The global energy transition has been on an extraordinary tear in recent years. It’s a surge that even President Donald Trump, with his ruthless dismantling of U.S. climate and energy policies, along with a broader economic slowdown, will struggle to reverse. Propelled by record levels of public and private investment, utility-scale solar and wind power accounted for close to 90% of all new energy build-outs in the U.S. in the first nine months of 2024, a nearly 30% surge over 2023. With the buildout of big solar and battery plants expected to hit an all-time high in 2025, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a recent report that renewables would jump to 93% of new power generation this year.
Still, the low-carbon, electrified future can’t come quickly enough. The surge in energy consumption by data centers, electric vehicles, and manufacturing is putting a strain on an already struggling electrical grid and pushing up planet-warming pollution: Alongside all the clean energy, the amount of energy derived from oil and coal and natural gas are also hitting all-time highs. The heavy-duty chips used to train AI models and infer outputs are especially demanding: Running and cooling the data centers they fill already uses as much electricity each year as Italy, which has the eighth-largest GDP in the world. With all these greenhouse gases, we’re likely to need even more cooling: January to June of last year was the planet’s warmest six-month stretch in 175 years.
This year’s Most Innovative Companies in energy are meeting the challenge with advances that stretch from microgrids to giant batteries to the fan motors that keep data centers and the rest of the economy humming along. By assembling giant battery systems, Powin is helping ease the transition to cleaner energy sources and optimizing grid performance. And Intersect Power is building up capacity before the grid even arrives by working “behind the meter” to combine battery storage with solar farms and, soon, Google’s data centers.
Others are cooking up new ways to store all that wind and solar energy: If Antora gets its way, those batteries could someday be giant blocks of carbon; if Form Energy does, they could also be big containers filled with water and iron. Meanwhile, Infinitum is removing iron, at least from the innards of the conventional motor: By replacing the heavy stuff with printed circuit board, it’s cutting motors’ energy by 20%. That could help lighten the load of data centers and all the other places that rely on fans and conveyors—a welcome reminder that even subtle innovations can have massive impacts.
4. Form Energy
For using little more than rust to build giant, safe batteries that keep the grid running smoothly
Integrating renewable energy sources like solar and wind into the power grid is dependent on long-duration battery storage. Form Energy’s shipping container-size solution harnesses iron, water, air and rust in a process that can store energy for days or even weeks, at a lower cost and with greater safety than more conventional batteries. Each battery is a 40-foot container filled with cells that include a plate of iron submerged in water with dissolved salts. As the battery discharges, it pulls in oxygen and the iron starts to rust. When it charges, the oxygen is released from the iron, returning it to an unrusted state.
The systems have yet to be deployed at utility scale, but the company has managed to rack up more commercial orders than most long-duration energy-storage startups, with 14 GWh of projects in the pipeline. In July, just a year after first breaking ground, Form completed construction of its first large manufacturing plant, a 550,000-square-foot facility at the site of a former steel mill in West Virginia. And with Minnesota’s Great River Energy, it’s planning to switch on its first deployment in Cambridge, Minnesota, in 2025.
Last year Form also won $147 million in funding from the Department of Energy to deploy a giant battery system in a former paper mill in Maine. When completed in 2028, it will be the largest battery installation on Earth, capable of discharging 85 megawatts of power for up to 100 hours in a particularly strained part of New England’s grid. Recently, the company notched $455 million in a Series F funding round, including investments from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners. Another investor, GE Vernova, said it would partner with Form to boost its manufacturing and supply chain operations.
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