AI is Boosting Clean Tech Startups in Europe

Clean Technology boosted by AI may enable an easier transition to sustainable technologies, cleaner energy sources and greener cities. In this article we explore some startups working on this in Europe and Scandinavia.

Image: Berlin in 2045 by ReInventing Society via DeviantArt ?

Hey Everyone,

While there has been considerable debate about the x-risks of A.I. of late, we have to admit that artificial intelligence will have profoundly good and positive impacts on quality of life overall in many ways, including on things like healthcare, education and also likely how we deal with the transition to smart cities, in reducing repetitive tasks and in the energy sector. AI can assist our civilization with the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable green energy and even in dealing with climate change in new ways.

I asked The Gap ’s Tobias Jensen for his take on this important topic, as he lives in Denmark and has a front row seat on Scandinavian policy around AI’s impact on environmental policies, clean energy, climate tech startups, and A.I.’s impact on the sector.

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In this article Tobias will help us discover some of the top startups in this important space, A.I. at the intersection of clean tech and how it’s being used to tackle Climate change.

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A guest post By Tobias Jensen , October, 2023.

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Introduction

In a new report published in the journal BioScience, a team of distinguished climate researchers analyzed what they describe as 35 planetary vital signs used to track climate change. The vital signs include ice sheet melt, greenhouse gas emissions, meat production, tree cover loss, and billion-dollar flood events. The researchers found that 20 of the 35 signs are at new extremes.?

Here is the bleak and unwavering conclusion from the report:

“We warn of potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems in such a world where we will face unbearable heat, frequent extreme weather events, food and fresh water shortages, rising seas, more emerging diseases, and increased social unrest and geopolitical conflict. Massive suffering due to climate change is already here, and we have now exceeded many safe and just Earth system boundaries, imperiling stability and life-support systems. As we will soon bear witness to failing to meet the Paris agreement's aspirational 1.5°C goal, the significance of immediately curbing fossil fuel use and preventing every further 0.1°C increase in future global heating cannot be overstated. Rather than focusing only on carbon reduction and climate change, addressing the underlying issue of ecological overshoot will give us our best shot at surviving these challenges in the long run. This is our moment to make a profound difference for all life on Earth, and we must embrace it with unwavering courage and determination to create a legacy of change that will stand the test of time.” - The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory , Ripple et al. (October 2023)

The root problem of climate change is not limited to fossil-fuel consumption but rather “ecological overshoot” meaning that humanity takes more from the Earth than it can safely give back. Humanity has come to view the Earth as a resource to be exploited. Yet, we are deeply connected with nature in complex ways - whether we like it or not - and changes in the climate have consequences way beyond rising temperatures, rising sea levels, and natural disasters to geopolitical conflicts, social unrest, and new pandemics.??????

The authors of the paper urge a transition to a global economy that prioritizes human well-being and curtails overconsumption and excessive emissions by the rich. Technological solutions to climate change are by no means the end-all-be-answer to solve the crisis. However, technological advances in AI provide us with invaluable tools to track, measure,? predict, mitigate, and adapt to climate changes and counteract the harm to nature the modern Westerner’s lifestyle is causing.

?? European Climate Tech startups that are leveraging AI

In this post, you will learn about five European Climate Tech startups that are leveraging AI to solve challenges related to climate change. You will learn how:

• The Ocean Cleanup detects plastic objects in the ocean.
• Electricity Maps estimates the origin and source of electricity.
• ClimateAligned tackles the climate financing gap.
• OroraTech detects wildfires from space.
• Material Nexus accelerates new material discovery and design.

If you are interested in learning more about or contributing to the burgeoning field of work at the intersection of AI and climate change, I highly recommend reading the paper “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning ”. The authors identify a multitude of key areas and applications where machine learning and AI tools are particularly useful in tackling climate change. The paper was published by the global and diverse non-profit organization, Climate Change AI , composed of volunteers from both academia and industry. It was spearheaded by influential AI researchers such as Andrew Ng, Demis Hassabis, and Yoshua Bengio, among others.?

1. The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization headquartered in the Netherlands that brands itself as “the largest cleanup in history”, aiming to clean up 90% of floating plastic pollution in the ocean.?

In 2014, the organization was supported by a crowdfunding campaign that brought in more than $2 million in donations from 160 countries. Three years later, The Ocean Cleanup secured $21.7 million in a funding round led by the Silicon Valley philanthropists, Marc and Lynne Benioff with participation from Peter Thiel and the Swiss Julius Baer Foundation.?

If you have ten minutes to spare, I recommend checking out the inspiring TedTalk below by the 19-year-old founder, Boyan Slat. He explains in the presentation why The Ocean Cleanup exists and how their solution, which is thoroughly reported in an interdisciplinary 528-page feasibility study , can help to get rid of plastic in the world’s oceans.??

