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Solyndra, the poster child of the first cleantech bubble, sought to revolutionize solar energy. ... [+]
IMAGE SOURCE: POLITICO
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink aptly captured the current ebullience when he
declared last week that “the next 1,000 unicorns” will be in climate tech.
Memories are short in the world of startups and venture capital. Amid the
recent surge of enthusiasm for climate investing, an important part of this
story is too often ignored or left out: this has happened before.
Between 2006 and 2011, the field of “cleantech” (as it was then called)
underwent one of the worst boom-and-bust cycles in the history of
technology investing. During these years, venture capitalists plowed over
$25 billion into cleantech startups—and lost over half their money. More
than 90% of the cleantech startups funded in this period did not even return
the money invested in them.
The carnage scared an entire generation of investors away from the category.
Macro Shifts
For starters, two big-picture trends have set the stage for climate tech
startups to thrive commercially in a way that was not possible the last time
around.
The first is the hard economic reality that renewables are now price-
competitive with fossil fuels.
The graph below is worth a thousand words. In 2009, in the midst of the
first cleantech boom, electricity from solar power was over four times more
expensive than electricity from natural gas on a levelized basis. By 2019,
driven by relentless scientific and engineering advances, both solar and wind
energy had become cheaper than any fossil fuel source. And the relative cost
of renewables is only going to continue to plummet in the years ahead.
The basic economics of renewable energy have transformed since the previous cleantech bubble.
SOURCE: LAZARD
The world looks very different today. Renewable energy’s dramatic cost
curve has set the stage for a worldwide transition to clean energy systems,
which is already underway. A systemic transition of this magnitude will
create wide-ranging market opportunities for an entire ecosystem of
startups that enable, accelerate and capitalize on the emerging renewable
energy economy.
The second fundamental shift is the simple fact that individuals, companies
and governments take climate change a lot more seriously today than they
did a decade ago.
Meanwhile, political leaders from nearly every country in the world will
gather in Glasgow this week for COP26 to hammer out strategies and
commitments to slow climate change. In order for humanity to even come
close to meeting the ambitious targets set out by the world’s governments in
the 2015 Paris Agreement, economies around the world will have to be
dramatically revamped.
The upshot of all this is that vast sums of money are now being channeled to
fight climate change—sums that would have been inconceivable just a few
years ago. Demand and budgets for technologies that reduce carbon
footprints are set to surge. It is a good time to be a climate startup.
It is a direct consequence of the fact that—to use the cliché but profoundly
true maxim that Marc Andreessen coined almost exactly one decade ago—
software is eating the world.
The venture capital model works best for startups with a particular profile:
massively scalable, capital efficient, rapid iteration cycles, low marginal
costs, recurring revenues. At risk of stating the obvious, startups with these
characteristics most often have software at their core. (They need not be
software-only; some hardware element is often necessary to activate
software’s potential.)
The first cleantech era was dominated by companies that simply did not fit
this profile: solar panel startups, battery startups, biofuel startups, electric
vehicle startups.
It is telling that the small handful of startups from the previous cleantech
cycle that did survive and thrive were software-centric: Nest, Opower, even
Tesla, which turned the car into a software product.
In pursuit of this vision, the company raised over $1 billion from private
investors and another $535 million from the U.S. government. It used this
money to build two factories (the second cost $733 million) and at its peak
employed well over 1,000 people.
After six years and massive capital expenditure, Solyndra concluded that it
could not manufacture its solar modules at scale in a cost-competitive way, a
situation that was further exacerbated by plummeting natural gas prices.
The company shut down, wiping out the nearly two billion dollars invested
in it (and permanently blemishing the Obama administration’s record). It
remains a cautionary tale in the world of clean energy innovation to this day.
Solyndra and the many companies like it that got funded during the last
cleantech cycle were too capital-intensive; their technology development
timelines were too long and uncertain; and their unit economics were too
shaky.
This time around, the climate tech landscape looks very different. Many of
today’s most promising climate startups are software companies.
Carbon Offsets
The idea behind carbon offsets is simple: one party pays for another party,
anywhere in the world, to eliminate an agreed-upon quantity of greenhouse
gases from the atmosphere through emissions reduction or capture.
Common examples of offset projects include planting trees (which soak up
carbon dioxide) and financing renewable energy infrastructure like wind
turbines. Offsets are often used to “net out” an organization’s or individual’s
existing carbon footprint.
How to confirm, for instance, that an additional tree in a distant forest has
actually been planted that otherwise wouldn’t have been? Or that that tree
will continue to grow and sequester carbon for years to come, rather than
being cut down next year? More to the point, how to do so scalably and
efficiently across the globe?
One area in which the two companies differ is their approach to the supply
side of the marketplace. While Pachama selects a curated set of forestation
projects from which users on its platform can buy offsets, NCX’s approach is
more radically democratized: any individual landowner, no matter how
small, can join the platform and sell carbon credits in exchange for a
commitment to preserve trees.
Today, the total number of carbon offsets purchased is small but growing
quickly, from $53 million in 2018 to $95 million in 2020. Former Bank of
England Governor and climate power player Mark Carney has argued that
this number could reach $100 billion by the end of 2030.
If the world’s companies and governments are serious about their recent net
zero emissions pledges (or if regulators introduce carbon emissions
mandates with more teeth), then expenditures on carbon offsets is about to
explode. While directly reducing one’s own emissions is always the most
effective form of decarbonization, these organizations will also inevitably
rely heavily on offset markets to minimize their carbon footprints. This is
especially true given that many essential human activities—air travel and
heavy industry, for instance—are for basic technological reasons unlikely to
be carbon-free any time soon.
These young carbon offset startups may soon find themselves serving as the
digital backbone for a new multi-billion-dollar market.
Precision Agriculture
Carbon offset markets and precision agriculture are just two examples of
areas in which high-upside, venture-backable software businesses are being
built to help decarbonize the planet. There are many other areas: energy grid
optimization, carbon accounting, building management, fire management,
climate resilience.
The diversity of these examples points to one more key difference between
today’s climate tech boom and the previous decade’s: this time around,
entrepreneurs and investors are taking a broader, more holistic approach to
the climate challenge.
While the first cleantech era focused more narrowly on renewable energy
generation (e.g., solar, wind, biofuels) and electric vehicles, the climate tech
ecosystem today encompasses startups building solutions across a wide
range of industries and use cases.
This reflects the reality that nearly every major activity that humanity
engages in contributes to our carbon footprint to some extent: building
things, moving things, powering things, eating things, computing things.
Decarbonization is an all-of-society challenge. Valuable software-powered
climate solutions will be built in literally every sector of the economy in the
years ahead.
Bits and Atoms
It is important to be clear on one point here, though: software alone will
never fix climate change.
But that does not mean that these technologies are attractive startup
investment opportunities or that they represent good fits for the venture
capital investment model. In certain cases, these innovations bear an
uncomfortable resemblance to the types of opportunities that venture
capitalists lost money on during the first cleantech era.
Conclusion
Climate change is the most pressing challenge facing humanity today. We
cannot expect government action alone to solve it. Market-based solutions
will be essential: technologies and products that drive global
decarbonization by creating economic value, gaining mass adoption and
generating compelling returns on investment.
Given the scale of the challenge, climate change will be one of the largest
business opportunities in this century. As Chamath Palihapitiya memorably
put it, “The world’s first trillionaire will be made in climate change.”
The dot-com bubble was painful, but the Internet is here to stay. A similar
dynamic will play out in climate technology. Expect climate startups with
trajectories rivaling Amazon and Google to be built in the years ahead—with
software at their core.
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