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Climate justice and environmental ethics in tech, with Amazon engineer Rajit Iftikhar
Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the giant company’s approach to climate change.
By deploying a kind of corporate social disobedience such as speaking out dramatically at shareholders meetings, and by engaging in a variety of community organizing tactics, the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” group has quickly become a leading example of a growing trend in the tech world: tech employees banding together to take strong ethical stances in defiance of their powerful employers.
The public actions taken by these employees and groups have been covered widely by the news media. For my TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology, however, I wanted to better understand what participating actively in this campaign has been like some of the individuals involved.
How are employees in high-pressure jobs balancing their professional roles and responsibilities with being actively, publicly in defiance of their employers on a high-profile issue? How do leaders in these efforts explain the philosophy underlying their ethical stance? And how likely are their ideas to spread throughout Amazon and beyond – perhaps particularly among younger tech workers?
I recently spoke with a handful of the Amazon employees most actively involved in the Employees for Climate Justice campaign, all of whom inspired me– in similar and different ways. Below is the first of two interviews I’ll publish here. This one is with Rajit Iftikhar, a young software engineer from New York who moved to Seattle to work for Amazon after earning his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell in 2016.
Rajit Iftikhar
Rajit struck me as a humble and precociously wise young man who could be a role model — though he seems to have little interest in singling himself out that way — for thousands of other software engineers and technologists at Amazon and beyond.
Greg Epstein: Your personal story has been key to your organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Can you start by saying a bit about why?
Rajit Iftikhar: A lot of why I care about climate justice is informed by me having parents from another country that is going to be very adversely affected by [climate change]. Countries like Bangladesh are going to suffer some of the worst consequences from climate change, because of where the country’s located, and the fact that it doesn’t have the resources to adapt.
Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of climate crisis; it is much harder for people to live in the rural areas, [people are] being forced into the cities. Then you have the cyclones that the climate crisis is going to bring, and rising sea levels and flooding.
So, my background [emphasizes, for me] how unjust our emissions are in causing all these problems for people in other countries. And even for communities of color within our country who are going to be disproportionately impacted by the emissions that largely richer people [cause].
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Rivian and ‘Free Solo’ star Alex Honnold team up to build solar microgrid with used EV batteries
Rivian, the once secretive company that made its public debut in November with an electric pickup truck and SUV, plans to give its batteries a second life and put them to work in a solar microgrid project in Puerto Rico.
The automaker is teaming up with The Honnold Foundation, an organization started by Alex Honnold, the professional climber and subject of the documentary Free Solo, on the microgrid project. Honnold and Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe will discuss the project Saturday in Denver. The discussion, which is scheduled for 6 pm MT, will be live-streamed.
The microgrid project will be set up in Adjuntas, a city of about 20,000 people in midwestern Puerto Rico that was severely impacted by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Casa Pueblo, an environmental watchdog based in Adjuntas that has been looking for ways to set up affordable sources of community power, is also a partner in the project.
Rivian is providing 135 kilowatt-hour battery packs from its development vehicles to support the microgrid. Earlier this year, battery engineers from Rivian and The Honnold Foundation visited Casa Pueblo and met with community leaders to design a site-specific system that will power many of the businesses located in the Adjuntas town square.
The downtown solar microgrid project will serve two purposes. It will give residents access to electricity for core business if the primary source of power is gone. The microgrid will also be used daily to offset the high cost of energy in Puerto Rico, which is twice the national average of the U.S.
The system is expected to launch in 2020.
“Second-life batteries are a big enabler to accelerating widespread adoption of renewable energy, and it’s exciting to envision this system contributing importantly to a community. This project allows us to model a customized energy storage solution that takes into account space constraints, disaster resiliency and energy independence,” Scaringe said.
The project marks the beginning of the company’s long-term plans to find a wide variety of applications for second-life batteries.
The company designed its pack, module and battery management system to transition from vehicle energy storage to stationary energy storage at the end of their vehicle life. The module itself is thin, a design that allows for second-life applications that are space-efficient and customizable.
