The Impact Innovator | Issue 271
In this week's The Impact Innovator edition:
The White House on Wednesday held a summit aimed to address the planet-warming gas methane and launched a new task force dedicated to the issue.?According to a press release from the?Biden?administration ahead of the event, the summit was set to focus on issues including the task force’s establishment, technology to detect methane emissions, other “common sense” actions such as plugging abandoned oil wells and inspecting pipelines, responding to super-emitting events and leading international efforts to address the issue.?Methane is more than 25 times as powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is responsible for about 20 percent of global climate change. Major contributors to methane emissions include the oil and gas and agriculture sectors, as well as landfills.?
The White House said its new task force will seek to “accelerate” plans to reduce emissions and “advance a whole-of-government approach to proactive methane leak detection and data transparency, and support state and local efforts to mitigate and enforce methane emissions regulations.” It did not specify what exactly this entails or who is on it, though it was described as “cabinet-level.”
And yes, it’ll have NACS accessibility. In a shocking but exciting announcement this morning, a group of some of the world’s largest automakers has combined forces into a new joint venture to deliver a new “high-powered” charger network across cities and highways in?North America?to expedite EV adoption. Oh, and they intend to power the entire network with renewable energy.?This is big news.?BMW Group, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz Group, Stellantis NV – what an unprecedented roster of automotive prowess teaming up for a yet-to-be-named charging joint venture.?
The seven new partners state that the joint venture intends to leverage federal and state investments in public charging with its own public and private funding, to quickly develop and implement a new network of “high-powered” chargers across North America. Each pending site will be equipped with multiple DC fast chargers that will be accessible to any and all EV drivers, whether their vehicle is using CCS or NACS. Well, maybe not all EVs…?no mention of CHAdeMO?(sorry LEAF drivers).?Per the?US Department of Energy, there are 32,000 publicly available DC fast chargers in the United States as of July 2023, but 2.3 million EVs are vying for a plug. That’s a ratio of 72 vehicles per charger. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory?(NREL)?estimates that 182,000 DC fast chargers will be needed in the US alone to support the 30-42 million BEVs and PHEVs estimated on roads by 2030.
Walmart and PepsiCo will collaborate on a project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million metric tons by 2030.?The companies say that's equal to keeping what would be?used?to generate electricity for 778,000 homes for a year out of the atmosphere.?Greenhouse gasses contribute to?climate change, which in turn leads to extreme weather events like recent global?record-breaking heat waves.?The?companies say?they'll invest up to $120 million to help U.S. and Canadian farmers adopt regenerative agriculture practices to improve soil health and water quality.
Regenerative ag, in part, focuses on land management and livestock grazing to get nutrients back into the soil rather than relying on fertilizers. Potato, oat, corn, wheat, soybean and rice are crops used to make many PepsiCo products sold at Walmart. Both Walmart and PepsiCo stated their goal is to reach zero emissions across their operations by 2040. Walmart?reported a 23% reduction?of all emissions through 2021, using 2015 as its baseline. PepsiCo, which also makes brands like Doritos and Lay's,?reported reductions?of 25% during the same years.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM) announced today the launch of two new sustainable bond funds, the Goldman Sachs Global Impact Corporate Bond Fund and the Goldman Sachs USD Green Bond Fund, which the firm said are aimed at enabling investors to enhance their portfolios’ sustainability profiles through an allocation to green, social and sustainability bonds.?The launch of the new funds follows several years of significant growth in the sustainable bond market, as companies and governments have turned to sustainable bonds to help finance their climate, environmental and social commitments and initiatives.?Last year, according to Moody’s Investor Services, green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked claimed a record 13% share of global bond issuance.
