Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment
TBLI Circle relaunch
On January 1, we've relaunched our TBLI Circle community with three membership tiers. Join us to access:
- Masterclasses on Growth, AI, and Sustainability
- TBLi Talk Interviews with sustainability thought leaders
- Sustainable Innovations Challenge for proposing solutions
- Monthly Virtual Networking, Spotlight Interviews, and Investor Salons
- Open Mic, Online Training, Weekly Podcasts, and AMA events
- Private Film Showings and a Global Family Office event
Upcoming TBLI events
Registration link for non- TBLI Circle Members
If you are a TBLI Circle member, you can click here to RSVP
TBLI Impact Networking (Mixer)
January 26th at 16:00 CET
Join the TBLI Virtual Networking (Mixer) and connect with impact investors, entrepreneurs, and sustainability thought leaders worldwide through our immersive virtual platform. Engage in timed 1-on-1 speed networking sessions.
Registration link for non- TBLI Circle Members
If you are a TBLI Circle member, you can click here to RSVP
TBLI's reflections on 2023 and looking forward to 2024.
It has been an incredibly rewarding year for TBLI and we sincerely hope that it has been the same for you, despite all the challenges that were faced. As we move forward into the Year of the Dragon, we are genuinely excited to continue building on this incredible momentum,
We want to express our deepest gratitude to everyone who has generously offered their support to TBLI and the entire Purpose-driven investment community. Your generosity has truly enriched all of us. We are eternally grateful for your contribution, as it allows us to pursue our big purpose of changing the Financial System so that it works for all stakeholders.
This is a perfect time for each of us to take a moment to rest and reflect on our own big purpose. As Dr. Seuss said, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not."
Let those words resonate with you as you contemplate your impact on the world.
UK use of gas and coal for electricity at lowest since 1957, figures show
Fossil fuel plants contributed about a third of electricity supplies in 2023 and renewables a record 42%
The amount of electricity generated by the UK’s gas and coal power plants fell by 20% last year, with consumption of fossil fuels at its lowest level since 1957.
Not since Harold Macmillan was the UK prime minister and the Beatles’ John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time has the UK used less coal and gas.
The UK’s gas power plants last year generated 31% of the UK’s electricity, or 98 terawatt hours (TWh), according to a report by the industry journal Carbon Brief, while the UK’s last remaining coal plant produced enough electricity to meet just 1% of the UK’s power demand or 4TWh.
Fossil fuels were squeezed out of the electricity system by a surge in renewable energy generation combined with higher electricity imports from France and Norway and a long-term trend of falling demand.
Higher power imports last year were driven by an increase in nuclear power from France and hydropower from Norway in 2023. This marked a reversal from 2022 when a string of nuclear outages in France helped make the UK a net exporter of electricity for the first time.
Carbon Brief found that gas and coal power plants made up just over a third of the UK’s electricity supplies in 2023, while renewable energy provided the single largest source of power to the grid at a record 42%.
It was the third year this decade that renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, hydro and biomass power, outperformed fossil fuels, according to the analysis. Renewables and Britain’s nuclear reactors, which generated 13% of electricity supplies last year, helped low-carbon electricity make up 55% of the UK’s electricity in 2023.
Dan McGrail, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said the data shows “the central role that wind, solar and other clean power sources are consistently playing in Britain’s energy transition”.
“We’re working closely with the government to accelerate the pace at which we build new projects and new supply chains in the face of intense global competition, as everyone is trying to replicate our success,” McGrail said.
Electricity from fossil fuels was two-thirds lower in 2023 compared with its peak in 2008, according to Carbon Brief. It found that coal has dropped by 97% and gas by 43% in the last 15 years.
Coal power is expected to fall further in 2024 after the planned shutdown of Britain’s last remaining coal plant in September. The Ratcliffe on Soar coal plant, owned by the German utility Uniper, is scheduled to shut before next winter after generating power for 24 years.
Renewable energy has increased sixfold since 2008 as the UK has constructed more wind and solar farms, and the large Drax coal plant has converted some of its generating units to burn biomass pellets.
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After 2023’s wild ride, climate venture capital poised for strong 2024
This year, cleantech startups tightened their spending and focused on revenue, but the latter months presaged a new year with plenty of fundraising.
It’s been a topsy-turvy year for cleantech venture investing, complete with unexpected corporate implosions.
2023 began on a somber note, with foreboding signs from the broader economy. Demoralizing interest rates, inflation and lingering supply-chain weirdness had investors and entrepreneurs on edge. Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft shed tens of thousands of jobs, and blue-chip corporates reined in their budgets. Disciplined climate startups cut their spending and hunkered down for a potentially long stretch of tough sales and no new funding.