Rivian is an electric automaker focused on adventure vehicles like pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. The company announced in February that it had raised $700 million in a round led by Amazon.
The company has spent the first part of its life operating out of the public eye. It was originally launched as Mainstream Motors in 2009. By 2011, the name changed to Rivian and moved out of Florida. Today, the company has more than 1,000 employees split between development locations in Plymouth, Mich., San Jose and Irvine, Calif. and Surrey, England. It also has a 2.6 million-square-foot factory in Normal, Ill.
Rivian plans to launch the R1T electric pickup truck and the R1S SUV in the U.S. in late 2020, with introduction to other global geographies starting in 2021.
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Fintech and cleantech… an odd couple or a perfect marriage?
The Valley’s rocky history with cleantech investing has been well-documented.
Startups focused on non-emitting-generation resources were once lauded as the next big cash cow, but the sector’s hype quickly got away from reality.
Complex underlying science, severe capital intensity, slow-moving customers and high-cost business models outside the comfort zones of typical venture capital ultimately caused a swath of venture-backed companies and investors in the cleantech boom to fall flat.
Yet, decarbonization and sustainability are issues that only seem to grow more dire and more galvanizing for founders and investors by the day, and more company builders are searching for new ways to promote environmental resilience.
While funding for cleantech startups can be hard to find nowadays, over time we’ve seen cleantech startups shift down the stack away from hardware-focused generation plays toward vertical-focused downstream software.
A far cry from past waves of venture-backed energy startups, the downstream cleantech companies offered more familiar technology with more familiar business models, geared toward more recognizable verticals and end users. Now, investors from less traditional cleantech backgrounds are coming out of the woodwork to take a swing at the energy space.
An emerging group of non-traditional investors getting involved in the clean energy space are those traditionally focused on fintech, such as New York and Europe-based venture firm Anthemis — a financial services-focused team that recently sat down with our fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg and I (check out the full meat of the conversation on Extra Crunch).
The tie between cleantech startups and fintech investors may seem tenuous at first thought. However, financial services have long played a significant role in the energy sector and is now becoming a more common end customer for energy startups focused on operations, management and analytics platforms, thus creating real opportunity for fintech investors to offer differentiated value.
Finance powering the world?
Though the conversation around energy resources and decarbonization often focuses on politics, a significant portion of decisions made in the energy generation business is driven by pure economics — is it cheaper to run X resource relative to resources Y and Z at a given point in time? Based on bid prices for request for proposals (RFPs) in a specific market and the cost-competitiveness of certain resources, will a developer be able to hit their targeted rate of return if they build, buy or operate a certain type of generation asset?
Alternative generation sources like wind, solid oxide fuel cells or large-scale or even rooftop solar have reached more competitive cost levels — in many parts of the U.S., wind and solar are in fact often the cheapest form of generation for power providers to run.
Thus as renewable resources have grown more cost competitive, more infrastructure developers and other new entrants have been emptying their wallets to buy up or build renewable assets like large-scale solar or wind farms, with the American Council on Renewable Energy even forecasting cumulative private investment in renewable energy possibly reaching up to $1 trillion in the U.S. by 2030.
A major and swelling set of renewable energy sources are now led by financial types looking for tools and platforms to better understand the operating and financial performance of their assets, in order to better maximize their return profile in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Therefore, fintech-focused venture firms with financial service pedigrees, like Anthemis, now find themselves in pole position when it comes to understanding cleantech startup customers, how they make purchase decisions, and what they’re looking for in a product.
In certain cases, fintech firms can even offer significant insight into shaping the efficacy of a product offering. For example, Anthemis portfolio company kWh Analytics provides a risk management and analytics platform for solar investors and operators that helps break down production, financial analysis and portfolio performance.
For platforms like kWh analytics, fintech-focused firms can better understand the value proposition offered and help platforms understand how their technology can mechanically influence rates of return or otherwise.
