At the end of last year, the United Arab Emirates hosted the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), where the world took stock of its progress on climate goals.
Not before time either: Last year was the hottest year on record, a title expected to be replaced annually from now on, with territories such as the UAE predicted to become inhabitable in future, due to dangerously high temperatures.
But while sectors such as aviation, energy, and construction are responsible for significant carbon emissions it could be technology innovations from smaller start-ups that may help to decarbonise these industries. But they need investment and bigger firms to collaborate with.
Positively, climate tech saw an 89% year-on-year increase in venture funding last year, with investment totalling $70.1 billion, as led by the US, China, and Europe, with most capital ploughed into start-ups.
Speaking with clean tech consultancy, Carbon Limiting Technologies, Chinese big tech firm Tencent, and the newly launched initiative ‘Cleantech for Iberia’, TechInformed looks at how cleantech is seeing new support, investment, and collaboration in a combined effort towards reducing carbon emissions.
Tencent
In November Chinese internet giant Tencent launched its one-stop-shop for all things climate business, TanLIVE globally, after launching a year ago in China.
Essentially a ‘LinkedIn’ for the climate community, the platform connects organisations working towards net zero with collaborative tools including community networking, project listings, and an ecosystem of vetted technological and financing solutions for entrepreneurs, investors, and research institutions in the climate sector.
Tencent’s VP of sustainable social value, Hao Xu, told TechInformed that the platform helped pull all the necessary cleantech partners together to help get things done in a very scattered landscape.
“In China, for instance, we often find that the information is scattered everywhere,” Xu explains. “There’s a city government that wants to do an innovation award, and then there are big corporations that want solutions, and investors and start-ups in this area, too.”
When everything is scattered, it is difficult to see just how businesses are decarbonising using technology, and what issues are needing to be answered.
On TanLIVE, if a company is looking for a technology to fix a problem, they can post it on to the platform, and those firms with the solution can contact the company directly to offer their services and apply through the platform.
Since launching last year, TanLIVE has already established partnerships with many local and international organisations. This includes major institutional users such as Impact Hub Shanghai, New Energy Nexus, Plug & Play China, C Team, IoT outfit Energy Chain and GMF Latino, a carbon capture solution.
Plus, on the platform, investors, public institutions, firms, and applicants can express their policies and views on the forum on various subjects in relation to sustainability and technology.
As the platform progresses, and more information and activity appear on TanLIVE, Xu explains that there will be a further stage, focusing on the knowledge and insight it has gained.
Cleantech for Iberia
Cleantech for Iberia is another collaborative initiative, with a goal to make the Iberian region “Europe’s next cleantech industrial leader”, and its director, Bianca Dragomir, has a background in bringing innovators, investors, and policymakers to push for a green transition, and economics.
Bianca Dragomir, director, Cleantech for Iberia
The Iberian Peninsula is home to 20% of green hydrogen projects and is fuelling the growth in renewables and cheap and abundant energy, explains Dragomir.
“If we look at clean tech investment, in the last five years we had a six-fold investment in the environment and innovations.”
“We want to continue this trend because Iberia is the hot spot for reindustrialisation, and it’s poised to be Europe’s next industrial lead,” she claims.
Cleantech for Iberia wants to do this by scaling up green technologies, such as plastic recycling, storage electrolysers, and investing in building factories for green cement, green fertiliser, and green steel, that are run on renewables.
“For this, we need to align policy, technology, and capital,” she says.
At the Web Summit in Portugal last year, Cleantech for Iberia announced a coalition with innovators and investors across the sector, that have committed to a combined fund size of €1 billion to be invested in technologies related to the net zero economy.
“The future is clean tech, and we need to make sure that our companies in Europe can flourish.”
While sustainability has a reputation for being expensive, Dragomir believes that this is an outdated view.
“I remember more than a decade ago everybody was saying ‘but solar energy is expensive’,” but since then, the price has dropped significantly. “Especially in the Iberian Peninsula, we are able to generate so much clean and abundant energy that lowers the cost for the consumer, or business.”
The initiative is also helping businesses to invest in digital transformation and green technology, which she argues are inextricably linked.
“The green transition and the digital transition are twin transitions,” says Dragomir. “They go hand in hand, and I think that there are many technologies, like using blockchain for energy consumption.”
For now, Cleantech for Iberia is primarily focused on the hardware: “That’s what will really move the needle in the energy transition.”
“The energy transition needs both software and hardware, but where it lags behind is the hardware for many reasons,” at the moment, and then the deep tech will follow,” she predicts.
Carbon Limiting Technologies
Beverley Gower-Jones, CEO of consultancy firm, Carbon Limiting Technologies, says that the types of technologies she sees working well with businesses to cut emissions are “wide and varied, depending on the sector.”
Beverley Gower-Jones, Carbon Limiting Technologies CEO
The CEO founded the consultancy in 2006, which helps low-carbon entrepreneurs commercialise their technology, and works with industries and governments to accelerate clean growth using them.
Gower-Jones is also a managing partner of the Clean Growth Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in UK seed and Series A firms that have the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Gower-Jones says that she is seeing an increased effort to deal with demand in the green power sector, when “the supply side is struggling to cope”. When green power solutions such as wind and solar see too much demand, they have no choice but turn to gas or coal-fired power stations to keep up. To handle this, she is seeing demand side response (DSR) having much more impact.
DSR is a programme UK business can enrol in, and if they reduce their energy consumption, such as turning up the air conditioning temperature, or turning down the heating to use less energy, they will receive money back.
Once firms are enrolled, and with the help of a partner, the process can be automated, and the customer gets paid automatically.
AI
Artificial intelligence is also helping industries to decarbonise. In one example, the cement industry, which accounts for about 8% of all CO2 emissions, is looking at AI and machine learning to determine the best energy efficiency possible.
Although Gower-Jones doesn’t go into specific examples, in construction AI is currently being used to learn multiple process areas, including quarries, raw material preparation, cement production and dispatch.
Manual processes can be optimised using AI algorithms which requires specialist consultants using their expertise to show machines how to structure their computing methods more like human thought, and how to break problems into simple steps.
“That technology is being rolled out in a number of different cement companies through consultants,” explains Gower-Jones.
With AI, she adds, the consultants can advise the cement company in terms of the processes and how to optimise them in the most efficient way.
Overall, Gower-Jones says that corporates and entrepreneurs must live up to their net zero commitments, “picking up the baton, now that other parts of society appear to have dropped it, and really run with it.”
“What I see day-to-day from all the fantastic pitch decks and things I get sent, really gives me huge positivity and enthusiasm for the future,” says Gower-Jones.
“I quite often say that it was doctors and nurses on the frontline of COVID, and it’s science and technology that’s on the frontline of climate change.”
