This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
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Today we'll distill a company that turns wasted solar and wind power into AI compute, right at the source: Rune 🇺🇸
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Solar and wind farms often make more power than the grid can absorb. When that happens, operators shut plants down, a process called curtailment, and the power just disappears.
1. Curtailment Is Exploding: US solar and wind curtailment hit 20 million MWh in 2024. Europe curtailed €7.2 billion worth of renewable electricity across just seven countries that same year.
California curtailments
2. Getting Worse Fast: Brazil curtailed about 20% of its solar and wind generation in 2025, wasting an estimated $1.23 billion. India lost 2.3 TWh of solar generation to curtailment that year, enough to power 400,000 households annually.
3. Grids Can't Keep Up: New transmission lines take years to permit and build, while US electricity demand is expected to grow tenfold by 2030 just from AI. Investment in renewable projects is shrinking due to weaker returns.
4. A Perfect Mismatch: AI data centers are stuck waiting years in interconnection queues for grid power. Wind and solar plants sit right next to megawatts nobody's buying. Nobody had built the plug between the two.
Product / Service 📦
Rune builds data centers that plug directly into solar and wind farms and run on the power that would otherwise be curtailed.
Installed Fast: Rune's RELIC units sit right at the power plant and start pulling power in as little as 30 minutes. They ramp compute up or down in under 100 milliseconds, matching whatever surplus power is actually available at that moment.
No Grid Connection Needed: The units run on direct current, tapping power before it even reaches the plant's inverter or the grid. That means no waiting years for a new grid connection, and no new transmission lines to build.
No Interference: RELICs plug into the plant's existing control software, so operators can see and override the data center's power use at any time. The plant keeps running exactly as before; Rune only takes the power that would otherwise go to waste.
The Payoff: Plant owners get paid for power they used to lose for free. This boosts the value of curtailed renewables at roughly a fifth the cost of battery storage.
Cheap Compute: AI companies and Bitcoin miners skip the grid queue entirely and tap power that would otherwise be wasted, delivering some of the cheapest compute around.
Market 🌐
The market of data centers powered directly at the source instead of through the grid, was worth $1.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $19.4 billion by 2034, a 30% yearly growth rate, driven by AI’s hunger for power and slow grid connections.
Source: International Energy Agency
The bigger opportunity: roughly 1,700 GW of clean energy projects are stuck waiting for grid connections in Europe alone, more than three times what the EU needs to hit its 2030 climate goals. Every one is a potential Rune site.
Other Key Players
Crusoe 🇺🇸: Turns flared gas from oil fields into compute, now expanding into renewables too.
Soluna 🇺🇸: Co-locates data centers at wind and solar plants for AI and Bitcoin mining.
IREN 🇦🇺: Runs Bitcoin and AI data centers on renewable power in Texas and Canada.
Competitors buy curtailed power at the meter; Rune taps it before the inverter, catching losses that never even reach the grid connection point.
Founding Story 🦄
AI generated based on individual photos I found
Rune was founded in 2023 by William Layden and Varun Palivela in California, under the name Liito before rebranding.
Layden's background is in energy: he started at the White House under President Obama, moved into hydropower, then led SoftBank Energy's clean power data center model, watching firsthand how much renewable electricity went unsold.
Palivela is a chip design veteran of Qualcomm, Nuvia, and Arm. Together they had the two halves needed to build a data center that lives inside a power plant instead of beside one.
RELIC unit
The company has raised $10.3 million to date, backed by Lowercarbon Capital, Nvidia and others. They started with Bitcoin mining to prove the model fast, and now they run a live RELIC deployment at a 200 MW solar plant in Texas, expanding into AI training workloads.
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. RELIC units deploy in just 30 minutes.
2. Skips construction, batteries, and the grid entirely. Pure DC power.
3. Their solution sits in a market growing 30% a year and potentially more.
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Super interesting one! Thanks, Javier!