2021年11月3日

商界终于意识到他们必须为气候变化做点什么，或者至少看起来是这样。最明显的切入点是衡量它们对问题的影响有多大。除非你足够大，足够老练，有专门的可持续发展团队，否则追踪碳排放可能会令人困惑、昂贵且耗时。大多数国家都没有强有力的政府政策来指导碳排放报告。Emma Foehringer Merchant介绍了碳报告初创公司不断增长的生态系统，这些公司的目标是更容易地跟踪排放，然后帮助公司减轻其影响。他们正在尝试不同的方法和风格来达到类似的结果。Watershed收集公司运营和供应链中直接和间接排放的原始数据。然后，该平台将公司与清洁能源和碳去除项目联系起来，以解决排放问题。客户包括快餐休闲沙拉典范Sweetgreen和外卖服务DoorDash。“气候中立”将自己标榜为排放核算的“有机标签”。 To earn that badge, a company must offset emissions from the previous year and devise short-term carbon-reduction targets that can be accomplished in one to two years. Clients include San Francisco’s most fashionable footwear brand, Allbirds, and outdoor brand Cotopaxi. There’s a risk here of confusion stemming from a bunch of startups with slightly different methodologies for counting and dealing with carbon emissions. Companies also disagree on the efficacy of carbon offsets, which zero out emissions on paper but not in the atmosphere. Many corporations push for minimal regulation to give them maximum room to maneuver. But the carbon-accounting execs Emma spoke with were pretty frank about the need for more government policy to clear up discrepancies in how different groups deal with carbon tracking: “It would be really nice if we had some sort of government policy that superseded all of this,” said Climate Neutral CEO Austin Whitman. The key tool to get 100 percent daytime solar power, today Grafting new and decentralized clean energy onto the existing hardware of the grid can feel like pushing a rock up a hill in perpetuity. Get Caught Up 26 May 2021 But cash-strapped rural utilities have already hit 100 percent of their daytime electricity needs with solar, thanks to a software startup called Camus Energy. Jeff St. John has the story on the company, which just raised a $16 million Series A round led by Park West and joined by Congruent Ventures and other investors. CEO and co-founder Astrid Atkinson used to work for Google, using software to corral servers at data centers into a highly reliable, always-on service. “The core of that model for Google was basically this idea of unreliable hardware with reliable software,” she said in an interview. “That’s what we were looking to bring into the grid space.” I’ve seen a lot of metaphors for the grid, but the cloud-computing analogy was new for me. It’s also a compelling narrative for Camus. If the electric grid can be optimized the way Google manages its data centers, modernizing the grid sounds less Sisyphean. Granted, a key difference between cloud computing and the grid is the financial incentives that govern electric utilities. Big regulated utilities typically earn a profit for building new things. It’s not an accident that Camus focuses on serving publicly owned utilities with fewer than 1 million customers. Those groups are structurally aligned to save money for their customer-owners while getting the most out of existing infrastructure. And new from Canary Media… Eric Wesoff has a new roundup of clean energy finance news , “with an eye on discerning real impact from greenwashing and fraud.” Highlights this time include: