Pod Insights Equity Podcast What’s more venture capital than space lasers? About this episode This week, we brought TechCrunch+ senior climate reporter Tim De Chant on to talk climate tech, hardware breakthroughs, and why we have a whole stage this year at Disrupt focused on sustainability.
On that last point, perhaps you have gone outside recently. Extreme weather around the world, warming oceans, fires — it's a mess out there. That's the bad news. The good news is that a number of startups are working hard to build new technologies that could shoothe our struggling planet. And perhaps make a lot of money in the process.
Here's what we got into on the show:
Climate tech venture capital activity. Why aren't we seeing more capital despite some interesting activity.
The question of fusion. Is it really around the corner (this time)?
Why we're both excited about potential hardware breakthroughs, even if LK-99 was not the real deal.
Dread about our changing world.
Tim is not only a great journalist, he's also very good at the whole science thing, so he was a treat to talk to!
We're back on Friday for our last recording before we're on stage at Disrupt! Talk soon.
For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more!
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:11 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and this is our Wednesday show where we sit down with a guest, think about their work and unpack the rest. Today is September 13th, 2023, and we are so close to TechCrunch Disrupt. I am flying out in two days, which is good because I'm going to be able to hang out with my dear friend, Tim Deschamps, from the TechCrunch Plus team, who is also on the podcast today because we are talking about climate tech. But Tim, first of all, welcome to the show. How are you?
0:42 Speaker 01 Thanks, Alex. Good. How are you doing?
0:44 Speaker 00 I'm hanging in there, but also we're going to disrupt this year in a little bit of a new way. And I hear there's a whole stage predicated on essentially what you do.
0:52 Speaker 01 Yes, there is a whole stage. A lot of people coming, going to be chatting for pretty much half the day, maybe a little bit more. Got some good names on the list this year, so show up.
1:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, and so it's called the Sustainability Stage. And which day of the event is it?
1:08 Speaker 01 First day, Tuesday.
1:09 Speaker 00 First day, Tuesday. So essentially, if you're coming to disrupt, come watch Equity live and then divvy your attention between my stage, the builder's stage, and where Tim will be over on the Sustainability Stage. It's going to be, if you couldn't tell, a massive show. So we're not stressed at all. I'm totally relaxed.
1:24 Speaker 01 Piece of cake.
1:25 Speaker 00 Piece of cake. I'm just hoping that all my clothes arrive before I have to finish packing, so that way I look presentable on stage.
1:32 Speaker 01 You too, huh?
1:33 Speaker 00 Did you know, Tim, that if you dress like a West Coast slob all the time, your closet is not appropriate for conference hosting?
1:41 Speaker 01 As a matter of fact, I do, Alex. I know that quite well.
1:44 Speaker 00 Alas. Anyways, lots to talk about today. First of all, we are going to talk about the IRA and how that fits in the US versus the rest of the world, especially the EU. Longtime listeners of the show will recall, we have talked about the Inflation Reduction Act here and there. But today, we have the expert in the house. And then we're going to talk about fusion power is breakout year, what has worked, what has not, and other high-profile misses in the hardware world, aka superconductors. There's a lot to talk about. I am very excited about climate tech, Tim, in general, because I have walked outside in the last couple of weeks and I have also read the news about hurricanes, ocean temperatures. And so just to set the tone here, how's our planet doing?
2:22 Speaker 01 Not good. Yeah, could be better. Things are definitely warm. We're on track for one of the warmest summers on record. I don't think it's going to be the warmest, but it's definitely up there. You know, if you're in the Northeast like we are, it is just humid and hot here. It feels like we moved to Houston, which is not something I'd ever planned to do. Nothing against Houston, but the weather down there is not my cup of tea.
2:44 Speaker 00 No, it feels like we're in a New Orleans summer, but without the charm and the New Orleans relaxed culture. So it's like Northeast New Orleans, which is probably the worst combination of things. You've got high-strung Bostonians sweating.
