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About 33 miles south of Phoenix, Interstate 10 bisects a line of solar panels traversing the desert like an iridescent snake. The solar farms shape follows the path of a canal, with panels serving as awnings to shade the gently flowing water from the unforgiving heat and wind of the Sonoran Desert. The panels began generating power last November for the Akimel Ootham and Pee Posh tribesknown together as the Gila River Indian Community, or GRICon their reservation in south-central Arizona, and they are the first of their kind in the U.S. The community is studying the effects of these panels on the water in the canal, hopeful that they will protect a precious resource from the deserts unflinching sun and wind. In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely-watched water users in the West in the process. The Gila River Indian Community in Arizona lined 3,000 feet of canals with solar panels. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] The communitys investments come at a critical time for the Colorado River, which supplies water to about 40 million people across seven Western states, Mexico, and 30 tribes, including GRIC. Annual consumption from the river regularly exceeds its supply, and a decades-long drought, fueled in part by climate change, continues to leave water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead dangerously low. Covering water with solar panels is not a new idea. But for some it represents an elegant mitigation of water shortages in the West. Doing so could reduce evaporation, generate more carbon-free electricity, and require dams to run less frequently to produce power. But so far the technology has not been included in the ongoing Colorado River negotiations between the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, tribes, and Mexico. All are expected to eventually agree on cuts to the systems water allocations to maintain the rivers ability to provide water and electricity for residents and farms, and keep its ecosystem alive. People in the U.S. dont know about [floating solar] yet, said Scott Young, a former policy analyst in the Nevada state legislatures counsel bureau. Theyre not willing to look at it and try and factor it into the negotiations. Several Western water managers Inside Climate News contacted for this story said they were open to learning more about floating solarColorado has even studied the technology through pilot projects. But, outside of GRICs project, none knew of any plans to deploy floating solar anywhere in the basin. Some listed costly and unusual construction methods and potentially modest water savings as the primary obstacles to floating solar maturing in the U.S. A Tantalizing Technology With Tradeoffs A winery in Napa County, California, deployed the first floating solar panels in the U.S. on an irrigation pond in 2007. The country was still years away from passing federal legislation to combat the climate crisis, and the technology matured here haltingly. As recently as 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis, most of the worlds 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity had been built in Asia. Unlike many Asian countries, the U.S. has an abundance of undeveloped land where solar could be constructed, said Prateek Joshi, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) who has studied floating solar, among other forms of energy. Even though [floating solar] may play a smaller role, I think its a critical role in just diversifying our energy mix and also reducing the burden of land use, he said. [Image: Paul Horn/Inside Climate News] This February, NREL published a study that found floating solar on the reservoirs behind federally owned dams could provide enough electricity to power 100 million U.S. homes annually, but only if all the developable space on each reservoir were used. Lake Powell could host almost 15 gigawatts of floating solar using about 23% of its surface area, and Lake Mead could generate over 17 gigawatts of power on 28% of its surface. Such large-scale development is probably not going to be the case, Joshi said, but even if a project used only a fraction of the developable area, theres a lot of power you could get from a relatively small percentage of these Colorado Basin reservoirs. The study did not measure how much water evaporation floating solar would prevent, but previous NREL research has shown that photovoltaic panelssometimes called floatovoltaics when they are deployed on reservoirscould also save water by changing the way hydropower is deployed. Some of a dams energy could come from solar panels floating on its reservoir to prevent water from being released solely to generate electricity. As late as December, when a typical Western dam would be running low, lakes with floating solar could still have enough water to produce hydropower, reducing reliance on more expensive backup energy from gas-fired power plants. Joshi has spoken with developers and water managers about floating solar before, and said there is an eagerness to get this [technology] going. The technology, however, is not flawless. Solar arras can be around 20% more expensive to install on water than land, largely because of the added cost of buoys that keep the panels afloat, according to a 2021 NREL report. The waters cooling effect can boost panel efficiency, but floating solar panels may produce slightly less energy than a similarly sized array on land because they cant be tilted as directly toward the sun as land-based panels. And while the panels likely reduce water loss from reservoirs, they may also increase a water bodys emissions of greenhouse gases, which in turn warm the climate and increase evaporation. This