Below is a present-time interview with Boyan Slat, ten years later. Nowadays, the organization's technology can sweep the area of a football field for trash every ten seconds.??

It’s fascinating that plastic objects can be found in remote sea area locations where no human has ever been. One challenge for The Ocean Cleanup has been to identify the “hot spots” for plastic concentration so it knows where to direct its efforts. This is where AI comes into the picture.

The company is now deploying a novel system for object detection that has the potential to create detailed maps of plastic densities in remote locations. Here is a rough overview of how it was made:

Step 1: In late 2019,? GoPro cameras attached to a cruising Maersk Transporter vessel recorded over 100,000 photos from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch with Vancouver, Canada, as the port of departure and arrival. The images were “geo-tagged” with GPS coordinates and covered a distance of hundreds of miles.??

Step 2: 4,000 example photographs of floating macroplastic were gathered from previous Ocean Cleanup missions carried out between 2018-2019. Staff members and volunteer data labelers created bounding boxes around clearly visible plastic items in the images. Hereafter, “data augmentation” was performed by making random changes to the original images and labels. For example, zooming in/out, adjusting brightness, shifting the position of pixels, or stretching, cropping, or rotating the images in different angles. The final training set consisted of 18,589 images, including 3,362 photos of various sea states without plastic items.?

Step 3: The Ocean Cleanup used the 18,589 images to train a neural network for object detection, most successfully with the YOLOv5 framework. More details about the training process can be found in the paper .???

Step 4: Finally, the research team applied the AI object detection algorithm to the image data collected in Step 1 and successfully identified 416 small plastic objects. The algorithm could detect plastic objects as small as 0.15 centimeters and up to a distance of 100 m.?

2. Electricity Maps

Speaking of mapping, the Copenhagen-based startup, Electricity Maps (formerly known as Tomorrow), has designed a real-time visualization of the world that shows where electricity is sourced from, how clean it is, and how much CO2 it emits at any time of the day. With a paid subscription, the data can be accessed historically or as a forecast for the next 24 hours, either through an API or as CSV files.?

Businesses as well as private people, use Electricity Maps to adjust their electricity consumption to save money and the environment by emitting less CO2. The use cases are plentiful and include optimizing EV charging, scheduling energy-intensive software updates at lower-carbon times, and reducing the carbon footprints of data centers. Google partners with Electricity Maps to manage electricity consumption at its data centers, report its carbon footprint 24/7, and even provides a carbon-footprint calculator to Google Cloud customers.?

Tracing back the origin of electricity is not an easy task since it's often imported from other areas that in turn imports it from other areas again. In Europe, electricity grids are highly interconnected as can be seen in the illustration over transmission lines below .

The half-French, half-Danish, Electricity Maps CEO, Olivier Corradi, has co-authored a case study accounting for the “flow tracing technique ” applied by Electricity Maps to follow the sometimes long chain of electricity imports. Electricity Maps uses machine learning models to estimate where electricity is sourced from, how it is generated (e.g. coal, gas, wind, solar, hydro), and from this data, carbon emissions can be calculated.?

3. ClimateAligned

In 2023, the world is set to invest an all-time record of $1.8 trillion in clean energy. However, the global share of climate financing still has a long way to go. According to a recently updated report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) ,? global investments in clean energy need to reach $4.5 trillion per year by 2030 in order to meet The Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Below is a chart from BloombergNEF that depicts a disheartening curve of what the required level of climate financing should look like.

According to data from Bloomberg , the size of the global bond market totaled $166 trillion in August 2023. The value of GSST ( green, social, sustainability and transition bonds) and SLB & SLL (sustainability-linked bonds and loans) totaled $4.6 trillion and the market is growing. The green investment opportunities are out there and investors have enough capital at hand to close the climate financing gap. Some of the main challenges remain to find the right opportunities, avoid “green-washing”-schemes, and keep up-to-date with complex regulatory frameworks.??

ClimateAligned is a London-based startup that helps to close the climate financing gap with an AI-driven platform that provides deep insights to institutional investors about opportunities for green and sustainable debt investments. ClimateAligned has raised ￡1.5 million of funding from leading venture capital investors, including Pale Blue Dot and Frontline Ventures.?

The company launched on September 7 at Europe’s leading climate tech festival, The Drop 2023 in Malm?. The Finnish founders,? Aleksi Tukiainen and Krista Tukiainen, combine their respective experiences with entrepreneurship in machine learning business and climate finance to offer the first-of-a-kind platform.?

ClimateAligned uses machine learning technology to collect, process, and analyze thousands of reports, frameworks, and documents concerning the climate and sustainability credentials of bonds and issuers. The company’s custom LLM (large language model) auto-generates output that investors and compliance analysts alike can use to gain more clarity and weigh different investment opportunities against each other.?

