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Obvious Ventures’ managing director makes his case.
Last month I wrote about potential overhype in the artificial intelligence space, asking a series of investors whether the hubbub around generative AI had current, tangible implications in the climate sphere. What I mostly heard was: Not yet. Many acknowledged that generative AI could plausibly do fundamental scientific research — creating new chemical and molecular formulations that could have broad implications for climate tech and beyond — but most didn’t think we were there yet.
Not everyone shares that perspective. Obvious Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that focuses on the three pillars of planetary, human, and economic health, says it wants to invest in what it calls “generative science.” Today.
“While most venture dollars are chasing large language models for enterprise productivity, Obvious is funding large science models trained on chemistry, physics, and biology, to generate new scientific breakthroughs in decarbonization, biotech, materials science, and robotics,” James Joaquin, co-founder of the firm, said in a recent blog post titled “ Generative Science: Our Contrarian View of AI.”
There are some companies pursuing this lofty vision, especially in the pharmaceutical space, and Obvious has even invested in a few of them. But whether “generative science” is currently upending the AI and climate space is debatable. In an interview, Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, walked me through why he’s so bullish on AI for climate.
“So computational biology and life sciences really, truly have been using machine learning for a long time,” Beebe told me. Of course, having a machine learning model that identifies patterns in reams of data is different from the type of “generative science” that could come up with new drugs, for example — but now one of Obvious Ventures’ earlier investments, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, has partnered with Nvidia to do just that. “That company uses AI to speed the drug discovery process. We have a number of companies where they are using similar concepts for proteomics and genomics, so that experience taught us that there are plenty of use cases where this can really apply,” Beebe told me.
The success of Recursion, which went public in 2021, has helped fuel the firm’s optimistic AI outlook, and it’s since made a number of investments at the intersection of AI and climate. Just a few weeks ago, Obvious led a $30 million round of Series B funding for Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals, which also included cleantech VC Lowercarbon Capital, among others. The company analyzes swaths of geological data to help locate areas with optimal geothermal resources, creating maps and greatly expediting what can be a highly inefficient process.
“Smart geologists will drill 10 exploratory wells and get one to hit,” Beebe told me. Zanskar aims with its software to dramatically improve that hit rate, and though the company hasn’t provided performance metrics, Beebe said that if we could get closer to nine out of 10, “that changes everything. It changes the economics of traditional geothermal.”
The company also pulls in data such as power line capacity and land pricing to make its recommendations, “It will tell you this is where you should drill to be cost effective. Not just this is where the heat is.”
As useful as this is, though, Zanskar’s tech isn’t generative AI — it’s just a great use case for increasingly powerful predictive AI, in which machine learning models analyze patterns in large datasets to make forecasts and recommendations, in this case where to drill. Thus far, it seems, none of Obvious Ventures’ investments in the climate and AI space are yet fulfilling the ultimate promise of “generative science” as Joaquin characterized it. “Generative media has delivered us a printing press that can write its own words,” he wrote, “but generative science will deliver a more consequential lab bench that can create its own novel arrangements of atoms.”
Beebe sees other climate applications for generative AI, however, particularly for the electric grid. “Maybe the mother of all near future generative science in the climate space is just making the grid smart,” he told me. While Obvious hasn’t yet invested in the AI-enabled smart grid space, Beebe is excited about “agentic systems” that will be able to make autonomous decisions based on real-time supply and demand data. “A result of that might be, let’s take power out of this massive Form seasonal battery sitting up in Modesto and move it to Southern California. Let’s take this water and start pumping it up the hill” choices that, today, “are really not automated in any coordinated way across the system,” he said.
Beebe also thinks there’s big AI potential when it comes to battery chemistries and nuclear reactor designs. “I think that AI is going to help basically expand the edge of what is physically or scientifically possible because of the rate of iteration of different designs. They won’t be right every time, but they will help us get closer and closer to the estimate space. We will then feed back in that reinforcement learning and then it will become better next time,” he told me. “And then I think things like fusion reactor designs are further down the line.”
Again, Obvious hasn’t yet invested in companies actually utilizing AI in these ways, but Beebe is confident that the future is near. And some recent research in does provide reason for hope For example, AI research laboratory Google DeepMind collaborated with the Swiss Plasma Center to learn how to better control hydrogen plasma in nuclear fusion reactors, and Microsoft used its own AI platform to discover a battery material that could reduce lithium use by up to 70%.
Obvious thinks large language models have a space in the climate tech landscape, as well. Last month, the firm co-led the seed round for Halcyon, a company trying to improve access to energy market data via LLM-enhanced searches. It was founded by ex-Twitter employees alongside Nathaniel Bullard (formerly chief content officer at BloombergNEF and publisher of a renowned-in-niche-energy-circles annual decarbonization report).
“We call it NatGPT internally,” Beebe said. “What they’re really trying to do is build a automated consultative service for energy developers to help them figure out where to site power plants, how to think about where to site transmission lines, how to answer any questions that they have about the vast and complex world of accelerating decarbonization of the grid,” Beebe told me. “It’s all AI-based and effectively LLMs, for the most part.”
In summary, even if Obvious’s current investments aren’t quite yet creating “ the chemicals and molecules” to “help solve humanity’s toughest challenges” in the climate sphere, watch this space.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct statements about Zanskar’s accuracy.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”