January, researchers at Cornell University found that floating solar covering more than 70% of a ponds surface area increased the waters CO2 and methane emissions. These kinds of impacts should be considered not only for the waterbody in which [floating solar] is deployed but also in the broader context of trade-offs of shifting energy production from land to water, the studys authors wrote. Any energy technology has its trade-offs, Joshi said, and in the case of floating solar, some of its benefitsreduced evaporation and land usemay not be easy to express in dollars and cents. Silver Buckshot There is perhaps no bigger champion for floating solar in the West than Scott Young. Before he retired in 2016, he spent much of his 18 years working for the Nevada Legislature researching the effects of proposed legislation, especially in the energy sector. On an overcast, blustery May day in southwest Wyoming near his home, Young said that in the past two years he has promoted the technology to Colorado River negotiators, members of Congress, environmental groups, and other water managers from the seven basin states, all of whom he has implored to consider the virtues of floating solar arrays on Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Young grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, about 40 miles, he estimated, from the pioneering floating solar panels in Napa. He stressed that he does not have any ties to industry; he is just a concerned Westerner who wants to diversify the regions energy mix and save as much water as possible. But so far, when he has been able to get someones attention, Young said his pitch has been met with tepid interest. Usually the response is: Eh, thats kind of interesting, said Young, dressed in a black jacket, a maroon button-down shirt and a matching ball cap that framed his round, open face. But theres no follow-up. The Bureau of Reclamation has not received any formal proposals for floating solar on its reservoirs, said an agency spokesperson, who added that the bureau has been monitoring the technology. In a 2021 paper published with NREL, Reclamation estimated that floating solar on its reservoirs could generate approximately 1.5 terawatts of electricity, enough to power about 100 million homes. But, in addition to potentially interfering with recreation, aquatic life, and water safety, floating solars effect on evaporation proved difficult to model broadly. So many environmental factors determine how water is lost or consumed in a reservoirsolar intensity, wind, humidity, lake circulation, water depth, and temperaturethat the studys authors concluded Reclamation should be wary of contractors claims of evaporation savings without site-specific studies. Those same factors affect the panels efficiency, and in turn, how much hydropower would need to be generated from the reservoir they cover. The report also showed the Colorado River was ripe with floating solar potentialmore than any other basin in the West. Thats particularly true in the Upper Basin, where Young has been heartened by Colorados approach to the technology. In 2023, the state passed a law requiring several agencies to study the use of floating solar. Last December, the Colorado Water Conservation Board published its findings, and estimated that the state could save up to 407,000 acre-feet of water by deploying floating solar on certain reservoirs. An acre-foot covers one acre with a foot of water, or 325,851 gallons, just about three years worth of water for a family of four. When Young saw the Colorado study quantifying savings from floating solar, he felt hopeful. 407,000 acre-feet from one state, he said. I was hoping that would catch peoples attention. Saving that much water would require using more than 100,000 acres of surface water, said Cole Bedford, the Colorado Water Conservation Boards chief operating officer, in an email. On some of these reservoirs a [floating solar] system would diminish the recreational value such that it would not be appropriate, he said. On others, recreation, power generation, and water savings could be balanced. Colorado is not planning to develop another project in the wake of this study, and Bedford said that the technology is not a silver bullet solution for Colorado River negotiations. While floating solar is one tool in the tool kit for water conservation, the only true solution to the challenges facing the Colorado River Basin is a shift to supply-driven, sustainable uses and operations, he said. Some of the Wests largest and driest cities, like Phoenix and Denver, ferry Colorado River water to residents hundreds of miles away from the basin using a web of infrastructure that must reliably operate in unforgiving terrain. Like their counterparts at the state level, water managers in these cities have heard floatovoltaics floated before, but they say the technology is currently too immature and costly to be deployed in the U.S. Lake Pleasant, which holds some of the Central Arizona Projects Colorado River water, is also a popular recreation space, complicating its floating solar potential. