Innovation Monitor: Climate Change and Innovation (with a focus on our hometown of NYC!)
Innovation Monitor: Climate Change and Innovation (with a focus on our hometown of NYC!)
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Welcome to this week’s Innovation Monitor.
Happy (day after) Earth Day! Let’s start with some climate reality. Whether we call it a climate emergency or climate crisis, we’re well into seeing the dangerous effects of CO2 emissions, pollution, and human activity.
More the half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reefs has been lost. Greenland and the Antarctic’s ice sheets are melting, and coastal cities around the world, especially in the global south, are at increased risk of rising sea levels. As U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier this week: “We are on the verge of the abyss.”
Yet there are glimmers of hope. The U.S. has rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement, and this week, the Biden administration announced a bold pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50–52 percent by 2030.
And while this is a global issue — rising temperatures and sea waters don’t stop at diplomatic borders — this week we’re focusing on how everyone can make a difference. So we’re going to go local — explore climate efforts here in New York City, and how are we leveraging innovation to push these forward.
We’ll briefly explore what else NYC has planned for its more sustainable future, including key sustainability initiatives — the OneNYC 2050 strategy and the 80 x 50 commitment — and then look at the accelerators and startups pushing for a greener city.
And to end on a note of optimism, this NY Times piece covers how the Union Square climate clock, that previously counted down until the effects of climate change became irreversible, is now counting up the percentage of renewable energy powering the earth’s consumption.
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Erica Matsumoto OneNYC 2050 Released on April 2019, OneNYC 2050 — or “NYC Green New Deal” — is an overarching three-decade strategy to create “a strong and fair city.” It’s composed of 30 high-level initiatives, with a chunk focusing on (or overlapping with) sustainability efforts. Some goals are lofty for a city this size… even for a thirty-year plan:
“[By 2050], buildings, transportation, and our economy are powered by renewable energy — wind, solar, and hydropower — through a modern, fully electric grid.” Others feel more in reach: “Subways and buses are fast and reliable…. Bicycle lanes abound and walking is a favorite way of getting around town.”
The high level goals include bold proclamations like:
- In 2050, New York City is prepared for a changing climate, and is no longer reliant on fossil fuels.
- In 2050, New Yorkers no longer rely on cars.
While some of the more concrete targets and goals include:
- Cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 17% “below 2005 levels amid significant population and economic growth.”
- Committed to divest $5B “of the City’s pension funds from fossil fuels, and invest $4B into climate solutions, becoming a global leader in the divestment movement.”
- Introducing congestion pricing, “to reduce traffic in Manhattan and generate funds for essential subway repairs and enhancements.”
Much like the Green New Deal that has been percolating at the federal level, the OneNYC 2050 idea also connects social equity with climate change, drawing the connection that renewable energy jobs will have dual benefits. NYC 80 x 50 In 2014, NYC committed to achieving 80 x 50, or an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, detailed in OneNYC 2050’s precursor, the OneNYC report.
The cost of 80 x 50’s vision is laid out in the official 2016 report, notably on page 73: “To achieve 80 x 50, nearly every building in NYC will need to complete a deep energy retrofit that holistically addresses heating, cooling, and the building envelope.”
Since the report was published, the cost of solar has plummeted, making retrofitting much more viable. Political agenda is also aligned for the first time in four years.
As the report notes, “buildings can also play an important role in scaling up distributed renewable energy resources, such as solar PV, and community-scale solutions, such as district heating and cooling networks, but coordination barriers and regulatory hurdles will need to be addressed.”
Early-Stage Innovation At the NYC Media Lab, we’re big proponents of accelerator-type programs to help early-stage startups better navigate their way to success. It’s incredibly encouraging to see a number of these types of programs popping up specific to tackling climate change, even here right in NYC.
The Circular City Studio
As part of the recent Circular City Studio program at Brooklyn’s Newlab, three startups tackled tough sustainability challenges in the city, prototyping their products in the second half of 2020.
Last December, they got a chance to present their results. Aclima, a “purpose-driven technology company dedicated to driving bold climate action,” deployed a mobile air quality sensing platform that “identified air pollution hotspots near emissions sources.”
Algramo builds “sustainable and contactless refill systems for cleaning products,” and “stocked its dispensers with much-needed cleaning products and reusable bottles.”
Finally, Sapient Industries is a software platform designed to reduce energy use in large buildings. “It does this by installing smart outlets and smart power strips throughout a building and collecting and analyzing consumption data for every plugged-in device.”
Urban-X
Launched by VC fund Urban US and BMW’s MINI subsidiary, the Urban-X accelerator latest cohort enters a market that’s ready for cleantech: “You can get the sense that sustainability and climate change startups have never had better tailwinds than right now,” says Urban US co-founder Stonly Baptiste Blue.
Here are a few companies in the ninth cohort:
- Domatic: A product that “centralizes AC/DC conversion at the source to pave the way for widespread solar-powered future that relies on DC.”
- Origen Hydrogen: “Low-cost hardware for green hydrogen production for heavy-duty vehicles, industry, and for long-term back-up power.”
- Urbio: “Software empowering cities and utilities to plan for and design the energy transition.”
Bigger Innovations Those are some of the earlier stage companies and technologies being incubated right here in NYC. Looking around to the rest of the world, we’re seeing some major projects underway to tackle some very important tasks:
Vacuuming gas from the atmosphere
To reduce our overall emissions, new technologies that could successfully pull CO2 from the atmosphere could fundamentally shift our trajectory, and solve for all the challenges of rapidly reducing consumption. One startup working on this is Climeworks — they’ve already launched a number of efforts and are sequestering thousands of tons of carbon each year.
The power of energy storage
The production of energy via coal remains the worst carbon emitter out of everything we collectively do. We’ve had great success in moving towards more renewable sources, but another area we could transform our energy consumption is simply better holding the energy we do produce. Right now “interconnectors” that shift grids from simply transporting energy to also storing it, have become a very in-demand area. Energy Vault, a Swiss start-up uses windy days and automated cranes to stack bricks, and even generates more energy when the bricks fall back to the ground.
This Week in Business History April 23rd, 2005: The first YouTube video in history is uploaded
The video was titled “Me at the Zoo” and uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawad Karim. It’s not…the most profound piece, but it started the user-generated video revolution that completely upended the media industry.
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