The financial service customers for clean energy-related platforms extends past just private equity firms. Platforms have been and are being built around energy trading, renewable energy financing (think financing for rooftop solar) or the surrounding insurance market for assets.
When speaking with several of Anthemis’ cleantech portfolio companies, founders emphasized the value of having a fintech investor on board that not only knows the customer in these cases, but that also has a deep understanding of the broader financial ecosystem that surrounds energy assets.
Founders and firms seem to be realizing that various arms of financial services are playing growing roles when it comes to the development and access to clean energy resources.
By offering platforms and surrounding infrastructure that can improve the ease of operations for the growing number of finance-driven operators or can improve the actual financial performance of energy resources, companies can influence the fight for environmental sustainability by accelerating the development and adoption of cleaner resources.
Ultimately, a massive number of energy decisions are made by financial services firms and fintech firms may often know the customers and products of downstream cleantech startups more than most. And while the financial services sector has often been labeled as dirty by some, the vital role it can play in the future of sustainable energy offers the industry a real chance to clean up its image.
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Despite declines for the quarter, Tesla is bullish on its overall energy business
Even as its solar business declined in step with its overall earnings, Tesla is bullish on the prospects for the energy side of its business over the course of the year.
The energy business is an unheralded part of Tesla — overshadowed by its headline-grabbing (and much larger) auto exploits — that chief executive Elon Musk thinks will generate an increasing share of revenue for the company over time.
Revenues from its solar power and energy storage business fell by 13 percent from the fourth quarter 2018 and 21 percent from a year ago period, down to $324.7 million from $371.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2018 and $410 million in the year ago quarter.
Solar energy deployments fell from 73 megawatts to 47 megawatts from the fourth to the first quarter, the company said. Those figures were offset by a slight increase in solar deployments.
The company actually introduced a new financing and purchasing model for solar installations in the second quarter — saying in its shareholder letter that residential solar customers can buy directly from the Tesla website, in standardized capacity increments.
“We aim to put customers in a position of cash generation after deployment with only a $99 deposit upfront. That way, there should be no reason for anyone not to have solar generation on their roof,” Musk and chief financial officer Zachary Kirkhorn wrote in the shareholder letter.
Tesla’s battery storage business was hit as the company shifted units from energy storage to installation in its own vehicles.
“Energy storage production in the second half of 2018 was limited by cell production as we routed all available Gigafactory 1 cell capacity to supply Model 3,” the company wrote in its letter. “Some Gigafactory 1 cell production has been routed back to the energy storage business, enabling us to increase production in Q1 by roughly 30% compared to the previous quarter.”
And Musk thinks that the energy business will grow significantly over the course of the year. “We hope that growth rate will continue and battery storage will become a bigger and bigger percentage over time,” Musk said on an analyst call following the earnings release. Potentially, Tesla thinks its energy business could grow by as much as 300 percent, Musk said.
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Google launches clean energy project in Taiwan, its first in Asia
Google has launched its first clean energy project in Asia. The company announced today that it struck a long-term agreement to buy the output of a 10-megawatt solar array in Tainan City, Taiwan, about 100 km south of its data center in the country. Google already has solar and wind projects across North and South America, as well as Europe.
The agreement is a collaboration between Google, several Taiwanese energy companies and the country’s government, which recently revised Taiwan’s Electricity Act to enable non-utility companies to purchase renewable energy directly. The revisions are part of Taiwan’s new energy policy, aimed at phasing out nuclear energy by 2025 and increasing the share of electricity generated from renewable sources to 20 percent.
Google is the first corporate power buyer to take advantage of the revised law. Its development partners are Diode Ventures, Taiyen Green Energy, J&V Energy and New Green Power.
The solar array will be connected to the same regional power grid at Google’s Chuanghua County data center, one of two in Asia (the other is in Singapore). The poles supporting the solar panels will be mounted into commercial fishing ponds, an arrangement that Marsden Hanna, Google’s senior lead of energy and infrastructure, said in a blog post will maximize land-use efficiency and respect the local ecology because “fish and solar panels can coexist peacefully.” Fishing pond owners will also be compensated for hosting the panels.
