How to cut industrial emissions and dodge the valley of death

Zero: The Climate Race

Bloomberg

Technology, Business, Science

4.7 • 219 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clean energy technologies saw a record influx of investment last year: $1.7 trillion in total. But that still falls short of what’s needed to meet climate goals. With venture capital investment now falling, it’s increasingly difficult for startups to gain traction.

Claire Curry, global head of technology, industry & innovation at BloombergNEF, follows the journeys of many young companies in the clean-tech space. On this week’s Zero, Curry tells Akshat Rathi about the kinds of innovative pathways that have proven successful. LanzaTech, for example, a nine-year-old carbon recycling technology company, works with Chinese steel companies looking for low-emissions solutions. H2 Green Steel also scaled quickly, in part through agreements reached with Mercedes Benz, IKEA and other big brands looking to access low-carbon steel. Curry explains how these approaches could be replicated by other startups.

Listen to Zero’s episode about green-iron startup Electra.
Listen to Switched On’s episodes on clean-energy investments and plastic recycling.

Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producers are Mythili Rao, Magnus Henriksson, and Sommer Saadi. Special thanks this week to Kira Bindrim. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Zero. I'm Akshatrati.
0:05.0	It's an interesting moment in the climate fight.
0:19.0	2024 will be a year of many big elections around the world.
0:24.6	And the governments that end up with power will determine the pace of the energy transition.
0:29.6	No matter what politics prevail, one thing that will continue to speed up the transition is technology.
0:36.6	But even there, the picture is a little bit
0:38.9	mixed right now. Last year saw record spending on clean energy reaching $1.7 trillion. That's $600 billion
0:47.6	more than what was spent on fossil fuels. And yet, it is still far short of the $4.5 trillion in clean energy investment needed
0:57.6	to be on track to meet climate goals. And by design, clean energy spending is front-loaded
1:03.4	with the cost of installing, say, solar panels, or wind turbines, or hydrogen electrolyzers.
1:09.2	That's becoming more difficult in an environment with high
1:11.9	interest rates. And of course, those are not the only technologies the world needs. Industrial
1:17.4	sectors like steel, cement and plastics also need to be decarbonized. Early stage technologies
1:23.6	need venture capital funding, which is also falling.
1:28.3	But some emerging companies have found a way to successfully take their technology to the market.
1:34.3	How did they do it?
1:37.3	That's the question I asked Claire Curry, global head of technology, industry and innovation at Bloomberg NEF.
1:47.2	We also talked about investment trends in climate tech and how to find the best early-stage startups. Claire, welcome to the show.
2:06.7	Thanks for having me.
2:08.0	Now, one of the things that is poorly understood about the energy transition is how much
2:14.2	climate tech and climate tech investments from early stage all the way to scaling
2:19.5	them up matters. And we're going to talk a lot about how exactly that works, how different
	...

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