Stepchange

There's an important and hard math problem to solve before any major energy project gets off the ground. It's all around financial modeling--how do you optimize the flow of capital into and out of a project? Who gets the tax credit? Should that be transferred out and sold or brought into a partnership? Answering those questions 1) correctly and 2) quickly is a major blocker in getting more solar, wind, storage, geothermal, and more built. The capital comes and then the shovels and then the electrons. Fortunately, this is a perfect software challenge. Beyond excited to announce Stepchange's latest investment in CapeZero to solve precisely this problem. They've reduced modeling time for customers from months to minutes and enabled project finance teams to move 50-75% faster on deals. They are founded by folks who have been working on major energy deals for decades and want to unlock this capability for the whole industry. Let's go! As a very random personal aside on this: CapeZero partners with Accufy Analytics, LLC to build out some of the most complex elements of the financial model. It turns out, that Accufy is where my dad worked from 1983 until his passing in 2016. I spent my childhood building computers and chatting with the team and my dad built much of the underlying modeling code. What a beautiful twist of the universe to put me back in touch in a work capacity with Eric Seale. Got shivers during diligence when we unpacked this with Manish Hebbar.

“To build the future, we need to understand the past” - a launch announcement! ??? We started our fund to invest in the step change solutions to the massive problems facing our economy and society. We believe that the companies being built today will become the protagonists in future history books - stories of how we tackled the crises of our time with ingenuity and urgency. But the more I think about the future we’re building, the more I wonder how we got to where we are today. What are the stories that shaped our modern world? How might those stories help us understand our current context? Those questions and the desire to better understand our world led to something new - the Stepchange Show! This show explores the technologies and systems that underpin the modern world - an “Acquired for Infrastructure”. In this first episode we start with coal - a dirty little rock that revealed itself to be the foundational story of how our modern world was built. I am excited to venture into the world of podcasting and longform “conversational audiobooks” with my co-host Ben Eidelson. After spending thousands of hours together, we figured why not do more together! Check out Episode 1:

To build the future, we need to understand the past. As a devoted listener of many climate podcasts, I love listening about the latest new thing, what the election means for climate, where we are at now. Yet, I often find myself wondering: How did we get here? The history, the context, the pivotal decisions, and the people who shaped the systems we rely on today are too often left out of the conversation. I'm an avid fan of the Acquired show by Ben and David--who expertly tell the stories of companies. Each 3-5 hour episode leaves me feeling like I gleaned key insights on what made that company work, what the context was as they navigated growth, and who the humans were that drove those companies forward. For a long time, I've been wanting someone to make "Acquired for infrastructure." What's the story of fertilizer? Or cement? Or batteries? How does our world work today and what got us to where we are? Well no one did it. So here we are. As part of the journey of building the Stepchange fund, I found a perfect co-conspirator for this project in Anay--someone equally passionate about diving into intense research on seemingly esoteric topics until we emerge with clarity and a compelling story to tell. So, today, we're doing it! I'm excited to announce the launch of the Stepchange show. We're starting with coal—and what began as research into a 'simple' energy source revealed itself to be the foundational story of how our modern world was built. The rise of coal reshaped economies, societies, and the very way we live. Let’s dig in: https://lnkd.in/gezfSniS And thank you to early listeners and supporters helping me get this going: Marc Bridge, Ben Gilbert, Arthur Shwab, Peter Pawlowski, Nathan Eidelson, Aaron Eidelson, Dimitri Dadiomov, Brie Wolfson, Sam Steyer, Nathan Wasserman and most of all Anay and Anna

Early this morning I took a 20-minute drive on I-5. I passed over 40 trucks. Of these exactly 100% of them were burning diesel fuel and 0% were electric. Almost all of these were short-haul trucks moving containers to and from the Seattle port—onward to local distribution centers. I find this deeply frustrating. We have all of the “hard” tech problems solved here—dense batteries, multiple truck manufacturers selling fully electrified trucks, high speed chargers. So why is everyone still burning diesel? Why are we spewing not just CO2, but also major localized pollution around the ports and nearby communities? It turns out that despite the hard physics problems being solved, the soft problems of coordinating, financing, and routing EV trucks remains. The traditional owner-operator model of short-haul trucking won’t be able to quickly transition to EV truck ownership. We need to optimize routes with charging, train drivers on new vehicles, and finance trucks in new ways. Enter Nevoya, a recent Stepchange investment. Anay and I met Sami Khan, John Verdon, and Thomas Atwood over the summer and were blown away by their grasp of the industry and how to unlock massive scale of EV trucking?now?and not in 10 years. This can't happen fast enough.

I do a lot of storytelling these days - telling Stepchange's story to prospective partners & investors; helping founders tell their story; building stories about the investability of certain solutions. But it's rare to go deep into our personal origin stories. And even more rare to do so in authentic conversation with a highly reflective friend whose journey has such uncanny parallels. In unpacking my path to climate investing, Ben Eidelson & I get into some real-talk on birth, death, and the finite nature of time (some of my favorite topics).??So grateful for our partnership and the chance to podcast-it-up! https://lnkd.in/g_TZea3G

Big news from portco itselectric!

Big deal--we haven't had detachable cables in the US. Until now. Key line: "Detachable cable EV chargers are the norm in the EU and UK, where drivers stow the charging cable in their vehicle when the charger is not in use. This design not only allows the charger unit to be compact and durable but also ensures charger uptime. Many US EV drivers are frustrated by limited access to public charging, and this experience is often exacerbated when charging cables are faulty or vandalized. With the detachable cable model, a damaged cable does not result in a downed charger." https://lnkd.in/eA9fHWPd