The Impact Corporate Bond Fund will invest globally in corporate high yield and investment grade green, social and sustainable bonds that have clearly defined social or environmental objectives and impact, with a focus on bonds that target a broad range of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The USD Green Bond Fund will invest in USD-denominated green corporate and government bonds and investment grade credit. The funds will be managed by a dedicated Green, Social and Impact bonds team within GSAM, who joined the firm following?Goldman Sachs’ acquisition?of sustainable investment-focused asset manager NN Investment Partners last year. The funds will utilize GSAM’s proprietary green and impact bonds assessment methodology, to select bonds that finance impactful environmental, social or sustainability projects.
The market for vehicle and home batteries is expanding exponentially, but there’s another battery opportunity that’s just getting off the ground.?Giant factories that produce textiles, food, chemicals and cement require massive amounts of energy. They can use power from wind and solar, but because those sources of energy are intermittent and not always nearby, they require large and very expensive batteries.?Now, companies such as?Form Energy, and a Silicon Valley-based startup?Antora Energy?are tackling the challenge with more affordable battery technology.?Here’s how it works: Electricity from wind and solar are run through coils, like in a toaster, to heat solid, well-insulated blocks of carbon to over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, storing a tremendous amount of energy. The blocks can be shipped cold in a battery module to factories. They are now being tested at an electric company in Fresno, California.
Clean energy is, of course, a top priority for climate investors. Christina Karapataki of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which was founded by?Bill Gates, says this business could be particularly lucrative. A few years ago, the field of participants was essentially empty. There are now about a dozen thermal energy storage companies using sand, rock, brick or other types of ceramic to store energy as heat. Antora has raised $80 million to date. Along with funding from Breakthrough Energy, Antora is also backed by Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Shell Ventures, BHP Ventures, Grok Ventures and Trust Ventures.
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Dioxycle, a French-American start-up that transforms CO2 emissions into high-value, sustainable chemicals, has announced today the successful closure of its Series A funding round of $17 million.?The raise was co-led by renowned climate tech investors?Lowercarbon Capital?and?Breakthrough Energy Ventures Europe?(BEV-E), with participation from?Gigascale Capital. This raise propels Dioxycle into an exciting new phase of development towards a first-of-its-kind industrial-emission-busting demonstrator.??Launched in January 2021, Dioxycle is developing a world-first technology to produce sustainable ethylene from recycled carbon emissions at equal or lower costs to fossil equivalents. Effectively, a ‘green discount’, that provides an immediate and built-in competitive advantage, as opposed to the ‘green premium’ that usually hampers the adoption of sustainable products.
With a market size of some $180 billion, ethylene is the world’s most consumed organic chemical, used in the production of textiles, plastics, furniture, and construction materials but has a hefty carbon footprint. By removing fossil fuels from the production of ethylene, Dioxycle has the potential to slash CO2 emissions by 800 million tons every year, representing over 2% of the global total.?By developing the electrolyzer to make a green discount possible, Dioxycle combines decarbonization with profitability and aims to trigger fast adoption even in regions with limited carbon reduction incentives. Having scaled from lab trials to first electrolyser stacks in 2022, the Series A funding will now enable the company to move to first on-site demonstrators and an industrial prototype before preliminary commercialisation within the next five years.
Microalgae is everywhere, it seems. It’s being used as a way to?replace fossil fuels?and is used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and as a food source. It’s a substantial market, too, expected to be?valued at $25.4 billion by 2033.?Brevel, a Tel Aviv–based company, is developing microalgae into an alternative protein and today announced $18.5 million in seed funding.?Founded in 2016 by three brothers, Yonatan Golan, Matan Golan and Ido Golan, Brevel developed a proprietary technology that combines fermentation and light to make a protein from microalgae that is sold to food companies as a powder for use in plant-based products.?The company claims the protein is “the most sustainable on earth” and can be considered a “ghost protein” because it doesn’t affect the flavor, color or taste of foods and therefore can be used in a wide variety of food applications.