2:57 Speaker 01 It's a recipe for to be cranky.
2:59 Speaker 00 Yes. In other words, don't drive in the Northeast because no one is behaving themselves. It's a hot mess.
3:04 Speaker 01 Totally.
3:04 Speaker 00 Okay, so the planet is doing poorly. I mean wildfires, massive flooding, massive droughts. Essentially, what it feels like to me is we were told that as the planet does warm up, what we should expect to see is more extreme weather more frequently. And it seems to be coming true as far as I'm told.
3:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, it seems like we're heading in that direction, if not already there. You know, the extreme fires that we've been seeing, this sort of stuff has been forecasted, freak weather events. I think it rained in the Bay Area earlier this summer, which is
3:34 Speaker 00 Really?
3:34 Speaker 01 Yeah, in like June or July. Super bizarre. I lived out there for five years. I never saw rain in the summer.
3:40 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:40 Speaker 01 So that's the kind of stuff. And then also the hurricane slash typhoon hitting Southern California recently. Of course, you get one offs every so often, but once you start stacking these things up and seeing them with the frequency that we've been seeing them, you know, the last year or two, obviously you're realizing things are starting to change.
3:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, right now we have massive flooding in China. Siberia is on fire. Canada is on fire. I mean, like when I was growing up, we never had to think about what are we going to do to handle the wildfire smoke? Now, every year I call my parents and I'm like, hi, how you guys doing? Can you breathe? Do you need to move? Shall I move you out here? It's definitely a changed world.
4:16 Speaker 01 And even moving out here, you're not safe.
4:19 Speaker 00 Well, we were until Canada decided to just go up in flames. Canada, it's supposed to be cold.
4:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I know. Get it under control.
4:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, famous for hockey, ice hockey, not fire walking. But apparently everything changes. So that's the context through which I think about startups that are trying to do better by the planet. And to me, nothing more noble out there than trying to make our, our only ecosystem that we have a bit more habitable and a bit perhaps longer lasting. Tim, you watch the climate tech space closer than anyone here at TC. How are startups doing, do you think, in terms of having an impact on the world as it currently exists?
4:57 Speaker 01 I think we're getting there. We're not there yet, but you're starting to see some companies break out of the A and B rounds and start moving into later rounds where you're starting to see the scale that they've been hoping to achieve. So there are companies that are, you know, making things easier. And thinking of Acadia, for example, you know, they're help people switch power providers to renewable power. They offer community solar, things like that. You know, I think they pulled in a really large series E earlier this year. And so you're seeing these companies finally getting to that size where they're not just bit players. They're not playing in a few markets. They're going nationwide or they're going multinational
5:38 Speaker 01 and they're attracting a lot of customers, which in aggregate can start to make an impact.
5:43 Speaker 00 Yeah. And then also in that kind of later stage climate tech roundup, we also saw Redwood Materials. I think they just raised like north of a billion dollars and they're going to put together the new five million square foot space and they're in the battery recycling space. So given that everyone wants to drive an electric car these days, that seems pretty bullish.
5:59 Speaker 01 It does. And I was actually pretty impressed by that because I was looking into recycling a few years ago and a lot of experts were saying, we're not really going to see significant movement in that space until the end of, you know, the 2020s. So a few years from now, but the fact that that's happening now suggests that everybody's timeline is getting moved up, which is nothing but a good thing.
6:21 Speaker 00 Well, I feel like the planet's timeline is also getting moved up. The question is, are we accelerating our own technology timelines fast enough to meet? I don't know, a meter of sea level rise? I mean, the numbers and the timelines aren't, we don't have that much time.
6:34 Speaker 01 No.
6:34 Speaker 00 Is what it feels like to me.
6:36 Speaker 01 Honestly, the best time to have done all this stuff would have been 20 years ago, 30 years ago. But we didn't, we delayed and here we are. There's no time like the present though, and we seem to be doing a pretty good job of making the most of it. I wouldn't say we're excelling at it, but we're, we're getting there.
