Greenify #72: Developed vs Developing countries, who pays the price?
July 21, 2023
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📌 Fact of the week
The US has launched grant programs with $20 billion in funding aiming to foster clean energy investments across the country. 💹
Hottest news of the week…
Regulation 🗃 – Busy agenda for the U.S.
What happened: The US is increasing its efforts to partner up with developing countries in order to incentivize and support the latter’s decarbonization ambitions. This week it held talks with both the Chinese and the Indian governments. On India, the US is looking to provide a lending platform to secure low cost of capital funding for India’s climate ambitions. On China, talks on climate goals between the two countries resumed despite the challenging current diplomatic relation between the two giants. 👍
Zoom out: The UN’s COP summit, held every year, will be held in Dubai this November. As part of previous COP summits, an agreement was signed by which wealthy industrialized nations with a track record of dirty emissions would have to provide funding support towards developing countries in order for them to meet climate goals. Indeed, as explained by our Chart of the week, actions in developing nations will determine the future of our planet. 🙏
Business 💰 – India 🤝UK
What happened: Indian company Tata Group will build a £4bn battery giga factory in the UK. The factory will supply batteries to Jaguar Land Rover and Tata’s own EVs. The factory’s initial output will be approximately 40GWh and it is estimated to provide c.40% of all battery production needed in the UK by 2030. The UK government will contribute by paying £500 million in subsidies to Tata Group, key move in attracting the Indian giant. 💸
Zoom out: Countries are increasing electrification efforts, looking to attract both domestic and foreign investments in key areas, such as battery manufacturing, in order to create new jobs, develop new industries and meet ambitious climate targets at the same time. The UK is also in talks with BMW over the potential opportunity for the latter to build a new factory for e-Minis at its manufacturing plant near Oxford. Looking at the other side of the world, last week we also spoke about China’s investment in Thailand’s EV market. 🚗
Innovation 💡 - Major breakthrough in geothermal energy!
What happened: Fervo Energy, a prominent start-up active in enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), announced the completion of a successful 30-days test that confirms commercial viability of its technology. Fervo showed that its Project Red site in Nevada, US, is capable of generating ~3.5 MW of electricity, a new record for an enhanced geothermal plant and enough to power ~2,600 homes. The company has already an agreement with Google, which will buy the electricity to power its data centre in Las Vegas. 📅
Zoom out: Conventional geothermal technologies usually tap into hydrothermal resources, i.e. places where heat is found near the earth’ surface. On the contrary, enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) attempt to exploit the thermal heat from almost anywhere, by drilling into rocks that are thousands of meters below the earth’s surface and pump fluids that will be transformed into steam and drive electric turbines. According to estimates, the US by itself sits on enough heat resources to meet the world’s electricity demand! 💡
Deep dives of the week…
Chart of the week - Developed vs Developing ⚔️
Europe and the U.S. are at the forefront of the energy transition, and in recent decades have developed technologies and regulatory schemes to support their decarbonization efforts… however, this can’t be enough. Why? The bulk of CO2 emissions comes from developing countries, whose global share of emissions is destined to rise further relative to developed countries. This makes their role and their climate ambitions paramount for our planet. 🗺️
Source: Center for Global Development
EX-company of the week - An unfortunate end for the tesla of bikes!
This week we talk about the unfortunate end of VanMoof, the Dutch e-bike maker who was trying to revolutionize the light mobility sector by creating nice looking e-bikes. The company, often defined as the Tesla of bikes, saw a boom in sales during Covid, followed by a decline thereafter. VanMoof also struggled with unexpected high costs of repairs that it was obliged to perform under its “guarantee scheme”. All of this led the company to miss interest payments to debtholders and eventually go bankrupt. 👀
Guess who are stakeholders calling to rescue?...Elon Musk himself, who received various mentions on Twitter to come and revive VanMoof. Will he have some spare change?💸
Deal of the week - Checking carbon credits’ validity!
London-based carbon credit rating firm Sylvera raised ~£50 million in series B from Balderton Capital and other European investors. 👍
Sylvera is a software-based company which provides the data to test the validity of carbon credits, i.e. if the carbon removal actually happened as described in the offset certificate. To do so, they use satellite, machine learning, and software to check if the atmosphere is actually experiencing that removal. They generate money by selling these data points to anyone who might be interested in the validity of these certificates - not only the buyer of carbon credits, but also banks and other stakeholders.
The raised money will be used for expansion, especially in the US, where they aim to locate in New York in order to be close to their clients. 🌎
👋 See you next Friday, for the best sum up of this coming week!
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