrees that experiments at those scales will get us to the point where we’re capable of making an “informed decision.” 

Wil Burns, a research professor and legal scholar at American University and a signatory to the International Non-Use Agreement, fears that scientists won’t be able to understand the extent of the potential downsides, including impacts on the protective ozone layer and changes to regional precipitation patterns, until we’re carrying out full-fledged solar geoengineering.

“The research would give you some answers,” he says. “I just don’t think it gives you answers that are that relevant. To get to those relevant answers, you have to deploy at scale—and I just don’t think that’s ever tenable.”

That’s because, in his view, using the technology would violate principles of intergenerational equity: If the world continues emitting greenhouse gases, increased levels of solar geoengineering would merely mask the continued warming of the planet. Burns says that means future generations—people who had no say in its use—couldn’t turn it off without triggering a sudden surge of warming, known as termination shock. 

“What that would do, in my mind, is put a sword of Damocles over future generations,” he says. “So even if you could, quote-unquote, ‘prove it works,’ I don’t think from an intergenerational perspective it would ever be tenable.”

(Some researchers, however, have argued that the risks of termination shock are less likely than often assumed—and that solar geoengineering could be slowly dialed down over time.)

‘The right approach’

Ilan Gur, the former CEO of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the UK research department that funded 21 geoengineering research projects last year, applauds Reflective’s road map. 

“Whether you’re a scientist or a policymaker or just a concerned citizen, our goal should be as quickly and efficiently as possible to answer the biggest questions scientifically that would tell us [whether] this is an approach that might work or that would never work,” he says. “We should all want to spend the effort and money to buy down that uncertainty, so my view is 100% the approach that Reflective is taking is the right one.”

Sebastian Eastham, an associate professor in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London who is leading an ARIA-funded research project exploring another approach to engineered cooling, agrees that the outdoor experiments described in the Reflective road map can’t resolve all the unknowns. But he says the map helps begin a conversation about how to make decisions concerning the use of a tool with potential benefits and risks, in the face of escalating climate dangers.

“Every hard decision that has ever been taken has been in the context of unresolved uncertainty,” he says. “That’s just the nature of things.”

Eastham adds that it’s become essential to move beyond computer simulations to address some of the key questions, arguing that appropriately designed and executed outdoor experiments can teach us so much more than millions of hours of computational processing time “that it almost becomes irresponsible to say, ‘Well, there cannot be ever any experiment.’”

The risk is “that we spin our wheels running the same computational simulations over and over and over again,” he says. That could prevent researchers from learning essential things about the effectiveness or the dangers of stratospheric aerosol injection. 

Weighing the risks

Gruener says the risks that solar geoengineering could exacerbate inequality need to be considered, but notes that unchecked warming also threatens to disproportionately harm developing regions.

She also acknowledges that outdoor experiments won’t fully address the scientific unknowns but stresses that they can answer a lot—and carry little environmental risk. She notes that 10 tons of sulfur dioxide is less than 2% of the amount that the global aviation industry releases into the atmosphere each day.

“Some people will be uncomfortable with any discussion of any outdoor experiment, but if we want decisions made on good science … then these are questions that an experiment will be necessary to address,” Gruener says.

She fears that the rising dangers of climate change will put growing pressure on nations and other actors to move forward with solar geoengineering, even if no one has done the necessary research to reduce scientific uncertainty and sort out the technical challenges.

“We don’t think the alternative is decisions not happening at all,” she says. “We think the alternative is decisions being made in a panic or on lack of evidence.”

The US is hitting records for the rapid growth of its energy storage market. That’ll go a long way to shoring up the grid, increasing reliability and also cutting emissions, since batteries can help store energy from intermittent renewables like wind and solar.

Crucially, this is all happening with the help of cheap Chinese batteries, though there’s been a concerted effort to reduce the US’s reliance on them. Most recently, in an executive order in late August, the Trump administration declared a national emergency that essentially bans Chinese batteries from being used in grid-scale energy storage systems.

There’s an argument to be made about reducing reliance on any single source of a crucial energy technology. But all this tension raises a broader question for me: How much should countries take advantage of cheap, available tech, versus cutting off major sources to force development of their own factories even if that comes at a higher cost?

This is hardly America’s first push to move away from Chinese influence in the battery supply chain. One of the major policy tools used in recent years is restricting the tax credits designed to incentivize use of the new technologies. Limiting the types of projects that are eligible can help reduce the cost of local technologies so they’re more competitive with otherwise cheaper imported options.

Back in 2022, the US government designed the tax credits that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act to restrict where a battery’s minerals could be mined, processed, or recycled, as well as where a battery and its components were assembled.

Those tax credits underwent a makeover in 2025, but the Trump administration has taken a similar tack. New legislation requires that starting in 2026, 55% of the cost of materials used for new energy storage projects must come from outside China and other restricted countries or the projects won’t qualify for tax credits. 

And we can’t forget about tariffs. Import taxes for batteries increased to 25% in January, up from 7.5%.

But the new executive order is a more drastic move. It bans the installation of “any foreign-produced bulk-power system electric equipment” that poses a national security risk. The order specifically calls out battery energy storage systems, as well as inverters and transformers.

“An outright ban was a bit of a surprise, and it does create a bit of concern for domestic players in the US,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, an energy industry analyst.

The move is likely to slow deployment of grid-connected energy storage projects in the near term, according to analysis from BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy. Projects could face delays as developers wait for clarity on the rules.

Depending on the detailed guidance from the Department of Energy, which is expected by the end of the year, some projects may need to find alternative sources for their cells, whether they’re domestically produced or imported from other countries. These will likely be more expensive than Chinese imports, says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF. “Worst case, those projects could get canceled,” he says.

Technically, the order applies even to existing energy storage plants, though it’s unlikely that they’ll be taken offline because of their batteries’ origin. Since most of these plants currently use Chinese batteries, enforcing the order to the letter would essentially mean removing most installed battery energy storage from the US grid, Kikuma says.

In the longer term, the US will eventually be able to meet its own demand for batteries. The country could have enough capacity by about 2030, though some factories may not ramp up or run at their full capability, meaning domestic supply won’t actually meet demand until later in the 2030s. 

New factories from LG Energy Solutions, Samsung SDI, Ford, and SK On are set to come online or ramp up by next year. In an ironic twist, a slowing EV market is helping, as some factories originally designed for vehicle batteries are retooling to build cells for grid storage instead. 

But it will come at a cost. Today, batteries produced in the US are still significantly more expensive than those made in China. Even switching to imports from other countries like South Korea would likely be more expensive.

This is a crucial issue that goes beyond the US and even beyond batteries. China is miles ahead of much of the rest of the world on technologies like solar panels and batteries. Through years of government support and experience with research and manufacturing, the nation is an energy powerhouse.

There’s a delicate political balance to maintain as the world figures out how to navigate this situation. There’s cheap technology on offer, which can help drastically reduce emissions and energy costs. But there can be risks associated with relying too much on any one player for crucial technologies.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes.

The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year. This growth is being driven by a combination of cheaper batteries and an urgent need for more energy storage capacity as renewables such as solar and onshore wind power are added to the grid. 

Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“It really came down to a handful of big projects,” says Shan Tomouk, energy storage and energy lead for Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But there was also growth in the category of so-called behind-the-meter batteries, which include both residential and industrial battery storage systems. These projects, generally smaller than utility-scale installations, are typically owned and operated by homeowners or businesses rather than utilities or power providers. 

In the behind-the-meter category, data centers led the way, making up about three-quarters of new batteries in the commercial sector. But residential batteries saw a sharp slowdown. These systems are often installed in homes to store power from solar panels or serve as a backup source in case of a blackout. Home installations are projected to drop by 16% in 2026 compared with last year, according to the report.

That drop happened largely because a tax credit that helped subsidize home battery systems ended in 2025, Tomouk says. Home installations should recover by the end of the decade, he adds. And tax credits for nonresidential batteries have largely survived.