6:52 Speaker 00 We may not be excelling, but we are to some degree accelerating. And part of that is the Inflation Reduction Act, AKA the IRA, which has had an impact that I think has surprised, frankly, at least myself, maybe also you, in terms of how quickly that went from being a law that was going to pass to a law that passed to the results we've actually seen in the market. So, Tim, just for folks who may not be in the US or may be doing something non-climathy, how is the IRA impacting climate tech in the US? And is it doing enough, do you think?
7:19 Speaker 01 It's had an enormous impact. I think there's always room to do more, but this is, I think, bigger than a lot of people expected, certainly compared with a few years ago. It's $369 billion worth of stimulus and incentives aimed at boosting both climate tech and the nation's industrial base. And the ultimate goal is to reduce carbon pollution by 40% by the end of the decade, which would almost get us to meeting our Paris Climate Agreement goals. It would certainly get us on the path. We'd need to do a little bit better, but would get us on the path to hitting net zero by 2050.
7:55 Speaker 00 Okay, so the end of the decade is, I don't know, 6.2 years? I can't.
8:00 Speaker 01 Something like that.
8:00 Speaker 00 I'm tired, but that's close enough. So six years and change to get a 40% reduction. That, okay, I'm not gonna lie, I'd forgotten those numbers and that actually feels aggressive enough to be cool. Like, I'm actually kind of like, all right, yeah, I'll take that.
8:13 Speaker 01 Yes, it's taken the US from being a laggard on climate to being something of a leader.
8:18 Speaker 00 Okay, that's what I want to get to next because the IRA passed just over a year ago. I think it was like a year and a week ago or something like that. And there has been some hubbub with the EU and kind of complaints about, you know, is the US overly favoring domestic industries? Are we breaking international trade policy? That seems to have died down a little bit. Is the Europe still mad that we're, I don't know how to phrase this politely, investing more in ourselves?
8:40 Speaker 01 Um, yes and no. I mean, one of the sources I spoke with jokingly said that they probably expected us to write a buy German act, but. We didn't, right? We wrote a buy American act instead. You know, the reality is that when you're going to be doing targeted stimulus, you know, liberal economists would of course love to have it be agnostic. But to get things passed in the Senate and the House, it helps to have a little sweetener, and that sweetener is buy American. And so the EU was pretty caught off guard by that. I think they thought of themselves as climate leaders and they'd really gone far down a path of developing carbon markets and kind of creating these almost more punitive incentives rather than carrots.
9:23 Speaker 01 So more sticks than carrots in this case. And I think they were surprised that a country like the US would come out with basically a buffet of carrots for climate tech. And they wanted more money to flow into the EU. And obviously it's not. It's flowing to the US. And actually, that 369 billion worth of stimulus and incentives, some people think it could be many times more than that when all is said and done.
9:46 Speaker 00 So on the carrot versus stick thing and the buy German versus buy American, was the expectation that we would implement a series of sticks and therefore companies that wanted to meet expectations would essentially go out and buy other technology that currently existed, aka German tech?
10:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, essentially. You know, in the past, the way the US has approached a lot of emissions reduction was to create these cap and trade markets. So we did this with sulfur dioxide to reduce acid rain. It was actually incredibly successful. It allowed companies to choose the lowest cost technologies to reduce the pollution. And those that couldn't would then buy credits from those that had. And over time, they would reduce the number of credits available in the marketplace, driving the price up and kind of in effect subsidizing more aggressive emissions technologies. You know, regions have tried to do that. The EU has tried to do that with carbon dioxide and other carbon-related pollutants.
10:41 Speaker 01 But the problem is that, you know, it never got buy-in in the US. It always was equated to a carbon tax or a tax on consumers. And people were worried about, even if you called it a fee and dividend where the money would be returned to consumers, it was essentially a non-starter because, you know, corporate interests weren't. Terribly interested, obviously, in being punished for basically the world's most readily available fuel source at the time. So instead, what they did is they put together a bunch of these carrots that basically said, if you build battery factories in the United States, if you make solar panels in the United States, if you build electric cars in the United States, we're going to give you both supply and demand side incentives to get that done.
