Week 1153

I dedicated some more time this week to burning down my climate reading list. Here are some of the resources that stood out to me and my brief notes on them:

• List of climate solutions compiled by Project Drawdown
• Approaching climate change as a technologist by Bret Victor
• Parachute: a newsletter that provides case studies on city level climate solutions
  • 93% of climate resources go towards mitigation (reducing emissions)
    • Parachute’s authors argue for increasing funding towards resiliency to protect disadvantaged communities from the symptoms of climate change that are already here (extreme weather conditions, changing coastal ecosystems, etc)
  • Climate Industrialism — a virtuous cycle of leveraging the demand for climate solutions to revitalize American industrialism (manufacturing, construction, infrastructure, etc) which leads to lower costs and more effective climate solutions
  • List of American Dynamism startups in the climate space
  • Case study: District cooling solutions in Austin, Texas
• US Energy usage by sector and time
  • The 4 end-use sectors are:
    • Residential: homes
    • Commercial: buildings like offices, malls, schools, hotels, hospitals, restaurants, places of worship, etc
    • Industrial: facilities and equipment for manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and construction
    • Transportation: vehicles like cars, buses, trains, ships, planes, etc
  • US total energy usage by these 4 end-use sectors increased by 3x from 1950 to 2022
  • There is also a 5th sector called the electric power sector that comprises of businesses that generate and sell electricity to the above end-use sectors
• Untangling the Grid: 101
  • The “grid” is essentially a load balancer for distributing energy from generators to consumers in the most cost efficient way.
  • During higher demand, the grid will request generated energy from more expensive sources. When demand falls, the grid will lower the cost of energy accordingly.
  • Energy is generated by generators (solar, wind, burning coal, stored hydro, etc) and moved to local substations via a transmission network. The substation lowers the voltage to an appropriate level for wall outlets and distributes the energy to local buildings.
  • The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulates the transmission and wholesale sale of electricity
    • Wholesale: bulk selling, usually interstate
  • Each state has it’s own public utility commission which regulates the distribution and retail sale of electricity
    • Retail: selling to individual homes and businesses
  • There are grids in different geographies across the country and each serves as an energy marketplace. It’s purposely designed to not be a free market and is regulated to maintain stable access to energy (this is my high level understanding of energy regulation; I don’t yet understand the mechanics of how commodity prices interact with regulation and consumer prices)
• The Unstoppable Battery Onslaught by Casey Handmer
  • Batteries have gotten cheaper to make
  • They are a way for energy suppliers to arbitrage grid prices
    • Store energy when there is less demand (prices are cheap)
    • Sell energy to the grid during peak hours
• Analysis of CleanTech 1.0 wave by MIT Energy Initiative
  • VC investments in cleantech during 2006 - 2011 ended up underperforming other categories of VC investments
  • Cleantech had a lot of manufacturing and science risk
    • Often times the science wasn’t proven yet and even after that it was difficult to scale up production and manufacturing for new materials and processes
  • Cleantech had limited exit options due to lack of M&A activity.
• Overview of the Carbon Dioxide Removal space by Jaime Wong
  • “Without choosing a specific problem domain, I found myself forever skimming across the surface: learning small details here and there, but never learning enough to evaluate real hypotheses about where I, personally, could apply leverage.”
  • Jaime covers a lot of interesting topics, but I really resonated with this message at the beginning of the post. It mirrors my current reflections after doing my own exploration of the climate space.
  • After all this reading and high level learning about the market, I’m convinced there will be several venture scalable opportunities in climate tech. I believe the space will grow exponentially due to three main tailwinds:
    • The cost of clean energy (specifically solar PV and onshore wind) has dropped significantly over the past decade and is now cheaper than both coal and gas.
    • The cost of lithium ion battery manufacturing has dropped at an exponential rate since 1996 and will continue to get cheaper as manufacturing scales up.
    • The IRA passed in 2022 directs an estimated 400B USD in federal funding towards clean energy. These incentives will last for at least the next decade.
  • Now that I have confidence in the market, I want to spend more time learning about the lower-level/day-to-day problems and discovering tangible insights that I can act upon. I doubt I will find this type of insight online so it will probably come from a more serendipitous process of talking to folks who work in climate and climate-adjacent industries.

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Some podcast episodes I enjoyed:

Pete Carroll on the Richard Sherman podcast

• I liked his response to the inevitable question about the Super Bowl interception
  • It’s another example of how you can do your best to control the inputs and sometimes the outputs will still turn out poorly. Losing the Super Bowl is heartbreaking but you have to move on and do your best to bounce back the next season.
• I also liked his response on team building. It’s important to get everyone focused and bought in on a single mission and inspire belief in your teammates. Everyone has their own unique talents and you need to provide an environment where everyone can maximize those talents.

Dr. Nicole Paulk at the All-In Summit

• Pretty inspiring to see what is possible with modern gene therapy
• Dr. Paulk showed an example of using gene therapy to cure blindness in a child who was blind at birth due to a missing gene
• There is potential for gene therapy to cure many types of cancer, augment humans with cool traits like night vision, and so much more
• Bottlenecks in bringing gene therapies to market:
  • Getting regulatory approval takes a long process
  • Developing the treatment, doing clinical trials, and deploying to market can take 10-15 years
  • It’s hard to manufacture the viruses needed for these gene therapies
  • It takes a lot of capital to fund the development of new treatments and the biotech funding market has cratered due to rising interest rates

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Some random stuff:

I found my new favorite Chinese restaurant. It’s called Happy Family Gourmet and is located in the SF Sunset District. It’s the most authentic Chinese food I’ve had in the US other than my mom’s cooking. I’d be ordering beef wraps and 肉夹馍 (I think it translates to “meat bun”) from there every day if I lived within walking distance to it.

My apartment has an annoying mosquito problem. I’m not sure how to get rid of them but I bought some mosquito nets to cover my face when I sleep.