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] In Arizona, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) delivers much of the Colorado River water used by Phoenix, Tucson, tribes, and other southern Arizona communities with a 336-mile canal running through the desert, and Lake Pleasant, the companys 811,784-acre-foot reservoir. Though CAP is following GRICs deployment of solar over canals, it has no immediate plans to build solar over its canal, or Lake Pleasant, according to Darrin Francom, CAPs assistant general manager for operations, power, engineering, and maintenance, in part because the city of Peoria technically owns the surface water. Covering the whole canal with solar to save the 4,000 acre-feet that evaporates from it cold be prohibitively expensive for CAP. The dollar cost per that acre-foot [saved] is going to be in the tens of, you know, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, Francom said, mainly due to working with novel equipment and construction methods. Ultimately, he continued, those costs are going to be borne by our ratepayers, which gives CAP reason to pursue other lower-cost ways to save water, like conservation programs, or to seek new sources. An intake tower moves water into and out of the dam at Lake Pleasant. [Photo: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News] The increased costs associated with building solar panels on water instead of on land has made such projects unpalatable to Denver Water, Colorados largest water utility, which moves water out of the Colorado River Basin and through the Rocky Mountains to customers on the Front Range. Floating solar doesnt pencil out for us for many reasons, said Todd Hartman, a company spokesperson. Were we to add more solar resourceswhich we are consideringwe have abundant land-based options. GRIC spent about $5.6 million, financed with Inflation Reduction Act grants, to construct 3,000 feet of solar over a canal, according to David DeJong, project director for the communitys irrigation district. Young is aware there is no single solution to the problems plaguing the Colorado River Basin, and he knows floating solar is not a perfect technology. Instead, he thinks of it as a silver buckshot, he said, borrowing a term from John Entsminger, general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authoritya technology that can be deployed alongside a constellation of behavioral changes to help keep the Colorado River alive. Given the duration and intensity of the drought in the West and the growing demand for water and clean energy, Young believes the U.S. needs to act now to embed this technology into the fabric of Western water management going forward. As drought in the West intensifies, I think more lawmakers are going to look at this, he said. If you can save water in two wayswhy not? Were Not Going to Know Until We Try If all goes according to plan, GRICs West Side Reservoir will be finished and ready to store Colorado River water by the end of July. The community wants to cover just under 60% of the lakes surface area with floating solar. Do we know for a fact that this is going to be 100% effective and foolproof? No, said DeJong, GRICs project director for its irrigation district. But were not going to know until we try. GRICs panels will have a few things going for them that projects on lakes Mead or Powell probably wouldnt. West Side Reservoir will not be open to recreation, limiting the panels impacts on people. And the community already has the fundsInflation Reduction Act grants and some of its own moneyto pay for the project. But GRICs solar ambitions may be threatened by the hostile posture toward solar and wind energy from the White House and congressional Republicans, and the project is vulnerable to an increasingly volatile economy. Since retaking office, President Donald Trump, aided by billionaire Elon Musk, has made deep cuts in renewable energy grants at the Environmental Protection Agency. It is unclear whether or to what extent the Bureau of Reclamation has slashed its grant programs. Under President Donald J. Trumps leadership, the department is working to cut bureaucratic waste and ensure taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently, said a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior, which oversees Reclamation. This includes ensuring Bureau of Reclamation projects that use funds from the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act align with administration priorities. Projects are being individually assessed by period of performance, criticality, and other criteria. Projects have been approved for obligation under this process so that critical work can continue. And Trumps tariffs could cause costs to balloon beyond the communitys budget, which could either reduce the size of the array or cause delays in soliciting proposals, DeJong said. While the community will study the panels over canals to understand the waters effects on solar panel efficiency, it wont do similar research on the panels on West Side Reservoir, though DeJong said they have been in touch with NREL about studying them. The enterprise will be part of the system that may one day offset all the electrical demand and carbon footprint of GRICs irrigation system. The community, they love these types of innovative projects. I love these innovative projects, said GRIC Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, standing in front of the canals in April. Lewis had his dark hair pulled back in a long ponytail and wore a blue button down that matched the color of the sky. I know for a fact this is inspiring a whole new generation of water protectorsthose that want to come back and they want to go into this cutting-edge technology, he said. I couldnt be more proud of our team for getting this done. DeJong feels plenty of other water managers across the West could learn from what is happening at GRIC. In fact, the West Side Reservoir was intentionally constructed near Interstate 10 so that people driving by on the highway could one day see the floating solar the community intends to build there, DeJong said. It could be a paradigm shift in the Western United States, he said. We recognize all of the projects were doing are pilot projects. None of them are large scale. But its the beginning. By Jake Bolster, Inside Climate News This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.
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E-Commerce
2012. I walk out of a gastroenterologists office with a brochure titled Your Life With Ulcerative Colitis. What the brochure doesnt say: A month later, I will wake up on the day of a critical midyear design presentation feeling too nauseous to leave my apartment, and will have to spend several weeks at my parents house, where I will miss several more midterms. A year later, Ill stand at a boarding gate and feel too sick to take a five-hour flight and meet with potential graduate school advisers. Ill soon learn that, for me, these wont be one-offs. Instead, Ill live a life of constant flux, impossible to plan for. Desperate for some control as I push through academia, I turn to tech products. But technology cant help me. Digital tools excel at routines, but falter at exceptions. I can schedule weeks of meetings in a few clicks, but when Im unwell, Im copy-pasting the same cancellation message a dozen times. My personal-finance app keeps me on track, but only until an urgent-care bill throws things off. When my fitness tracker chastises me for not closing my rings during a particularly brutal flare-up, I shove it into my junk drawer. Technology is failing me when I need it the most. Happy paths 2016. I join Big Tech, working as a user researcher in early-stage and AI technology. Two things become immediately clear. First, my story is far from unique. Anecdotes from many hundreds of user interviews reflect lives riddled with chaos and disruption. Changeunplanned and plannedis the norm. Second, consumer products are largely designed for happy paths. A clear-cut problem is solved by a superhero technology, resulting in a favorable outcome that is tied off with a neat bow. For the sake of clarity, efficiency, and technical ease, the zigzag realities of lives are often sanitized into an idealized arc. We trot out these squeaky clean stories as hero use cases for a product ideafirst to convince ourselves, then our executives, and, finally, our users. Todays explosion of consumer-facing GenAI products are built with the same recipe. We get heartstring-tugging stories with just enough complexity to feel real, without any of the mess. A dad uses AI to prepare for a job interview while reminiscing on parenthood. A parent brings a childs imaginary creature to life in a custom picture book. Some brands try to incorporate more chaotic realities (a storm hits restaurant patio seating) only to portray absurd overdependence on AI (waiters leave their customers drenched because an AI agent doesnt reseat them indoors). If youre like me, these ads make you want to scream: Youre standing in the middle of the kitchen. How are your kids not interrupting your conversation with AI 27 times? But in contrast to the hero use case, taking kid snack breaks and asking AI to repeat itself over the noise of toddler screams are often cordoned off as edge cases in product development. The implication: These occurrences are rare. But they arent. Human journeys are not straight lines. They are dynamic, defined by change, interruptions, and curveballs. Some 60% of Americans reported experiencing an unexpected expense in the past year, though 42% dont have an emergency fund greater than $1,000. Households with two or more children have a viral infection in the household more than 50% of the time. And an estimated 28% of work time each year is lost to distractions. When technology isnt resilient to this reality, it breakssometimes catastrophically. Like when a Florida teen dies by suicide after his lengthy conversations with a Character.ai chatbot turn darkly romantic. When AI-powered cameras mounted on public buses mistakenly ticket thousands of legally parked vehicles in New York because they fail to recognize alternate side zones. Or when AI weather models fail to predict the worst storms because extreme weather data doesnt exist in the training data. These outcomes are extreme, but the pathways leading there are deeply ordinary, broken by nascent technology that isnt resilient to the gritty reality of human behavior. Sometimes, the catalyst stems from the tech itself, like security vulnerabilities. Other times, its agnostic of the technology, like mental health. But in all cases, the technology was not resilient to changes in context. AI’s broken promise Years ago, you could blame technology as the limiting factor. But AI should, ideally, thrive on this sort of complexityusing its superpowers of pattern recognition, synthesis, and triangulation of thousands of data points about users and their environment. GenAI has introduced a new frontier around deep reasoning and human interaction that should make the technology more tractable and transparent. AI is uniquely positioned to help people anticipate and recover from change, the kind that they may not have seen coming. Yet the Character.ai system didnt raise the alarm when a conversation overtly turned dangerous, much less recognize patterns that may suggest that it was headed that way. On issuing its 7,000th ticket in one day, the MTAs system didnt flag that this is an unusually large number of violations on a route. Its never easy to deal with the complex behavior of humans and societies. But when we keep designing to make already great lives 1% better, we are perpetuating a specific type of harmone that happens when the people designing the technology arent considering the real ways it might be used. As UX practitioners, we are uniquely positioned to start the conversation about how to change this. To move toward an AI UX rooted in resilience, well need to shepherd at least three main shifts in the way our products are designed. 