This story aired in the April 21, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
This is Climate Week in San Francisco. Tomorrow is Earth Day, and there’s a lot of events focused on climate action, and innovation.
The Bay Area is known for being a hub for all kinds of progressive movements. And that includes technology that drives environmental innovation. And the city’s Mission district is home to Otherlab, one of the companies that is constantly trying out new things to find creative ways to solve problems as they arise.
Engineers there are working on projects from floating wind turbines to solar powered scooters. And one of it’s biggest focuses is new start ups. And you can find Otherlab spin offs around the Bay Area, manufacturing products to fight climate change.
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When you visit Otherlab’s headquarters on 20th Street in the Mission, you never know what you’re going to see there. It’s a three-story building that once was home to a pipe organ factory. During a visit in 2011 co-founder and chief scientist Saul Griffith pointed out an elephant made of fabric that could walk.
“This is our inflatable elephant Ganesh, the world’s first inflatable walking robot,” Griffith told me, pointing to a four-foot tall elephant made of gray fabric with white tusks. It walked really slowly.
They were also working on an electric cargo tricycle called the Onya. There were a bunch of prototypes of the tricycle, which had a steering mechanism allowing it to turn at high speeds on San Francisco’s hilly streets.
Griffith pointed to what he referred to as “the super bad-ass computational geometry programmers” beavering away in the corner.
Otherlab creates custom software for many of its projects and credits that for its innovative inventions. And people outside the tech world have noticed. The MacArthur Foundation awarded Griffith a genius grant in 2007, calling the Australian-born engineer a "prodigy of invention in service of the world community."
During a visit in 2013 I saw the Othermill, a desktop power tool that could cut intricate patterns into everything from printed circuit boards to slabs of chocolate, based on instructions from a computer. Otherlab raised $300 thousand on Kickstarter for the project in less than 24 hours.
On my most recent visit, I saw an electric scooter covered in solar panels.
The Lightfoot will sell for $5,000 and should be available in the summer of 2025.
The ground floor of Otherlab is used for prototyping. It’s filled with huge computerized tools, sewing machines, fabrication tables and rows of wooden library card catalogue cabinets filled with screws, bolts, nuts and springs.
“I’ve always had a theory of innovation that true innovation is an unsupervised workshop and free pizza,” Griffith said.
That may’ve been true in Otherlab’s early days but calling the 2025 day-to-day operation “unsupervised” is a bit of a stretch. For its bread and butter, Otherlab works on contracts mostly for the federal government focused on energy, health care and agriculture. But having all those tools has given the Otherlab engineers the freedom to play, and pursue personal projects like the solar-powered scooter and the electric cargo trike. Otherlab is known for using unconventional materials.
Take that walking elephant. It walked with the aid of actuators, a mechanical device that converts electrical energy into mechanical motion. The actuators consisted of bicycle inner tubes sewn into fabric by Pete Lynn, an Otherlab engineer who reckons he’s spent 10,000 hours at a sewing machine. The son of a famous kite designer in New Zealand, Lynn designed kites himself before Saul Griffith hired him to work at a wind energy company called Makani that was based in Alameda and acquired by Google before it was shut down. As young men, both Griffith and Lynn were avid kite surfers. Lynn said that in middle age he;s no longer surfing but a recent post on Instagram showed Griffith sticking with the extreme sport.
Lynn works solely in the early research and development phase of Otherlab’s projects.
“Otherlab is one of the very few organizations in the Bay Area where you can do that over and over again, work on that initial disruptive phase,” Lynn said. “I put on my [business] card ‘disruptive technology engineer,’ he said with a chuckle.
It turns out that making the inflatable elephant walk helped launch new technologies.
“That elephant spurred all kinds of applications,” said Patti Lord, the program lead at Otherlab. It was the foundation of a technology that’s come to be known as ‘soft robotics’ and it’s been used in products made by three companies that spun out from Otherlab.
“The air-actuated solar tracker that Sunfolding brought to market, Canvas’s drywall-finishing robot and Roam’s exoskeletons all can draw a line back to some of that early soft robotic work,” Lord said.
