Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
How Tech is Changing Wildfire Management (MCJ)
Map Shows Stunning Improvement in California Drought (SFC)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Divert, a 16-year-old company based in Concord, Ma., that works with grocery store chains like Albertsons and Safeway to reduce food waste (it donates it or sends it to an anaerobic digester machine that replicates what happens in a landfill), raised a $100 million round led by Enbridge (TC)
Industrial Sun, an Austin startup that develops renewable energy and storage systems for industrial customers such as refineries, pumping and compression stations, and manufacturing plants, raised a $90 million round. Investors include EIG and Modern Energy. (F)
Sesamm, a startup helping companies navigate ESG goals, raised a $37M Series B-2 led by Opera Tech Ventures and Elaia (TC)
Novata, a platform providing private markets with ESG solutions, raised a $30M Series B led by Hamilton Lane (BW)
Circ, a startup based in Danville, Va., that breaks down polymers used in textiles and separates individual fibers that can be reused in new clothing, raised a $25 million Series B extension round from Zalando (ET)
ION Mobility, a four-year-old Singapore startup that develops hardware and software for electric motorbikes, raised an $18.7 million Series A round. Investors included TVS Motor and others (TN)
Aquafortus, a seven-year-old startup based in Auckland, New Zealand, that aims to build more efficient waste recovery systems for oil and gas companies, raised a $17 million Series A1 round led by DCVC and Novo Holdings (More)
SepPure, a 4.5-year-old, Singapore-based outfit that says it has created a sustainable chemical-resistant nano-filtration technology to replace the chemical separation processes in multiple industries, including vegetable oil, pharmaceutical, petrochemical and oil industries, has attracted $12 million in a new funding round. SOSV led the round (TC)
XL Batteries, a four-year-old startup based in Marlborough, Ma., that is developing organic flow battery technology, raised a $10 million "seed-2" round led by Catalus Capital and including Xerox Ventures and SIP Global. More here.
PteroDynamics, a six-year-old startup based in Colorado Springs, Co., that develops vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, raised a $7.5 million seed round from Kairos Ventures (MorePteroDynamics, a six-year-old startup based in Colorado Springs, Co., that develops vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, raised a $7.5 million seed round from Kairos Ventures)
Velotric, a startup based in Carson, Ca., that makes commuter and off-road electric bicycles for less than $2,000, raised a $7.4 million Series A round. Investors included Redpoint China Ventures Capital (TC)
Green Theory
Additionality in Wonderland
If home electricity in the US generates more than 12 metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions, per person per year, when the average household of 3.3 people goes solar, they should save more than 36 metric tons, right?
Let’s say you knew the family was in West Virginia: the state with the most carbon-heavy electricity in the country.
Does that make their switch to solar worth the same emissions savings as 4 New York households, each using the same amount of electricity?
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To answer these questions, everyone from social scientists to carbon accounting firms must consider additionality. Additionality represents the search to wonder how an action changed the world, or how a future change might impact it. The depth to which one considers additionality can either solidify an argument from a place of ignorance, bog the searcher down in confusion, or achieve a thoughtful-enough level of consideration, somewhere in between.
Consider two households that used the same amount of grid electricity in 2021: one in West Virginia, and one in New York. It could seem that a sustainability-minded solar panel installer would obviously sell their last panels to the West Virginia household, for the higher carbon offset effect.
Even within states, however, greenhouse gas emissions vary greatly
Who’s living on low emissions? At this level, it’s clearly those in denser areas. The difference between suburban and city living was put in dramatic contrast by the New York Times in December of 2022: the lifestyles of more densely populated areas generally generate less energy per person.
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Zooming in further, the researchers assigned values down to a fairly granular neighborhood level. Of course, even individual to individual, anyone’s responsibility for and complicity in emissions varies.