1. Shift the user stories we tellwhich directly map to the problems we choose to solve. UX must choose to foreground the hard, complex story. We all have one: a multigenerational household with life-stage changes, moves across the country, divorce, job loss, a chronic illness. Right now, a key barrier to centering these stories is that they extend ideation cycles, which is uncomfortable in an increasingly launch-first-or-perish climate. As a result, cleaner stories, like the product narratives described earlier, win out. To break this cycle, UX can introduce complex user stories to product teams starting with ideation, through prototype and concept testingespecially ones that cut horizontally across product ecosystems. This requires creating a new canon: an accessible taxonomy of types of complexity, curveballs, and changes that we can easily pull from. Such a taxonomy might take the form of brainstorming prompts, user journey templates, or a card deck or visualization used in sprints. This cracking open will take time, but the more we tell these stories, the easier thy will roll off the tongue, and the more they can become normalized. 2. Shift how we leverage user data in AI-powered products. Today, user data collected by companieswhile wide-rangingisnt always curated or connected well. Most users, particularly younger generations, have resigned themselves to data collection and dont mind it, but also dont understand how the data is used or whether it benefits them. This is not an argument to collect more data. Rather, its a call to connect existing data for more meaningful, tangible user benefits, like helping navigate blind spots and complexity. Consider a simple example: Anns AI agent has access to a calendar app where she has blocked off time for a post-work run, a weather app that shows unexpected evening rain showers, and a maps app that she frequently uses to navigate to a yoga studio. This agent can now surface a timely suggestion: help Ann move meetings to shift the run to earlier in the day, or help her find a class at the yoga studio at that time. In reflecting how people really use their technology, this sort of cross-product dialogue and synthesis has the opportunity to leverage AI and user data to unlock resilience in the face of change. 3. Shift away from traditional definitions of seamlessness and magic moments toward ones that gracefully embrace failure, meaningful friction, and deep, explicit user feedback. AI advancements tend to tempt product teams to remove all friction and present users with auto-magical solutions to needs they werent even aware of, from hyper-personalized AI-driven ads to smart nudges on food and shopping apps. Common success metrics used today reflect the value we place on frictionless experiences: fewer clicks, greater session length, engagement with automation features, fewer user-submitted comments. This can cause a misleading overreliance on implicit behavioral signals that dont always reflect real intent. Take the example of an in-app pop-up: A user might spend a long time viewing it, even clicking on a linknot because they find it useful but because they cant find the exit. Even when users do provide explicit feedback, its often not in a form that can be interpreted meaningfully, leading to undesired outcomes. Think, for example, of how OpenAIs models grew sycophantic after a thumbs-up on a response was used as a signal to make the chatbot behave more in that direction. Instead, how might we offer users more ways to provide granular feedback that can shed light not only on the what but also the why? This can be meaningful friction that can empower users to have their unique human context be better understood while harnessing the beyond-human capabilities of AI. One could argue that this, in fact, is the more magical experience. Finally, the pursuit of seamless perfection risks underplaying the shortcomings of AI itselfmisunderstood accents, factual inaccuracies, biased imagery. These are a function of the technology, and are bound to happen. UX needs to treat these as predictable breaking points in the technology, build frameworks to classify them, and design intentionally with them as part of the user narrative. Of course, its far simpler to sketch these solutions than implement them, but if AI is to work well for real-world problems, we need to tackle real-world complexity head-on. UX is in a powerful position to shift these mindsets. As it has done for domains like accessibility and product inclusion, UX can redefine the problems and narratives that emerging technology is built for, and reshape the UX to accommodate product and user realities to support resilience. Are we brave enough to get into the messy weeds and do it?
