Silicon Valley Bank Climate Tech Report 2021

The team at Silicon Valley Bank have put together an interesting report on the future of Climate Tech. Big hat tip to the Exponential View for the referral.

Put in your email address to get the full report.

Key points

• Investments in Climate Tech are increasing - VC funding is up by 122% from 2015-2020 in transportation and logistics.
• Costs to deploy Cleantech are decreasing - Solar, wind, and storage, are competitive with fossil fuels on a cost basis. As a result, innovators of cleantech can deploy products faster at less cost – increasing adoption.
• Electrification can make a huge impact on reducing GHG emissions - 73% of greenhouse gas emissions are coming from energy: Transportation, homes and buildings and industrial processes. There’s an opportunity to decrease emissions by ~70% via decarbonizing the grid with electrification

https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/future-of-climate-tech#

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A few comments from climate scientist Michael Molitor;

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There is no underlying climate tech investment thesis.

I reverse engineer the definition and start by imagining what food, transport, and stationary transport look like in 2030 if we are on a 1.5 to 2.0C temperature increase trajectory—the answer is EVERYTHING changes!

Then I ask: what technologies are here today but which need to scale much faster and in which areas do we need new tech.

The biggest problem is that most climate tech investing believes things don’t need to change much and we can get there with a few tweaks—like digitization of agriculture—which is just wrong.

Ag is terrible and low plant to animal protein conversion just sucks—in food we have to shift from growing to making it using synthetic biology.

We also have to leverage the insane levels of protein conversion in insects which has evolved over hundreds of millions of years…https://www.csiro.au/en/news/news-releases/2021/an-industry-with-legs-australias-first-edible-insects-roadmap

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