Arbor Energy

Members of the Arbor team spent last week at #CEBASummit2026. The conversations there reflected how much corporate procurement has shifted in a short period of time. U.S. data center demand is on track to triple by 2030, and that pace is forcing a real-time redesign of grid infrastructure and the regulation around it. The race for 24/7 carbon-free energy is now happening at a scale and speed the system wasn't built for. With gas turbines backlogged into the next decade and new nuclear at 7–10 year lead times, corporate buyers are looking to developers for creative ways to meet demand. The most notable shift was around gas, which was largely outside the dialogue just a few years ago. This year it was central, driven by constrained grids and AI load urgency. The emerging question is under what conditions gas is acceptable, and Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) has surfaced as a key tool for turning firm power into clean firm power. With emerging draft Energy Attribute Certificate methodologies, corporate buyers are looking at how to safely credit and catalyze CCS to tackle deep system decarbonization. The throughline across the summit: getting to a reliable, decarbonized grid will take collaboration across buyers, developers, utilities, and the policymakers who can clear regulatory bottlenecks and modernize transmission. Thanks to CEBA for convening the conversation, and to the partners we got to spend time with along the way.

We're hiring a Senior Thermodynamics Performance Engineer to own the cycle simulation for our supercritical CO₂ power system. The role is the simulation backbone for a first-of-a-kind machine, with architectural ownership over how the modeling stack evolves. The cycle is direct-fired and the working fluid lives near the critical point, which makes the modeling hard in interesting ways. You'd work closely with our combustion, turbomachinery, and controls engineers, and the predictions you build get reconciled against hardware running this year. If you've spent your career modeling thermal systems and want to bring that rigor to a system at the frontier of what's possible in clean baseload power, find the role in the comments and reach out to Phillip Cabrera to learn more.

Last week we welcomed John Crane, Technology Manager at the National Energy Technology Laboratory, to our test site in San Bernardino. Our team first connected with John at a Supercritical CO₂ Symposium, and while he was in Los Angeles, he joined us for a tour of the facilities, presentations from both sides, and a live test run. The systems on that test stand involve a fairly small corner of the engineering world, and it was a pleasure to spend time with someone who understands the details deeply and could engage directly with the work underway.

We're hiring two roles at different ends of the same effort: developing clean, next-generation power systems. In El Segundo, we're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the turbomachinery team working on our supercritical CO₂ turbine. The role spans design, analysis, and test, leading a small team working through problems that don’t have well-established answers. At our test site in San Bernardino, we're hiring a Fluid Power and Mechanical Technician to support our gasification test stand, which converts biomass into syngas to power our turbine. It’s first-of-a-kind hardware, and what gets learned in test directly shapes what gets built next. Both roles and all our open positions are linked in the comments.

Carbon capture on natural gas has a meaningful role in the clean energy transition. CEBA makes that case clearly in a recent piece linked in the comments. But not all capture approaches get you to the same place. Conventional gas + CCS separates CO₂ from a dilute exhaust stream after combustion, typically capturing 80–90% and relying on large post-combustion equipment. Arbor’s closed-loop system uses oxy-combustion to produce a concentrated CO₂ stream as part of normal operation, enabling greater than 98% capture without downstream scrubbing. The difference comes down to where in the process the chemistry happens.

A few years ago, a data center could contract for renewable energy credits on a different grid, in a different state, and call it done. Now they're procuring power as critical infrastructure, on site and ready when the facility opens. We’re designing modular, zero-emission baseload systems for exactly that demand. Our CEO Brad Hartwig explains the shift.

PBS NewsHour recently ran a segment on the pressures showing up across the grid: turbine backlogs, the gaps that renewables and storage can't yet fill, political headwinds slowing grid investment. Bringing dependable baseload power online in conventional ways takes time, and demand is moving faster. The people and projects shaping this decade can't wait years for the energy they need to get there. We're working to shorten those timelines, with clean baseload systems designed for manufacturability and deployment at scale. Watch the episode at the link in the comments.

Turbines don’t get much attention in energy transition conversations, even as they become one of the clearest constraints in the market. More than half of data centers are delayed because of power generation, and demand for baseload turbines now exceeds global production capacity by more than 2x. Our CEO Brad Hartwig joined Tom Raftery's Climate Confident podcast to talk through why the turbine supply chain matters so much right now, and what Arbor is building to address it. Link in the comments.

Before 2019, satellites were nearly always custom-built, designed individually and launched one or a few at a time. Then Starlink standardized the satellite for mass production and paired that with reusable rockets. What was once a bespoke, years-long process became continuous. I see the same pattern coming to energy – moving toward standardized, repeatable construction. We tend to think of large, complex structures as the answer to powering the grid because it's inherently a gigawatt-scale problem. But several companies we work with at Gigascale Capital are approaching it from a megawatt scale. Arbor Energy is developing factory-built, modular supercritical CO₂ turbines to provide clean baseload power. Their units are 90% prefabricated, capable of producing 25 MW each, designed to link together into hundreds of megawatts or more at a single site. Radiant is building portable fission microreactors that ship fully assembled in a container and can replace diesel generators. When you approach a gigawatt-scale problem with compact models, you gain leverage points on several dimensions. Replication becomes easier, and so does iteration. Deployment is faster, and within the same capital and time constraints, you can bring more capacity online to meet demand. Energy is following the same curve that satellite technology did just a few years ago, and I believe we'll see more innovation pushing toward modular, smaller solutions to solve our biggest energy problems going forward.

The City of El Segundo has been home to ambitious aerospace and defense engineering for decades. Satellites, launch vehicles, radar systems—the infrastructure of the modern space age was built on these streets. Today the Gundo is one of the densest concentrations of hard tech talent in the country, and there's more serious engineering happening per square mile here than just about anywhere. We were glad to welcome Mayor Christopher Pimentel to Arbor last week for a close look at our hardware and the team behind it.