🌳 Understory Newsletter on sustainability and climate tech #62
Happy Monday everyone, hope you all had a good weekend and an amazing week ahead. We have a couple of quick announcements for this week:
(1) Our newsletter is moving to Substack!
(2) Don’t forget to sign up for our June 22 Startup event! We have PlanIT Impact, Mimica, and Arbor presenting. It will be a fast-moving set of startup presentations. Invite friends, peers, and investors to our event.
📚 Worth Reading
New York Times wrote an interesting article about challenges in ramping up offshore wind farms in the US. The article talks about Jones Act, which requires ships that travel from a U.S. port and within U.S. water to be made, registered, owned, and staffed by U.S. citizens. As a result, companies like U.S. based Dominion Energy, which is working on wind farms, have to either find or build ships big enough to be able to put wind turbines in water. Just eight ships in the world can transport the largest turbine parts so Dominion is building its own ship costing $500 million and will take at least 2 years to finish. To put this in perspective in regard to what this means from a sovereign renewable energy competitiveness standpoint, Europe has over 5000 offshore wind turbines and U.S. has 7 (seven, yes you read that right). U.S. is not even on the map for offshore wind installations based on market intelligence from the Global Wind Energy Council. It seems that Jones Act is a barrier for U.S. to scale offshore wind farms.
Let’s start with some basics. An offshore wind farm is a group of wind turbines in the ocean to harvest wind energy to generate electricity. Onshore wind farm means wind turbines built on land.
You may ask why offshore wind farm is important:
Less cost to transport wind turbines from water to another location in water vs. from water to land.
Wind tends to be stronger at sea and more steady so probably the ROI per wind farm is higher (our hypothesis).
Since offshore wind farms do not utilize land then land can either be preserved, reforested, or use for agriculture.
What this industry needs:
More trained workers. According to the Global Wind Energy Council, at least 480,000 trained workers are needed to help reach 490GW of wind power by 2025.
Policy change to give incentives (not necessarily financial) for companies and consumers to adopt wind energy or diversify energy supply where possible.
International co-opetition so that as a planet, we can share best practices and deliver more sustainable offshore wind power around the world.
🚀 Funding and Congrats!
Next Energy Technologies raised $13m led by Alon Blue Square Israel and Viracon. Rincon Advisors which is a real estate family office, also participated.
One Concern raised $45m from Sompo Holdings. One Concern generates models that help predict natural disasters.
Endua received funding from Main Sequence and Ampol to make hydrogen power from electrolysis.
Climavision, a weather services and intelligence platform, raised $100m in funding! Private equity firm TPG was a lead investor.
Croptimistic Technology Inc. raised $5m Series A funding to help farmers and growers deploy variable fertilizer with data insights.
Circulor, a sustainable supply chain traceability company, raised $14m Series A. The round is led by the Westly Group with participation from Salesforce Ventures, BHP Ventures, Sky Ocean Ventures, Future Positive Capital and 24Haymarket.
Amogy, a developer of ammonia-based emission-free, high energy-density power solutions, raised major funding round led by AP Ventures, DCVC, and Collaborative Fund.
Terraformation, a reforestation startup, raised a mega Series A round of $30m.
Toyota Ventures launches $150 million Climate Fund.
💡 Startup Spotlight
Terraformation - an early stage startup accelerating reforestation.
👀 Quick Hits
Over 450 investors managing $41 trillion assets released a joint statement to governments to move fast and aim high in climate policies.
Join the new movement of #FashionDetox. Slow fashion is good for the Earth. Learn more from our Sustainable Fashion Webinar and Startup Showcase.
Tyson Foods issues sustainability targets including hitting net zero carbon emission from global operations and supply chain by 2050.
Sustainable building and design could be a reality in the U.S.
Green energy is an “unstoppable trend” for investors.
🎧 Podcast
Revolutionizing smart reusable packaging with software, hardware, and data
Weighing Waste, Transforming the Waste Industry
Democratizing ESG reporting for small businesses
The Understory Podcast is also available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts.
⚙️ Jobs
Sustainability Program Manager - Carbon at Facebook
Manager Sustainability and ESG at jetBlue
Product manager and engineers at Topl
Circular Economy/Sustainability Program Manager at Cisco
Director of Sustainability at Georgia Pacific
Senior Director, Sustainability at Tory Burch
Head of Sales at Lizee
Software Engineer at LimeLoop
Director of Operations at Returnity
Business Developer & Sales at Resortecs
Various Roles at Imperfect Foods
Various Roles at Southface
Associate for Sustainability and ESG Strategies at JP Morgan
Commercial Development Manager at Matter
Sr. Program Manager, NA Transportation Sustainability at Amazon
Program Manager, Energy & Sustainability Advocacy at Google
Sustainability Communications Manager at UPS
Director, Strategic Innovation at NRG Energy
Share your open positions on the Understory Slack channel
🗓 Events
June 22: Startups Driving Sustainability Showcase - June Showcase
June 24: Fintech South 2021 Conference