11:26 Speaker 00 Yeah. So here's where I get a little confused because the IRA has bolstered investment in American manufacturing. It seems to have provided a lot of incentives that are being well received in this nation, enough to piss off Europe. So, you know, there must be some impact. And then when I look at climate tech investing, I think it's off like 40% this year.
11:45 Speaker 01 Yes.
11:46 Speaker 00 And so there's a mismatch to me between like, okay, cool. We've set the market up for this. Everyone knows it's a problem. Things are on fire or being drowned. And yet the capital is slowing to startups that I think are probably going to have a big impact on tidying up how we live as a species. So square this for me or tell me that I'm not insane because it just, it feels like a weird mix.
12:05 Speaker 01 I agree. It does feel like we need a little bit more investment in the space. That 40% number, I think, represents kind of the general tenor in the market where you're starting to see companies that might've started to dabble in climate tech, maybe pull back a little bit, you know, in tandem with their other investments. But there are funds that are raising big numbers right now and putting it out there. So I don't think it's necessarily going to slow down. I think maybe one of the other things you're seeing is there has been a wave of climate tech startups over the last few years that got funded at the pre-seed, seed, maybe series A rounds. It's going to take them some time to grow before they can start attracting bigger investments. And of course, later rounds drive bigger investments, which is going to prop up the entire sector.
12:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's hard to count to a billion dollars, $5 million at a time. It's much easier to do so $100 million at a time.
12:55 Speaker 01 Exactly.
12:56 Speaker 00 Or in the case of Redwood, you can count to $1 billion in one step. Watch this.
13:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:01 Speaker 00 One.
13:02 Speaker 01 You know, and you've seen that with the battery sector especially because, you know, we have spent the last, oh gosh, almost 20 years investing.
13:10 Speaker 01 Big money and not big money, but you know, we spent money developing various battery technologies and we had some wins and we had some losses. And after the Great Recession, a lot of those companies either broke up or bought for pieces, stuff like that. But some of those employees at those companies went out to found the companies that are now kind of driving some of the new technologies that you're starting to see, you know, get big funding, like whether it's Redwood or Seela or some of these others, you know, they're finally at the point where they're building gigafactory scale factories. So some of this is it takes time, some of it's the bumpiness of the market over the years. But I think with a little bit more considered effort, we could probably compress the timeline
13:53 Speaker 01 a little bit further. But yeah, realistically speaking, it's going to take a bit.
13:57 Speaker 00 So one thing I'm not sure about is if we should be hoping for step function change technologies that really shake the snow globe, or if we should be expecting a broad array of incremental improvements across the board to actually really change the current climate dynamic. And so, you know, Tim, when you're talking to founders in the space, are most of them shooting for step change functions? Are they shooting more for incremental? Like, what's the tenor of those conversations?
14:25 Speaker 01 I think it depends on the sector. There are some cases where you're going to see incremental improvement. You know, I think solar panels are a great example. Everybody's shooting for 25, 30% efficiency, something like that. And you see it in batteries too, right? Where you get these slow incremental improvements where by the time a new entrant, you know, makes it to the market, the old players have almost caught up to it.
14:50 Speaker 00 Ah, I see. Okay.
14:51 Speaker 01 And then, you know, maybe the new player has a little bit more headroom and can go a little bit further. But you know, we're seeing like batteries, for example, we're seeing pretty significant advances in lithium iron phosphate, LFP cells. You know, typically they're heavier, they were bigger, so they had lower energy density. They're still going to be heavier because they have iron relative to like lithium, cobalt, manganese, some of these other ones. But what you're seeing is that these cheaper cells have started to get a lot more attention and that is improving their performance to the point where they're making for pretty good substitutes for a lot of the other kind of more, not bespoke, but more expensive cell technologies.