Overall, batteries are a bright spot in energy right now. “This is one of the strong sectors in the US,” says Isshu Kikuma, an energy storage analyst at BloombergNEF, an energy consultancy.

As the battery market continues to grow, one major trend to keep an eye on is a move toward US-made technology. Today, nearly all the systems coming online use cells made in China, though some are put together into complete energy storage systems in the US.

Tariffs were already pushing the US energy storage industry toward domestic production. And beginning this year, energy storage tax credits required projects to limit their reliance on batteries imported from China. There’s a lot of manufacturing capacity set to come online in the US, though these factories probably won’t be able to meet demand until at least 2030 or so, Tomouk says, so prices could tick up.

The steel industry isn’t exactly known for innovation. Very little has changed about purifying iron ore since the process was invented and commercialized in the 1850s.

The majority of steelmakers melt solid iron ore at dizzyingly high temperatures inside blast furnaces, where the material reacts with gases to trigger chemical reactions that remove oxygen. It then undergoes further refining to purify it before it is made into products like rebar and car frames.

The process relies on coal, and it generates roughly 7% of the carbon emissions that drive climate change—about as much as the fashion industry. Decarbonization has proved difficult: Profit margins are tight and furnaces have long service lives, making investment tough to justify.

Now Laureen Meroueh may have found a way to clean up steelmaking without driving up the price. Meroueh, the founder of Hertha Metals, invented a new furnace that simplifies the chemistry behind the process. Her method turns iron ore into refined liquid steel in a single step, and it swaps coal for natural gas. Together, those changes slash emissions by at least half, she says, and cut costs by 25% compared with steelmaking business as usual.

If it catches on, the tech could be transformative. “There’s huge value in reducing the size of this production system,” says Iryna Zenyuk, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine. “They’re massive. They’re inefficient and require a lot of energy input, so even if they just save energy efficiency, that’s already a big step.”

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the steel industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system.

Still, it’s a risky endeavor, but pushing limits isn’t new for Meroueh. At 12 she was accepted into a pilot program to take college-­level courses through Florida Atlantic University in lieu of a traditional secondary education. She was immediately drawn to engineering and explored topics including calculus and ocean wave energy.

Despite the rigorous coursework, she would spend hours sitting in trees and surfing, which fostered a deep appreciation for nature and a desire to safeguard it. “I don’t know how you can’t be drawn toward trying to help protect that,” she says. 

Now 34, Meroueh has let that passion inform her professional goals. After finishing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT, she led a green hydrogen startup before founding Hertha in 2022. A first-generation Lebanese-American from an entrepreneurial family, she saw starting her own company as a typical path. “Seeing how common it is to take that jump to start your own business is what made me feel like ‘This is normal,’” she explains on a video call from her office at Hertha’s pilot plant in Conroe, Texas, just north of Houston.

That facility can produce one metric ton of steel per day. “One ton per day is a big metric for steel,” says Rajesh Swaminathan, a partner at Khosla Ventures, one of the company’s investors. (Hertha had raised about $20 million in funding as of July 2026.) 

Swaminathan says the company’s scale-up is “impressive,” especially given how little the team has spent. Competitors, he notes, have created far less steel with $50 million or $100 million in funding.

Hertha’s approach focuses on what it can fix about the industry now, as opposed to waiting around for a zero-carbon system. While other approaches to making green steel center on using hydrogen to free oxygen from iron ore—a method that could one day cut or eliminate emissions—Meroueh says Hertha is content for the time being with a continued reliance on fossil fuels, mainly to keep costs down. The current Hertha plant could eventually switch to a fully decarbonized system without drastically changing the hardware, she says, if hydrogen becomes more affordable. 

In the meantime, plans are underway to expand into a new plant next to the existing one. The facility is slated to produce 10,000 metric tons of high-purity steel per year and should reach full capacity by the end of 2027. By 2030, Meroueh believes, Hertha can up its output to 500,000 metric tons per year with the addition of a third site. That’s only a fraction of the approximately 80 million metric tons of steel produced annually in the US, but Zenyuk says making even one metric ton is still an achievement.

In Meroueh’s mind, the world isn’t going to outgrow its need for steel, so she’s asking another question: “How can we be smarter about how we make things … so that it’s also not going to harm us in the long term?”

Google’s newest AI weather forecasting model predicts wind speed at 100 metres above the ground, roughly the height of a modern wind turbine. It also forecasts cloud cover and how much sunlight reaches the surface, and it updates every hour. Energy traders, grid operators and wind and solar developers already pay other companies for that data. The introduction of WeatherNext 3 now puts Google in their market.

Google DeepMind and Google Research released the model on September 3. It produces a global forecast every hour at up to five-kilometre resolution for surface variables such as temperature and moisture. The previous version, WeatherNext 2, worked on a 25-kilometre grid and refreshed every six hours. Google says the new energy variables are meant to help grid operators and developers predict how much power their wind and solar assets will generate, then match that against demand.

The consumer side of the launch has had most of the attention. WeatherNext 3 now powers weather results in Google Search, the Gemini app, Google Maps and the Google Maps Platform Weather API. Behind it sits an enterprise layer that matters more commercially. The same forecast data can be queried in BigQuery and Earth Engine or downloaded in bulk from Google Cloud Storage, with no model setup required by the customer.

Why the energy sector is buying AI weather forecasting

Grid operators are running a system that has become harder to predict at both ends. On the generation side, renewables now account for most new capacity. S&P Global Market Intelligence’s US Grid Outlook 2026 projects solar and energy storage as the primary sources of new capacity this year, at 51.2GW and 25.7GW respectively out of more than 90GW of planned additions. 

Solar and wind generate according to the weather rather than demand, so each gigawatt added makes a short-term forecast more accurate.

On the consumption side, the new load is coming from AI. S&P Global identifies the spread of data centres across North America as a primary driver of the recent surge in electricity demand, forcing utilities to revise their load forecasts upward. Deloitte’s 2026 Power and Utilities Industry Outlook projects peak demand growing by roughly 26% by 2035, with data centre demand alone potentially reaching 176GW, five times its 2024 level.

The cost of getting a forecast wrong is straightforward. If an operator underestimates how much wind power will arrive, it has to buy replacement electricity at short notice, usually from gas plants kept on expensive standby. If it overestimates, wind and solar farms end up being paid to switch off because the grid cannot absorb what they are producing. Both outcomes are expensive, and both are forecasting failures.

The market Google is entering

Selling weather forecasts to the energy sector is an established business. Vaisala, Solcast, DNV’s WindGEMINI and IBM’s HyperWatch all compete in it. So does Jua, a Swiss firm that claims its EPT-2 model beats Microsoft Aurora and DeepMind’s earlier GraphCast on accuracy while updating 24 times a day, against what it describes as a typical four updates a day among competitors.

Google’s advantage is reach. The same forecast appears as a table in BigQuery, a layer in Earth Engine, an API in Google Maps Platform and the default answer in Google Search. No specialist vendor has that spread, and the hourly refresh closes the update-frequency gap those vendors have used to differentiate themselves.

The incumbents have one technical argument left. Jua’s published position is that physics-based models such as ECMWF’s HRES still outperform purely data-driven AI models during record-breaking extreme weather, because physics models encode rules about how energy and mass move through the atmosphere, while AI models learn patterns from past data. 

Jua sells a physics-constrained product, so the claim serves its own interests. It also describes the conditions grid operators worry about most, when a storm falls outside anything the model has seen in training.

What is new, and what is being oversold

The architectural claim behind WeatherNext 3 is that it learns from real observations instead of from simulations. Most AI weather models, WeatherNext 2 included, are trained on output from numerical weather prediction models, which are supercomputer-driven physics simulations that carry a six-hour data lag. That lag can introduce bias in fast-changing variables such as rain and surface temperature. WeatherNext 3 ingests live geostationary satellite imagery and trains directly on readings from individual weather stations.

