Climate technology: Making industry emissions-free is a challenge, but not impossible

The TechEnergy Ventures team gathered for our annual offsite retreat last month to discuss the state of climate technology, review what we did last year, and align our priorities as we move forward. It wasn’t all work, of course. Our time in the amazing countryside outside Tandil, Buenos Aires province was the perfect opportunity for bonding and leisure activities, from riding horses to playing football and listening to some incredible music played by our own talented team.

We had a very ambitious agenda. We reviewed both our ongoing projects and new opportunities to advance our investment and impact thesis, portfolio strategy, and capabilities building. We also took several live polls amongst ourselves. These led to some valuable and interesting discussions. With the support of BTS, a consultancy specializing in the people side of strategy, we had multiple team-building sessions. We were honored as well to have energy expert Michael Barnard as a guest speaker. He played the devil’s advocate, providing contrarian views for us to consider, which was fantastic to balance some of our internal views. We also had time for fundamental questions, such as: “Why are we doing this?” and “what’s our purpose?"

All in all, the retreat was an incredible experience with a highly engaged team that once again demonstrated their passion and commitment to our ambition. While we had many points of consensus, we also had divergent views that were healthy and constructive:

1. Are we late? Despite the optimism that technology can play a vital role in accelerating decarbonization, there is an unfortunate consensus that we will fail to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Only 10% of us think that we will achieve net-zero by 2050, while 70% predict more than 10Gta (1.8°C) and 20% predict more than 20Gta (2.3°C).
2. Is technology the bottleneck? We don’t think so. Instead, we concluded as a team that the leading reasons holding back a faster reduction in carbon emissions are conflicted interests, inefficient capital allocation, and a lack of willingness to pay a green premium. Technology, on the other hand, is advancing at an impressive pace and delivering innovation to help reduce emissions. It’s incredible how quickly the long-overlooked scientific fields are now showing encouraging pace of development and innovation.
3. Will there be a climate-tech bubble? While the segment has shown resilience, there is a reasonable risk of a climate-tech bubble. Ninety percent of us believe that 50% of climate-tech funds will not return the capital to their investors.

Despite these challenges, we are more than excited about the role that we can play in supporting the development of technologies that can accelerate the decarbonization of the industrial and power sectors.

· Andrea Siciliani , Enrico Bonatti , Ezequiel Urdampilleta , and Tomás Rauch have not only identified and reviewed over 350 hardware companies within our verticals of interest, but they have analyzed hundreds of cases for the use of decarbonization technologies.

• We have announced five investments (Versogen, Quaise Energy, Quino Energy, Svante Technological Solutions , and Noon Energy) and closed on another seven opportunities that we will unveil shortly. While our first five investments were based in North America, we’ve since expanded our reach with investments in the Europe, Israel, and the United Kingdom.
• We are also growing our investment team in both Buenos Aires and Milan to accelerate the decarbonization of our group, develop business opportunities in our geographies of interest, and support our expanding portfolio of companies.
• Our technical team, led by Marco Tivelli , continued to build capabilities, with Abigail Rozenblit and Nicolás Fiandrino joining the effort that brings together the expertise of the Grupo Techint and several highly knowledgeable external advisors.
• We collaborated and co-invested with many leading universities and accelerator programs, climate-tech venture capital firms, and leading corporate venture capital firms.

We are extremely thankful for the vote of confidence given to us by the entire climate-tech ecosystem, which has shared insights and investment opportunities with us. We do not take this collaboration for granted, and seeing some of the most relevant players in the segment actively support our ambition has definitely been one of the highlights of our first year of operation.

As we build on our mandate, we look forward to strengthening our contribution to the climate-tech ecosystem. We are more confident than ever that by working together we will be the great enabler to reach the ambitious transformation that the world needs.