More information about ClimateAglined’s technology will be available in an upcoming white paper that is not yet published as of this date.?

4. OroraTech

OroraTech is a German startup that specializes in early detection of wildfires by use of data from small satellites called CubeSats.

The company launched in 2018 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Münich, supported by a research grant and the European Space Agency Business Incubator. The four founders, Thomas Grübler, Bj?rn Stoffers, Florian Mauracher, and Rupert Amann combined their expertise in economy, electrical engineering, computer science, and business to build the globally used solution for detecting wildfires OroraTech stands behind today.?

On January 13, 2022, Ororatech launched its first CubeSat into space with a rocket from SpaceX during the Transporter-3 mission . The CubeSat is about the size of a shoebox,? orbiting at an altitude of 525 km, and captures high-resolution thermal images of the Earth’s surface that can be used for precise temperature measurements. Current satellites have a much lower temporal resolution than Ororatech’s CubeSats and large geostationary satellites can be as big as a truck (AerialFire ).?

The satellite images from CubeSats are analyzed by an AI algorithm and transmitted back to Earth. The images are combined with ground-based camera data, local weather information, and other data sources from satellites owned by space agencies such as ESA and NASA. The processing system can detect unusually high temperatures and thereby wildfires at an early stage, counted in minutes rather than hours, compared to detection from airplanes, helicopters, watchtowers, cameras, patrols, and other detection methods used up until now. OroraTech’s mission is to launch a constellation of more than a 100 satellites by 2026, to transmit thermal images of every place on earth twice per hour, and to detect new fires almost instantly, with high accuracy.?

From a user perspective, OroraTech offers a cloud-based service where subscribers can use different maps: a wind map with visualization of wind speed and direction, maps on temperature and humidity, greenness of vegetation and moisture levels, terrain information such as topography, and a “fire danger index” that indicates the risk of fire in certain areas. Fire warnings are sent directly to subscribers as an e-mail notification? (RESET - Digital for Good ).?

The platform is used by commercial forestry companies, wildfire services, NGOs, and insurance companies all over the world. Notably, OroraTech’s solutions were successfully used in Chile , while the country experienced one of the deadliest wildfires on record in? February of this year.??

Source

5. Materials Nexus

The fifth and final startup I will bring attention to today is Materials Nexus, a technology company that combines AI with quantum physics to predict novel, sustainable materials. The UK-based startup raised ￡2 million in seed capital this summer in a round led by Ada Ventures.?

Green technologies that are indispensable to reach a net zero carbon future such as wind turbines and electric vehicles heavily rely on mining of rare-earth materials and precious metals, and the extraction processes take a heavy toll on the environment. As the founder and CEO of Materials Nexus, Jonathan Bean, a theoretical physicist from Cambridge, explains in a press release :

“In the UK alone, there are almost 11,500 wind turbines and more than 810,000 fully electric cars on the roads. Globally, there are currently 314,000 turbines and an additional one million are needed to meet our energy needs. But the mining and processing of rare-earth materials to build them emits over eight million tonnes of CO2 plus other greenhouse gases in addition to using lots of water and toxic chemicals – and this will naturally increase as more of us switch over to green technologies. Our mission is simple – to discover more sustainable materials which governments and companies can use to build green technologies, in a way that’s commercially viable.”?

Materials Nexus’ AI system can predict properties of new materials in much the same way as AI is being used for drug discovery. The machine learning algorithms and proprietary datasets have been built in-house. Some of the first applications of its AI technology is to find alternative materials for batteries, semiconductors, and superconductors.??

The company is working together with businesses of all sizes. It’s planning to make profits by filing for patents on the novel materials, and either build facilities to produce the materials and sell them to large companies, or license them to existing manufacturers.?

Whereas the search for new, sustainable materials traditionally can take decades, Material Nexus is aiming to rapidly speed up the process, discover new materials, and push new sustainable products out on the market in months.?

Wrapping Up & Towards a net zero carbon emissions future

• Here you have it, five European climate tech companies that are using AI in different ways to build a more sustainable future for the planet.
• From removing plastics in the ocean, detecting wildfires with space technology, bringing in more climate finance via green and sustainable bonds, mapping electricity use, and discovering new sustainable materials, AI technology can be used for so many nature-preserving purposes.
• Unquestionably, the AI frenzy of today will spur off a lot of important innovation in the years to come that will set humanity on the path to a net zero carbon future, more sustainable systems, and a healthier planet overall.?

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The Gap , by the Futuristic Lawyer (Tobias Jensen)

Writing about the intersection of business, law and tech with a focus on social issues from Copenhagen as an A.I. researcher, writer and consultant.

The Gap

Writing about the intersection of business, law and tech with a focus on social issues.

By TobiasMJ

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