The shift is real, though narrower than much of the coverage has suggested. Google’s own system diagram shows the model taking in one-hour satellite mosaics alongside traditional historical analysis. DeepMind senior research scientist Ilan Price told Bloomberg the gain comes from not waiting for the next analysis and using the most recent information available instead. 

Reporting puts the remaining data lag at three to four hours, down from about seven. Dependence on numerical weather prediction has been reduced, not removed.

The accuracy figures need similar care. Google reports improvements of up to 60% against NASA’s IMERG satellite product, 30% against MRMS radar and 10% against rain gauge readings at early lead times, measured using a standard scoring method for probability forecasts. Those are three separate baselines, and the percentages do not add together. The widely repeated claim of 50% better precipitation forecasting applies specifically to forecasts a day or more ahead. Every figure carries an “up to” qualifier, which makes each one a best case rather than a typical result.

Google published no independent third-party validation alongside the launch. It points instead to live evaluations by Brightband, whose leaderboard it cites in claiming WeatherNext 3 is the most accurate global weather model to date. A utility considering a switch away from a paid specialist will care more about performance in its own service territory, on its own assets, than about a global leaderboard position.

Google’s own stake in the problem

Google is selling forecasting tools into a grid problem its own industry helped create. The data centre build-out driving the load growth utilities are struggling to serve is led by the hyperscalers, Google among them, and Google has signed multi-gigawatt renewable procurement agreements to supply its own facilities.

Accurate prediction of wind and solar output is directly useful to a company matching large volumes of clean energy against a load that is both growing and variable. That is commercial logic, and it goes some way to explaining why the energy variables shipped in this release.

Google has not published pricing for enterprise access to WeatherNext 3, or said whether the BigQuery and Earth Engine data carries standard Cloud query charges or a separate licence. Utilities weighing a move away from a paid specialist will want that figure before they weigh any accuracy claim.

2025, more than 65,000 employees in its Corporate and Investment Bank were actively using the platform, while more than 90% of its engineers were using AI coding assistants.

The bank also said AI-based transaction screening allowed it to review more than twice the previous transaction volume while reducing manual operator checks by half.

Bank of America is using a generative AI-enabled system called EricaAssist with more than 18,000 customer service employees. The tool summarises why a customer is calling, retrieves relevant information, and recommends possible next steps while keeping the employee responsible for the interaction.

Bank of America said in July 2026 that EricaAssist can deliver contextual guidance in under three seconds and has reduced average call times by nearly one minute. The bank plans to extend the system to additional servicing scenarios and business lines later in 2026.

(Photo by Google)

See also: MIT AI forecasts extreme weather without historical data

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.

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Every major economy is staring at the same problem right now. Artificial intelligence is consuming electricity at a pace that grids were never designed to handle. In the US, capacity market prices in PJM, the country’s largest grid operator, have risen more than tenfold in two years, with data-centre growth identified as a primary driver. In Europe, utilities are scrambling to upgrade transmission infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with hyperscalers’ demand.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects global data-centre electricity consumption could approach 1,000 TWh by the end of this decade. Renewable energy is largely there, but the ability to coordinate it, through AI energy grid mapping at national scales, is what most countries still lack. But China just built it.

A study published in Nature this week by researchers from Peking University and Alibaba Group’s DAMO Academy has produced something that no country has managed before: a complete, high-resolution, AI-generated inventory of an entire nation’s wind and solar infrastructure, with the analytical framework to coordinate it as a unified system.

Using a deep-learning model trained on sub-metre satellite imagery, the team identified China’s 319,972 solar photovoltaic facilities and 91,609 wind turbines, processing 7.56 terabytes of imagery to do so.

AI energy grid mapping

Prior research into solar-wind complementarity – the idea that two sources can offset each other’s variability in time and geography – has largely relied on hypothetical or modelled deployment scenarios. How complementarity manifests under real-world infrastructure, and how it shapes system-level integration outcomes, has until now remained unclear.

The researchers show that solar-wind complementarity substantially reduces generation variability, with effectiveness increasing as the geographic scope of pairing expands.

In practical terms, the further apart the facilities being coordinated are, the more reliably they achieve balance. A cloud that covers solar farms in Gansu does not darken wind corridors in Inner Mongolia, for example. The study’s findings point to a structural inefficiency in how China currently manages its grid: coordination happens at a provincial rather than national level.

Transitioning to a unified national scale, the researchers argue, would make it easier to pair complementary energy sources, stabilise the grid, and avoid curtailment – the wasting of generated renewable power that has long been one of China’s most costly clean-energy problems.

Liu Yu, a professor at Peking University’s School of Earth and Space Sciences, described the inventory as allowing China to see its new-energy landscape from a “God’s-eye view,” a phrase that carries more operational weight than it might first suggest. Grid operators cannot optimise what they are not aware of – until now.

China is in the middle of an AI-driven electricity demand surge that is straining its grid. The rapid proliferation of data services and massive computing facilities have pushed the sector’s power consumption up 44% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026, reaching 22.9 billion kilowatt-hours, according to the China Electricity Council.

That is an extraordinary rate of growth for a sector whose demand was already great. This has accelerated data-centre expansion in China’s northern and western provinces, where land is cheaper, wind and solar resources are more available, with commensurately lower electricity prices. The provinces being targeted for new data centres are the same regions with the highest solar-wind complementarity.

Behind the model

The technical achievement behind this is worth understanding in its own right. DAMO’s deep-learning model was trained to identify solar photovoltaic facilities and wind turbines from sub-metre resolution satellite imagery, a task complicated by the sheer diversity of installation types, terrain conditions, and image quality.

The resulting dataset covers installations in 1,915 Chinese counties, spanning everything from rooftop panels in coastal cities to utility-scale wind farms on the Mongolian plateau. Processing 7.56 terabytes of imagery to produce a nationally consistent, county-level inventory is a demonstration of what large-scale geospatial AI can do when applied to infrastructure problems, and a template that other countries could, in principle, replicate.

China’s clean energy sector generated an estimated 15.4 trillion yuan (US$2.26 trillion) in economic output last year, equivalent to Brazil’s entire GDP, according to the Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Managing an asset base of that scale without a national-level visibility tool was always going to be a limiting factor, a limit that’s now gone.

The study’s dataset and code have been made publicly available via Zenodo.

(Photo by Luo Lei)

See also: Inside China’s push to apply AI in its energy system

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events, click here for more information.

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A rare warm spell in January melted enough snow to uncover Cornell University’s newest athletic field, built for field hockey. Months before, it was a meadow teeming with birds and bugs; now it’s more than an acre of synthetic turf roughly the color of the felt on a pool table, almost digital in its saturation. The day I walked up the hill from a nearby creek to take a look, the metal fence around the field was locked, but someone had left a hallway-size piece of the new simulated grass outside the perimeter. It was bristly and tough, but springy and squeaky under my booted feet. I could imagine running around on it, but it would definitely take some getting used to.

My companion on this walk seemed even less favorably disposed to the thought. Yayoi Koizumi, a local environmental advocate, has been fighting synthetic-turf projects at Cornell since 2023. A petite woman dressed that day in a faded plum coat over a teal vest, with a scarf the colors of salmon, slate, and sunflowers, Koizumi compulsively picked up plastic trash as we walked: a red Solo cup, a polyethylene Dunkin’ container, a five-foot vinyl panel. She couldn’t bear to leave this stuff behind to fragment into microplastic bits—as she believes the new field will. “They’ve covered the living ground in plastic,” she said. “It’s really maddening.” 

The new pitch is one part of a $70 million plan to build more recreational space at the university. As of this spring, Cornell plans to install something like a quarter million square feet of synthetic grass—what people have colloquially called “astroturf” since the middle of the last century. University PR says it will be an important part of a “health-promoting campus” that is “supportive of holistic individual, social, and ecological well-being.” Koizumi runs an anti-plastic environmental group called Zero Waste Ithaca, which says that’s mostly nonsense.

