In today’s edition:

💰 Banking collapse and climate tech

🤖 AI’s carbon footprint

🌞 Floating solar panels

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💼 Big Business (1-minute read)

The carbon footprint of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is the new, shiny toy of the tech industry with expectations it’s going to revolutionise industries. However, creating AI-powered tech, like chatbots, requires lots of electricity.

Powering AI: Companies like Microsoft, Google and ChaptGPT use cloud computing, which relies on many servers in massive data centres, to train AI algorithms (called models). New research suggests that training a single model can gobble up more electricity than 100 US homes in a year. Yet, the sector’s growing fast with a limited understanding of its emissions.

More transparency: However, suggestions for better transparency on the environmental costs are growing, with several new papers pushing for reporting in this space to motivate more investment in developing efficient algorithms.

What does Silicon Valley Bank collapse mean for climate tech?

What happened: Many start-ups have relied on Silicon Valley Bank UK for financing, an offshoot of its larger US parent. Over the last few years, the institution has relied on taking bets on government bonds whose value had been inflated by near-zero interest rates. As interest rates have risen, those bets have gone sour. On Friday, the Bank of England announced that the bank is to enter insolvency - placing funds of portfolio companies with deposits at SVB at risk.

Climate-Tech Impact?: In Feb, An SVB senior manager said the bank had roughly 1,500 venture-backed startup clients working in climate tech alone.

Fall-Out: In the short term, some companies are at risk of not making payroll. In the longer term, Climate tech companies may have problems making major investments in demonstration projects, pilot lines and research and developments, stalling progress on climate innovation at a time when it is needed most. But hot off the press, HSBC is set to buy Silicon Valley Bank UK for £1 in a rescue deal and rectify this fall-out.

$6bn to slash US manufacturing emissions

Manufacturing accounts for 24% of US greenhouse gas emissions, and the Biden Administration has taken a step towards reaching a carbon-free economy by 2050 through a $6bn fund to decarbonize industrial manufacturing. The Energy Department’s Industrial Demonstration Program will provide up to 50% of the cost of first-of-a-kind projects aimed at stripping carbon dioxide from energy-intensive products like concrete, steel and chemicals. These decarbonisation projects can be expensive to develop and likely raise production costs, so government funding aims to offset some of the burden manufacturing companies face.

💰 Deals of the Week (1-minute read)

🛵 Shifted Energy raised $4.3M in Seed Funding for its virtual power plant software that helps utility companies balance the grid and helps consumers benefit from financial incentives.

🍎 Cleantech startup Trawa has secured €2.4 million in pre-seed to fuel its vision of making sustainable energy procurement accessible to companies of all sizes.

🚗 Southampton-based climate tech startup ViridiCO2, which focuses on decarbonising the chemical industry using carbon capture, has closed a £3m seed round.

☀️ Paris-based climate-tech start-up Ecosystem Restoration Standard (ERS) is raising €5 million in seed funding to launch a standard to certify ecosystem restoration projects in the voluntary carbon markets using its next-generation dMRV (Digital Monitoring, Reporting & Verification)

💭 Little Bytes

Quote: “There is this willingness from the EU to be the green deal leader and the environmental leader globally.” Justine Maillot, coordinator of the campaign group Break Free From Plastic Europe.

Stat: Women now make up over 40% of board members at top UK companies - rising 3% in 2022 — WEF

Watch: AI enables early screening of lung cancer

🗞 In other news…

• Airbus’ most popular aircraft takes to the skies with 100% sustainable aviation fuel

• Solar panels floating on water are becoming an ever more popular clean-energy option for island nations and those with limited land — massive solar farms atop bodies of water can be found in China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand.

• The UK is set to join nations like Italy, Australia, and the US by signing up to a global coalition to halve food waste globally by 2030 — the UN Food System Summit Coalition on Food is Never Waste.

• US and EU have launched new talks on critical minerals trade to support Green Tech

🎣 Gone Phishing

Three of these stories are true, one we've made up, guess which:

• Mysterious green lights appear over Hawaii

• Helicopters drop off food for cows stranded in Californian snow

• Family discovers bobcat sleeping in their dog's bed

• Robo-waiters serve drinks at the Oscars

📆 Events to watch out for

How to Prototype the World's First Circular Economy Nation State's Built Environment

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