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This week we’ve seen the UK launch a Green Bond to help increase ClimateTech investment, and in the wake of the Texas power outages AI jumps up to the challenge of helping manage complex energy networks. Plus, I’ve stumbled across a €200M fund that is helping clean up cities, and their concrete-alternative investment, $10M gets invested into meat alternatives, the potential pitfall of solar farms making deserts hospitable and nano technology that could help smartphones become the new COVID tests.Could Hospitable Deserts Be a Bad Thing?
Giant solar energy farms could make deserts hospitable, fruitful places, but could have more broad reaching negative climate impacts. Read more here.
Agritech Robots Roam the Farm
Covid hit farming hard, with revenues dropping 12%, and production costs climbing. This is in the face of needing to increase production 70% by 2050. As such AgriTech is big business, this company creates robots for in the field. Read more here.
Reducing waste and carbon in retail using AI
New York startup, Impact Analytics, Raises $11 Million Funding to help retailers make more precise merchandising and allocation decisions, reducing waste and their carbon footprint using Artificial Intelligence. Read more here.
€200m EU CleanTech Funding to clean up EU cities
With real estate backing, this new CleanTech VC 2150 launches a €200m fund to clean up Europe’s cities. Investing in various climate tech startups from new construction materials (like CarbonCure) to algorithms, which make buildings more efficient to manage and city planning more sustainable. Read more here.
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Upcoming Interview: CEO of BEAD talks about Intelligent Buildings, Smarter Cities and Human Wellbeing. Find out more here.
Meat Free Chicken Company Raises $10M
As Singapore continues its trend as a food tech hub, Next Gen raises $10M from Blue Horizon, and launches a plant based alternative to Chicken thighs. Apparently, TiNDLE Thy, which is made of water, soy, wheat, oat fiber, coconut oil and methylcellulose, a culinary binder, and a proprietary blend of plant-based fats allows it to cook like and taste like chicken meat. Read more here.
UK Launches New Green Bond
UK chancellor launches a new ‘green bond’ to encourage investment in climate tech Read more here.
Micro-fluidics for rapid smartphone COVID detection
In an upcoming interview with Bisu I learn about the use of labs-on-a-chip and micro fluidics. In this development, micro fluidics are trying to provide lab-free, high accuracy rapid diagnosis of COVID. Read more here.
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Upcoming Interview: CEO of Bisu talks about the health data we flush away everyday, and how micro fluidics could help our health. Find out more here.
Energy Security and AI
A few years ago I was lucky enough to hear a talk from one of the UK National Grid leadership. During that tlak some of the fragility of the system, and the challenges that lay ahead for efficient and optimal use of renewable sources became very apparent. One area that really catpured my attention was the complexities and dependencies of sharing energy loads between countries using interconnects. In the beginning of 2020 the UK imported 9% of it’s energy from these interconnects. Beyond this, instead of having hundreds of large power generation facilities, modern supply grids need to manage a huge number of much less predictable generators (wind, solar) and potentially batteries and reverse charging from electric vehicles. This, plus a much less predictable consumer demand and unusual weather. As such, balancing energy supply with demand is now a big-data problem, and AI is looking to step up to this challenge. With the Texas blackouts in our minds, this article looks at how AI might help protect energy security. Read more here.
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