The Impact Innovator | Issue 264
In this week's The Impact Innovator edition:
The world's biggest asset manager BlackRock?said it hopes to raise up to $7 billion for its fourth Global Renewable Power Fund as clients ramp up climate-friendly investments.?The fund, focused on projects in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, could invest across wind and solar as well as other clean technologies such as batteries and grid infrastructure.?Demand from institutional investors to back such projects has increased in recent years as more seek to align their portfolios with the transition to a low-carbon economy, BlackRock's Global Head of Climate Infrastructure David Giordano told Reuters.?The move has also been fuelled by a rapidly changing policy backdrop, with the United States and European Union both introducing major financial backing for clean energy to help cut carbon emissions in the fight against global warming.?
Just Climate, an investment business focused on addressing the net-zero challenge, recently said it successfully closed on its inaugural fund,?Climate Assets Fund I, ?which surpassed its initial target of $1 billion, raising $1.5 billion in institutional capital.?This investment will be directed towards high-impact solutions that can reduce or eliminate emissions while generating financial returns.?Climate Assets Fund I attracted a diverse group of institutional investors from various regions, including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Participants in the fund include California State Teachers’ Retirement System, PSP Investments, AP4, Colonial First State Investments, Builders Asset Management, and AP2, among others.?Additionally, top organizations such as Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, IMAS Foundation, Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, Harvard Management Company, the Imprint Group of Goldman Sachs, and Hall Capital Partners also contributed to the fund’s founding investor group. Climate Assets Fund aims to invest in growth-stage, asset-heavy companies across?energy , mobility, industry, and buildings. By targeting these high-emitting, hard-to-abate industries, the fund intends to drive substantial emissions reductions in the next decade.?
Middle-market solar and storage project investor?CleanCapital ?received an additional commitment of up to $500 million from Manulife Investment Management. CleanCapital will leverage this investment to fund early-stage solar and storage development and acquire renewable energy assets throughout the United States, as well as expand its partnerships in emerging markets.?Additionally, the company surpassed a major investment milestone: the cumulative deployment of more than $1 billion to fund operating, new construction, and early-stage development solar and storage assets. Already one of the largest commercial solar asset owners in the U.S., CleanCapital continues to lead the clean energy transition by connecting institutional capital to the myriad opportunities available in the middle market sector.? CleanCapital’s investments to date ?comprise a diverse renewables portfolio of more than 200 distributed generation projects totaling 400 MW and spanning 26 states and one U.S. territory, as well as corporate investments in renewable energy project developers.?
Carbon removal startup?Nori ?announced?$6.25 million ?in new funding. Current investors M13, Toyota Ventures, Placeholder and Cargill led the round. The Seattle company has raised a total of $17.25 million.?Nori also shared news that?Matt Trudeau , a digital markets, exchanges and cryptocurrency veteran, is now CEO. Former CEO and co-founder?Paul Gambill ?shifted to the role of chief product officer.?Nori uses the blockchain to sell carbon credits provided by farmers employing sustainable practices that capture and hold carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere. The credits, which are issued as Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs), are available to individuals and businesses. In March, the company migrated its operations from Etherium to the?Polygon? blockchain platform. Last year Nori announced a?partnership? with Bayer, a global leader in agriculture, which is providing “hundreds of thousands of verified carbon removal offsets” to the Nori platform.
Charm Industrial – the?company ?using agricultural residues to produce bio-oil and sequester it, announced a major milestone that will help accelerate the deliveries of its carbon credits. Charm has raised $100 million in its latest Series B funding round led by?General Catalyst .??It also announced that as of June 7th, 2023, it has managed to deliver 6,209 tons of carbon removal. Charm Industrial is rapidly expanding operations boosted by new record-breaking deals with Frontier and JPMorgan Chase for the delivery of additional 140,000 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide removed via bio-oil sequestration.?The funding will go towards accelerating operations in the US and carbon removal deliveries.?Other investors that took part in the round were also Lowercarbon, Exor Ventures, Kinnevik, Thrive Capital and Elad Gil.?Charm opened a second site in Fort Lupton, Colorado in 2022, responsible for biomass processing R&D, bio-oil gasification, forward-deployed pyrolysis testing and operations. It plans to ramp up operations in Colorado and expand its lone pyrolyzer into a continent-wide fleet of tens of thousands of pyrolyzers.?