In addition, that method helps the company achieve cost parity with plant-based proteins like pea and soy because it can generate co-products alongside the protein, including functional lipids and pigments, according to the company. For its part, Brevel will leverage the new funds into the continued development of its protein. The company is initially targeting the dairy alternative sector and currently operates a 500-liter pilot in Israel and will move into a commercial-scale factory with the capacity of a 5,000-liter fermentation and light system. Beyond that, the company is preparing to build an even larger facility with a total capacity of 900,000 liters, planned for 2025.?NevaTeam Partners led the seed round, which included $8.4 million raised in June 2022 that converted from grants and convertible loans into shares. The leftover $10.1 million was recently raised.
Over the past five years, U.K.-based startup?ev.energy?has built a?customer base of?120,000?electric-vehicle drivers in Europe and North America who are using its charging software to save money, ease stress on the power grid and soak up as much surplus clean energy as possible.?But the company wants to go way bigger. On Thursday, it closed a $33?million funding round to help scale up the platform to? “millions of vehicles,” said Nick Woolley,?CEO?and co-founder. That’s an ambitious goal for a?startup, but one appropriate to the challenge of handling the? “colossal” power demands of future?EV?fleets, he?said.?With the government?EV?mandates now in place across the world, EVs are forecast to reach?40?million in global annual car sales and a?cumulative?3,000?gigawatt-hours of battery capacity by?2030,?according?to the International Energy Agency.?All of those EVs will eventually charge from power grids that may?struggle to support all of that new electricity demand. That’s an increasing concern not only for grid operators and consumers, but for?the automakers?investing as?much as a?collective $1.2?trillion?in EVs and batteries through?2030?as?well.
Controlling when and how these millions of EVs charge could spell the difference between an?EV?fleet that causes grid overloads and one that can help ease grid strains by absorbing surplus clean energy. A?welter of studies has found that?well-implemented smart-charging regimes?can reduce the need for new power plants and grid infrastructure to the tune of billions of dollars. Ev.energy’s investors represent a?cross-section of the industries focused on the immense challenge and potential of?EV?charging. The startup’s new funding round was led by National Grid Partners, the venture arm of U.K. and U.S. utility giant National Grid, and included InMotion Ventures, the investment arm of Jaguar Land Rover, and Wex Venture Capital, the investment arm of commerce and fleet management provider Wex. This week’s funding adds to an?$8.8?million round in?2021?led by utility-backed fund Energy Impact Partners and including Future Energy Ventures, the?VC?arm of German utility E.ON.
Deloitte, in collaboration with AT&T and Salesforce, has unveiled a connectivity-based approach to address the challenges of ESG reporting.?By combining AT&T’s asset connectivity platforms with Deloitte Digital’s Sustainability 360 powered by Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, this collaboration aims to provide businesses with an efficient method to better pursue sustainability initiatives forward.?According to Deloitte’s 2023 CxO Sustainability Report, nearly a quarter of business executives identified the difficulty of measuring their organizations’ environmental impact as a major barrier to successful sustainability efforts. The complexity of collecting data from diverse sources across extended value chains often results in data discrepancies, making it challenging to comply with regulations and face accusations of greenwashing.?This hindrance not only affects the credibility of sustainability reporting but also impacts the ability to identify improvement opportunities and manage emerging risks effectively.
Deloitte, AT&T, and Salesforce’s approach uses advanced technologies to streamline?ESG data collection, enhance data integrity, and accelerate the identification of sustainability improvement opportunities. AT&T’s sensor technology plays a critical role in providing direct connectivity with an organization’s emissions sources, including stationary and mobile assets. This connectivity enables organizations to track emissions more accurately, bolstering the granularity of Scopes 1, 2, and 3 emissions reporting. Moreover, AT&T’s technology supports expanded sustainability use cases, such as environmental management for water, waste, and raw materials, and facilitates faster data sharing through 5G network connectivity.?As a result of the partnership between these companies,?Deloitte?Digital’s Sustainability 360 offers an audit-ready platform for ESG data management.