Lord was referring to the innovative tracker for solar panels developed by a now-defunct Otherlab start-up called Sunfolding and a spin-off located a block and a half away from Otherlab called Roam Robotics, which makes a smart knee-brace with both medical and military applications. Canvas, a start-up incubated at Otherlab and now headquartered on Folsom Street, manufactures a robot that they claim can apply joint compound to drywall seams and sand the wall in less than half the time it takes for humans to do it.
Four blocks north of Otherlab on Alabama Street is the headquarters of Gradient, a spin-off that makes heat pumps. Advocates of electrification are keen on heat pump technology because it displaces fossil fuel-based heating systems, which contribute to climate change.
Gradient’s founder and chief technical officer Vince Romanin walked me around the company’s headquarters. He said the company’s heat pump can reduce gas heating costs by half and that landlords who are faced with the prospect of costly gas leak repairs find the savings offered by converting to heat pumps attractive. Romanin said that heat pumps can also help utilities.
“The data from our system can help utilities understand if they electrify a building what is the resource needed,” Romanin said. “It lets them expand electrification without massive costs updating their electrical infrastructure. And eventually, we want this system to talk to the grid so that a utility can say, ‘You know what? If all of these homes were to pre-cool now, so that we can turn them down by 30% when everyone gets home from work and plugs in their EV, I could manage my grid better.’”
A heat pump cools as well as heats a home. One half of the heat pump is inside. The other half has to be outside. Gradient’s heat pump sits on a window sill, so homeowners can avoid the expense of having to break through walls to connect the interior and exterior components. The company says installing its heat pump is as easy as assembling an Ikea couch.
The latest model of the Gradient heat pump can heat and cool a 500 square-foot space. Its MSRP is $3,800. According to Romanin, Gradient’s is the first all-weather heat pump that runs off a standard 120-volt circuit, eliminating the need for a costly electrical upgrade to 240-volt service. Another spin-off from Otherlab makes an appliance that can also work on 120-volt power.
The Copper company in Berkeley, occupies a cavernous 8,000 square-foot building that was once home to a print shop. On the day I dropped by about 30 people gathered to watch chef Lisa Pinckney cook cabbage soup.
Pinckney picked the recipe because it shows off the many things the Copper range does: sautéing, boiling and simmering. And it does it all, she boasted, very fast.
Alice Gates, a retired lawyer who lives in Berkeley, said her city keeps telling her to get rid of her gas appliances.
“I have gas heat. I have a gas dryer. My PG&E bill, it’s never been higher,” Gates said.
Gates wanted to replace her 80-year-old gas stove with an induction range, but that required an expensive electrical upgrade.
“I had been intending to get an electric stove but I couldn’t get PG&E to upgrade my electricity panel," she said. “They told me [it would take] at least six months and [I’d have to pay them] $1,500 ahead of time… to come and upgrade my electrical panel. So, I cancelled that order and then maybe a week later there was a story in Berkeleyside about this battery-powered electric stove. So, that very same day I ordered [a Copper stove].”
Copper likes to point out that the batteries in its stove not only allow people to keep cooking when the grid goes out, they save consumers money by powering the appliance when electric rates are highest, then draw power from the grid to charge during off-peak hours when electricity is cheapest.
The Copper stove costs $6,000 but because it comes with a battery, it qualifies for a federal tax credit that brings the price down to about $4,200. That may seem like a lot to spend on a new oven but because the Copper stove runs off a 120-volt circuit, just like the Gradient heat pump, it doesn't require an electrical upgrade with a potentially hefty price tag. There are 32 of Copper’s induction ranges installed at a housing development for seniors and the disabled in Martinez.
When Copper and Gradient were projects within Otherlab, both received millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Both companies have won contracts with the New York City Housing Authority to supply thousands of their appliances. But they both face uncertainty over the continued availability of federal subsidies for their products under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. The Trump administration is trying to claw back billions of dollars earmarked for those subsidies.
Otherlab’s future may be precarious. It has received more than $40 million in federal funding since it started in 2009. With the Trump administration slashing research spending, Otherlab could lose its lifeline. The company declined to comment on whether any of its government contracts have been frozen or what the radical changes in Washington’s energy policy bode for its future.