15:31 Speaker 00 So wait, going back, lithium, cobalt, what was the last word there?
15:35 Speaker 01 NMC, lithium with nickel, cobalt and manganese.
15:38 Speaker 00 Aren't those all metals?
15:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:40 Speaker 00 So like, okay, look, I passed chemistry in high school and my dad is a chemist. So like, I'm kind of the family failure, but like, why is iron so much heavier than the other metals?
15:50 Speaker 01 Oh, that's a good question. I haven't looked into that.
15:52 Speaker 00 Yes, I'm glad I'm not dumb as hell.
15:54 Speaker 01 You stumped me on this one. I suspect it probably has to do with how many ions it can store.
16:01 Speaker 00 And essentially.
16:02 Speaker 01 You need more of it.
16:02 Speaker 00 Because you need, you need more total iron. So that's, that's the weight discrepancy. Okay, that makes sense to me. Sorry, everybody. This is not supposed to be Alex's science lesson.
16:10 Speaker 01 I'm gonna have to fact check that one though, so don't hold me to it.
16:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, if it's wrong, we'll just ping Nova and have them do a show on it and we'll get that sorted out. Okay, but, but on the, on the step function change side of things, we have heard about a couple of technologies, especially in your coverage recently, that seem to either have gotten close to changing the paradigm of your energy around the world, or are almost there. And of course, I'm talking about the LK99 room temperature superconductor, which appears to not be what we wanted. And then of course, there's progress in fusion, we'll get to in a second. But on LK99, Tim, is that story done?
16:42 Speaker 01 It's pretty much done. I haven't, you know, I was on vacation, so I didn't look into it over that time. But people were pretty definitive that what they were seeing was probably your more run of the mill ferromagnetism. Your magnet that you stick on the refrigerator.
16:55 Speaker 00 Yes.
16:55 Speaker 01 People were hopeful. There was some kind of like quirkiness about the material that gave them some suggestion that maybe they were seeing some hints of superconductivity, but it was probably just artifacts of maybe contamination in the way it was made.
17:11 Speaker 00 No, that's just, I'm still so sad about that. It was so fun to read the hype and the hope and people like really are like.
17:16 Speaker 01 I know.
17:17 Speaker 00 Crossing fingers and toes.
17:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, the first couple of weeks were really exciting. You know, people thought they were on to something. There were some theoretical kind of like modeling studies that suggested maybe this could be true. There might be something here. But you know, the nice thing about this one was anybody could pretty much reproduce it. They were pretty basic materials. The conditions to perform the experiment were not exotic.
17:41 Speaker 01 And so, yeah, you could go out and kind of throw this together in basically a basement lab, which is essentially what this company had done.
17:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was, I was gonna say, like, I was watching videos of people trying to, like, verify this. Like, they were like Twitch streams of people, like, trying to, like, manufacture this stuff. And it did not have that, like, science fiction high-tech vibe that I expected. It had more, like, basement math lab vibes.
18:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. Well, it turns out that the company that did it in South Korea was based in the basement of some apartment building or something like that.
18:10 Speaker 00 Dude, I love that. I love the idea of science having a breakthrough because people are tinkering, like, essentially at night in the basement. Like, that's-
18:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, and, you know, maybe somebody will get it done. My money's still on the big labs, though.
18:21 Speaker 00 All right. Well, I'll take the other side of that bet just for fun. We'll, we'll call it a lunch bet, and we'll see who's right.
18:26 Speaker 01 Sounds good.
18:27 Speaker 00 Moving on, for me using Tim as my personal tutor, we are going to take a quick break and then come back and talk about fusion, superconductors, and how big-swing technology could really change the future.
18:41 Speaker 00 Okay, but we don't have LK99. We don't currently have a room temperature superconductors. We don't have that revolution coming. But something that may be coming is, is fusion. And I'm gonna say near future, because it sounds like we're seeing experiments where we're getting more energy out than we're getting in. And I know we're far from commercial viability, but the bits and pieces that I'm seeing do feel pretty positive.