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E-Commerce
Mining isnt known for innovation. For more than a century, weve extracted copper using the same process: dig, crush, grind, leach, repeat. Meanwhile, demand has exploded, fueled by EVs, AI infrastructure, and the energy transition. That mismatch has created a bottleneck. Were using yesterdays tools to power tomorrows economy. The conductive highway Copper is the metal that moves energy. Literally, electrons dont travel from solar panels to batteriesor from your laptop charger to the cloudwithout it. Copper is the conductive highway that keeps the worlds electrons flowing. Its in every EV, every wind turbine, and every data center. Its also in short supply. Weve mined the easy stuff. Now were left with lower-quality ores, deeper deposits, and rising costsjust as demand hits historic highs. And when the global economy is built on electrons, copper is no longer just a commodity. Its a strategic resource, central to national security, electrification, and economic stability. Global copper demand is projected to reach 50 million metric tonnes annually by 2035double todays levels. According to BloombergNEF, the world needs over $2 trillion in mining investment by 2050 to meet electrification targets. Meanwhile, ore grades have declined more than 40% since 1990. Investors are watching this gap, and innovation must step in. Innovative microbes But something big is happening underground. And I mean that literallywhere the cool rocks are and things get interesting. As a scientist, I spent years working on astrobiology, cloud platforms, and energy systems. Ive seen how cross-disciplinary thinking can unlock entire industries. Today, I lead a team using engineered microbes to recover copper from ore that conventional mining leaves behind. It sounds unusual, and it is. But thats the point. Innovation in mining doesn’t come from fitting init comes from standing out. Mining is a deeply conservative industry, and for good reason. Even small changes carry massive financial and operational risks when your tools move millions of tons of earth. But thats also what makes this moment so powerful: When something new works, it really matters, especially when it can be plugged into existing infrastructure without requiring entirely new capital build-outs. Juice from a rock At Endolith, we recently completed testing with BHP, one of the worlds largest mining companies, through their Think & Act Differently (TAD) BioMetals innovation program. Our microbes were tested under simulated field conditions on a low-grade primary sulfide orea material so complex most operators consider it uneconomic to process. In one study, microbes shaped through adaptive laboratory evolution and guided by AI recovered up to 80% more copper from this material. Thats like squeezing juice from a rockand getting nearly twice as much. And this wasnt just a lab trick. These microbes work in real mining environments. They dont need clean rooms or perfect conditions. They need oxygen, acidity, and timeconditions already present in heap leach operations worldwide. We didnt reimagine the entire mine. We made the part most people had written off valuable again, making it cheaper, cleaner, and easier to operate. By using microbes that require no expensive reagents or intensive energy inputs, were cutting both capital expenditures and operating expenses, making recovery from low-grade ore economically viable again. Leapfrog technologies Heres why that matters. Ore grades are falling. Permitting timelines stretch for decades. Investors and regulators demand lower impact, higher performance, and real ESG outcomes. Mining companies know the status quo is unsustainable, but risk makes experimentation difficult. Most “sustainable mining” efforts rely on incremental gains: better water management, slightly lower emissions, and somewhat faster recovery. Important? Yes. Transformative? Not even close. We need leapfrog technologiesnew tools that unlock value, speed, and sustainability together. Biology is one of those tools, and right now, its underused. Biology belongs in the core toolkit of modern extraction. CRISPR for rocks Industrial biotechnology has already transformed medicine and agriculture, unlocking precision, efficiency, and resilience at scale. Its time for mining to catch up. Think of this as CRISPR for rocks. Instead of blasting ore with chemicals, we let microbes do the work. They break down rock, extract metals, and leave far less waste behind. With help from cloud-based systems, we can tune that process in real time, adjusting to changes in temperature, pH, or ore composition. Similar biological platforms could be applied to rare earths, lithium, and other minerals critical to the clean energy economy. The opportunity here is massivenot just for Endolith but for a new generation of industrial innovators focused on extraction rather than consumption. As governments prioritize mineral independence and ESG compliance, scalable bio-based solutions are becoming essential to securing the future of energy, technology, and defense. Scaling this kind of innovation takes more than strong results. It takes strong partnerships between startups and majors, scientists and operators, and regulators and entrepreneurs. We found that with BHP and the TAD team. They gave us a shot. We delivered. And now were working with others to bring this to production. But scaling also requires trust in the science, in the process, and in the promise of doing things differently. It means rethinking how we define innovation in mining and giving ourselves permission to imagine something beyond the current constraints. A systems problem People tend to talk about clean tech and hard tech as if theyre separate. EVs go in one box, mining goes in another. But thats a false split. There is no clean energy without minerals, no electrification without copper, and no scalable, sustainable supply without reimagining how we recover it. This is a systems problem, and it requires systems thinking. That reimagining wont come from status quo thinking. Itll come from radical collaborationand from being brave enough to try something different underground. Itll come from leaders willing to back bold science and turn pilot results into platform change. Heres the thing: I used to study how life evolved on Earth billions of years ago. The most extraordinary life forms Ive worked with? Theyre here on Earth today. Deep in the rocks, quietly solving problems we’ve struggled with for decades. So, if you want to power the future, start by listening to the ground and the weird, wonderful microbes doing the heavy lifting. In a world racing toward electrification, these tiny organisms just might be our biggest asset.
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E-Commerce
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