Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Cleantech 2.0
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
3y ago
It took two decades to walk a long and windy road to mainstream returns on cleantech investments. Clean tech 1.0, 20 years ago, happened when the internet bubble busted and Silicon Valley VCs jumped into cleantech. Solar and fuel cells were hot, driven by expectation of mass adoption of fuel cell cars by 2020. The Obama era, with its subsidies and feed in tariffs, saw solar and wind power scale to utility scale but also the financial crisis. Capital intensive was a curse and breakthrough technologies were starved of capital. Venture capital lost about half of the $25B they invested in cleantec ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: The Emerging Carbon Economy
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
3y ago
The CarbonXprice winners were announced last week. Both CarbonCure Technologies and CarbonBuilt develop CO2-to-concrete technologies, despite CO2-to-polymers and CO2-to-chemicals companies also being among the finalists. Their win is no surprise, as one of conditions for winning was that the technology can be deployed at commercial scale in the near term. Lux research predicts that the carbon economy will be $550 billion by 2040, projecting that CO2 utilization will be driven by the building materials industry. ExxonMobil announced their plans for a potential new upstream business by deploying ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Climate and the cost of inaction
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
3y ago
A systemic change is on the rise In 2008 Mark Lynas, a science writer, published his book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. He is back now with his final warning; Six Degrees of Climate Emergency. In the twelve years since the first book was published, the situation has not improved. His apocalyptic scene in 2045 where hurricane Odessa destroys houses and floods large parts of Houston Texas has actually happened in 2017, when hurricane Harvey reached Texas in a world already 1 degree warmer than in preindustrial times. His book lays out the scenarios for an increase of 1,2, 3 and mor ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Hydrogen Economy
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
3y ago
Regional stakeholders in Zuid-Holland have worked on the so-called Roadmap Next Economy over the last few years, advised by Jeremy Rifkin. Mr. Rifkin published a book “The Hydrogen Economy” in 2002 and predicted at the time that a critical watershed for the fossil era was fast approaching. The Guardian science writer Larry Elliott titled his review of the book “H is for Hot air”. In April 1972 J. Bockris of Flinders university South Australia published an article in Science titled “A hydrogen economy”. The concept envisages, he wrote, “atomic reactors floating on deep enough (for heat dis ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: At Home and Reflecting a Bit
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
In his 2005 TED talk  Professor in astrophysics, Martin Rees, wondered if this would be our (humanity) final century. We probably all saw the 2015 Bill Gates Ted Talk where he predicts the pandemic threat. Dr. Toby Ord, a moral philosopher with an engineering background and working at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity institute, founded by Nick Bostrom , recently published the Precipice with the not very uplifting subtitle: existential Risk and the future of humanity. Existential means a threat to humanity’s long term potential here, not nece ..read more
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EV Locker Room Talk
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
The Volkswagen Group is betting on Electric Vehicles (EV’s), unveiling their plan to produce 29 million EV’s in the coming 9 years, whilst also announcing significant 2019 results.  Full disclosure… I drive an EV much to the amusement of my energy knowledgeable friends, who like to say: “you drive on coal now” (I charge at home and my utility promises me 100% wind power at a small premium). Therefore, I would like to ask you to please help me put the debate on what has a lower carbon footprint, a Diesel or an Electric car, to bed. Before jumping to conclusions, it is not as clear-cut as you mi ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Big Picture Revisited
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
About a year ago, I wrote in my blog that sucking CO2 out of the air had gone from moral hazard to moral imperative but that CO2 removal and usage technology could at best fill gaps in an overall effort to decarbonise the economy. A more holistic view was needed, to include land use. I also wrote that nature is about balance and that rebalancing nature’s cycles (carbon, hydro and thermal) requires massive restoration of forest and degraded land and the planting of trees. Signing on to planting a trillion trees became the “entry fee” for the World Economic Forum last week. Although in itself a ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: In Pursuit of Net Zero
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
We visited the Cleantech Group’s Asia summit in Singapore on October 8th and 9th with a delegation from Rotterdam (vice mayor, city officials and entrepreneurs). I was invited to speak during the opening session and wanted to remind the audience that we need to get honest and on with climate change. We have about 12 years. Thankfully this was not me saying this but Michael le Page in the New Scientist in his excellent overview article Climate (un)certainty: “Amid the morass of confusing and conflicting numbers, two things remain crystal clear. First, we have to reduce net global emissions to z ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Big Picture
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
Big picture: summer reading “It is too late to be a pessimist”, I sometimes say, and continue to try to do things in relation to the climate, speak here, nudge there and start a project. Comes summer holiday, we may have some time to reflect on the big picture and on what we can do. A recent study published in Nature tries to answer the following question: what would happen if we stop building fossil burning stuff? To answer that question the researchers looked at all the emissions from electricity, energy, transport, residential and commercial infrastructure as of 2018. They then estimated th ..read more
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Blog by Fred van Beuningen: Helsinki
Clean Tech Delta Blog
by CTD
4y ago
Blog by Fred van Beuningen Helsinki Was the place to be in the week of June 3rd with Artic15, Cleantech days and the World Circular economy forum.  Sitra, Finland’s development fund, has been at the forefront of circular economy and presented an update of their circular economy strategy. Interesting to note that next to logical drivers as low carbon economy and resource scarcity they highlight competitiveness and economic growth: “targets set in the Paris agreement will require $90 trillion of investments by 2030”. At my former company we would say that “sustainability is business and business ..read more
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