Southern Droughts, Power Demand, Embodied Carbon, & 'We Don't Do Solar': Throwing it all in the same pot like a classic cajun crawfish boil

Today was the rare glorious Friday with no meetings. So while trying to catch up on paperwork, emails, and some more VC reach outs, I found myself reading a lot of articles today. And its funny and tragic in how they all shared the some common themes.

First, the New York Times reported on how its horrible year for the usually wonderful crawfish boil season. You haven't lived life until you have been to a crawfish boil. My first was in 2010, thanks to a new friend in my life then, Jack McIntyre , oil patch salesman extraordinaire, cajun chef, and wonderful human. Well this year's season has been decimated from the drought of last summer, and its not recovering. For me it is another case of climate volatility getting worse and worse, and lives, livelihoods, and traditions getting upended as a result. Now that part of the U.S. is where much of the oil and gas industry lives and breaths. But instead of drawing a line connecting the two, I'd much rather think about all the good people on the ground in the industry I met in my prior jobs, and how I'd love for all of them to continue to be working in that energy corridor, but for energy solutions that will reduce climate volatility in the future (and while I lose points for this in many green circles, adding natural gas to our power grid is ok for me, so long as we are turning off coal in step. Carbon reduction today is a good thing).

Next, several of my LinkedIn contacts posted the story I read today, as seen in the WaPo and the Times, that America is going to soon run out of power. One of the ironies to the story is that the boom in clean energy manufacturing onshoring back to the U.S. is causing that issue, along with the massive growth in power hungry data-centers, driven from the AI revolution. The reality is that we are not moving fast enough as a country to install more (renewable) power, and to equally install more smart transmission. And yes, while we need more wind farms, solar farms, smart hydro, and I'd even throw in small modular nuclear, we need to also be thinking about better use of distributed energy, particularly on site of such data centers, vertical ag farms, and smart manufacturing plants. If we are going to push forward on the EV revolution (I'd rather see us go all-in for Hybrids first, but I digress), then we do need to look seriously at Vehicle-to-Grid as an energy source to shave peak demand.

Then, my new great friends at cove.tool published this excellent piece on defining what embodied carbon is, particularly in the context of buildings. You have all seen the statistic: 40% of the world's green house gases actually comes from buildings - the making of the materials used in buildings, and from the operations of the buildings themselves. As the cove article demonstrates, there is a great amount of activity in the built environment community to work to eliminate buildings from the climate change equation. One example they discussed was better use of recycled materials in builds. That makes sense to me, and there sure is a lot of such activity. And yet....

During my day of reading and grinding, I made a point to reach out to some new Climate-related VC funds that I recently discovered, particularly as my firm SolaBlock is raising its Series A, and my friend Andrew Chan gave me the assignment of reaching out to more VCs than just the excellent handful we are in dialogue with. One firm I discovered recently invested in a recycling tech for the built environment, so I reached out to them to explain what a great fit we may also be for them, as we truly are Building Embedded PV. Within a few thousand seconds , I received a polite response back: "Thank you for your message, but solar is not a fit for us." Its good to know that the 27-page intro deck that I sent along that explains how we are a great hybrid constructiontech and climatetech product is truly unique must have been read with such great detail. This isn't the first time I received a quick no with such a sentence akin to 'solar bad, climate software good,' so I was ready to go with my canned response back: "Saying we’re simply solar is a bit like saying a refrigerator is an EV b/c it also uses an electric motor. We’re a building material that uses solar to assist creating net zero buildings."

So this brings me to the climate boil pot. All the articles above should terrify us. We continue to head down the path of unmitigated climate disaster, that is if we do not respond by acting faster and smarter in creating new tech and investing in them. And that means being more creative in thinking about our climate solutions. It also means that the capital providers cannot be quickly dismissive when a hybrid solution presents itself. In my customer, er, capital discovery journey I have been going through since late 2023, I have seen that its the constructiontech VC community that understands us, and therefore has been given SolaBlock a real shot. And I think its because the constructiontech world is used to being around the innovation surrounding product development, and manufacturing. Many in the pure climatetech side of the world say they get hardware, but the reality speaks otherwise. Digging a bit more deeper for ours and other great climate change-fighting products coming into the market means as a VC you can truly separate yourself as a leader.

In a few years, when our product is being embraced globally, and we are also seeing tangible results of our attacking climate change head on via innovation and aggressive execution, I may take a trip down to Houma, LA, once more and enjoy Jack's crawfish, corn, and cajun sausage. Because the comeback our our climate can also mean the comeback of our great culture and traditions. Lets get it done.