The agreement means Google will get a long-term, fixed electricity price for its operations in Taiwan.
“As the Taiwanese government pursues further measures to remove market barriers and reduce renewable energy costs, we’re hopeful that more companies will purchase renewable energy, driving even larger projects across Taiwan,” said Hanna.
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Oil and gas giants Chevron and Occidental are backing tech to combat carbon emissions
Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company developing technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and process it for use in enhanced oil recovery or in the creation of new synthetic fuels, has locked in financing from two big industry backers — Chevron and Occidental Petroleum — to bring its products to market.
The undisclosed amount of capital Carbon Engineering raised from the investment arms of two of the world’s largest oil and gas companies — Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Chevron Technology Ventures — will be used to commercialize its technology at a time when legislation in California and British Columbia are making low-carbon fuels more economically viable, according to a statement from the company’s chief executive, Steve Oldham. The company had already managed to nab Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates as an investor.
Gates is one of several big-name backers to be drawn to renewable energy technologies in the face of a steadily warming planet that’s rapidly approaching a tipping point of no return when it comes to global climate change. Together with a group of other multi-billionaires, including Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma, Masayoshi Son and Meg Whitman, Gates launched a $1 billion fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures last year to back companies that are developing things like new energy storage and water production technologies.
The Squamish, B.C.-based Carbon Engineering isn’t in the Breakthrough portfolio, but is one of several companies working on making economically viable a technology called “direct air capture” of carbon dioxide.
At the company’s pilot plant in Squamish, air gets hoovered up by giant fans into a processing facility where it is treated with potassium hydroxide, which captures and holds the carbon dioxide. Then more chemicals and heat are added to the mix to create millions of small white pellets — which contain higher concentrations of the carbon dioxide.
After that, the pellets are heated again to create a gas that is almost pure carbon dioxide. That gas can be either sequestered underground (a proposition with no economic benefit for Carbon Engineering at the moment) or converted back into fuels or chemicals, or used in enhanced oil recovery.
Carbon Engineering and competitors like ClimeWorks or Global Thermostat claim they can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for roughly $100 per ton, or a bit less once they can get to scale. To make money though, they’ll need to refine that carbon dioxide into some sort of product — likely a fuel, which will return that carbon to the atmosphere.
Other companies tackling carbon capture, like Newlight Technologies and Opus12, convert the carbon into plastics or chemicals, while companies like CarbonCure aim to turn the captured carbon into a cement replacement.
While these products from carbon emissions are available, they’re not yet commercially viable at a significant scale. Oldham told National Public Radio that the fuel Carbon Engineering manufactures is roughly 20 percent more expensive than regular gasoline.
That’s why states like California are putting incentives in place to offset the added costs of using these low-carbon products.
Carbon Engineering has already spent $30 million to develop its process, while Climeworks raised $31 million last year to develop its own version of this carbon capture technology.
Not all climate watchers are convinced that these kinds of negative emission technologies are the answer. They argue that it’s less expensive to use renewable energy and other carbon-free energy sources than to take carbon dioxide out of the air.
At this point, though, emission reductions may not be enough. Given the dire reports coming out of the Trump administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s going to take pretty much a combination of everything that humanity’s got to avoid a pretty catastrophic fate for a pretty large portion of the world’s population.
Even the companies that have been notorious for their contributions to the climate crisis that the world faces are waking up to the need for decarbonization (even if it’s an open question of whether they’re being dragged to the table or sitting down of their own free will).
Oxy Low Carbon Ventures is a good example. Reading the writing on the wall, the firm has invested not just in Carbon Engineering, but another company called NET Power, which purports to have developed a power plant with zero emissions.
“It is a very important time for the air capture field right now,” said Oldham in a statement. “We’re seeing leading jurisdictions, like California and British Columbia, creating markets for low carbon fuels and technologies like DAC, through effective climate policy. These efficient market-based regulations, and action from energy industry leaders like Occidental and Chevron, show the power of policy in driving innovation and achieving emissions reductions while delivering reliable and affordable energy.”
