Greenify #74: Fusion Round-Up
August 11, 2023
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📌 Fact of the week
Morocco has tendered for a 400 MW solar plant in the Atlas mountains.🏔️
Hottest news of the week…
Regulation 🗃 – UK Reality Check
What happened: A study ran by Bain & Company and CDP revealed that two thirds of UK corporate emissions are not covered by decarbonization targets. Specifically, for the 1,450 analysed UK companies, 64% of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions are not covered by a reduction target. In addition, those companies which do actually have emission reduction targets are not fairing well, with 21% of companies set to miss their Scope 1 & 2 emission goals. 👎
Zoom out: This is not looking good for the UK. The country had already said publicly it was not on course to meet its 2030 goal of cutting emissions by 60% vs 1990 levels. This is particularly worrying in the context of COP28, the climate conference held in Dubai later this year, where countries are expected to announce and deliver more ambitious climate plans.📈
Business 💰 – Marvelling Fusion
What happened: Marvel Fusion, a German nuclear fusion start-up, has partnered with the Colorado State University to build its is laser demonstrator in the US. The $150 million partnership will be used to develop the first laser facility for commercial fusion energy research. In December, we had already spoken about the successful fusion experiment in the US, where scientists had used the world’s largest laser to achieve a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time.🥇
Zoom out: Nuclear fusion energy has been a decades long dream for scientists. For those who watched Oppenheimer, they’d know it’s been on science’s agenda for a while. Nuclear fission is currently used as an energy source by some countries, such as France in Europe, yet fusion is still far away from achieving a “scalable” passport. As opposed to fusion, it would provide additional environmental advantages, as it emits no carbon and, most importantly, no long-lived radioactive waste. 🗑️
Innovation 💡 - Google mitigating aviation emissions
What happened: Google has trained its algorithms to spot areas of the sky where planes are more likely to create contrails. Contrails are the white shades left by planes in the sky that we observe everyday. This is an amazing achievement, as thanks to this predictive capacity pilots could now plan their route to avoid “ice supersaturated regions”, characterized by higher humidity, where planes have larger chances of creating contrails. Google is partnering with American Airlines to test the feasibility and effectiveness of shaping routes to avoid contrails!🛫
Zoom out: Contrails are responsible for ~35% of aviation's global warming impact! This is because some of the contrails, which are mainly ice molecules, rather than disappearing immediately spread out and trap heat inside the atmosphere. Contrary to all the other innovations in the aviation industry, the cool thing is that this predictive tool could be used immediately by airlines to reduce emissions in the short term! 📉
Deep dives of the week…
Chart of the week - The Fusion Race
As experiments on nuclear fusion are getting traction, the race to enter and compete in the space is getting intense. The number of private fusion companies grew exponentially from about two in the ‘90s to more than twenty in 2021. We wouldn’t be surprised to see more companies entering the industry should experiments keep yielding positive results. 💸
Deals of the week - Battery Time
The first deal of this week is Stabl Energy securing €15m! The Munich-based start-up does “battery repurposing” i.e. they take used batteries from vehicles to reuse them for energy storage in other sectors. They are also able to take different battery modules together regardless of their previous usage. Repurposing batteries is the most efficient way to maximize the life of critical materials, better than recycling.🔋
As a second deal, Cornish Lithium, a company active in lithium mining in Cornwall, UK, just raised £53.6m led by the UK Infrastructure Bank to boost supply of battery-grade lithium for EVs and renewable energy storage. Lithium mining is more common in developing countries, where it often has negative impacts on the local waters and biodiversity. The news of expanded production in Europe is particularly positive as sustainability practices are more advanced in the old continent. In fact, mined lithium will help EU battery and car makers comply with sustainability regulations. 🌎
👋 See you next Friday, for the best sum up of this coming week!
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