Today’s newsletter looks at a startup using AI to spot leaky pipes and tough-to-find infrastructure issues that can plague key energy transition assets. You can read and share a full version of the story on Bloomberg.com. For unlimited access to climate and energy news, please subscribe. 

An AI handyperson

By Dina Bass

While many artificial intelligence tools are aimed at software developers and office workers, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker are investing in a startup deploying the technology for dirty, time-consuming infrastructure maintenance tasks like pest control and inspecting power poles and air-conditioning systems.

San Francisco-based BrightAI has raised a $51 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures and Pritzker’s Inspired Capital, along with BoxGroup, Marlinspike and VSC Ventures. The round valued the company at around $300 million, according to a person familiar with the company who didn’t want to be named discussing financial details. Upfront Ventures led a previous round, and the company has raised a total of $78 million.

“So many people are so focused on the future of digital AI, but we’re excited about this new layer of AI: the physical world AI,” said Alexa von Tobel, founder and managing partner at Inspired. “Think about every electricity pole that exists. If it’s tilting a little bit, that’s dangerous. That can start a fire.”

Six-year-old BrightAI was founded by Alex Hawkinson, who previously started home technology company SmartThings. BrightAI’s platform — called Stateful — relies on custom semiconductors and AI models that analyze data. Several different devices the company offers collect data.

Pipes and UV reactors inside a water filtration plant. Photographer: James MacDonald/Bloomberg

“I jokingly say we’re sort of still in the Roman era of infrastructure management,” Hawkinson said. “It’s that old way: You send people to periodically inspect it and it’s brutal, dirty, dangerous work.”

Some equipment, like underground water pipes, can’t even be inspected in person. That can mean leaks go undetected for a long time, negatively impacting performance and costing companies money.

One customer, Azuria Water Solutions, uses Stateful to train autonomous robots to scan pipes and then act by making precise cuts in those that are being repaired. Another, Pelsis, has created an AI-powered insect trap with sensors and cameras that warn facilities about potential infestations — a camera takes pictures of the trap’s glue board and an AI hub in the trap figures out the number, size and species of insects and sends that data to the cloud.

To Khosla, part of the appeal is the atypical nature of BrightAI’s market — unlike many segments of the AI market, it’s ripe with opportunity and has little competition. 

“When you come to high-value infrastructure — remote stuff like pipelines and power poles and electric utilities — there’s just far less competition for a greater need and it can be a very large market,” he said. “There’s lots of businesses like this that are not what I would call your ‘Silicon Valley hype put some software together’ kind of business, but they are also much more resilient and harder to displace once established.

Read the whole story on Bloomberg.com. 

AI for carbon cuts

AI for weather forecasts

More from Green

President Donald Trump is allowing chemical makers, coal-fired power plants and other facilities to bypass a range of environmental regulations on grounds that the waivers are needed for national security purposes.

The plants, which also include taconite iron ore processing operations and chemical manufacturing facilities that play a role in the production of semiconductors and energy, were granted two-year waivers from Environmental Protection Agency rules via proclamations signed by Trump and released on Thursday evening. The rules were finalized under the previous Biden administration.

A coal-fired plant in Castle Dale, Utah, in June 2022.  Photographer: George Frey/Bloomberg

“The exemptions ensure that these facilities within these critical industries can continue to operate uninterrupted to support national security without incurring substantial costs to comply with, in some cases, unattainable compliance requirements,” the White House said in a statement.

Among the exempted operations were taconite iron ore plants in Minnesota owned by the United States Steel Corp. and six facilities owned by Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. in Minnesota and Michigan, according to the White House, which said the steel was used in national defense systems and other critical infrastructure.

US solar manufacturers said they have filed new trade petitions against India, Indonesia and Laos alleging illegal practices by largely Chinese-owned companies operating in those countries. 

The European Union’s climate chief expects to attract the financial firepower of some of the bloc’s biggest pension funds to help modernize power grids that are key to the green transition.

A tally of recent news you may have missed on changes affecting climate policy and science under the Trump administration.

• The US is threatening to leave the International Energy Agency unless the Paris-based organization dials down some of the climate-related assumptions it makes in its forecasting. “We will do one of two things: we will reform the way the IEA operates or we will withdraw,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Bloomberg’s Ari Natter. “My strong preference is to reform it.”
• NASA said it won’t house past US national climate assessments on its website, the Associated Press reported, in a reversal of an earlier statement by the agency. The major scientific reports had originally been hosted on globalchange.gov, which has gone dark. An archived version of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, from 2023, is still available from an online National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration repository. Work on the sixth assessment was underway when the Trump administration dismissed all of the expert authors this spring.
• The Commerce Department has suspended work on a NOAA tool to help predict the influence of climate change on extreme rainfall, according to the Washington Post. Without it, communities may be less prepared for future flood threats, experts said.
  – Danielle Bochove and Eric Roston

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