This fight is more than just the usual town-versus-gown tension. Synthetic turf used to be the stuff of professional sports arenas and maybe a suburban yard or two; today communities across the United States are debating whether to lay it down on playgrounds, parks, and dog runs. Proponents say it’s cheaper and hardier than grass, requiring less water, fertilizer, and maintenance—and that it offers a uniform surface for more hours and more days of the year than grass fields, a competitive advantage for athletes and schools hoping for a more robust athletic program.

But while new generations of synthetic turf look and feel better than that mid-century stuff, it’s still just plastic. Some evidence suggests it sheds bits that endanger users and the environment, and that it contains PFAS “forever chemicals”—per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, which are linked to a host of health issues. The padding within the plastic grass is usually made from shredded tires, which might also pose health risks. And plastic fields need to be replaced about once a decade, creating lots of waste.

Yet people are buying a lot of the stuff. In 2001, Americans installed just over 7 million square meters of synthetic turf, just shy of 11,000 metric tons. By 2024, that number was 79 million square meters—enough to carpet all of Manhattan and then some, almost 120,000 metric tons. Synthetic turf covers 20,000 athletic fields and tens of thousands of parks, playgrounds, and backyards. And the US is just 20% of the global market. 

Where real estate is limited and demand for athletic facilities is high, artificial turf is tempting. “It all comes down to land and demand.”

Frank Rossi, professor of turf science, Cornell

Those increases worry folks who study microplastics and environmental pollution. Any actual risk is hard to parse; the plastic-making industry insists that synthetic fields are safe if properly installed, but lots of researchers think that isn’t so. “They’re very expensive, they contain toxic chemicals, and they put kids at unnecessary risk,” says Philip Landrigan, a Boston College epidemiologist who has studied environmental toxins like lead and microplastics.

But at Cornell, where real estate is limited and demand for athletic facilities is high, synthetic turf was a tempting option. As Frank Rossi, a professor of turf science at Cornell, told me: “It all comes down to land and demand.”

In 1965, Houston’s new, domed base­ball stadium was an icon of space-age design. But the Astrodome had a problem: the sun. Deep in the heart of Texas, it shined brightly through the Astrodome’s skylights—so much so that players kept missing fly balls. So the club painted over the skylights. Denied sunlight, the grass in the outfield withered and died.

A replacement was already in the works. In the late 1950s a Ford Foundation–funded educational laboratory determined that a soft, grasslike surface material would give city kids more places to play outside and had prevailed upon the Monsanto corporation to invent one. The result was clipped blades of nylon stuck to a rubber base, which the company called ChemGrass. Down it went into Houston’s outfield, where it got a new, buzzier name: AstroTurf.

AP PHOTO/ED KOLENOVSKY, FILE

That first generation of simulated lawn was brittle and hard, but quality has improved. Today, there are a few competing products, but they’re all made by extruding a petroleum-based polymer—that’s plastic—through tiny holes and then stitching or fusing the resulting fibers to a carpetlike bottom. That gets attached to some kind of padding, also plastic. In the 1970s the industry started layering that over infill, usually sand; by the 1990s, “third generation” synthetic turf had switched to softer fibers made of polyethylene. Beneath that, they added infill that combined sand and a soft, cheap shredded rubber made from discarded automobile tires, which pile up by the hundreds of millions every year. This “crumb rubber” provides padding and fills spaces between the blades and the backing.

In the early 1980s, nearly half the professional baseball and football fields in the US had synthetic turf. But many players didn’t like it. It got hotter than real grass, gave the ball different action, and seemed to be increasing the rate of injuries among athletes. Since the 1990s, most pro sports have shifted back toward grass—water and maintenance costs pale in comparison to the importance of keeping players happy or sparing them the risk of injury. 

But at the same time, more universities and high schools are buying the artificial stuff. The advantages are clear, especially in places where it rains either too much or not enough. A natural-grass field is usable for a little more than 800 hours a year at the most, spread across just eight months in the cooler, wetter northern US. An artificial-turf field can see 3,000 hours of activity per year. For sports like lacrosse, which begins in late winter, this makes artificial turf more appealing. Most lacrosse pitches are now synthetic. So are almost all field hockey pitches; players like the way the even, springy turf makes the ball bounce.

Furthermore, supporters say synthetic turf needs less maintenance than grass, saving money and resources. That’s not always true; workers still have to decompact the playing surface and hose it off to remove bird poop or cool it down. Sometimes the infill needs topping up. But real grass allows less playing time, and because grass athletic fields often need to be rotated to avoid damage, synthetic ground cover can require less space. Hence the market’s explosive growth in the 21st century.

The city and town of Ithaca—two separate political entities with overlapping jurisdiction over Cornell construction projects—held multiple public meetings about the university’s new synthetic fields: the field hockey pitch and a complex called the Meinig Fieldhouse. Koizumi’s group turned up in force, and a few folks who worked at Cornell came to oppose the idea too—submitting pages of citations and studies on the risks of synthetic grass.

At two of those meetings, dozens of Cornell athletes turned out to support the turf. Representatives of the university and the athletic department declined to speak with me for this story, citing an ongoing lawsuit from Zero Waste Ithaca. But before that, Nicki Moore, Cornell’s director of athletics, told a local newspaper that demand from campus groups and sports teams meant the fields were constantly overcrowded. “Activities get bumped later and later, and sometimes varsity teams won’t start practicing until 10 at night, you know?” Moore told the paper. “Availability of all-weather space should normalize scheduling a great deal.”

That argument wasn’t universally convincing. “It’s a bad idea, but that’s from the environmental perspective,” says Marianne Krasny, director of Cornell’s Civic Ecology Lab and one of the speakers at those hearings. “Obviously the athletic department thinks it’s a great idea.”

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Members of Cornell on Fire, a climate action group with members from both the university and the town, joined in opposing the use of artificial turf, citing the fossil-fuel origins of the stuff. They described the nominal support of the project from student athletes as inauthentic, representing not grassroots support but, yes, an astroturf campaign. 

Sorting out the actual science here isn’t simple. Over time, the plastic that synthetic turf is made of sheds bits of itself into the environment. In one study, published in 2023 in the journal Environmental Pollution, researchers found that 15% of the medium-­size and microplastic particles in a river and the Mediterranean Sea outside Barcelona, Spain, came from artificial turf, mostly in the form of tiny green fibers. Back in 2020, the European Chemicals Agency estimated that infill material from artificial-­turf fields in the European Union was contributing 16,000 metric tons of microplastics to the environment each year—38% of all annual microplastic pollution. Most of that came from the crumb rubber infill, which Europe now plans to ban by 2031. 

This pollution worries the Cornell activists. Ithaca is famous for scenic gorges and waterways. The new field hockey pitch is uphill from a local creek that empties into Cayuga Lake, the longest of the Finger Lakes and the source of drinking water for over 40,000 people.

And it’s not just the plastic bits. When newer generations of synthetic turf switched to durable high-density polyethylene, the new material gunked up the extruders used in the manufacturing process. So turf makers started adding fluorinated polymers—a type of PFAS. Some of these environmentally persistent “forever chemicals” cause cancer, disrupt the endocrine system, or lead to other health problems. Research in several different labs has found PFAS in many types of plastic grass.

But the key to assessing the threat here is exposure. Heather Whitehead, an analytical chemist then at the University of Notre Dame, found PFAS in synthetic turf at levels around five parts per billion—but estimated it’d be in water running off the fields at three parts per trillion; for context, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s legal drinking-water limit on one of the most widespread and dangerous PFAS chemicals is four parts per trillion. “These chemicals will wash off in small amounts for long periods of time,” says Graham Peaslee, Whitehead’s advisor and an emeritus nuclear physicist who studies PFAS concentrations. “I think it’s reason enough not to have artificial turf.”