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This project is mapping every solar panel in the country using machine learning
Renewable energy is the future, but at present no one is tracking just who’s got solar panels on their roof, in their back yard, or a shared neighborhood installation. Fortunately, solar panels generally work best when exposed to the light. That makes them easy to spot, and count, from orbit — which is just what the DeepSolar project is doing.
There are a number of initiatives for collecting this information — some regulated, some voluntary, some automated. But none of them is comprehensive enough or accurate enough to base policy or business decisions on at a national or state level.
Stanford engineers (mechanical and civil, respectively) Arun Majumdar and Ram Rajagopal decided to remedy this with what seems like, in retrospect, rather an obvious solution.
Machine learning systems are great at looking at images and finding objects they’ve been “trained” to recognize, whether it’s cats, faces, or cars… so why not solar panels?
Their team, including grad students Jiafan Yu and Zhecheng Wang, put together an image recognition machine learning agent trained on hundreds of thousands of satellite images. The model learns both to identify the presence of solar panels in an image, and to find the shape and area of those panels.
Having evaluated the model on nearly a hundred thousand other randomly sampled satellite images of the U.S., they found they achieved an accuracy of about 90 percent (slightly more or less depending on how it’s measured), which is well ahead of other models, and it estimated cell size with only about a 3 percent error. (Its main weakness is very small installations, Rajagopal told me, but this is partially due to the limits of the imagery.)
The team then put the model to work chewing through over a billion image tiles covering as much of the lower 48 states as they could find suitable imagery for. That excludes quite a bit of area, but consider that much of that is, for example, mountains. Not a lot of solar installations there, and few people are trying to put up cells in national parks.
All in all it’s about 6 percent of the actual country — but Rajagopal pointed out that urban areas comprise only about 3.5 percent, so this covers all of them and more. He estimated that perhaps perhaps 5 percent of installations are in the areas the system has yet to process (but is working on).
Scanning took a whole month, but at the end the model had found 1.47 million individual solar installations (which could be a few panels on a roof or a whole solar farm). That’s many more than have been counted by other efforts, and the most successful of those didn’t come with the exact location, as DeepSolar’s data does.
Basic plotting of this data produces all kinds of interesting new info. You can compare solar installation density at the state, county, census tract, or even square mile level and compare that to all kinds of other metrics — average sunny days per year, household income, voting preference, and so on.
A couple interesting findings: Only 4 percent of all census tracts (roughly 3,000 out of 75,000) had more than 100 residential-scale solar systems, meaning installations are highly concentrated. Residential solar made up 87 percent of the total installation count, but with a median size of around 25 square meters, only 34 percent of the total solar cell surface area.
Peak deployment density can be found where there are about a thousand people per square mile — think a small town or suburb, not a major city. And there’s a sort of inflection point at which people start installing: when an area receives more than 4.5 kWh per square meter per day of solar radiation. How that corresponds to weather, location, exposure and so on is a more complicated question.
This and other demographics are all good information to know if you want to invest in solar, since they basically tell you where it’s justified or needed.
“We have created and released a website where you can play with the data at the aggregated level (we are keeping it at census tract level) to respect the privacy of consumers,” Rajagopal said. “We are exploring how to make individual detections public while respecting privacy (perhaps by encouraging public participation and crowdsourcing).”
“We decided to share all of the work in open source to encourage others in industry and academia to utilize both the method as well as the data to produce more insights. We feel that changes need to happen fast, and this is one of the ways to aid in that. Perhaps in the future, services can be built around this type of data,” he continued.
Plans are underway to expand the service to the rest of the U.S. and other countries as well. The data is available to peruse here, or here as a map; the team’s paper describing the project was published today in the journal Joule.
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The cost of energy storage has stalled adoption of renewable power. Energy Vault has a solution.
