--- description: Find out why Todd Bandhauer is on TIME's 2025 list of the 100 most influential leaders driving business climate action. title: Todd Bandhauer: The 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders of 2025 image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6781ac5794a79cd5/6998cb01a97fc0ee02a74cf2/Innovators-Todd-Bandhauer.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Oct 30, 2025 # Todd Bandhauer CTO and co-founder, AtmosZero by Todd Bandhauer  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) _As co-founder and chief technology officer at AtmosZero, Todd Bandhauer has been instrumental in developing an electric heat pump that can replace gas boilers in food, paper, textile, and other industries, saving energy and cutting emissions. This year Colorado’s New Belgium Brewing became the first company to_ [_install_](https://atmoszero.energy/stealth-to-steam/ "undefined") _AtmosZero’s Boiler 2.0 heat pump at its flagship brewery. Now AtmosZero is taking steps to commercialize the product further, and in February_ [_opened_](https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/02/10/3023394/0/en/AtmosZero-Opens-New-Factory-in-Colorado-to-Deliver-Decarbonized-Steam-Globally.html "undefined") _a new facility capable of manufacturing 100 units per year._ **What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government, needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?** The electrification of heat is a very promising approach to reducing greenhouse emissions, but more alignment in the electricity market is needed to unleash its potential. Heat for industry accounts for 13% of energy-related carbon emitted to the environment every year. This heat is used in a variety of ways, including generating steam for thermal processes (like making great beer) to controlling chemical reactions and refining metals. We often think that heat is only used in huge facilities, but more than 50% of all steam industrial steam boilers are small to medium scale. And with electricity it is much easier to decarbonize small, diffuse point source emissions than trying to capture carbon at the point of combustion, and much more cost effective and scalable than other approaches like using hydrogen or renewable natural gas. This is especially true as the cost of renewable electricity remains low, and the cost of grid-scale energy storage and other clean energy solutions (like next-gen geothermal and nuclear) continues to drop. While many early adopters have internal and external incentives to electrify their heat, a bottleneck remains in switching from fuel combustion to electricity on an impactful scale due in part to a lack of aligned incentives in utility bills. Many industrials have fixed, unsophisticated electricity rates, putting upward pressure on electricity costs. This upward pressure is a reflection of real challenges in the electricity market, from congested transmission to the increased proliferation of intermittent renewable power generation. Communities, utilities, and innovative energy service companies can solve this problem, but only if they work together. The old unsophisticated way of charging industrials for electricity has to change. If you want your community to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, don’t just demand renewables and other low-carbon electricity. Demand the utilities and your local government work to address burning of fuels for industrial heat by providing more incentives to switch to electricity. **What’s one sustainability effort you personally will try to adopt in the next year?** I live in Fort Collins, Colo., which is an incredible college town, and it’s continually rated as one of the best places to live in the U.S. Unfortunately, nearly everyone is car dependent and we have rapidly increasing housing prices with little relief in sight. Beyond this, I have a very active family, with three children (one of them a 290-lb college-bound football player) that need to be transported to all corners of Northern Colorado and beyond, and my wife and I have many things that come up on a daily—sometimes hourly—basis that demand quick response. These real-time and economic pressures make change very challenging. This is why I will not look down upon people who make the hard economic choice to buy a gasoline vehicle or purchase a house in an area that is affordable but not close enough to bike to work, or even choose not to be a vegetarian. We need people to develop solutions that address things at the systemic level. The best thing I can do is use my skills as a leader to help grow AtmosZero to become the workhorse of a new era of clean manufacturing and heating across the globe. When we are successful, the impact of the team will be greater than anything I can do individually right now. **What gives you hope about the future of the planet?** The first thing that gives me hope is people—especially young people. It drives me nuts when I hear folks complain about younger generations. When I teach at CSU, I meet all sorts of amazing kids who are genuine, hard-working, and honest. I’ve heard so many amazing stories, and it’s clear to me that the young people I am around want to be and do something authentic that makes a positive impact in peoples’ lives. At AtmosZero, we’ve hired some of the best and brightest people who want to work together to make a real hardware solution that is deployed in the field, accepted by the customer, and reduces CO2 emissions to combat climate change. Not some fake solution on a piece of paper, but a real one that provides real value. The second thing that gives me hope is that there are so many options for zero-emission electricity. Utility-scale solar is still the lowest (unsubsidized) cost of electricity, and wind energy is also competitive. Batteries continue to get cheaper, and there is a lot of excitement about developing and lowering the cost of nuclear technologies and next-gen geothermal power. Even carbon capture for power plants is coming of age, with several U.S. Department of Energy investments over the last decade showing significant promise. All of these technologies are creating good, high-paying jobs for a wide range of skills, especially engineers, financiers, and those working in the trades.The challenge is that there is a big correction happening, especially in the world of investor-backed emerging technologies. There will be less focus on economically unsustainable solutions, and companies and technologies that rely upon huge government subsidies aren’t going to last. It’s imperative that we develop technologies that keep that in mind. We must develop real economic solutions that provide quantifiable economic value so that they can scale and make an impact. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326567/todd-bandhauer/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326567/todd-bandhauer/"},"headline":"Todd Bandhauer","datePublished":"2025-10-30T11:30:16.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T01:01:22.793Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326567/todd-bandhauer/","keywords":["TIME100 Climate 2025","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6781ac5794a79cd5/6998cb01a97fc0ee02a74cf2/Innovators-Todd-Bandhauer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"TIME Staff","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/time-staff/"}],"creator":"TIME Staff","articleSection":"Climate","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6781ac5794a79cd5/6998cb01a97fc0ee02a74cf2/Innovators-Todd-Bandhauer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/climate/","name":"Climate"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time100-climate-2025/","name":"TIME100 Climate 2025"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time-100-climate-2025/7326567/todd-bandhauer/","name":"Todd Bandhauer"}}]}] ```