19:02 Speaker 01 It feels like we're getting somewhere. You know, if you'd asked me five, seven years ago about fusion, I would have told you the same old story of, we've heard all these promises before. It's always 10, 20 years in the future. 10, 20 years from now, we'll probably be hearing that same story. Yes, now they're saying it's probably about 10 years in the future, but there does seem to be a lot of smart minds kind of coalescing around that number. It does seem like we're gonna hit commercial-scale pilot plants in the early 2030s.
19:33 Speaker 00 And backing this rapid, perhaps, progress towards eventual functional commercial fusion energy is quite a lot of capital. I think there was about $4 billion invested in these companies between 2021 and 2022. A figure that I presume was inflated by the market at the time, but that amount of capital does not flow into a science project. You know, that's probably stuff that has a commercial hope attached to it.
19:55 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah, exactly. A lot of these companies have gotten far enough along that investors have gotten comfortable putting really large sums into these companies. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, I can't remember the figure, but they've raised well over $1 billion from investors. And rightly so. They've got, they're really far along. They've got a big project. And I think the other thing investors like about it is they have this high-temperature superconducting magnet, which is different, of course, than room-temperature superconducting. It's still cold, but it doesn't have to be close to absolute zero.
20:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. I was about to say, high temperature does not mean like hot. It means slightly less than as cold as possible.
20:34 Speaker 01 It's relative. It's relative. But their high-temperature superconducting magnets are kind of the secret sauce that they're counting on. And so they're setting up potential supply deals with companies that you might think of as being competitors. And I think investors are also looking at it as, hey, this is a great way that if, even if their main experiment for this commercial-scale fusion doesn't work, we've got this really cool technology that we can use in MRIs, we can use in computing, we can use in quantum computing, we can use in all sorts of different applications.
21:06 Speaker 00 So how much power are we getting out so far? Because I was reading through, I think it was your post about kind of the repeat breakthrough and getting net energy out of a fusion reaction. And I know this isn't a lab, but the first was at 3.15 megajoules, and then the second was 3.5 megajoules. And to me, a megajoule is probably something that I'd find in a Pokémon game to like hatch a rare Pokémon. So what the fuck is a megajoule? And how much energy is that really? Could it power a toaster? Could it power a million toasters?
21:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have that answer off the top of my head. What I can say is it's a small fraction of what the entire plant required. I think it's about two orders of magnitude smaller. than the actual amount of energy that this department energy facility required not only to fire the lasers, but also to run, you know, the support equipment, the computers, et cetera. So we still got a long way to go, but the fact that they were able to get more power out of that little fuel pellet than they did when the lasers hit it. So what they do is they measure the amount of energy that the lasers impart on that little fuel pellet. That is the scientific energy in and then the energy they get from the
22:17 Speaker 01 explosion. If it's any more than the energy in, you know, they cheer, they've succeeded.
22:21 Speaker 00 I thought it wasn't an explosion, though. I thought it was more of a like a coming together versus a boom.
22:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. So in this case, this is inertial confinement fusion. And so for that, what they're doing is they're shooting lasers at a tiny fuel pellet, which then kind of bounces off the inside of this gold plated thing. It's very exotic. And essentially, these x-rays bombard the fuel pellet, which then compresses it. And then once it's compressed, it fuses and you get a tiny little pop.
22:48 Speaker 00 And this is why Tim has a much cooler job than I do, because he gets to ask people about lasers all day, whereas I get to approve time off and check people's expenses. Also, according to the inevitable, the venerable CheckYourMath.com, one megajoule is 239,005 calories. In case you wanted to do the math there. So 3.5 megajoules would be somewhere around 800,000, 850,000 calories. I don't know if that's even a useful comparison.
23:13 Speaker 01 I guess we can light that on fire and heat our house or something, right?
23:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's like 4,000 days of me eating. Actually, that's not true. It's like 25 days of me eating. But yeah, our Teresa, our producer, just weighed in with, quote, "That's a lot of pizza." So yes, we now know the fusion to pizza conversion factor. Everyone here is welcome. Now, I want to talk about some other frontier tech really quick while I have you. Obviously, you know, I think about you as our climate guy, but you're also kind of our in-house scientist. Sorry. So quantum, I know there's continued progress there. How are you feeling about the state of quantum from a big tech and startup perspective?
23:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think we're getting somewhere. I think it's kind of on the order of fusion. It's maybe not quite that far off, but you know, it's a technology that's going to take some time. We're making pretty good headway on it, but these things don't happen overnight. There's a lot of challenging engineering problems to solve.
23:59 Speaker 00 And you also have to have lots of cooling for quantum.
24:03 Speaker 01 Exactly. So very much in the same boat as fusion in that regard. So the two can kind of help each other in that way.
24:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was thinking about like, I'm like, well, we need tons of energy to get things so cold you can run quantum computers. If only there was a new source of energy out there that we could provide so that we wouldn't have to burn a bunch of coal.
24:19 Speaker 01 If only.
24:20 Speaker 00 The quantum thing.
24:21 Speaker 01 Well, what we really need is a room temperature superconductor.
24:24 Speaker 00 Ah, so close.
24:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:26 Speaker 00 RIP LK99. So, we've talked about recycling a little bit. We've talked about batteries, talked about power generation, we've talked about computing. Is there like a major space component to when I think about kind of climate tech? Because I know some people do want to put like, you know, big mirrors in the sky and tinker with like how much solar radiation we receive and all that. Does that cross your radar from a startup perspective?
24:44 Speaker 01 It does on occasion. There are some companies that are starting to look into wireless power transfer.
24:50 Speaker 00 Yeah.
24:51 Speaker 01 Which would be, yeah, which would be key if you want to do space-based solar power, which is something that the EU has oddly kind of thrown their hat behind. And, you know, some of this is they're interested in boosting the market for space launch capability, and what better way to do that than building power plants in space? But, you know, anybody who's played SimCity 2000 will remember it's a wonderful, very clean technology.
25:15 Speaker 00 This is the, I'm trying to remember which power plant. You're talking about the microwave.
25:18 Speaker 01 The microwave power plant. That's what it was. Yep. You beam power down from space. And that's exactly what they're doing with this wireless power transfer. It's basically a glorified like microwave antenna and rectenna pairing, and they're just beaming it down. And they have to do all sorts of like clever things, like what if, I don't know, birds get in the way or clouds or whatever.
25:39 Speaker 00 Well, if birds get in the way, they won't be in the way for long.
25:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. But they have ways of like kind of isolating it so that they're not just like frying everything in its path.
25:47 Speaker 00 Also, if you've played SimCity 2000, and if you haven't, sorry that this is too slightly older people talking about video games from our childhood, but there's a natural disaster, I think, associated with that, which is when the power misses and harms a huge fiery line through city. Yeah.
26:00 Speaker 01 Fries your city.
26:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:01 Speaker 01 That's exactly what they're hoping to avoid, you know?
26:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, clearly.
26:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, you know, they've gotten to the point where they've done some pretty decent large demos. And their first application of this is probably not going to be in space. It's probably going to be either hooking up very remote renewable power or supplying power to remote islands or settlements or stuff like that. But, you know, people are thinking about these problems and they're thinking about ways to do it safely.
26:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. And there does seem to be some venture money flowing into it, which I think is interesting.
26:30 Speaker 00 I think it's fantastic is what is more venture capital than space lasers?
26:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:34 Speaker 00 I mean, seriously, like, I mean, venture cap, I think VC got a little sedate or kind of like it felt safe on SaaS.
26:40 Speaker 01 Yes.
26:40 Speaker 00 Like, oh, we'll just keep funding software companies. Like, okay, cool. But like, we can do that with like a bank loan, probably. So like, space lasers, that feels like
26:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, let's take some big swings, right?
26:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:50 Speaker 01 Fusion, superconductors, space lasers.
26:52 Speaker 00 All right. But I want to go from all the fun stuff, just to wrap up here, all the way down to the personal. Because I think that one thing I have noticed in my personal life is that more people are paying attention to the changing climate and they're concerned about it. And so, you know, for folks out there who are excited about this tech that's being built, but also want to have kind of a personal impact, how much effort should we as individuals be doing to tidy up our own energy and carbon footprint?
27:13 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, that is the perennial question and something I've really struggled with over the years. I think as much as you have appetite for, you know, the best thing that you can do, everybody says is go out and vote, right? That's the first thing. The second thing is, you know, look at your bank statement and look at the sorts of things that you're doing and see where you can make a difference. Reducing consumption is something anybody can do. That has a big impact. You can also switch to a renewable power provider, if that's possible. You can buy solar panels. Those are really profitable and it doesn't take long to recruit that investment in many states. You can look at heat pumps, for example. There are a lot of incentives.
27:49 Speaker 00 I knew you were going to mention heat pumps. I was just waiting for you to drop it.
27:53 Speaker 01 Unsexy, but they're there, you know? It's a great, we, our house runs exclusively on heat pumps right now. We're in the Northeast and it works great. So the technology's out there, it's proven, and now there are like wonderful incentives that I wish we'd been able to get.
28:05 Speaker 00 Do heat pumps come with like free crunchy granola and Teva sandals?
28:08 Speaker 01 Not quite, not quite.
28:10 Speaker 00 Not quite. Okay. So that's my childhood, right? Sorry, I forgot. Okay. Yeah, because I've been thinking a lot about our climate footprint in my family and it is tectonic, I think is a way to phrase it. Our house is old, so like when we cool it, it all the cool leaks out. When we heat it, all the heat leaks out. We also have two buildings that we heat and cool. And like, we have dogs that eat. And like, I don't know, we're, we're just, we have a non-electric garlic. We fly commercial a lot. We're terrible. And I do want to do better, but I'm just always torn between like, we're all going to sink.
28:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:38 Speaker 00 And also like, maybe I should turn the AC down.
28:41 Speaker 01 What I mean, what it really comes down to is we need wide-scale systemic change of the sort that, you know, ideally the private market and government can provide. There's a limited amount of signals that we as consumers can send, but where we can send them, give it a shot.
28:56 Speaker 00 Yeah, we should.
28:56 Speaker 01 Can never hurt.
28:57 Speaker 00 I also think that there's probably a green premium because if a startup came to me and said, hey, you know, if you buy our hosting or our email service or whatever, and by the way, we are carbon negative and we're going to charge you more, but we're going to take better care of the planet, we're going to cool our data centers with recycled water out. Like, I mean, I would happily pay 30% more to take better care of.
29:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think there is a part of the market for the green premium. You're not going to get it everywhere. But the nice thing is it's getting to the point now where the green premium doesn't need to exist. A lot of times, you know, if you're running on renewable power, it's cheaper. If you're using recycled water, it's cheaper. And so you don't necessarily, you can, yes, you can sell on these benefits and you might be able to segment the market such that you can get a premium in one part and just sell it regular in the other part. But it's not everywhere, but it does seem like we've seen a shift where the green premium doesn't necessarily need to exist for companies to pay attention to these things.
29:55 Speaker 00 Well, that's very encouraging to hear and also kind of a mark of how far the tech has come. But Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show and I will see you at Disrupt in mere days.
30:04 Speaker 01 Amazing. Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Alex.
30:06 Speaker 00 All right. And for everyone else, don't forget Equity comes out three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Monday is our weekly kickoff show. Wednesday is our thematic show where we bring on a guest and badge them with a lot of questions. And then Friday, of course, is our news roundup. We are EquityPod on Twitter and Threads and we are opening Disrupt. We'll see you there. Pugs, goodbye.
30:25 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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