Climate Tech 101 (Part 2): Reduce, Remove, and Retrofit

Welcome to Part 2 of Climate Tech 101, a simple guide to make climate tech more approachable.

The first part was a climate change primer, to set the stage for future posts. This post is an intro to the different areas of climate tech, that you can use as a jumping off point to go deeper wherever excites you!

Part 2: reduce, remove, and retrofit

Summary:

• A simple framework to understand climate tech is “reduce, remove, and retrofit”
• Technology is our best chance to solve climate change
• We can reduce emissions to zero by 2050 by electrifying everything and using clean energy
• The grid is the energy bottleneck, then storage if we are going to reduce
• We can remove carbon to cover what we can't reduce fast enough
• For what we can’t change fast enough, we can retrofit and adapt to our new realities of climate change
• [Bonus] We should research geo-engineering as a Plan B, but be careful (and not bank on it)

A simple framework to understand climate tech is “reduce, remove, and retrofit”

As we look to reduce carbon in the air, think of it like water in a bathtub.

CO2 in the air has a limit of ~450 parts per million (ppm) to stay under 2°C of global warming. Imagine that’s the water line that we’re allowed before the bathtub overflows.

The tap is still on – we’re pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the air every year. It takes hundreds of years for carbon to cycle out, so our bathtub water is not going to just evaporate. As long as the tap remains on, our water level will keep rising and the planet will keep warming.

To save the bathroom, we need to reduce (turn off the tap), remove (open the drain), and retrofit (put towels down where it’s going to overflow).

Going back to climate change, we need to: reduce our carbon emissions to net-zero by scaling clean energy and electrifying everything, remove carbon from the air, and retrofit whatever can’t change fast enough, to meet our new realities of 2-4°C of climate change.

Technology is our best chance to solve climate change

We shouldn’t let our homes go without heat or have people starve around the world, so to combat climate change the only solution that lets everyone win is to innovate our way out of the problem.

Two great examples where trillion-dollar industries are being disrupted by doing exactly that are in solar power generation and electric vehicles.

Solar costs are decades ahead of forecasts; it’s now cheaper to build a solar photovoltaic or onshore wind facility than to build a new coal or natural gas facility.

How did we get here?

Solar photovoltaics were invented by Bell Labs in the 1950s, mass produced and incentivized by the German government in the 2000s, and scaled by Chinese factories in the late 2000s. Solar prices are dropping so much that it’s poised to be a majority of U.S. electricity by 2050, up from only 3% today.

Electric vehicles (EVs) have a similar story: great basic research (both private and public), government policies in terms of incentives, and business models in Tesla’s famous top-down strategy have led to today. By 2035, EVs will be more than half of new car sales.

Concerted efforts in many other areas of the problem can yield similar impact.

We can reduce emissions to zero by 2050 by electrifying everything and using clean energy

Reduction (or decarbonization) is most of what you’d think of in climate tech - reducing emissions through clean energy, electric vehicles, home electrification, and a lot more that you can see in the first post.

The main way we’ll decarbonize is to electrify everything that currently uses combustion – from cars to furnaces – and to run it with clean energy.

There is no silver bullet. Even fusion, if we get it to work within 20 years (2043), won’t be a silver bullet if we want to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

In order to reduce emissions, there are only a lot of lead bullets. Solar is likely going to be the most important – electric power is about a quarter of the problem, though renewable energy will likely be a lot more than a quarter of the solution.

The grid is the energy bottleneck, then storage if we are going to reduce

Surprisingly, more solar projects is not (right now) the solution to get to clean energy. There are already 8,100 energy projects just sitting in “interconnection queues” – waiting for things like permitting or impact studies to get connected.

That's over 1,400 gigawatts – more than our entire electricity need, stuck in 4+ years of bureaucracy to even get the right permits.

Many projects today give up: 70-80% of projects get withdrawn due to grid interconnection delays. Easier permitting and large (typically high-ROI) investments in the physical grid are essential to decarbonize.

We also need to solve energy storage. The reason? Clouds and nighttime.

Simply put, solar panels need the sun. They're intermittent. If there’s a 3 day storm over Tokyo, the city would need more battery capacity than we make in a decade in order to still function, at a cost of $400B+. It's impractical.

Other non-battery solutions to storage could be sustainable chemical fuels, pumped hydro, hydrogen, or even storing energy as heat in bricks. Nuclear, which operates in all weather, could also be a piece of the solution to intermittency.

We can remove carbon to cover what we can't reduce fast enough

We may still need to remove 10-30% of our current emissions per year. Due to hard-to-abate sectors, we won’t be able to reach net-zero emissions by decarbonizing alone.

Going back to the bathtub analogy, Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is needed because the tap is still fully on, so we need to open the bathtub drain. We can't turn the tap off fully or fast enough in hard-to-abate sectors, like cement and steel and aviation fuel.

Also, countries won’t decarbonize at the same time – the U.S. and Europe will go first but even India, a massive economy that is rapidly developing, is only aiming for net zero by 2070. There will be a lot of emissions coming from the rest of the world for a while.

So what's the solution? Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

You’re probably already familiar with plans to save and regrow forests to fight climate change. There are also engineered solutions that have advantages over forests.

Replanting and maintaining forests is a natural form of CDR, though concerns exist around existing offsets, such as a lack of additionality (would preserving this forest have happened anyway?), measurement (how much carbon really is being sequestered?), verification (how do I know anything about this forest?), and permanence (what if there's a fire or someone sells the land?).

Companies like Pachama and Mombak are working to improve quality, though there's still a concern over using land up to 2-4x the size of the United States globally in order to plant trees, instead of growing food or other uses.

Other forms of CDR leverage technology, which has advantages in permanence, land use, and scalability though the costs need to come down a lot. A few examples are big fans to draw in air to adsorb CO2, spreading basalt dust in fields to accelerate the natural weathering of rocks to trap carbon, or liquifying farm detritus and storing it in retired oil wells.

For what we can’t change fast enough, we can retrofit and adapt to our new realities of climate change

Retrofitting is the recognition that we’ll need to adapt to a new normal, since climate change is going to happen to some degree no matter what.

This category is a catch-all for how we adapt to our new reality, including wildfire and flood protection, preparing for sea level rise, extreme weather early warning systems, new insurance and reinsurance models, building retrofitting, improving water and food security, and more.

Many enormous businesses will be built here, and I'll go into more detail on the business and policy opportunities in a later post.

[Bonus] We should research geo-engineering as a Plan B, but be careful (and not bank on it)

Solar geo-engineering – specifically Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and a few related technologies – pop up all the time in science fiction. Think seeding more reflective clouds, putting mirrors in space, or using nukes to erupt volcanoes – all with the goal to reflect more sunlight.

We have little idea what all will happen if we use space mirrors to keep sunlight from getting to Earth.

Our climate is a delicate ecosystem, and most smart people are justifiably nervous about using geo-engineering. Geo-engineering carries unknown risks, and could even be used in geopolitical warfare (imagine I steal my neighbor’s water by seeding clouds over my land).

Having said that, when we know little about something, we should research it!

As a result of how speculative and risky it is I won't focus more on it, but if you'd like to dig in more, geo-engineering research groups exist like this group at Harvard that you can check out.

I hope you enjoyed Part 2! In Part 3, we’ll be looking at trends in climate technologies that tend to win, as we try to resource what will likely win going forward.