—Illustration by Peter Greenwood for TIME

Sometimes you need to climb 30 ft. in the air, atop a modified oil rig, to get a better view of what’s coming next. In October, TIME’s Justin Worland did just that when he traveled to southwestern Utah, where Fervo Energy is adopting fossil-fuel technologies for a rapidly changing energy landscape.

Read the 2026 TIME100 Climate list here

When we launched TIME100 Climate in 2023, funding from the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act, the single largest climate investment in American history, was starting to flow through the U.S. economy, making the country an exemplar of how government policy can influence climate action. Three years later, we’re in a very different world—with signals that new investment is being driven less by direction from Washington than by desire from markets.

In May, Fervo Energy staged one of the largest U.S. clean-energy initial public offerings in history. This was fueled by the geothermal-energy company’s Cape Station plant in Utah, with 100 MW of power scheduled by the end of 2026 and an additional 400 MW planned in 2028—which would be enough to power 500,000 homes. In September, Google signed a landmark deal for the plant to supply power to a future data center in the area.

That promise of clean data-center power is largely driving the enthusiasm of this new moment. Investments in clean energy will nearly double those in fossil fuels this year, according to the International Energy Agency. “Around the world, countries and companies are turning to technologies that were developed as climate solutions and now also offer energy security, speed, reliability, and increasingly attractive economics,” Worland writes in this issue.

Our 2026 TIME100 Climate, co-edited by Emma Barker Bonomo and Kyla Mandel, looks at Fervo’s CEO Tim Latimer and 99 other individuals who are leading and navigating this transformation. To assemble this group, our editors and correspondents reviewed hundreds of names, with a particular focus on those who achieved measurable and sustainable action over the past 12 months.

What we found was a global story: At Start Campus in Portugal, CEO Robert Dunn led the design and development of the 1.2-gigawatt Sines Data Campus, an AI data center to be run entirely on renewable power and cooled by seawater. At the end of last year, Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in Sines. In neighboring Spain, CEO Mario Ruiz-Tagle has led Iberdrola España through a period of rapid expansion of the country’s wind and solar resources, which set the average Spanish household up to see a 10-euro savings on monthly energy bills since March, even as Europe is hit hard by high oil prices.

It’s noteworthy that value—not values—is driving much of this change. While advocates have argued for decades that shifting to sustainable, renewable, noncarbon energy is simply the right thing to do, people everywhere are finding that moving away from fossil fuels is the right move for their bottom lines. India’s Mahindra Last Mile Mobility, led by CEO Suman Mishra, grew 85% year-over-year in the first quarter of fiscal year 2027 to become the country’s market leader in electric three-wheelers. In Chile, Juan Carlos Muñoz spearheaded Chile’s transition to electric public transportation; Santiago now has the largest fleet outside of China. And in Kenya and Rwanda, BasiGo CEO Jit Bhattacharya is pioneering leased electric buses and charging infrastructure to cut diesel buses.

These innovators join a host of groundbreaking thinkers, investors, and pioneers who continue to write new playbooks for climate action, reminding us the world is full of leaders keeping their eyes on the future.