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If you want to pat yourself on the back, it’s tempting to simply zoom in until you feel connected to a low-emissions area, or—failing that—zoom back out until you feel lumped in a large enough aggregate that you don’t need to take responsibility. Neither of these reflections help solve the climate crisis, on their own, but recognizing the complexity of additionality is an essential consideration for those trying to make arguments or assumptions around how change happens at scale.
Where’s the most emission-offsetting installation?
For a home in Vermont that’s getting clean power from the grid, rooftop solar is unlikely to be the best investment for sustainability or personal finances. On the other hand, installing an electric heat pump, to ditch gas heating, would offset emissions through electrification.
Indeed, holding all else constant (including heat pumps) a solar panel installed on an average West Virginia roof will almost certainly offset far more emissions than a Vermont roof. A heat pump installed to switch from natural gas to coal electricity for home heating in West Virginia would deliver the opposite impact.
Considering Perspective
Perspective matters as much as attempts to quantify additionality. On a recent episode of Catalyst, the investor host and Bloomberg New Energy Finance guest muse about the crash in global car sales, accompanied by soaring Electric Vehicle sales. They question if EVs should be heralded as replacements for gas cars, if the world is turning away from buying new cars in general. For someone dreaming of, or working toward, a world beyond personal motorcars, maybe new EVs represent a deeper entrenchment of today’s suburban pathways, and other car-focused human spaces.
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Regardless of whether EVs go far enough in replacing gas cars, we can measure how much electricity they used, and therefore apply how much approximate oil, and therefore rough emissions, we would save. Still, this oil displacement, or offset calculation, does presume that the EV driver must drive, and has no other choice, and that their amount of driving would be the same with their old combustion motorcar.
Comparing Scenarios
For a more concrete example of additionality, take The Energy Transition show’s latest hydrogen highlight. If a new clean hydrogen facility negotiates with a utility or city that has 50% clean power, and signs a contract for 10% of it (5% of the total energy) the hydrogen company may state that they sell “green hydrogen.”
And yet, now the local provider needs to increase energy output, and can ramp up electricity production from oil or gas plants much faster than deploying a massive new solar project. Is this hydrogen really “green” then, if it causes a sudden increase in emissions? Perhaps not.
Finally, imagine a farm that is already sequestering carbon through whatever practices they’ve done for generations, and making a profit. Does buying the farm’s newly minted carbon offset credits excuse one’s own emissions in a life far away, or does the credit payment just provide a subsidy to a farm while increasing emissions?
If you want to “work the levers” at scale, choose carefully
Finding the right level of detail and alternative scenario requires attention to information about current choices or position, historical trends, and more. At the same time, remembering to connect numerical forecasts of complex outcomes back to reality is crucial to creating change. As Barbara Tuchman summarizes in the end of The March of Folly (1984):
A last folly was the absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we were doing, about effectiveness in relation to the object sought, about balance of possible gain as against loss…
Absence of intelligent thinking in rulership is another of the universals [in destructive leadership], and raises the question, whether … there is something about political and bureaucratic life that subdues the functioning of intellect in favor of “working the levers” without regard to rational expectations. This would seem to be an ongoing prospect.
In other words, leaders who reward finders of re-assuring data, over thoughtful, relevant data, will get followers who focus more on finding pleasing metrics, rather than the most useful information. Identifying and reporting on an irrelevant, or even backwards, metric, just like making a sustainability decision around a flawed central tradeoff, can misdirect or disable desired impacts.
In this way, one sees how large scale decisions may rest on an individual leader’s ability or inability to grasp additionality, by connecting relevant information to a clear sense of how a change ripples through a system—a skill hard enough to consider in one’s own life (beyond sustainability, too).
Measuring greenhouse gas emissions, or other attributes of sustainability, from the top down, we can at least see changes over time, and compare other changes to isolate (or argue over) impacts, and therefore attempt to define additionality. Quantifying additionality precisely takes quality information, time, and more. If that all sounds too complicated, converting higher emissions activities to lower emissions activities can be undertaken in one’s own life, every day.
The Closer
PSA from the NPS.