Because solar and wind power are now cheaper to produce than energy from fossil fuels, the only obstacle that remains to the mass adoption of renewable power is the amount of money utilities need to spend to store the energy those systems produce.
Right now, storing 100 megawatts of renewable energy (enough to power roughly 600,000 homes) means spending roughly $65.6 million on massive batteries like the kind made by Tesla, or relying on huge pumped hydro-electric storage projects that essentially create man-made dams where the release of water spins turbines to generate energy (those projects are typically far larger than 100 megawatts).
A new company called Energy Vault, launched from Bill Gross’ Idealab incubator in Pasadena, Calif., has developed a technology, based on the principles of pumped hydro storage, that it claims can slash the cost of energy storage to a fraction of the current price and make renewable energy cost-effective all day, every day.
As climate change worries mount, finding a solution that can make renewables even more compelling and cost-effective isn’t just a good business — it’s a global priority. 
Energy Vault’s technology consists of a 33-story-high, six-armed crane with booms extending to nearly the length of a football field (about 87 yards). That crane is surrounded by 5,000 huge concrete blocks weighing roughly 35 metric tons altogether (or around 172,000 pounds).
“These would typically be built out near wind farms or solar plants,” said Robert Piconi, the chief executive of Energy Vault. “This is not something that you’d drop in the middle of the city.”
The cranes are controlled by a software system that manages the movement of the cement blocks to either store the energy generated by solar or wind farms, or discharge that energy onto the power grid.
According to Piconi, each of the company’s systems will have 35 megawatt hours of nominal energy capacity and 4 megawatts of peak power capacity. Ramp times occur in as little as a millisecond with 100 percent power achieved in 2.9 seconds.
The systems have roundtrip efficiencies of roughly 90 percent and there’s no energy loss, as the technology relies on mechanical energy from incredibly durable materials that have a roughly 30-year lifetime.
And all of this at a price tag of around $7 million to $8 million per system, according to Piconi. What makes the system even more sustainable, according to Piconi, is the use of recycled concrete that was only going to be landfilled — instead of new cement construction.
Energy Vault has already set up a demonstration system in Biasca, Switzerland, next to the company’s Lugarno headquarters. That demonstration plant likely had a role in the company’s ability to sign up a clutch of initial customers, including The Tata Power Company Limited, India’s largest integrated power company, to deploy an initial 35 MWh Energy Vault system by 2019.
“Innovation in energy storage represents the largest and most near-term opportunity to accelerate renewable deployments and bring us closer to replacing fossil fuels as the primary source to meet the world’s continual growth in energy demand,” said Bill Gross, co-founder, Energy Vault and founder of Idealab. “We’re excited to support Energy Vault in bringing this groundbreaking technology to the market.”
Indeed, over the next two years, Energy Vault expects customers to build between 500 megawatts and one gigawatt of storage capacity using its systems, according to Piconi.
“We have customers on every continent to build these units,” he said.
Piconi, a former Danaher executive, met Gross 12 years ago as the Idealab founder was beginning his push into renewable energy technologies. The two men stayed in touch and began seriously contemplating the creation of Energy Vault after nearly a decade of collaboration and contact.
It was back in 2017 that Piconi, Gross and fellow co-founder and chief technical officer Andrea Pedretti hit upon the idea for Energy Vault’s novel approach to energy storage.
“It became clear to him a few years ago how important storage was going to be,” said Piconi.
The three men started looking at the efficiencies available through pumped hydroelectric storage, and began brainstorming ways to mimic that process using mechanical energy. “We looked at a steel tower first, but that was too expensive. We thought about water in a tower pumped up, but there were efficiency issues there,” Piconi said. “Then we got to the concrete bricks and the crane.”
The concrete was important for the cost of materials, and because of the energy intensity and pollution that’s involved with manufacturing cement, the team decided to use recycled cement to make the blocks that its energy storage system would use.
Enter, Cemex, one of the largest cement manufacturers in the world, which has joined with Energy Vault as a partner.