Then, in March, prolific venture lender Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, followed by Signature Bank and First Republic. The reverberations are still being felt among startups and investors alike. In the cleantech space, many a SPAC bled out its once-inflated valuation; surprisingly, the casualties included electric bus-maker Proterra. The venture-backed company became the rare electric-vehicle SPAC that sold a real product to real customers, generating real revenue. It declared bankruptcy in August, and its once-mighty electric transit bus division was sold at the ignominious price of $10 million to Phoenix Motorcars, a publicly traded EV maker grappling with its own financial struggles.
But 2023 turned out to be “a tale of two halves,” said investor Zach Barasz, who previously worked at Kleiner Perkins’ Green Growth Fund, and later joined colleagues from that institution as a partner at G2 Venture Partners.
“The first half was slow in terms of investments and slower in terms of quality opportunities,” Barasz said. “In the second half of the year, that changed quite quickly, with many more high-quality opportunities. 2024 is going to be a very busy year for new investments.”
Cleantech financing went out on a cheery note this December when Congruent Ventures, a pioneering firm dedicated to seed-stage climate investing, raised a $275 million new fund after turning away offers that would have doubled that amount. It signaled untapped interest from the bigger institutions that invest in venture funds, indicating that they want to put more money into early-stage climate investing, as long as the investors seem to know what they’re doing in this still-emergent industry.
“We’ve been getting rejected our whole careers in this — that’s part of the fun,” Congruent Ventures co-founder and managing partner Abe Yokell told Canary Media. “We’ve been telling the same story since day one, and it has tipped. […] There is a massive amount of institutional…interest in investing in climate solutions.”
The tough times of early 2023
Cleantech startups entered 2023 still battened down from the 2022 market slowdown. This was true of venture capital broadly — Pitchbook called the first quarter “a rough couple of months” in which “fundraising’s momentum has all but come to a halt.”
Climate Tech VC tracked a 40% year-over-year drop in funding for climate-related startups during the first half of the year. But growth funding took the biggest hit, while seed funding actually increased.
Veteran cleantech investor Amy Francetic said her fund — Buoyant Ventures, with $81 million under management — signed just a few follow-on deals in the first six months. Part of the slowdown came from an unexpected moment that triggered “pencils down” on any new deals.
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Climate scientists hail 2023 as ‘beginning of the end’ for fossil fuel era
Cautious optimism among experts that emissions from energy use may have peaked as net zero mission intensifies
Global efforts to slow a runaway climate catastrophe may have reached a critical milestone in the last year with the peak of global carbon emissions from energy use, according to experts.
A growing number of climate analysts believe that 2023 may be recorded as the year in which annual emissions reached a pinnacle before the global fossil fuel economy begins a terminal decline.
The milestone is considered a crucial tipping point in the race to drive emissions to net zero. But for many climate experts it’s an inflexion point that was due years ago and which, although encouraging, falls far short of the rapid reduction the world needs.
The world’s leading climate scientists have consistently warned that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere means it is critical to drive down emissions before 2030 if leaders hope to keep global heating to a maximum of 1.5C above pre-industrialised levels. The rate at which emissions would need to be reduced will require, most experts agree, global transformation on a scale not yet in the pipeline.
“We can take a small pause to celebrate this tipping point,” said Dave Jones, a director at the climate thinktank Ember. “But in a way it’s worrying that we are still talking about when emissions might peak. The reality of the situation is that we need deep and fast reductions in emissions if we hope to stay within the vanishingly small budget for carbon which remains.”
The International Energy Agency (IEA) raised hopes earlier this year of an end to the fossil fuel era when it predicted for the first time that the consumption of oil, gas and coal would peak before 2030 and begin to fall as climate policies took effect.
“It’s not a question of ‘if’, it’s just a matter of ‘how soon’ – and the sooner the better for all of us,” said Fatih Birol, the head of the IEA.
To understand how the world may have already reached an end to rising global emissions, just two years after one of the steepest emissions hikes in history, it helps to look at the global electricity sector.
“The world is teetering at the peak of power sector emissions,” said Malgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, the lead author of a report by Ember. Earlier this year the report found that emissions from generating electricity had plateaued over the first half of 2023 and could be poised to fall from next year.
The report studied power generation across 78 countries representing 92% of global electricity demand. It found a 16% rise in the amount of solar power generated and a 10% jump in global wind power output.
In the IEA’s flagship report, widely considered to be one of the most influential in the climate and energy debate, it found that the steady rise of wind and solar power was on track to outpace the world’s growing demand for energy – meaning renewables will start to displace fossil fuels on a global scale.
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Polar bear dies from bird flu as H5N1 spreads across globe
Current outbreak, which started in 2021, is estimated to have killed millions of wild birds and thousands of mammals globally
