🍏 Self-Driving Cars, Clean Algae & Lots of Batteries - 8.27.21
One Big Thing to Chew On
A new study finds that electric, self-driving taxis might not be the answer to our climate problems that many people think, Axios' Joann Muller reports.
“While electric vehicles themselves have lower emissions than traditional gasoline-powered ones, our work shows that deploying electric robocabs en masse on America’s streets could actually increase the number of trips, miles driven and overall emissions,” says Harvard law professor Ashley Nunes, the study's lead author.
What's needed: The researchers offered several policy recommendations, including:
Clean up the electricity grid, using more renewable energy sources.
Rather than subsidizing EV purchases, federal and state governments could offer discounts for ride-pooling.
What We’re Listening to This Week
Podcast: Freakonomics - This is Your Brain on Pollution. Another really great climate-relevant episode from Freakonomics this week. It’s got psychology, economics, environmental intersectionalism and some jokes.
Top Deals of the Week
We’re switching up the deal flow section - it’ll start by highlighting a few deals that stood out to us this week, and then be followed by other climate-tech deals worth mentioning. Shout to Zach Stein of Carbon Collective for the inspiration. Let us know what you think!
Ample raises a $160M Series C led by Moore Strategic Ventures. (TC)
The story: This eight-year-old, SF-based battery-swapping startup, aims to change how we think about EVs. Instead of having to charge your battery, they want you to swap out your depleted one for a fully charged unit at their charging stations.
Why we’re excited about it: Charging is a big pain point, both for potential consumers and for governments trying to grapple with how to build out an entirely new charging infrastructure. My biggest hurdle to getting my first EV is that I don’t have access to a dedicated parking spot where I can install charging. When Ample opens to consumers it will instantly solve that problem for me. I can’t wait!
Form Energy raises a $240M Series D led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (RA)
The story: This four-year-old, Somerville, Ma.-based company says it’s developing and scaling the production of a new type of rechargeable battery that can store electricity for 100 hours.
Why we’re excited about it: If it works, this would be a huge technological breakthrough in one of the biggest TAMs in climate tech. We’re also excited about this because we just featured a podcast interviewing the founder last week!
Energy Vault raises $110M Series C led by SoftBank (BW)
The story: This Swiss firm is building a six-armed crane that builds and deconstructs towers of bricks. When excess (hopefully renewable) energy is available, the autonomous crane lifts the bricks to form the tower. Then, when it comes time to draw the power back, the crane lowers the bricks, returning 90% of the energy through gravity.
Why we’re excited about it: With such large potential from a simple, mechanical concept, Energy Vault is not only providing a viable source of badly needed storage, it also expands the imagination of what climate solutions look like. We’re going to need a lot of wacky ideas, so get to dreaming!
Other Deals This Week
Plentywaka, a two-year-old, Lagos and Toronto-based mobility startup, has raised a $1.2 million in seed funding led by The Xchange. (TC)
Gross-Wen Technologies, a seven-year-old, Slater, Ia.-based company whose wastewater treatment technology uses algae to clean wastewater, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding co-led by ISA Ventures and the Iowa Farm Bureau's Rural Vitality Fund. (PR)
FlexGen Power, a battery energy storage system, received a $150M investment led by Apollo (BBG)
One Actionable Item
Get a job working under the wide umbrella of climate tech
Ok, I try to keep the action items fairly low-lift and admittedly this is a big task. But the cool thing about climate tech is it’s incredibly interdisciplinary. No matter your skills or experience, you are qualified for something, somewhere under the wide umbrella of climate tech.
Start by checking out Climatebase. Their jobs page is filterable by sector (private/nonprofit/public), industry, role and more.
Ask friends who are working in climate tech how their work is going. Josh’s solar tech company is hiring across teams. Mack’s consulting firm, which does some work in solar strategy and EV research, is hiring, too.
Check out our comprehensive list of early stage climate tech ventures. Ok - It’s not quite ready to release to the world yet, but keep your eyes peeled for an airtable that’ll cover everything out there by name, industry, stage and investor.
Green Theory
Don’t Overreact, We’re Talking Nuclear Energy
With origins dating back to before the weaponization of nuclear fission, the idea of splitting atoms to generate electricity has been a reality for 70 years. From Idaho to the USSR, nuclear power plants have been providing us power with no point-source emissions for decades.
This lack of emissions classifies nuclear as clean, but it’s not renewable. Renewable energy specifically refers to sources that are never diminished by use--wind captured by turbines today will not deplete the howling gales of tomorrow. Clean energy, on the other hand, refers to net-zero, or zero-emission sources, including renewables, but also nuclear, which requires rare mineral mining.
Critics of nuclear energy have more than the, often uranium, inputs to fuss over. Between the storage of spent byproducts and the potential for warhead development, there’s a lot to weigh before we even bring up reactor meltdowns.
Globally, nuclear accounts for roughly 10% of electricity production. Compared to the other popular, clean--but not renewable--solution of carbon capture and storage (which offsets less than 1% of global carbon emissions today) one sees how large of a scale the nuclear question raises.
The Sunrise Movement suggests we focus on and invest in renewables first and foremost, but despite its portrayal as an anti-nuclear organization, its message is more nuanced. Shutting down existing plants is often accompanied by a rise in the use of coal and natural gas, so walking away from nuclear entirely may send us backwards on the mission toward emissions drawdown. On the flip side, should we keep pouring R&D into nascent nuclear technology such as fusion? Recent breakthroughs are exciting, though the jury is out on the best way to proceed with clean energy.
The Closer
Shot in our very own Monterey Bay on Tuesday - you gotta click through and watch the full video.
From the abstract of the EV paper: "4) the aforementioned externalities may be mitigated by leveraging a specific set of technological, behavioral and logistical pathways".
This reads like a sentence you write in middle school when you replace ever other word with another you don't really grasp from thesaurus.com.