How Tech Firms Are Addressing Climate Change

While everyone's paralyzed by the $3.7 billion funding cut, the smartest companies in climate tech are making their biggest moves yet. Not waiting. Building. Redwood's Brilliant Pivot: JB Straubel's Redwood Materials deployed 700 used EV batteries to power a Nevada data center. Not recycling them. Using them as-is for grid storage. While Li-Cycle went bankrupt begging for government money, Redwood raised $2 billion privately. Why? They solved real problems for real customers. 95% material recovery rate. Contracts with Ford, Toyota, Panasonic. No subsidies needed. The Nuclear Rush Is Real: Amazon paid $650M for one data center because it sits next to a nuclear plant. Microsoft's restarting Three Mile Island. Google signed for 500MW of small reactors. Not because of climate goals. Because AI/data center demand could hit 400 terawatt-hours by 2030. They need reliable power. Now. Who Else Is Moving? Rondo's heat batteries: Already powering New Belgium Brewery. AtmosZero's heat pumps: Replacing industrial boilers today. Not pilots. Revenue. Climate tech funding grew 15% YoY despite everything. First-stage startups outperforming the broader VC market since 2019. The Opportunity Map: - Industrial heat: 30% of emissions, almost no solutions - Grid flexibility: Every solar farm needs it - Building efficiency: Boring but massive - Carbon removal: Microsoft alone needs megatons The companies attacking these problems right now, while others wait for "policy clarity" will own the next decade. The Harsh Reality: Subsidies created zombie companies. Their death creates opportunity. Every competitor frozen in fear is market share you can take. Every company "reassessing strategy" is a customer you can win. 2001 dot-com crash gave us Google's dominance. 2008 gave us Uber and Airbnb's growth. 2025's climate shakeout? We're watching it create winners now. The Real Question: Your competitors are in defensive mode. What offensive play are you running? Who's already pivoting successfully that we should watch? The bold don't wait for permission. They build the future while others debate it. #CleanTech #EnergyTransition #DataCenters #NuclearEnergy #Innovation

I'm excited to share the launch of "Bold Measures to Close the Climate Action Gap," the latest report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Economic Forum Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders. https://lnkd.in/e8MCFKAm    We see businesses doing more to tackle climate change, but collectively, the world is moving way too slowly. This new report focused on opportunities for companies and governments to translate their individual actions into more substantial global progress. The bottom line is that our individual efforts must be more geared to driving systemic change. The report highlights five ways for companies to do this, including: 1. Accelerate supplier decarbonization. In many companies, suppliers’ emissions are 3x to 8x their own Scope 1&2. Cutting the first 50% of many products’ supply chain emissions can be achieved with an end-price impact under 1% 2. Enable customers to make greener choices. Product redesign, circularity, reducing customers’ energy consumption can substantially lower the emissions footprint of many products. 3. Drive change with peers in your sector, especially in supply chain ‘pinch points’: Ten players or less control more than 40% of many key markets; clearer product labeling is another great area of opportunity 4. Engage in cross-industry partnerships, especially large-scale buying groups, to mobilize capital and accelerate development and scaling of advanced technologies 5. Advocate and support bolder policies. First, make sure you and your lobbying partners are not harming climate progress in your government engagements. Then, look for opportunities to go further to be an effective partner to governments to encourage bold and pragmatic changes in incentives, policies, and reporting. The report is filled with real life examples of what companies are doing today in each of these areas. Thanks to Pim Valdre and Pedro G Gomez Pensado from WEF and my colleagues Dr. Patrick Herhold, Jens Burchardt, Cornelius Pieper, Edmond Rhys Jones, Trine Filtenborg de Nully, Galaad Préau and Natalia Mrówczyńska for leading the work on this important report. And to my Alliance co-chairs, Jesper Brodin, Christian Mumenthaler, Ester Baiget, and Feike Sijbesma for your continued leadership.

As #datacenters scale rapidly to support #AI, cloud computing, and other digital services, much has been written about whether existing grids can meet the surge in electricity demand—and whether emissions will spike, since most grids remain carbon intensive. This outlook - focusing on the risks and challenges of data center growth - misses the transformative role that data centers and technology companies could play in accelerating national and regional energy, climate, and sustainable development goals. In our new blog, Perrine Toledano, Bradford M. Willis and I explain how #hyperscalers can help resolve the very constraints that are slowing the energy transition and undermining broader climate and development goals. Specifically, hyperscalers can uniquely: 🔹 reduce investment risks and marginal costs for new clean grid infrastructure, as large, predictable off-takers 🔹 create financeable demand for large-scale energy storage. Storage integration - which strengthens grid reliability and resilience - has been hard to finance because of uncertain revenue streams. 🔹 expand access to water and thermal systems through shared-use infrastructure platforms, learning from successful models in other sectors like mining 🔹 deploy rapidly-evolving AI and digital tools to increase energy efficiency, manage energy demand, streamline interconnection, lower system costs, and optimize maintenance, among other evolving functions, and 🔹 expand access to broadband and digital services, closing the persistent digital divide, and bringing transformative benefits in health, education, agriculture, and financial inclusion to underserved communities. These benefits are happening already in ad hoc ways - but could be massively scaled when embedded in strategic policy frameworks and coordinated with public and private partners. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ea6vMMaG Side note: our current focus on carbon footprinting has distracted from—rather than supported—tech firms’ transformative potential. While footprinting can provide a useful snapshot of emissions/exposure/influence, our over-emphasis on emissions reporting has crowded out any discussion of strategic systemic integration and even creates perverse incentives. The over-reliance on footprinting as the key metric has also very predictably led to myriad illegitimate practices, including 'offsetting' emissions with unbundled RECs or dubious carbon credits, and other accounting loopholes (see yet another timely, insightful article from Simon Mundy on big tech's climate claims: https://lnkd.in/eNvtGxGu). Let's shift the focus to encouraging tech firms to engage in strategic public/private cooperation in grid design and expansion, financing solutions, and expanded digital inclusion -- optimizing transformative digital innovations for societal and planetary benefit.