Two Hot Climate Tech Startups Just Raised $1 Billion+ in IPOs (techcrunch.com) 37
Public stock exchanges "appear to be warming to climate tech startups," reports TechCrunch. "Or at least some of them."
This week, nuclear startup X-energy went public, raising $1 billion in an upsized share offering that appears to have delivered a windfall for its investors, including Amazon [and Google]. Retail investors apparently can't get enough, with the stock popping 25% in its first hour of trading. Also this week, geothermal startup Fervo said it filed for an initial public offering. The size of the Fervo IPO has yet to be disclosed, but private investors have valued the company at around $3 billion, according to PitchBook.
The move to go public aligns with what investors told TechCrunch at the end of last year. After years of tepid attitudes toward climate tech companies, they expected public markets to start welcoming energy-related startups. Nearly every investor that weighed in on the question said the startups with the best chances of going public specialize in either nuclear fission or enhanced geothermal. Fervo, specifically, was mentioned several times. Thank data centers for that. The AI craze has taken a trend of rising demand for electricity and made it sexy and salable.
The move to go public aligns with what investors told TechCrunch at the end of last year. After years of tepid attitudes toward climate tech companies, they expected public markets to start welcoming energy-related startups. Nearly every investor that weighed in on the question said the startups with the best chances of going public specialize in either nuclear fission or enhanced geothermal. Fervo, specifically, was mentioned several times. Thank data centers for that. The AI craze has taken a trend of rising demand for electricity and made it sexy and salable.
When I hear Climate Tech (Score:3)
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> Not sure about the geothermal(does it scale outside of special cases?)
Depends on what you mean by "scale." It's geologically limited, as in you need to find the right spot to build them, so in that sense they do not scale well... but otherwise the Earth has a functionally unlimited amount of heat energy to tap, so in that sense they scale better than nuclear since we have a definitely finite (if large) amount of nuclear fuel on this planet.
=Smidge=
Let's heat the world! (Score:2)
Re:Let's heat the world! (Score:4, Informative)
Couple things here.
First; The amount of heat rejected to the atmosphere for all of human production would be a fraction of a fraction of a percent of what is already reaching the Earth from the sun; over 170,000 Tera-watt hours of energy in the form of sunlight per hour, which is roughly how much energy all of humanity consumes per year. All of human energy use is ~0.01% of the energy the Earth receives from the sun.
Second, we're already adding that energy to the atmosphere. How do yo think coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power work? Even solar and wind capture energy and turn it into heat. The point is to not produce CO2 in the process, because;
Third, the heat gain is more than offset by the reduction in greenhouse gasses that keep that heat from radiating back out into space, which is what causes the warming in the first place.
=Smidge=
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but it is worth nothing
Not if the amount is so small that its not worth it. Like are you going to bring up the heat generated by the friction of migratory bird wings against the air while in flight?
Re: When I hear Climate Tech (Score:2)
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I think of expensive tech that is not viable in the real world for the foreseeable future. Not sure about the geothermal(does it scale outside of special cases?), but I don't include nuclear in this group.
I agree. These are energy companies. Granted their focus is on energy which doesn't use fossil fuels but they're still energy companies.
To my mind, "climate tech" would mean things like carbon capture or geoengineering or climate mitigation.
Whatever. If calling yourself "climate tech" gets investor dollars, it doesn't really make a difference.
Sigh (Score:2, Insightful)
It's still not "green" if you just pump it into a datacentre.
In a datacentre, it gets used up by what are effectively space heaters (computers), and then vented out into the world. And about half of that power is used to try to cool that heating by... venting the heating to the world. The actual "AI" output barely even registers in the efficiency of the overall system, even if you use that to design something actually useful (because, yeah, AI can innovate, invent, infer, right?).
There are far more intere
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I don't know. "Hot climate tech startup" seems to me to mean pro-global warming. They want a hot climate, so what better way to do so than with AI? ;)
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Electricity demand for AI is today, and will continue to be, irrelevant in terms of humanity’s carbon intensity. If we electrify ground transport, we remove about 25% of our carbon impact. Heating and cooling of buildings is the same again. At most, fossil powered data centres would account for 10% at some point many years from now, and that’s assuming they’re all fossil powered, which they wouldn’t be.
Data centres are not going to be that big a deal for carbon. Not nothing, but ther
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There are far more interesting uses you could put such huge amounts of electricity to that don't just directly convert it to heat so that people can see a funny animated cat picture.
...but you can have it create funny photo realistic cat pictures and videos!
