Joule
Volume 7, Issue 4, 19 April 2023, Pages 611-618
Journal home page for Joule

Commentary
The role of corporate investment in start-ups for climate-tech innovation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2023.02.017Get rights and content

The authors organized the workshop “Accelerating Climate-Mitigating Technology Development and Deployment”, bringing together experts in energy innovation, investment, modeling, and policy. Together, they developed a research agenda for bridging granular private investment data and energy systems models to inform climate and innovation policy (https://drum.lib.umd.edu/handle/1903/21828). The authors are based at the University of Maryland (UMD) Center for Global Sustainability (CGS) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), with expertise in energy and climate policy, innovation and technological change, and macro energy systems and integrated assessment modeling.

Surana is a Senior Fellow at CGS, Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and an investor in start-ups at IST cube. Edwards is an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison. Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Associate at CGS. Borrero is a graduate student at UMD. Clarke is the Director of Decarbonization Pathways at the Bezos Earth Fund and Senior Fellow at CGS. Fedorchak is a former undergraduate student at UW-Madison. Hultman is the Director at CGS, Professor at UMD, and was recently Senior Advisor for the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate at the US Department of State. McJeon is an Associate Research Scholar at CGS and an Earth Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Thomas is a graduate student at UW-Madison. Williams is the Director of the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, a Distinguished University Professor at UMD, and the former Director of ARPA-E.

Section snippets

Main text

Enabling and accelerating the full potential of energy innovation is a critical component of the global policy response to climate change.1 Incentivizing start-ups advancing climate-tech (i.e., products and services related to clean energy and climate change), has become central to innovation policy because start-ups are nimble (compared to incumbents), can quickly focus on bringing new technologies to market, and simultaneously create new jobs and catalyze local industries.2 Public policies to

Acknowledgments

Funding for this research was provided by the Energy and Environment Program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under grant number G-2021-14177 (K.S., M.R.E., K.M.K., Z.H.T., M.A.B., N.E.H., L.C., E.D.W., H.M.). Z.H.T. acknowledges support from the Roy F. Weston Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. The authors thank S. Kurowski and C. Doblinger for their data inputs. The authors are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their extensive and constructive feedback.

Author contributions

K.S. and M.R.E.

References (18)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (3)

9

These authors contributed equally

View full text