Professional services firm?PwC , in its newly released report, predicts an enormous shift in the private markets towards ESG investments.?The report, titled ‘GPs’ Global ESG Strategies: Disclosure Standards, Data Requirements & Strategic Options’, was prepared by PwC Luxembourg and forecasts a significant increase in ESG-focused private market assets under management (AUM).?The report surveyed 600 global participants, 300 General Partners (GPs) and 300 Limited Partners (LPs), across the U.S., EU, UK, and Asia Pacific. The anticipation is that ESG-focused AUM, which has seen a steady rise from $600bn in 2015 to $1.1tn in 2021, will skyrocket further with a base case AUM prediction of $2.7tn by 2026, potentially reaching as high as $4.5tn.?The report highlights the intention of investors to pivot towards an ‘ESG or nothing’ strategy. A considerable 76% of LPs disclosed plans to stop investing in non-ESG private market products, with a similar percentage of GPs intending to halt their offering of non-ESG products. PwC expects the funding to be used to expand the reach of ESG investments and enhance the associated technological and workforce capabilities.
Coral restoration work—where fragments of coral are grown in nurseries and then reattached to reefs—is limited now by the fact that it’s done manually. Foster, who had grown up with a family business that mass-produced construction materials, started wondering if restoration could borrow some of the same manufacturing strategies.??On a Fulbright fellowship, she traveled to San Francisco to begin working on a more automated system. At Autodesk, the design and engineering software company, she joined a program that connected her with pro bono help from employees. They helped design a new mold for the same basic equipment that her family uses to make blocks for walls. Instead of blocks, the new mold makes coral “skeletons,” which each have six small spaces where fragments of coral can be attached, and a handle on top so divers can place the structures in the ocean. (The skeletons are secured in place using wires.)?Over time, the coral will grow and fuse together into one piece. Planting corals on this type of structure means that they can become established much more quickly (depending on the type of coral, it could happen in months rather than years).?
The relationships between plants and the fungi that colonise their roots are responsible for locking away a huge amount of carbon underground – maybe equivalent to more than one-third of global emissions from fossil fuels.?Almost all land plants on Earth have a symbiotic relationship with fungi that live in the soil around their roots, trading the carbon they draw from the air for nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus.?These mycorrhizal fungi store the carbon they get from their plant partners in their tissues and the surrounding soil, thus keeping it out of the atmosphere. But despite the interest in nature-based solutions to climate change, mycorrhizal fungi have been largely overlooked, says?Heidi-Jayne Hawkins ?at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. So, she and her colleagues set out to calculate just how much carbon plants might be transferring to these fungi. By scouring data from dozens of scientific studies on the relationships between plants and fungi, the researchers estimated that between 3 and 13 per cent of the carbon dioxide?that plants pull out of the atmosphere ends up in the fungal tissue. The team then used global data on which plants live where, how productive they are and which fungi they are associated with to estimate that about 13.1 gigatonnes of CO2?is transferred to fungi each year – equivalent to around 36 per cent of?annual emissions from fossil fuels around the world.
The idea of solar energy being transmitted from space is not a new one. In 1968, a NASA engineer named Peter Glaser?produced the first concept design ?for a solar-powered satellite. But only now, 55 years later, does it appear scientists have actually carried out a successful experiment. A team of researchers from Caltech?announced on Thursday ?that their space-borne prototype, called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1), had collected sunlight, converted it into electricity and beamed it to microwave receivers installed on a rooftop on Caltech's Pasadena campus. The experiment also proves that the setup, which launched on January 3, is capable of surviving the trip to space, along with the harsh environment of space itself.?
The experiment — known in full as Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (or MAPLE for short) — is one of three research projects being carried out aboard the SSPD-1. The effort involved two separate receiver arrays and lightweight microwave transmitters with custom chips, according to Caltech. In its press release, the team added that the transmission setup was designed to minimize the amount of fuel needed to send them to space, and that the design also needed to be flexible enough so that the transmitters could be folded up onto a rocket. Space-based solar power has long been something of a holy grail in the scientific community.
Hurtigruten Norway, a company with a 130-year history of transporting cargo and passengers at sea, has unveiled its first zero-emission cruise ship concept. Called "Sea Zero", the plans for the cruise ship were revealed in March last year, and now we have the first glimpse of what the company plans to build.?Maritime transport is one of the challenges that electrification is yet to solve.?Battery-operated ships ?have limited ranges and carrying capacities and are not cut out for the long haul.??To begin with, the shipbuilder will use multiple 60-megawatt batteries that will be charged at the port before it sets sail on its voyage. The cruise ship features three autonomous and retractable sail wing rigs to prevent the hassle of finding ports to charge them up again.?Each rig will reach a height of 164 feet (50 m) when fully extended and be used to cover 8,073 sq. ft (750 sq. m.) surface area to tap into wind energy. The rigs will also provide 16,146 sq. ft (1,500 sq .m.) of area for solar panels, which will be used to recharge the batteries while at sea.?The shipbuilder is also turning to?artificial intelligence ?(AI) to increase the efficiency of maneuvering, a move that will see the size of the bridge reduced significantly in size and resemble the cockpit of the aircraft, the press release said.
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1 年Good reads and thank you Joshua Soloway —the story on Hurtigruten Norway is also worth mentioning and a challenge worth tracking. Will you cover a follow-up/update article in the future?