Beep. Beep. Beep.

Edwin Olson can still hear the faint sound of the autonomous vehicle he helped build as part of MIT’s team for the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 as it returned from the hourslong competition.

“It was the most amazing feeling,” he told Tech Brew.

Nearly 20 years later, Olson is the CEO of an AV company of his own, May Mobility, and the industry is in a much different position than it was in the early days of self-driving vehicle technology.

Plenty of would-be contenders have come and gone. Leaders have emerged. Lots of modern vehicles now come equipped with some automated features, and fully self-driving vehicles are operating on a limited basis—progress is being made. But hype around people being ferried to and fro in AVs on a mass scale has collided with technical, regulatory, and scalability challenges. Yet industry stakeholders are still working toward a future where many more of our transportation needs are met by driverless vehicles—and someday by steering wheel- and pedal-free ones.

“The public sentiment was significantly ahead of the technical reality…And then what basically happened is, the technical reality got ahead of public sentiment. And I think that’s where we are right now,” Olson said. “It can’t do everything. But it works pretty damn well, and it can solve real problems.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Things that might help keep you cool this summer:

• Swimming pools
• Popsicles
• Electric vehicles (really!)

The idea behind a new partnership between vehicle-to-grid integration platform ChargeScape and software platform Leap is that EVs don’t have to be liabilities to the electric grid, but can collectively serve as assets on the scale of power plants.

The companies announced in a news release Wednesday that they’re teaming up “to accelerate electric vehicle participation in grid services programs across the United States.” ChargeScape and Leap said they’re trying to create “the largest EV virtual power plant” (VPP) in the country.

How does it work? A VPP is a pool of aggregated energy resources—like EV batteries—that can coordinate with grid operators to send power to the grid during times of need. Leap’s focus is on helping tech companies scale VPPs.

“We help them turn their millions of devices and customers into a resource that, to grid operators, looks just like a traditional power plant—only, as we all know, it’s much faster and much cheaper to build,” Jason Michaels, Leap’s CEO, told Tech Brew.

Keep reading here.—JG

Massachusetts green tech advocates want offshore wind to be the little clean power source that could in the face of hostility from the Trump administration, according to their comments during a panel on the blue economy at the ClimaTech conference earlier this week.

In addition to discussions about the state’s ocean clean tech market and port infrastructure, panel attendees addressed the wind-turbine-shaped elephant in the room: the fact that President Trump withdrew seven major offshore wind leases via an executive order in January. Two of the leases affected are for projects that would have been constructed off the coast of Massachusetts, for which the state is suing the Trump administration.

“What’s been a real drag on the blue economy is the new federal administration,” Bruce Carlisle, managing director of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, said during the panel. “It’s kind of depressing, but we do have to talk about it. Certainly for offshore wind, the moratorium and other actions have severely curtailed and put a huge aerial fog on it.”

All that said, though, Carlisle encouraged Massachusetts offshore wind developers in the audience to “keep [their] eyes on the prize,” “ride out” the current administration, and “get ourselves in a position for when things get a little bit better.”

Keep reading here.—TC

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

To the Max: Remember when HBO Max became merely “Max” and we all went ahead and continued to call it HBO anyway? Someone seems to have noticed. Marketing Brew reported that Warner Bros. Discovery rolled back the rebrand this week.

Tech CEOs, they’re just like us: Who among us hasn’t thrown open the ol’ MacBook only to find a calendar full of squares and rectangles with very little space between them? Mark Zuckerberg, too. CFO Brew reported on his comments from Stripe’s annual Sessions conference:

“I get really frustrated and [in a] bad mood if my whole day is scheduled, and there’s a thing that I know is really important, and I don’t get time to do it because I’m sitting in other things that are not the most important thing to be doing,” Zuckerberg said. “You have too many days like that in a row and I just explode.”