Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
The Case for Urban Cycling in 12 Graphs (G)
Brazil’s presidential contest will decide the fate of the Amazon (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Electra, a green iron refiner, raised $85M in funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Amazon, BHP Ventures, and others (BW)
The Rounds, a three-year-old, Philadelphia, Pa.-based sustainability-minded home restocking service, has raised $38 million in Series A funding. Redpoint Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz led (TC)
Solar energy company Solestial raised a $10M seed round led by Airbus Ventures (BW)
AgriWebb, a livestock business management solution, raised a $6.7M Series B extension from by Germin8 Ventures and iSelect Fund (BW)
Reneum Institute, a London startup that is building a blockchain marketplace for renewable projects seeking funding, raised a $4.1 million led by Ajeej Capital, with Outlier Ventures also chipping in. (RQ)
Universal Hydrogen, a two-year-old, Los Angeles startup that is building a distribution network to deliver hydrogen fuel to airlines, raised an undisclosed amount from American Airlines. (FWN)
Green Theory
The Cost of Doing Nothing
If you bought a $1000 television in 2007, you might have been frustrated to see a bigger, better TV available at a fraction of the cost just 5 years later. In this time, while inflation decreased the relative value of the dollar, the price per square TV inch fell roughly 3-fold. Though not as dramatic of a change, a $1000 television in 2017 would cost a mere $558 today. As a recent Oxford paper explains, “[T]echnologies can be divided into two groups based on their rates of improvement. For the first group, comprising the vast majority of technologies, inflation-adjusted costs have remained roughly constant through time.” TVs, then, stand out among technologies over the last 6+ decades.
The authors continue with an example of a first-group technology—despite “enormous progress in technologies for [fossil fuel] discovery and extraction, as easily accessible resources are depleted, it becomes necessary to extract less accessible resources, creating a ‘running-to-stand-still’ dynamic in which prices have remained roughly constant for more than a century.” With more scientists, more time, and more money pouring into stand-still technologies, what distinguishes the second group of technologies? For these rarer innovations “costs have dropped roughly exponentially while deployment has increased exponentially.” Joining TVs, optical fibers, and transistors, green energy technologies such as solar, wind, and batteries could save money across the planet, even if they don’t save the planet.
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Those passionate about a just energy transition for the sake of human life, wildlife, or other morally minded missions see inherent value in climate solutions, outside of their dollars and cents. Just like a flashy plasma screen in the 1990s, many expensive, early rooftop solar systems meant more about an owner’s virtues and interests than their financial shrewdness. With solar cost declines each year, 96% of homeowners now cite saving money on utility bills as a reason they did or would install solar panels. The US Department of Energy adds: “Even places with relatively low solar resources, such as the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, can experience cost savings.” For the individual household or community, going green with your energy might make sense regardless of the environmental impact. With such rosy results in sunny solar boom states such as Texas and California, surely the savings-focused, ecosphere-ignorant model of the energy transition can’t scale to the entire planet, right?
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Oxford researchers at the Smith School would beg to differ; the team argues that a faster global shift to renewables would save roughly $12 trillion, relative to a scenario with no policy interventions. Given renewables’ higher upfront costs, critics often cite paying for the energy transition as a barrier. But rather than wait for inertia to leak out of fossil fuel corporations and institutions as renewables grow, the authors posit that capturing the low cost of renewables today helps further reduce costs going forward, and saves money over time. Figure 7A (above) displays the key scenario differences in dollars. As the share of renewables grows, total energy system expenditure falls. The earlier the shift, the bigger the impact. That $12 trillion saved in a faster transition would equate to 4 years of 2020 energy spending for free, without accounting for environmental impact at all. Adding in the savings from avoided planetary and human devastation, the savings grow 2-20x. Nonetheless, this paper’s innovative modeling puts forward a clear financial imperative: the faster we’re greener, the more we save.
The Closer
From The Economist: “The blood of the horseshoe crab is still widely used to test the safety of American medicines and implanted devices, including antibiotics and vaccines.
The crabs are strapped to steel countertops and, still alive, drained of about a third of their blue-coloured blood. Then they are returned to the ocean.
The blue liquid is the only known natural source of limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), an extract that detects endotoxin, a nasty and sometimes fatal bacterium. A litre of it goes for as much as $15,000.”
Special Update: Green Bite Powers up with Executive Editor
The Green Bite is delighted to welcome long-time reader, content influencer, and friend, Madilyn (Maddy) Fisher to our team to support operations and delivery. After well over 1 year of the Green Bite, we are excited to expand our capacity to provide the most up-to-date green tech news to your inbox each week through Maddy’s work in her new role as Executive Editor. Welcome, Maddy, and thank you to our subscribers for your support and engagement!
A really interesting figure would be to see the cost of rooftop solar on a sq. ft. or kw basis compared to other technologies - flat screen TV's, 13" laptops, external hard drives, electric cars, electric scooters. i.e. how is the cost of solar declining relative to other (consumer) electronics.
A future hire should be Chief Data Storyteller!