A lot of hype, pump and dump !! (Score:3)
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Based "we have huge sums of money to throw at AI, and most if it will be wasted but if we buy into the next Google early enough we can become trillionaires."
X-energy is probably a scam. Their website gives it away: https://x-energy.com/xe-100/ [x-energy.com]
A little 80MWe reactor, obvious lie about the land use requirements. It needs a water pump to avoid melting down, so it's "intrinsically safe" design is clearly bollocks. Hilariously they claim that their SMR is "economically viable" while others are not. Their FAQ on
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The funny thing is that nobody (!) has a working SMR prototype (except maybe the Chinese, but details are scarce and there are no cost estimates) and nobody has any realistic cost estimates. It looks very much like all these startups are just get-rich-quick schemes with zero engineering validity. Of course, the nuclear fanatics have gone so desperate now that they will cheer for anything that caters to their hallucinations and they never had any contact to actual reality anyways.
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Yeah. Even the UK is in on it with Rolls Royce. That's going to be a big waste of money. Public money.
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Indeed. I mean all indicators since nuclear reactors actually went commercial is that the only way to reduce cost is to make them larger. The SMR pushers have one theoretical argument, that of mass-production. This may or may not work, but seriously, how long have SMRs been pushed and why has nothing really happened? I do not think this has any realitistic chance of working out.
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The funny thing is that nobody (!) has a working SMR prototype (except maybe the Chinese, but details are scarce and there are no cost estimates) and nobody has any realistic cost estimates. .
Its going to be nice to be first in the G7 then. Ours here in Canada continue along on time and on budget.
https://www.opg.com/projects-s... [opg.com]
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Good luck with that. Nuclear tech is very, very difficult to get right. Run a prototype at full power for a few years and come in with a realistic cost estimate that is not 5...10x higher than renewables and we can talk. Before that, have fun with your pipe-dreams.
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Hot air sells well. There are a lot of clueless people with money, apparently. Which just shows how very broken the system is. See crapto, LLMs, VR, Quantum "computing" and some other really dumb hypes.
Climate Tech? (Score:2)
Sounds more like energy tech.
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x-energy produce fuel pellets for nuclear power stations and maybe one day nuclear power stations too. I can't find anything climatey except they are funded by amazon climate funds
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No I was wrong, they don't produce fuel pellets yet
Nuclear is not "climate tech" (Score:1)
Nuclear is excessively expensive and cannot even beat wind for CO2. It also has a host of other problems.
Maybe if somebody actually demonstrates a working prototype for an SMR for a few years, including a honest (!) cost analysis, this will change. But no such demonstration exists, just some theoretical concepts and meaningless non-nuclear "demonstrations". No, the military reactors the Russians put on a barge do not count (and have zero published costs estimates anyways) and what the Chinese are doing may
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It surely can when there's no wind to power the turbines, which happens with annoying frequency.
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The really depends. I guess you have not kept current with the tech. And when it (rather rarely) happens, it is _predictable_ . A reactor SCRAMing is not predictable. Predictability is _everything_ in grid stability as a grid is never stable by itself. It gets real-time controlled and monitored and there is a lot of planning involved.
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" nuclear needs to be backed up by fast reserve capacity, because it can go away (due to SCRAM) at any time with zero warning "
What the hell are you talking about? There always a nuclear power station somewhere where it isn't going scram
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You know, the usual low-intelligence black and white thinking.
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Au contraire. I have some actual clue how the tech works, while you have none.
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You have really no clue how a grid works, do you?
Here is some clue: A nuke SCRAMing means the same amount of electricity has to be supplied immediately (seconds) from some other source or the grid becomes unstable. This can be done by hot-standby gasturbines, some water (but even they are slow at spin-up to full power needing something like 30 seconds for ultra-fast water) and batteries. Some "other nuke" cannot do it. They are far too slow to react. It would also mean that "other nuke" would need to be run
Only When– (Score:2)
it affects the billionares.
correction (Score:2)
Maybe this headline is better.
Two COOL Climate Tech Startups Just Raised $1 Billion+ in IPOs
Though the nuke startup is literally hot, in that it generates heat. While the geothermal startup harvests existing heat. So this headline is most accurate:
A COOL Climate Tech Startup and a HOT Nuclear Power Startup Just Raised $1 Billion+ in IPOs
Geothermal won't work (Score:2)
Oh, and AI datacenters don't need heating! They need electricity. So there's that. In fact, you'd be better off using the hot water from the d
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