I thought it would be a good "New Year" exercise to update the FEST map and add some thoughts on each climate tech sector. As a reminder, FEST is a framework, inspired by Bill Gates' book, that illustrates the impact of climate tech on the different parts of how we live. Emissions can broadly be […]

Happy New Year! I spent some time over the holidays making a fun little reference timeline for the IRA credits. The various effective dates can be confusing and I figure it would be helpful to have a birds eye view of when each provision comes into play. From this angle, we can observe that there […]

There’s been a LOT of money poured into climatetech over the last few years and even with the recent downturn, new money keeps coming in. According to CTVC, 2022 has seen an uptick in the number of new climatetech VC investors announced (45 -> 47), despite rising interest rates and a broader market slowdown for […]

Last time I looked at the history of wave energy and what lessons we can draw from past cycles that could be relevant to today’s climatetech challenges. This week I wanted to create the actual wave energy market map, in part to get a better sense of the variety of wave energy converters (WEC) that […]

After looking at the breadth of ocean-based climate solutions last week and having a better understanding around the potential of the ocean, I thought it might be informative to look at wave energy more specifically. Four things that are worth noting about the wave energy space: The resource is huge. As mentioned last week, wave […]

Most of what we talk about in climatetech happens on land – hydrogen production, power generation, carbon sequestration, grid optimization, industrial decarbonization, residential energy efficiency, etc. This is because the majority of technologies get deployed around people’s homes, in city environments, or industrial complexes, all of which largely occur on land. But what about the […]

This week I had a grand plan to write about the economics of first commercial facility / FOAK commercial and why it makes complete sense to invest in these projects. But it was much more difficult to make the numbers work than anticipated. Even if a company gets over the FOAK hurdle, the lengthy time […]

After discussing types of FOAK last week, this week I wanted to see if I could find a good estimate for the amount of FOAK funding we need. One way to look at this is to try to pare down estimated infrastructure spend to what will be spent on FOAK technologies. Most infra spend estimates […]

After last week’s look at commercial facilities that have been successfully funded, I wanted to better understand what projects in the future will need large first commercial facility (or large first-of-a-kind / FOAK for short) funding. I went through the list of hard-tech climatetech technologies and think there's ultimately 3 types of startups that will […]

The scaling problem in hard asset climatetech is well-known and well-documented…valleys of death, unfit capital, project development challenges, etc. etc. Technologies that require some kind of plant, facility, or large chunky infrastructure to be built struggle the most with scaling. Here's how the ease of funding curve looks across a company's maturity (thanks, Lanzatech): Initial […]