Energy Vault has already raised capital through several “seed” rounds to develop its technology and get the prototype in Switzerland up and running.
“Energy Vault’s team has developed a disruptive platform, and we are enthusiastic to work with their team to deploy an environmentally efficient and cost-effective energy storage solution that is highly viable,” said Dr. Davide Zampini, head of Cemex Global R&D and IP. “We share a common commitment to enable a future where resources are used responsibly, which is paramount to Cemex’s strategy for sustainable development.”
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Facebook has committed to using 100% renewable power for global operations by 2020
Earlier today, Facebook said that it has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent and using 100 percent renewable energy to power global operations at the social networking giant by the end of 2020.
So, while the company may have problems keeping foreign nationals from using the platform for influence operations (or garbage influencers from engaging in influence operations), at least they’ll be doing it with less of an effect on climate change.
Facebook gave itself a well-deserved pat on the back for its pace of acquiring renewable energy. The company bought over 3 gigawatts of new solar and wind energy since its first renewable energy purchase in 2013 (that includes 2.5 gigawatts in the past 12 months alone — a rate of acquisition that makes the intervening years look… well… kind of paltry).
What’s especially good about the Facebook renewable purchases is that they’re not just offset agreements — deals where a company buys renewable energy in some far-flung geography to offset the power they’re buying in local markets that relies on traditional carbon-based fuel sources.
“All of these wind and solar projects are new and on the same grid as our data centers,” the company said. “That means that each of these projects brings jobs, investment and a healthier environment to the communities that host us — from Prineville, Oregon, and Los Lunas, New Mexico, to Henrico, Virginia, and Luleå, Sweden.”
The targets that Facebook is making public today are part of the company’s commitment to the Paris Agreement through the “We Are Still In” initiative, the company said.
For Facebook, the announcement is something of a victory lap. Back in 2015, the company set a goal of having 50 percent of its power supplied to facilities from renewable energy sources by 2018. It actually hit that target in 2017.
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Solar project lending startup Wunder Capital raises $112 million as renewable energy shines
As renewable energy continues to gobble up more and more of the new energy capacity coming online, the solar project lending company Wunder Capital has raised $112 million in primarily debt financing to boost its business.
The 90 percent debt and 10 percent equity commitment came from the multi-strategy investment firm Cyrus Investments, which has backed renewable energy projects for years through its investment in RePower Group.
“The debt component is going to blow out the lending opportunity,” says Wunder chief executive Bryan Birsic.
Wunder chose to consolidate the debt and equity round with a single lead investor to simplify the negotiation process on both sides of the table, Birsic said. “Since Cyrus is an equity holder in the company we can come to better terms,” on debt facilities and repayment, he said.
Wunder lends money to commercial solar energy development projects throughout the U.S. and its business has been buoyed by a flood of demand for new solar energy projects coming online.
Since its launch in 2016, the company has financed more than 180 projects throughout the U.S., which are generating somewhere in the range of 50 megawatts (or enough electricity to power roughly 32,500 homes).
The Boulder, Colo.-based company makes money in three ways: It charges closing fees, a servicing fee and annual interest rate on the debt it provides — typically Wunder will pull in between 4 percent and 5 percent off of each loan it provides to a project.
And business… for renewable energy… is booming.
For instance, the industry appears to have shaken off concerns over price increases stemming from the tariffs imposed on solar panels as part of broad punitive measures President Trump has taken against China (which supplies most of the world’s solar panels).
“It was really pleasant to see that folks were less reactionary and more responsive to the data,” says Birsic. The headlines, Birsic explains, were worse than the reality for the industry. The headlines in January predicted a 30 percent tariff on solar panels, but banks thought those increases would ultimately result in a 3 percent price increase for residential solar installations and a 4 percent price increase for commercial solar.
Those price increases would only bring costs in line with what they were at the end of 2017, since over the course of the year prices on installations declined 10 percent, Birsic says.
“We’re very cool with the economics as it existed in 2017,” he said.
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