This gets confusing, though. There are over 16,000 different types of PFAS, few have been well studied, and different ­companies use different manufacturing techniques. Companies represented by the Synthetic Turf Council now “use zero intentionally added PFAS,” says Melanie Taylor, the group’s president. “This means that as the field rolls off the assembly line, there are zero PFAS-formulated materials present.”

Some researchers are skeptical of the industry’s assurances. They’re hard to confirm, especially because there are a lot of ways to test for PFAS. The type of synthetic turf going onto the new field hockey pitch at Cornell is called GreenFields TX; the university had a sample tested using an EPA method that looks for 40 different PFAS compounds. It came back negative for all of them. The local activists countered that the test doesn’t detect the specific types they’re most concerned about, and in 2025 they paid for three more tests on newly purchased synthetic turf. Two clearly found fluorine—the F in “PFAS”—and one identified two distinct PFAS compounds. (The company that makes GreenFields TX, TenCate, declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.)

PFAS isn’t the only potential problem. There’s also the crumb rubber made from tires. A billion tires get thrown out every year worldwide, and if they aren’t recycled they sit in giant piles that make great habitats for rats and mosquitoes; they also occasionally catch fire. Lots of the tires that go into turf are made of styrene-­butadiene rubber, or SBR. In bulk, that’s bad. Butadiene is a carcinogen that causes leukemia, and fumes from styrene can cause nervous system damage. SBR also contains high levels of lead.

But how much of that comes out of synthetic-­turf infill? Again, that’s hotly debated. Researchers around the world have published suggestive studies finding potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals like zinc and lead in synthetic turf, with possible health risks to people using the fields. But a review of many of the relevant studies on turf and crumb rubber from Canada’s National Collaborating Centre for Environmental Health determined that most well-conducted health risk assessments over the last decade found exposures below levels of concern for cancer and certain other diseases. A 2017 report by the European Chemicals Agency—the same people who found all those microplastics in the environment—“found no reason to advise people against playing sports on synthetic turf containing recycled rubber granules as infill material.” And a multiyear study from the EPA, published in 2024, found much the same thing—although the researchers said that levels of certain synthetic chemicals were elevated inside places that used indoor artificial turf. They also stressed that the paper was not a risk assessment. 

The problem is, the kinds of cancers these chemicals can cause may take decades to show up. Long-term studies haven’t been done yet. All the evidence available so far is anecdotal—like a series for the Philadelphia Inquirer that linked the deaths of six former Phillies players from a rare type of brain cancer called glioblastoma to years spent playing on PFAS-containing artificial turf. That’d be about three times the usual rate of glioblastoma among adult men, but the report comes with a lot of cautions—small sample size, lots of other potential causes, no way to establish causation.

Synthetic turf has one negative that no one really disputes: It gets very hot in the sun—as hot as 150 °F (66 °C). This can actually burn players, so they often want to avoid using a field on very hot days.

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Athletes playing on artificial turf also have a higher rate of foot and ankle injuries, and elite-level football players seem to be more predisposed to knee injuries on those surfaces. But other studies have found rates of knee and hip injury to be roughly comparable on artificial and natural turf—a point the landscape architect working on the Cornell project made in the information packet the university sent to the city. Athletic departments and city parks departments say that the material’s upsides make it worthwhile, given that there’s no conclusive proof of harm.

Back in Ithaca, Cornell hired an environmental consulting firm called Haley & Aldrich to assess the evidence. The company concluded that none of the university’s proposed installations of artificial turf would have a negative environmental impact. People from Cornell on Fire and Zero Waste Ithaca told me they didn’t trust the firm’s findings; representatives from Haley & Aldrich declined to comment.

Longtime activists say that as global consumption of fossil fuels declines, petrochemical companies are desperate to find other markets. That means plastics. “There’s a big push to shift more petrochemicals into plastic products for an end market,” says Jeff Gearhart, a consumer product researcher at the Ecology Center. “Industry people, with a vested interest in petrochemicals, are looking to expand and build out alternative markets for this stuff.”

All that and more went before the decision-­makers in Ithaca. In September 2024, the City of Ithaca Planning Board unanimously issued a judgment that the Meinig Fieldhouse would not have a significant environmental impact and thus would not need to complete a full environmental impact assessment. Six months later, the town made the same determination for the field hockey pitch.

Zero Waste Ithaca sued in New York’s supreme court, which ruled against the group. Koizumi and lawyers from Pace University’s Environmental Litigation Clinic have appealed. She says she’s still hopeful the court might agree that Ithaca authorities made a mistake by not requiring an environmental impact statement from the college. “We have the science on our side,” she says.

Ithaca is a pretty rarefied place, an Ivy League university town. But these same tensions—potential long-term environmental and public health consequences versus the financial and maintenance concerns of the now—are pitting worried citizens against their representatives and city agencies around the country. 

New York City has 286 municipal synthetic-­turf fields, with more under construction. In Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan, two fields were approved via Zoom meetings during the pandemic, and Massimo Strino, a local artist who makes kaleidoscopes, says he found out only when he saw signs announcing the work on one of his daily walks in Inwood Hill Park, along the Hudson River. He joined a campaign against the plan, gathering more than 4,300 signatures. “I was canvassing every weekend,” Strino says. “You can count on one hand, literally, the number of people who said they were in favor.” 

But that doesn’t include the group that pushed for one of those fields in the first place: Uptown Soccer, which offers free and low-cost lessons and games to 1,000 kids a year, mostly from underserved immigrant families. “It was turning an unused community space into a usable space,” says David Sykes, the group’s executive director. “That trumped the sort of abstract concerns about the environmental impacts. I’m not an expert in artificial turf, but the parks department assured me that there was no risk of health effects.”

Artificial turf doesn’t go away. “You’re going to be paying to get rid of it. Somebody will have to take it to a dump, where it will sit for a thousand years.”

Graham Peaslee, emeritus nuclear physicist studying PFAS concentrations, University of Notre Dame

New York City councilmember Christopher Marte disagrees. He has introduced a bill to ban new artificial turf from being installed in parks, and he hopes the proposal will be taken up by the Parks Committee this spring. Last session, the bill had 10 cosponsors—that’s a lot. Marte says he expects resistance from lobbyists, but there’s precedent. The city of Boston banned artificial turf in 2022.  

Upstate, in a Rochester suburb called Brighton, the school district included synthetic-­turf baseball and softball diamonds in a wide-ranging February 2024 capital improvement proposition. The measure passed. In a public meeting in November 2025, the school board acknowledged the intent to use synthetic grass—or, as concerned parents had it, “to rip up a quarter ­million square feet of this open space and replace it with artificial turf,” says David Masur, executive director of the environmental group PennEnvironment, whose kids attend school in Brighton. Parents and community members mobilized against the plan, further angered when contractors also cut down a beloved 200-year-old tree. School superintendent Kevin McGowan says it’s too late to change course. Masur has been working to oppose the plan nevertheless—he says school boards are making consequential decisions about turf without sharing information or getting input, even though these fields can cost millions of dollars of taxpayer money.

In short, the fights can get tense. On Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts, a meeting about plans to install an artificial field at a local high school had to be ended early amid verbal abuse. A staffer for the local board of health who voiced concern about PFAS in the turf quit the board after discovering bullet casings in her tote bag, she said, which she perceived as a death threat. After an eight-year fight, the board eventually banned artificial turf altogether. 

What happens next? Well, outdoor artificial turf lasts only eight to 12 years before it needs to be taken up and replaced. The Synthetic Turf Council says it’s at least partially recyclable and cites a company called BestPLUS Plastic Lumber as a purveyor of products made from recycled turf. The company says one of its products, a liner called GreenBoard that artificial turf can be nailed into, is at least 40% recycled from fake grass. Joseph Sadlier, vice president and general manager of plastics recycling at BestPLUS, says the company recycles over 10 million pounds annually. 

Yet the material is piling up. In 2021, a Danish company called Re-Match announced plans to open a recycling plant in Pennsylvania and began amassing thousands of tons of used plastic turf in three locations. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2025.

