Gigaton Throwdown

Cleantech investor Sunil Paul doesn't just invest his time and effort into startups, he and a lot of volunteers have also now launched the "Gigaton Throwdown", an effort to answer a huge question:

What would it take to reduce CO2e emissions by a gigaton by 2020?

It's well worth downloading and reading the report at the GT website. 

The report looks at nine different technology areas (ones where cleantech VCs have been putting in a lot of dollars, in most cases) to see what it would take to scale up each one to a gigaton of annual emissions reductions by 2020, including an estimate of how much money would need to be invested in order to make that kind of impact.

• Next generation biofuels ("corn ethanol cannot deliver 1 gigaton of CO2e reductions because of massive land-use requirements," the report states) could achieve the target with an investment of $383B, creating 394k jobs.
• Building efficiency technologies could achieve the target with an investment of $61B, creating 681k new jobs.
• Concentrating solar power could achieve the target with an investment of $2.24 trillion, creating 484k new jobs.
• Construction materials could achieve the target with an investment of $445B, creating 328k new jobs.
• Enhanced geothermal could achieve the target with an investment of $919B, creating 448k new jobs.
• Nuclear could achieve the target with an investment of $1.27 trillion, creating 269k new jobs.
• PHEVs cannot achieve the target by 2020.
• Solar PV could achieve the target with an investment of $1.71 trillion, creating 1.63 million new jobs.
• Wind power could achieve the target with an investment of $1.38 trillion, creating 452k new jobs.

A couple of surprises here -- I would have thought wind power would have been in a better position, given existing low costs, to make a cost-effective impact on emissions reductions.

But the big winner here in terms of cost-effective impact is, unsurprisingly, energy efficiency (long-time readers of this site will know this is one of my favorite investment areas for this very reason).  And the big winners in terms of jobs creation are the service-intensive areas like building efficiency equipment/system installation and solar installation.

A few favorite areas for big venture investment don't end up looking so good, on the other hand.  Remember, this is just one (pretty good) report, and it doesn't have a direct bearing on returns potential in these sectors.  But it's still interesting to juxtapose which sectors would have the biggest "bang for the buck", versus where the venture bucks are going.

Kudos to the Gigaton Throwdown team for a great and timely report.  Hopefully policymakers will read the report -- and hopefully investors will, too.