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🌐 This week in Supercool: Deployed

Author

Josh Dorfman
April 03, 2026

This is Deployed — Supercool's weekly newsletter tracking where the low-carbon economy is scaling up.

If it isn't operational, it isn't Deployed.

This week: Two offshore wind projects sent first power to the grid. Cambodia switched on the largest battery in its history. Tesla opened its first public charging stop for Semi trucks in California. In Vancouver and Santa Monica, two very different low-carbon housing projects — a tall timber Passive House and a prefab all-electric development — opened their doors. In Nevada and Finland, used EV batteries and data center waste heat found productive second lives.

DEPLOYED

What’s gone operational.

Wind Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project sent its first electricity to the grid from 28 miles off Virginia Beach. The 2.6-gigawatt project is 70% complete and is expected to power 660,000 homes when finished.

Ørsted's Revolution Wind project sent its first electricity onto Rhode Island's grid. The project is expected to lower New England wholesale power prices. Two separate federal attempts to stop construction were overturned in court before a single electron reached the grid.

Tesla opened its first public Megacharger station for Semi trucks in Ontario, California, near the junction of I-10 and I-15 and minutes from the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The company plans 37 Megacharger locations across major US freight corridors by the end of 2026.

Canada's first tall timber Passive House building is now home to 81 families in Vancouver. The nine-story project uses locally sourced mass timber and robotically prefabricated cross-laminated timber panels, cutting embodied carbon by 75%. It uses less than one-tenth the energy of a typical apartment building.

Plant Prefab built 13 apartments at its factory in Tejon Ranch and installed them on a narrow infill lot in Santa Monica in three days, delivering Berkeley Station, the city's first modular affordable housing development. The all-electric building is targeting LEED Gold certification.

Crusoe and Redwood Materials are expanding their Sparks, Nevada campus from 4 to 24 modular data centers after an initial system built with second-life EV batteries and on-site solar delivered 99.2% uptime over seven consecutive months.

atNorth's heat reuse partnership with Kesko is now supplying nearly all the heating for the grocery store next to its Espoo data center. The recycled heat is projected to eliminate about 200 tons of CO₂e from Kesko's annual emissions.

SchneiTec’s 1,000-megawatt-hour battery in Pursat province is now operational, storing excess renewable power and releasing it when supply dips. The project is Cambodia’s largest battery system and a major step toward a more stable grid as the country adds more clean electricity.

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This week’s Supercool sponsor

Climate risk has entered the building.

As heat, flooding, volatility, insurance pressure, and a growing list of things your building was never quite designed for.

That’s the backdrop for Risk and Resilience — Designing for a Changing World, a Johnson Controls fireside chat featuring Ralph DiNola, founder of Building Insights Group and former CEO of New Buildings Institute, in conversation with Rob Tanner, Marketing Director at Johnson Controls, on April 8.

They’ll explore how forward-thinking design can help buildings do more than meet code: it can help them stay durable, adaptable, and valuable in a more chaotic world.

Expect practical takeaways on:

  • How climate and environmental risk are changing building and retrofit decisions

  • Design strategies that go beyond compliance

  • Real-world examples of buildings designed for the world ahead

For sustainability leaders, architects, urban planners, and anyone making bets on long-term building performance.

What: A Fireside Chat with Johnson Controls

When: April 8, 12-1 pm, CST

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SUPERCOOL ECOSYSTEM

Operational updates from companies we’ve featured.

Zum (Episode 25) posted $333 million in revenue in 2025, up 35% year over year. The company now serves more than 4,000 schools across 15 states and completed 68.5 million student rides in 2025, up 120% from the prior year. It also deployed the nation's first fully electric school bus fleet in Oakland Unified.

Quilt (Episode 68) reached 100 certified installer partners across 26 US states and six Canadian provinces less than a year after launching its partner program in April 2025. Its 100th partner extends the company's reach into Alaska.

TerraCycle (Episode 49) has opened its Reg A fundraising round, building on the momentum of last year’s Reg CF raise, which hit the $5 million cap in under 60 days. The company is raising capital to scale operations and push its mission to eliminate the idea of waste, with $19.3 million in gross profits in 2024 and 75% revenue growth since 2020.

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HORIZON

Not yet deployed, but we’re tracking.

The twin cities of Görlitz, Germany, and Zgorzelec, Poland, have broken ground on United Heat, a project that will connect and decarbonize their separate heating networks by 2030. The system will serve 86,000 residents using solar thermal, seasonal storage, lake water, and wastewater recovery across 12 kilometers of new pipeline.

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If you see something go live — opened, launched, commissioned, connected, shipped — hit reply and send it my way.

Deployed stays selective about what's actually moving, and tips make it smarter.

Josh

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