In Ithaca, university representatives told planning boards that it would be possible to recycle the old artificial turf they ripped out to make way for the Meinig Fieldhouse. That didn’t happen. An anonymous local activist tracked the old rolls to a hauling company a half-hour’s drive south of campus and shared pictures of them sitting on the lot, where they stayed for months. It’s unclear what their ultimate fate will be.

That’s the real problem: Artificial turf just doesn’t go away. “You’re going to be paying to get rid of it,” says Peaslee, the PFAS expert. “Somebody will have to take it to a dump, where it will sit for a thousand years.” At minimum, real grass is a net carbon sink, even including installation and maintenance. Synthetic turf releases greenhouse gases. One life-­cycle analysis of a 2.2-acre synthetic field in Toronto determined that it would emit 55 metric tons of carbon dioxide over a decade. Plastic fields need less water to maintain, but it takes water to make plastic, and natural grass lets rainwater seep into the ground. Synthetic turf sends most of it away as runoff.

It’s a boggling set of issues to factor into a decision. Rossi, the Cornell turf scientist, says he can understand why a school in the northern United States might go plastic, even when it cares about its students’ health. “It was the best bad option,” he says. Concerns about microplastics and PFAS are “significant issues we have not fully addressed.” And they need to be. 

Douglas Main is a journalist and former senior editor and writer at National Geographic.

When I started digging into desalination technology for a new story, I couldn’t help but obsess over the numbers.

I’d known on some level that desalination—pulling salt out of seawater to produce fresh water—was an increasingly important technology, especially in water-stressed regions including the Middle East. But just how much some countries rely on desalination, and how big a business it is, still surprised me.

For more on how this crucial water infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable during the war in Iran, check out my latest story. Here, though, let’s look at the state of desalination technology, by the numbers.

Desalination produces 77% of all fresh water and 99% of drinking water in Qatar.

Globally, we rely on desalination for just 1% of fresh-water withdrawals. But for some countries in the Middle East, and particularly for the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Oman), it’s crucial.

Qatar, home to over 3 million people, is one of the most staggering examples, with nearly all its drinking water supplies coming from desalination. But many major cities in the region couldn’t exist without the technology. There are no permanent rivers on the Arabian Peninsula, and supplies of fresh water are incredibly limited, so countries rely on facilities that can take in seawater and pull out the salt and other impurities.

The Middle East is home to just 6% of the world’s population and over 27% of its desalination facilities.

The region has historically been water-scarce, and that trend is only continuing as climate change pushes temperatures higher and changes rainfall patterns.

Of the 17,910 desalination facilities that are operational globally, 4,897 are located in the Middle East, according to a 2026 study in npj Clean Water. The technology supplies not only municipal water used by homes and businesses, but also industries including agriculture, manufacturing, and increasingly data centers.

One massive desalination plant in Saudi Arabia produces over 1 million cubic meters of fresh water per day.

The Ras Al-Khair water and power plant in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia, is one of a growing number of gigantic plants that output upwards of a million cubic meters of water each day. That amount of water can meet the needs of millions of people in Riyadh City. Producing it takes a lot of power—the attached power plant has a capacity of 2.4 gigawatts.

While this plant is just one of thousands across the region, it’s an example of a growing trend: The average size of a desalination plant is about 10 times what it was 15 years ago, according to data from the International Energy Agency. Communities are increasingly turning to larger plants, which can produce water more efficiently than smaller ones.

Between 2024 and 2028, the Middle East’s desalination capacity could grow by over 40%.

Desalination is only going to be more crucial for life in the Middle East. The region is expected to spend over $25 billion on capital expenses for desalination facilities between 2024 and 2028, according to the 2026 npj Clean Water study. More massive plants are expected to come online in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt during that time.

All this growth could consume a lot of electricity. Between growth of the technology generally and the move toward plants that use electricity rather than fossil fuels, desalination could add 190 terawatt-hours of electricity demand globally by 2035, according to IEA data. That’s the equivalent of about 60 million households.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

As the conflict in Iran has escalated, a crucial resource is under fire: the desalination technology that supplies water across much of the region.

In early March, Iran’s foreign minister accused the US of attacking a desalination plant on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz and disrupting the water supply to nearly 30 villages. (The US denied responsibility.) In the weeks since, both Bahrain and Kuwait have reported damage to desalination plants and blamed Iran, though Iran also denied responsibility.

In late March, President Donald Trump threatened the destruction of “possibly all desalinization plants” in Iran if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened. Since then, he’s escalated his threats against Iran, warning of plans to attack other crucial civilian infrastructure like power plants and bridges.

Countries in the Middle East, particularly the Gulf states, rely on the technology to turn salt water into fresh water for farming, industry, and—crucially—drinking. The mounting attacks and threats to date highlight just how vital the industry is to the region—a situation made even more precarious by rising temperatures and extreme weather driven by climate change.

Right now, 83% of the Middle East is under extremely high water stress, says Liz Saccoccia, a water security associate at the World Resources Institute. Future projections suggest that’s going to increase to about 100% by 2050, she adds: “This is a continuing trend, and it’s getting worse, not better.”

Here’s a look at desalination technology in the Middle East and what wartime threats to the critical infrastructure could mean for people in the region. 

A vital resource

Desalination technology has helped provide water supplies in the Middle East since the early 20th century and became widespread in the 1960s and 1970s.

There are two major categories of desalination plants. Thermal plants use heat to evaporate water, leaving salt and other impurities behind. The vapor can then be condensed into usable fresh water. The alternative is membrane-based technology like reverse osmosis, which pushes water through membranes that have tiny pores—so small that salt can’t get through.

Early desalination plants in the Middle East were the first type, burning fossil fuels to evaporate water, leaving the salt behind. This technique is incredibly energy-intensive, and over time, processes that rely on filters became the dominant choice.

Membrane technologies have made up essentially all new desalination capacity in recent years; the last major thermal plant built in the Gulf came online in 2018. Many reverse osmosis plants still rely on fossil fuels, but they’re more efficient. Since then, membrane technologies have added more than 15 million cubic meters of daily capacity—enough to supply water to millions of people.

Capacity has expanded quickly in recent years; between 2006 and 2024, countries across the Middle East collectively spent over $50 billion building and upgrading desalination facilities, and nearly that much operating them.

Today, there are nearly 5,000 desalination plants operational across the Middle East.

And looking ahead, growth is continuing. Between 2024 and 2028, daily capacity is expected to grow from about 29 million cubic meters to 41 million cubic meters.

Uneven vulnerabilities

Some countries rely on the technology more than others. Iran, for example, uses desalination for about 3% of its municipal fresh water. The country has access to groundwater and some surface water, including rivers, though these resources are being stretched thin by agriculture and extreme drought.

Other nations in the region, particularly the Gulf countries (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Oman), have much more limited water resources and rely heavily on desalination. Across these six nations, all but the UAE get more than half their drinking water from desalination, and for Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait the figure is more than 90%.

“The Gulf countries are much, much more vulnerable to attacks on their desalination plants than Iran is,” says David Michel, a senior associate in the global food and water security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

There are thousands of desalination facilities across the region, so the system wouldn’t collapse if a small number were taken offline, Michel says. However, in recent years there’s been a trend toward larger, more centralized plants.

The average desalination plant is about 10 times larger than it was 15 years ago, according to data from the International Energy Agency. The largest desalination plants today can produce 1 million cubic meters of water daily, enough for hundreds of thousands of people. Taking one or more of these massive facilities offline could have a significant effect on the system, Michel says.

Escalating threats

Desalination facilities are quite linear, meaning there are multiple steps and pieces of equipment that work in sequence—and the failure of a component in that chain can take an entire facility down. Attacks on water inlets, transportation networks, and power supplies can also disrupt the system, Michel says. 

During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi forces pumped oil into the gulf, contaminating the water and shutting down desalination plants in Kuwait. 

