Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
MCJ’s Investment in Kodama Systems [where Mack currently interns!] (MCJ)
Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think (WSJ)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
Ecorobotix, a nine-year-old Swiss startup, raised a $52 million Series B round. Aqton PE and Cibus Capital were the co-leads (TEU)
ChrysaLabs, a leading innovator at the forefront of soil science, announced an $11M financing round led by Leaps by Bayer, TELUS Ventures, and BDC Capital (PR)
Green-Got, a Paris-based neobank focused on ecological transition, raised $5.5M in funding from VC Pale blue dot and others (FN)
Voltfang, a two-year-old startup based in Aachen, Germany, that recycles dead EV batteries, raised a $5.5 million round led by PropTech1 Ventures (TEU)
Altris, a Swedish sodium ion battery developer, raised a $5.4M bridge round from unnamed current investors and employees (FN)
Olyns, a recycling tech startup, raised a $4M Series A led by Vanedge Capital (PRN)
Werewool, a five-year-old Brooklyn startup that produces biodegradable fibers for the fashion industry, raised a $3.7 million seed round. Material Impact and Sofinnova Partners were the co-leads. More here.
Climate tech startup Improvin raised a $3.6M seed round led by Pale blue dot and Dynamo Ventures (FN)
Swan Innovations, a virtual power plant startup, raised a $3.25M seed round (PRN)
Obeo Biogas, a biogas developer for dairy farms, raised a $3M seed round led by Diagram Ventures (BW)
Mycocycle, a five-year-old Chicago startup that is using fungi to transform industrial waste into reusabl e materials, raised a $2.2 million seed round led by Anthropocene Ventures (F)
Farmless, a nine-month-old, Netherlands-based producer of non-animal-based protein alternatives, says it has raised a €1.2 million in pre-seed equity funding Revent and others (TC)
Green Theory
Read between the Transmission Lines
The grid is all around us, carrying electricity to our appliances. We may take it for granted in cities, or urbanized areas with steady flows of electricity, but our vulnerabilities get heightened when the power goes off. To power the energy transition to a cleaner, more just future, we’re going to need a lot more generation capacity, such as wind farms. To get the power to the people, however, we’ll need more transmission lines, too, and our existing policies, processes—and grids themselves—are getting stretched to the limits.
It’s not easy to estimate the size of the high-voltage transmission bottleneck in one figure. The US added 10 GW of utility-scale solar (think big fields, filled with panels) in 2020. This installation and interconnection represented less than 1% of all projects’ capacity submitted for review: 1.44 TW (down to 1.25 TW today). These staggering queue figures clock in above or around the US grid-tied generation capacity, today.
And yet, if this endless queue of projects were merely waiting on some paperwork before breaking ground, it seems we’d be further along in bringing more renewables online. Something deeper must explain the inability to get these projects connected to the grid, transmitting power to people.
Transmission Impossible: Barriers to Load Growth
For all of the energy around clean energy, building a new utility-scale clean energy project, and getting paid to let it deliver energy to consumers, can take up to 4 years. One problem: given long timelines and frequency of rejection, site developers are incentivized to each submit as many requests as possible, inflating the queue. Next, when a permit finally gets approved, it may include requirements around a new transmission buildout, which falls squarely on the permit holder, causing them to withdraw, and also stimulating over-submission of interconnection requests.
Local opposition to transmission line builds may be eased by technological innovations, such as “[h]igh-voltage direct-current lines capable of sending lots of power across long distances, which can be run underground along existing rights of way, such as highways,” according to this interview with Liza Reed, a climate policy research manager specializing in energy transmission. The interview contains several other hardware and software solutions, that help clean electrons circumvent these different bottlenecks.
Utilizing…Utilities
Another tack: instead of trying to cram more or better projects through, we could make more out of the transmission lines we already have. Director of Loan Programs, Jigar Shah, explains:
[The grid is] the largest machine in the world, and it doesn’t get optimized for utilization.
We have allowed the grid to go from probably 70% utilization in the pre-air conditioning days of the 1970s, to probably 40% today.
Letting any trillion-dollar project go so underutilized appalls Shah. “We already paid for this stuff. Why not use it at a higher capacity factor?” he asks, in this recent public episode of the Energy Transition Show. In Shah’s view, the existing framework of offering the right to transmission capacity is what limits the grid more than anything. Instead of actively ensuring usage of the transmission capacity, regulators enable energy generators to let transmission capacity sit idle. The proposed policy change is known as active curtailment, and it's getting more financially friendly to those generating power, as energy storage gets less expensive.
Distributed Distribution Eases Transmission
To unlock a clean energy transition faster, we can also try to work from the consumer edge inward, rather than from a systems-level outward. Distributed energy resources, such as rooftop solar or home backup batteries, harness energy right around where it will be used. In this way, they don’t require new high-voltage transmission lines to carry power over long distances. These powerful technologies empower localized energy independence, with renewable inputs, as we’ve explored in Green Theory before.
Further building resilience, and relieving pressure on transmission infrastructure, Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) help balance demand across networks of increasingly granular energy resources. Shah cites that, as of late, US homeowners and contractors add around $10B in new load demand investments every month, between heat pumps, EV chargers, and new thermostats. If we want to fit these new demands onto the grid quickly, VPPs can connect those new app-enabled resources to smart grid technologies, and smooth out daily or weekly curves.
Between detecting unusually cool wires to identify extra transmission capacity, and connecting Puerto Rico’s thousands of Tesla Powerwalls to local microgrids, innovators have plenty of pathways to making sure we aren’t reliant on more of the same old transmission tragedy, on our path to rapidly electrify US society, and drawdown our greenhouse gas emissions.
The Closer
Osprey with a puffer, by @mark.smith.photography