Lowercarbon Capital

We've crossed 30,000 hours of pyrolysis operations and we're starting to scale up our reactors to drive up throughput and drive down costs. Let's go! Full blog post in comments.

Xcimer Energy Corporation and TRUMPF just published the blueprint for a laser fusion power plant that doesn’t cost a stupid amount of money to build. The NIF’s laser architecture, the only approach that actually achieved breakeven in 2022, has a cost floor of ~$1,000/joule. Xcimer’s is under $100. That gap is the difference between making history and generating near limitless clean energy every day.

One of the reasons I got excited about climate investing at the start was the sense that we were at the start of a supercycle. The logic was that things that are more efficient + more performant tend to win over time, without requiring people to pay a premium to do the right thing. And the assets that would accrue the most value would be physical - enabled by software, but grounded in atoms. What's interesting is that the supercycle thesis has only gotten stronger in the years since I left regular-way tech investing and moved into hardtech / deeptech / however you want to label it today. It's not one cycle anymore - electrification, deglobalization, defense, AI infrastructure - they're layering on top of each other, competing for the same copper, steel, grid capacity, and generation. It's also a different world than when software got valued on the predictability of its recurring revenue. In a stable macro environment, that made sense. Today feels harder to predict, and that multiple has compressed accordingly. You can't prompt-engineer your way out of a grid interconnection queue, so hardware feels like it has a deeper moat? The Carlyle Group published a good piece on this today, which is worth reading if you're watching the rotation from tech into energy and metals play out, too...

Distributed energy storage is moving from concept to core grid infrastructure, and our partnership with El Paso Electric Company is a prime example of what that looks like in practice. In this interview with PV Magazine, Tim Pianta, Base Power Company's Head of Utility Partnerships, shares how we're helping utilities like EPE unlock flexible, customer-sited capacity faster and more cost-effectively than traditional buildouts. Read the full interview: https://lnkd.in/ghBkguN3 #DistributedEnergy #GridReliability #EnergyStorage #Utilities #DER

Isometric just partnered with 8 Earth-observation and data providers to sharpen nature-based carbon removal certification. Better data in, better certificates out.

Texas is staring down another summer of data center growth, infrastructure constraints, and dog day heat. In anticipation, El Paso Electric (EPE) just made the smart call to deploy Base Power Company’s home batteries to strengthen the grid. Base Power provides the distributed flexibility, EPE manages the fleet, and customers keep the AC humming without the blackouts.

Each year Contrary Research releases its Tech Trends Report, which came out last week (and I'll link in comments). The first half focuses heavily on LLM/AI adoption curves, but the second half is about the bottlenecks around power and energy constraints, which is what we specialize in at Lowercarbon. A few counterintuitive facts: - Energy demand from EVs alone could actually exceed AI-driven growth over the coming decade (although data centers are most of the narrative today); - >70% of the US grid is 25+ years old, and 80% of US power outages in the last few years have been due to weather. - New transmission line permitting takes four years on average to secure, and shortages in large electronic transformers are driving a large increase in price and lead times. We have written before about the difficulty of timing demand, but supply chain bottlenecks are ripe for growth-stage investments (technologies that are ready and able to scale now). Some new announcements in this space coming soon!