The facilities are also generally located close to other targets in this conflict. Desalination is incredibly energy intensive, so about three-quarters of facilities in the region are next to power plants. Trump has repeatedly threatened power plants in Iran. In response, Iran’s military has said that if civilian targets are hit, the country will respond with strikes that are “much more devastating and widespread.” Other governments and organizations, including the United Nations, the European Union, and the Red Cross, have broadly condemned threats to infrastructure as illegal. 

But war isn’t the only danger facing these plants, even if it is the most immediate. Some studies have suggested that global warming could strengthen cyclones in the region, and these extreme weather events could force shutdowns or damage equipment.

Water pollution could also cause shutdowns. Oil spills, whether accidental or intentional, as in the case of the Gulf War, can  wreak havoc. And in 2009, a red algae bloom closed desalination plants in Oman and the United Arab Emirates for weeks. The algae fouled membranes and blocked the plants from being able to take water in from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.

Desalination facilities could become more resilient to threats in the future, and they may need to as their importance continues to grow. 

There’s increasing interest in running desalination facilities at least partially on solar power, which could help reduce dependence on the oil that powers most facilities today. The Hassyan seawater desalination project in the UAE, currently under construction, would be the largest reverse osmosis plant in the world to operate solely with renewable energy. 

Another way to increase resilience is for countries to build up more strategic water storage to meet demand. Qatar recently issued new policies that aim to improve management and storage of desalinated water, for example. Countries could also work together to invest in shared infrastructure and policies that help strengthen the water supply through the region. 

Preparedness, resilience, and cooperation will be key for the Middle East broadly as critical infrastructure, including the water supply, is increasingly under threat. 

“The longer the conflict goes on, the more likely we’ll see significant water infrastructure damage,” says Ginger Matchett, an assistant director at the Atlantic Council. “What worries me is that after this war ends, some of the lessons will show how water can be weaponized more strategically than previously imagined.” 

As the war in Iran continues to engulf the Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, one of the most visible global economic ripple effects has been fossil-fuel prices. In particular, you can’t get away from news about the price of gasoline, which just topped an average of $4 a gallon in the US, its highest level since 2022.

But looking ahead, further consequences for the global economy could be looming in plastics. Plastics are made using petrochemicals, and the supply chain impacts of the oil bottleneck near Iran are starting to build up. 

Plastic production accounts for roughly 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions today. And our current moment shows just how embedded oil and gas products are in our lives. It goes far beyond their use for energy. 

As I write this, I’m wearing clothes that contain plastic fibers, typing on a plastic keyboard, and looking through the plastic lenses of my glasses. It’s hard to imagine what our world looks like without plastic. And in some ways, moving away from fossil-derived plastic could prove even more complicated than decarbonizing our energy system. 

Crude oil prices have been on a roller-coaster in recent weeks, and prices have recently topped $100 a barrel.

Crude oil contains a huge range of hydrocarbons, and it’s typically refined by putting it through a distillation unit that separates the raw material into different fractions according to their boiling point. Those fractions then go on to be further processed into everything from jet fuel to asphalt binder. We’ve already seen the price spikes for some materials pulled out of crude oil, like gasoline and jet fuel.

Let’s zoom in on another component, naphtha. It can be added to gasoline and jet fuel to improve performance. It can also be used as a solvent or as a raw material to make plastics.

The Middle East currently accounts for about 20% of global naphtha production­ and supplies about 40% of the market in Asia, where prices are already up by 50% over the last month.

We’re starting to see these effects trickle down already. The price of polypropylene (which is made from naphtha and used for food containers, bottle caps, and even automotive parts) is climbing, especially in Asia.  

Typically, manufacturers have a bit of stock built up, but that’ll be exhausted soon, likely in the coming weeks. The largest supplier of water bottles in India recently announced that it would raise prices by 11% after its packaging costs went up by over 70%, according to reporting from Reuters. Toys could be more expensive this holiday season as manufacturers grapple with supply chain concerns.

Americans will likely feel these ripples especially hard if disruptions continue. The average US resident used over 250 kilograms of new plastics in 2019, according to a 2022 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s an absolutely massive number—the global average is just 60 kilograms.

The effects of higher prices for both fuels and feedstocks could compound and multiply, and alternatives aren’t widely available. Bio-based plastics made with materials like plant sugars exist, but they still make up a vanishingly tiny portion of the market. As of 2025, global plastics production totaled over 431 million metric tons per year. Bio-based and bio-degradable plastics made up about 0.5% of that, a share that could reach 1% by 2030.

Bio-based plastics are much more expensive than their fossil-derived counterparts. And many are made using agricultural raw materials, so scaling them up too much could be harmful for the environment and might compete with other industries like food production.

Recycling isn’t the easy answer either. Mechanical recycling is the current standard method used for materials like the plastics that make up water bottles and disposable coffee cups. But that degrades the materials over time, so they can’t be used infinitely. Chemical recycling has its own host of issues—the facilities that do it can be highly polluting, and today plastics that go into advanced recycling plants largely don’t actually go into new plastics.

There’s been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how this energy crisis is going to push the world more toward renewable energy. Solar panels, electric vehicles, and batteries could suddenly become more attractive as we face the drastic consequences of a disruption in the global fossil-fuel supply.

But when it comes to plastic, the future looks far more complicated. Even though the plastics industry is facing much the same disruptions as the energy sector, there aren’t the same obvious alternatives available for a transition. Our lives are tied up in plastic, with uses ranging from the essential (like medical equipment) to the mundane (my to-go coffee cup). Soon, our economy could feel the effects of just how much we rely on fossil-derived plastics, and how hard it’s going to be to replace them. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Qichao Hu doesn’t mince words about how he sees the state of the battery industry. “Almost every Western battery company has either died or is going to die. It’s kind of the reality,” he says.

Hu is the CEO of SES AI, a Massachusetts-based battery company. It once had aims of making huge amounts of advanced lithium metal batteries for major industries like electric vehicles—but now the company is placing its bets on AI materials discovery.

Hu sees the pivot as an essential one. “It’s just not possible for a Western company to build a sustainable business,” he says. The company is still making some batteries, but only for smaller markets like drones rather than those that would require higher volumes, like EVs. The new focus is the company’s battery materials discovery platform—which it can either license to other battery companies or use to develop materials to sell. 

Some leading US EV battery companies have folded in recent months, and others, like SES AI, are making dramatic changes in strategy. This shift in who’s building batteries and where they’re doing it could shape the future geopolitics of energy. 

The work that would eventually evolve into SES AI began at MIT, where Hu completed his graduate research. His battery work was aimed at applications in oil and gas exploration. The industry uses sensors that go deep underground, where temperatures can top 120 °C (about 250 °F). The team hoped to develop a battery that could withstand those high temperatures and last longer on a single charge. 

The chosen technology was a solid polymer lithium metal battery. These cells use lithium metal for their anode and a polymer for their electrolyte (the material that ions move through in a battery cell). Together, these components can increase the energy density of a cell significantly, relative to the lithium-ion batteries that are common in personal devices and EVs today. (Lithium-ion batteries generally use a graphite material for their anode and a liquid for the electrolyte.)

That solid-state battery technology became the foundation of Solid Energy, a startup Hu founded that spun out from MIT in 2012 and raised its first private investment in 2013.

The team eventually realized that underground oil exploration was a small market, so after several years of operation they began to focus on electric vehicles, which were starting to come into the mainstream. After the team tweaked the chemistry to work better at lower temperatures, the company built its first pilot facility in Massachusetts and eventually another facility in Shanghai.

By 2021, the battery industry was booming, Hu recalls, and EVs were the hottest industry to be in. There was a ton of interest in next-generation battery technology from major automakers at the time, and Solid Energy started developing technology with GM, Hyundai, and Honda.

Larger vehicles, like SUVs and trucks, seemed like a good fit for next-generation batteries, Hu says. Massive vehicles like the ones Americans like to drive would need lighter batteries so they could have a reasonable range without being prohibitively heavy.