It looks like?cheese. It smells like cheese. It tastes like cheese (specifically mature cheddar). And it is cheese—at least under the microscope. “Synthetic dairy” is made with the same ingredients as the conventional sort. But instead of getting the main ingredient from a live ruminant, Better Dairy, a three-year-old British cheesemaker, derives some of it from yeast. These microbes are fed sugar, which they then convert into milk proteins in a process which is similar to brewing.?Remilk, an Israeli startup, has recently received approval to sell its fare in America, Israel and Singapore. Perfect Day, a Californian one, already sells synthetic milk, ice cream and cream cheese. It recently signed contracts to sell its proteins to Nestlé, a food giant, and to Starbucks. In its latest funding round two years ago it raised $350m, valuing it at $1.6bn. All told, precision fermenters have raised nearly $3bn from investors since the start of 2021.
Synthetic dairy dispenses with certain undesirable aspects of milk and milk-making. Lactose, to which some people are allergic, and hormones, which have been linked to some adult diseases, can be stripped out. Fermentation tanks do not need to be pumped full of antibiotics and can be set up anywhere—handy at a time of rising worries about food security and climate change. The process uses less water and, because it requires less energy and less land, emits fewer greenhouse gases than conventional dairy production, which is responsible for more than 3% of annual planet-warming emissions, almost twice as much as aviation (and a lot of it from belchy cows).?The technology is also a work in progress. For now Better Dairy’s cheddar still uses bovine casein, one of the proteins in milk; the firm is working on a synthetic version that would make its cheese properly vegan. And the process remains costly. A fermenter that can hold about 30 litres of milk can cost ￡150,000 ($190,000). Buying a cow, which can produce about as much in a day, will set you back ￡1,600.
NASA, joined by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could be testing a nuclear-powered rocket in space within the next three years.?On Wednesday, the agencies?announced?that the aerospace contractor Lockheed Martin will design, build, and test a nuclear propulsion system as part of an ambitious program called the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO).?NASA hopes that the technology it develops could eventually be used to power trips to Mars, cutting their lengthy duration in half.??How a nuclear powered rocket should work, in a nutshell, is that a fission reactor using uranium would heat up extremely cold liquid hydrogen, propelling hot gas out of a nozzle to generate thrust.?Though Lockheed will be responsible for most of the rocket, designing the fission reactor itself will be done by another firm called BWX Technologies.?If all goes to plan, the first DRACO test could see a nuclear-powered rocket in space as early as 2027. NASA itself is investing a chunky $300 million, with the overall value of the award totaling nearly $500 million.
Right now, getting to the Red Planet is a?staggeringly lengthy?and?expensive exercise. Even when?Mars is at perigee?— when the orbits align roughly every two years so that it’s at its closest point to Earth — a one-way trip can take at least six months, and usually longer. That sluggishness owes to the inefficiency of chemically powered rockets, which can't carry enough fuel to power the engines much longer after launch. But nuclear propulsion should be at least twice as efficient, according to NASA, cutting down on heavy propellant, and lengthening the time the engines could stay firing. NASA has been contemplating nuclear propulsion since the Project Orion days of the 50s and 60s, when it and the military entertained the idea of chained atomic bomb detonations to propel a spacecraft. After decades out of the spotlight, serious notions of using the technology heated up again in recent years, as?consensus grew amongst NASA scientists?that using nuclear engines would be the most practical way of getting to Mars. In 2021,?DARPA confirmed?that it wanted to send a nuclear-powered rocket into space. Of course, anything involving nuclear technology comes with great safety concerns. With those in mind, the DRACO vehicle will be launched with the reactor?off, according to project manager Tabitha Dodson,?as quoted by?The New York?Times. Only when it's reached a safe distance in space — somewhere between 435 miles to 1,240 miles above Earth — would it be turned on. At that distance, the craft would stay in orbit for over 300 years, plenty long enough for radioactive elements to safely decay.