EIP Weekly Reads 4/12/21
EIP Weekly Reads 4/12/21
Energy Impact Partners is a strategic investment platform leading the energy transition. And we read a lot. Here are some of the key stories making the rounds with us this week.
Exciting news: We’ve launched the EIP Climate Tech Index, which is designed to track the daily performance of public companies primarily involved in providing technology that supports global decarbonization.
The EIP Climate Tech index is currently up 165% over the last 12 months, compared to the NASDAQ at 69% over that same period. Wild. You can read more in Techcrunch, Axios, and the Financial Times.
Even the WSJ is bullish on the EV future with promises of record-setting revenue growth from EV startups. They do however point out…
Sunnova is also making a major play with it's acquisition of Sunstreet and exclusivity on Lennar's residential solar and storage service provider for new home communities.
As we launch our Frontier Initiative, which is focused on developing the transformative technologies that advance the transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, we've been going deep on net zero studies. A few shout-outs to the great work from…
UC Berkeley's 2035 Report which has some fantastic analysis on getting to 90% carbon-free electricity by 2035. That analysis underpins this great chart in Quartz on what load growth looks like as we decarbonize the most carbon-intensive industries.
It's impossible to talk about deep decarbonization without giving credit to the excellent Net Zero America project from Jesse Jenkins and team at Princeton. There are a lot of excellent charts, but one that caught our eye following our investment in Form Energy was on the market opportunity for long-duration storage as a firm resource against nuclear and gas + CCS.
Speaking of CCS, honorable mention to this new report from the Global CCS Institute on the readiness of carbon capture and this (reasonable) question from Pitchbook on whether CCS startups can actually make any money. Their killer stat: VC-backed carbon capture startups took in a record-setting $336.5 million last year.
We love seeing our portfolio companies getting along: celebrating this exciting new partnership with Volta using Sitetracker's tech to double the size of its EV charging station network in a little over two years. And another EIP company, Arcadia, has entered the Texas market with their acquisition of Simple Energy.
In other Texas news, Berkshire Hathaway has proposed building power plants to provide emergency services in Texas. Submitting that without comment. ERCOT also released their final assessment of the outages here. While interesting -- this report does do a bit of a disservice by using capacity estimates for wind and solar rather than what was expected in their own Winter resource adequacy assessment. You can read a great take from our SVP Andy Lubershane on Medium about what lessons can be learned from Texas about the grid of the future here.
The Glorious Leeds United demolished the champions-elect, and most expensive team in the world, Manchester City 2-1 with a brace from Stuart Dallas over the weekend (after going down to 10-men).
Adam James is the Chief of Staff and Senior Vice President at Energy Impact Partners. You can follow him here on Twitter.