The company also shifted its chemistry focus, and in 2022 it announced a battery with a silicon anode rather than a lithium metal one. That shift could help make the battery easier to manufacture.

Since then, growth in the EV market has slowed, at least in the US, partly because of major pullbacks in funding from the Trump administration. EV tax credits for drivers, a key piece of support pushing Americans toward electric options, ended in late 2025. With the market for large electric cars in trouble, Hu says, “now we have to look at every market.”  

The AI materials discovery platform on which it’s pinning many of its hopes is called Molecular Universe. The company seeks not only to provide its software to other battery companies but also to identify new battery materials and either license them or sell them to those companies.

COURTESY OF SES AI

The platform has already identified six new electrolyte materials, according to the company. Hu says one is an additive that could help improve the lifetime of batteries with silicon anodes. 

One of the challenges with silicon anodes is that they tend to swell a lot during use, which can cause physical damage and prevent efficient charging and discharging. To address the problem, the industry typically uses a material called fluoroethylene carbonate (FEC), which can help form an elastic film on the anode so the battery can still charge effectively. That additive can degrade at high temperatures, though, producing gases that can harm a battery’s lifetime. The SES platform identified a compound that works like FEC but doesn’t release those gases.

The company’s long history and deep battery knowledge could help make its platform a useful tool, Hu says. He sees the actual model as less crucial than SES’s domain expertise and data from years of making and testing batteries. 

“By not actually making the physical battery, we’re actually able to scale and then generate revenue faster,” he says. 

But some experts are skeptical about the near-term prospects for AI materials discovery to revive the industry. “New materials development, as much as we thought that was what people wanted (and, frankly, it should be what the cell makers want)—I don’t know that that seems to be the real linchpin of the battery industry’s progress,” says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm that focuses on the energy storage industry.

Investors are pulling back, and a slowdown in public support is making things difficult for some parts of the battery industry, she adds: “I don’t know that the ability to discover any new material is going to unlock anything new for the battery industry at this point in time.”

Just a few years ago, the battery industry was hot, hot, hot. There was a seemingly infinite number of companies popping up, with shiny new chemistries and massive fundraising rounds. My biggest problem was sifting through the pile to pick the most exciting news to cover.

That tide has turned, and in 2026, what seems to be in unlimited supply isn’t battery success stories but stumbles or straight-up implosions. Companies are failing, investors are pulling back, and batteries, especially for EVs, aren’t looking so hot anymore. On Monday, Steve Levine at The Information (paywalled link) reported that 24M Technologies, a battery company founded in 2010, was shutting down and would auction off its property.

The company itself has been silent, but this is the latest in a string of bad signs, and it’s a big one—at one point 24M was worth over $1 billion, and the company’s innovations could have worked with existing technology. So where does that leave the battery industry?

Many buzzy battery startups in recent years have been trying to sell some new, innovative chemistry to compete with lithium-ion batteries, the status quo that powers phones, laptops, electric vehicles, and even grid storage arrays today. Think sodium-ion batteries and solid-state cells.

24M wasn’t trying to sell a departure from lithium-ion but improvements that could work with the tech. One of the company’s major innovations was its manufacturing process, which involved essentially smearing materials onto sheets of metal to form the electrodes, a simpler and potentially cheaper technique than the standard one. 

The layers in the company’s batteries were thicker, which cut down on some of the inactive materials in cells and improved the energy density. That allows more energy to be stored in a smaller package, boosting the range of EVs—the company famously had a goal of a 1,000-mile battery (about 1,600 kilometers).

We’re still thin on details of what exactly went down at 24M and what comes next for its tech. The company didn’t get back to my questions sent to the official press email, and nobody picked up the phone when I called. 24M cofounder and MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang declined to speak on the record.

For those who have been closely following the battery industry, more bad news isn’t too surprising. It feels as if everyone is short on money these days, and as purse strings tighten, there’s less interest in novel ideas. “It just feels like there’s not a lot of appetite for innovation,” says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm that focuses on the energy storage industry.

Natron Energy, one of the leading sodium-ion startups in the US, shut down operations in September last year. Ample, an EV battery-swapping company, filed for bankruptcy in December 2025.  

There were always going to be failures from the recent battery boom. Money was flowing to all sorts of companies, some pitching truly wild ideas. But what recent months have made clear is that the battery market is turning brutal, even for the relatively safe bets.

Because 24M’s technology was designed to work into existing lithium-ion chemistry, it could have been an attractive candidate for existing battery companies to license or even acquire. “It’s a great example of something that should have been easier,” Rodby says.  

The gutting of major components of the Inflation Reduction Act, key legislation in the US that provided funding and incentives for batteries and EVs, certainly hasn’t helped. The EV market in the US is cooling off, with automakers canceling EV models and slashing factory plans.

There are bright spots. China’s battery industry is thriving, and its battery and EV giants are looking ever more dominant. The market for stationary energy storage is also still seeing positive signs of growth, even in the US. 

But overall, it’s not looking great. 

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. 

Loudoun County, Virginia, once known for its pastoral scenery and proximity to Washington, DC, has earned a more modern reputation in recent years: The area has the highest concentration of data centers on the planet.

Ten years ago, these facilities powered email and e-commerce. Today, thanks to the meteoric rise in demand for AI-infused everything, local utility Dominion Energy is working hard to keep pace with surging power demands. The pressure is so acute that Dulles International Airport is constructing the largest airport solar installation in the country, a highly visible bid to bolster the region’s power mix.

Data center campuses like Loudoun’s are cropping up across the country to accommodate an insatiable appetite for AI. But this buildout comes at an enormous cost. In the US alone, data centers consumed roughly 4% of national electricity in 2024. Projections suggest that figure could stretch to 12% by 2028. To put this in perspective, a single 100-megawatt data center consumes roughly as much electricity as 80,000 American homes. Data centers being built today are gearing up for gigawatt scale, enough to power a mid-sized city.

For enterprise leaders, energy costs associated with AI and data infrastructure are quickly becoming both a budget concern and a potential bottleneck on growth. Meeting this moment calls for a capability most organizations are only beginning to develop: energy intelligence. The emerging discipline refers to understanding where, when, and why energy is consumed, and using that insight to optimize operations and control costs.

These efforts stand to address both immediate financial pressures and longer-term reputational risks, as communities like Loudoun County grow increasingly concerned about the energy demands associated with nearby data center development.

In December 2025, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 300 executives to understand how companies are thinking about energy intelligence today, as well as where they’re anticipating challenges in the future.

Here are five of our most notable findings:

• Energy intelligence is becoming a universal business priority. One hundred percent of executives surveyed expect the ability to measure and strategically manage power consumption to become an important business metric in the next two years.
  
• AI workloads are already driving measurable cost increases, and the surge is just beginning. Two-thirds of executives (68%) report their companies have faced energy cost increases of 10% or more in the past 12 months due to AI and data workloads. Nearly all respondents (97%) anticipate their organization’s AI-related energy consumption will increase over the next 12-18 months.
  
• Mounting costs are the top energy-related threat to AI innovation. Half of executives (51%) rank rising costs as the single greatest energy-related risk to their digital and AI initiatives. Most companies currently tracking and attempting to optimize data center energy consumption are motivated by cost management.
  
• Organizations are responding through infrastructure optimization and energy-efficient partnerships. To address mounting energy demands, three in four leaders (74%) are optimizing existing infrastructure, while 69% are partnering with energy-efficient cloud and storage providers. More than half are also implementing AI workload scheduling (61%) and investing in more efficient hardware (56%).
  
• Closing the measurement gap is the next frontier. Most enterprises still lack the granular data needed for true energy intelligence. This gap is especially pronounced for companies relying on third-party cloud providers and managed services for their data compute and storage needs, where 71% say rising consumption-based costs originate, yet energy metrics are often opaque.

Download the full report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.