On a plot of land on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, startup Gridware built a full-scale electrical grid, complete with 50-foot poles, 200-foot spans of wire, and 12.5 kilovolts of power flowing through it. Once it was finished, the company then set about destroying it. Over and over and over again.

“I’ve destroyed it thousands and thousands of times,” Gridware co-founder and CEO Tim Barat told us. “I throw trees on the lines, I cut live wires, I explode transformers.”

The goal of all of this mangling is to collect data on the kinds of things that might happen to power lines in the real world. Gridware has used it to inform the sensors the company now supplies to utilities. Its product, Gridscope, mounts onto electrical poles and listens for signs of threats or problems using machine learning.

“If you [test] enough, you start to recognize the patterns associated with how the equipment will behave,” Barat said. “And then what we discovered is—and we weren’t surprised by this—it matches what happens in the real world.”

Keep reading here.—PK

ICYMI, six major US banks left the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a UN-supported group through which banks pledged to align their lending, investments, and market activities to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The departures, which were followed by four Canadian banks, were widely seen as a response to criticism net-zero pledges have drawn from the political right in the US.

And while the exodus is certainly notable, experts told Tech Brew that the alliance itself was more of a way for banks to brand themselves as going green rather than a pathway for them to actually achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions—and that leaving the group probably won’t have much bearing on their business.

Shivaram Rajgopal, the chair of Columbia Business School’s accounting division, said he suspects that leaving the alliance won’t make banks lose retail customers. In fact, Rajgopal said staying in the group might be a detriment to business: For example, if an alliance bank decides not to lend to an energy-inefficient company, that company could take its business to one of the banks that’s left the group.

“[There will be] two regimes,” Rajgopal said of banks that stay in the group and those that don’t. “You’re going to have a different clientele.”

August Fern, who chairs the Climate Tech Track at UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck startup accelerator and is a partner at Baruch Future Ventures, told Tech Brew that banks that leave the alliance will be “just as able to finance any climate technology deal as they were before.”

“They’re gonna back any deal that makes them money,” Fern said. “If there’s a profitable solar deal, they’re still going to back that solar deal.”

That’s why, in Fern’s opinion, the alliance itself wasn’t groundbreaking in the first place.

Keep reading here.—TC

The big battery innovation boom doesn’t just mean companies are discovering new ways of manufacturing batteries: It also includes startups figuring out how to make existing batteries last longer.

Two startups that increase the lifecycle of large-scale batteries each received more than $10 million in venture capital funding this month. Sonocharge Energy, which uses acoustics to make batteries last longer and charge quicker, secured $23.5 million from Honda and investors Cycle Capital, Temasek, and Khosla Ventures. And Moment Energy, a Canadian large-scale battery repurposer, got $15 million to build the world’s first second-life battery factory from the Amazon Climate Pledge Fund and Voyager Ventures.

Both investments are tied to electric vehicles—Sonocharge Energy batteries can be used in EVs, and the batteries that Moment Energy recycles are from EVs—but have applications relevant to large-scale energy storage, too: Sonocharge batteries can help power data centers, and Moment Energy’s battery energy storage system can provide backup power for hospitals, remote communities, and manufacturing facilities.

Keep reading here.—TC