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That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.
States filed yet another motion on Monday asking the court to release urgently needed disaster relief.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Job and funding cuts to federal emergency programs have the nation’s tsunami response experts, shall we say, concerned.
On energy transition funds, disappearing butterflies, and Tesla’s stock slump
On job cuts, long-term planning, and quarterly profits.
The more Hurricanes Helene and Milton we get, the harder it is to ignore the need.
As the southeastern U.S. recovers from hurricanes Helene and Milton, the destruction the storms have left behind serves to underline the obvious: The need for technologies that support climate change adaptation and resilience is both real and urgent. And while nearly all the money in climate finance still flows into mitigation tech, which seeks to lower emissions to alleviate tomorrow’s harm, at long last, there are signs that interest and funding for the adaptation space is picking up.
The emergence and success of climate resilience advisory and investment firms such as Tailwind Climate and The Lightsmith Group are two signs of this shift. Founded just last year, Tailwind recently published a taxonomy of activities and financing across the various sectors of adaptation and resilience solutions to help clients understand opportunity areas in the space. Next year, the firm’s co-founder Katie MacDonald told me, Tailwind will likely begin raising its first fund. It’s already invested in one company, UK-based Cryogenx, which makes a portable cooling vest to rapidly reduce the temperature of patients experiencing heatstroke.
As for Lightsmith, the firm held the final close of its $186 million growth equity fund for climate adaptation solutions in 2022, which co-founder and managing director Jay Koh told me is one of the first, if not the first fund with a climate resilience focus. As Koh sees it, the evolution of climate adaptation and resilience technologies can be broken up into three stages, the first being “reactive and incremental.” That’s largely where we’re at right now, he said — think rebuilding a dam higher after it’s been breached in a flood, or making a firebreak broader after a destructive wildfire. Where he’s seeing interesting companies emerge, though, is in the more proactive second stage, which often involves anticipating and preparing for extreme weather events. “Let’s do a lot more data and analytics ahead of time. Let’s deploy more weather satellites. Let’s look at deploying artificial intelligence and other technologies to do better forecasting,” Koh explained to me.
The third and final stage, he said, could be categorized as “systemic or transcendent adaptation,” which involves systems-level changes as opposed to incremental improvements. Source Global, one of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies which makes solar-powered hydropanels that produce affordable drinking water, is an example of this. As Koh told me, “It’s not simply improving the efficiency of desalination filters by 5% or 10%. It’s saying, listen, we’re going to pull water out of the air in a way that we have never done before.”
But while the activity and interest around adaptation tech may be growing, the money just isn’t there yet. “We’re easily $50 [billion] to $60 billion below where we need to be today,” MacDonald told me. “And you know, we’re on the order of around $150 [billion] to $160 billion below where we need to be by 2030.” Everyone else I spoke with echoed the sentiment. “The latest statistics are that less than 5% of total climate finance tracked on planet Earth is attributable to adaptation and climate resilience,” Koh said. “Of that, less than 2% is private investment.”
There’s a few reasons why early-stage investors especially may be hesitant to throw their weight behind adaptation tech despite the clear need in the market. Amy Francetic, co-founder and managing general partner at Buoyant Ventures, which focuses on early-stage digital solutions for climate risk, told me that the main customer for adaptation solutions is often a government entity. “Municipalities and other government contracts, they’re hard to win, they’re slow to win, and they don’t pay that much, either, which is the problem.” Francetic told me. “So it’s not a great customer to have.”
One of Buoyant’s portfolio companies, the now defunct StormSensor, reinforced this lesson for Francetic. The company used sensors to track water flow within storm and sewage systems to prevent flooding and was able to arrange pilot projects with plenty of water agencies — but few of them converted into paying contracts. “The municipalities were willing to spend money on an experiment, but not so many of them had a larger budget.” Francetic told me. The same dynamic, she said, is also at play in the utility industry, where you often hear about new tech succumbing to “death by pilot.”
It’s not all doom and gloom, though, when it comes to working with larger, risk-averse agencies. AiDash, another of Lightsmith’s portfolio companies that uses artificial intelligence to help utilities assess and address wildfire risk, has five utility partnerships, and earlier this year raised $58.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round. Francetic and MacDonald both told me they’re seeing the conversation around climate adaptation evolve to include more industry stakeholders. In the past, Francetic said, discussing resilience and adaptation was almost seen as a form of climate doomerism. “They said, oh, why are you doing that? It shows that you’re giving up.” But now, MacDonald told me that her experience at this year’s climate week in New York was defined by productive conversations with representatives from the insurance industry, banking sector, and venture capital arena about injecting more capital into the space.
Bill Clerico, the founder and managing partner of the venture firm Convective Capital, is also deeply familiar with the tricky dynamics of climate adaptation funding. Convective, founded in 2022, is solely dedicated to wildfire tech solutions. The firm’s portfolio companies span a range of technologies that address suppression, early identification, prevention, and insurance against damages, and are mainly looking to work with utilities, governments, and insurance companies. When I talked to Clerico back in August, he (understatedly) categorized these establishments as “not necessarily the most fast-moving or innovative.” But the bleak silver lining, he told me, is that extreme weather is forcing them to up their tempo. “There is so much destruction happening so frequently that it’s forcing a lot of these institutions to think about it totally differently and to embrace newer, more novel solutions — and to do it quickly.”
People, it seems, are starting to get real. But investors and startups alike are also just beginning to define exactly what adaptation tech encompasses and what metrics for success look like when they’re less measurable than, say, the tons of carbon sucked out of the atmosphere via direct air capture, or the amount of energy produced by a fusion reactor.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning and buys a loaf of adaptation. You don’t drive around in an adaptation or live in an adaptation,” Koh noted. “What you want is food, transport, shelter, water that is resilient and adapted to the effects of climate change.” What Koh and the team at Lightsmith have found is that many of the companies working on these solutions are hiding in plain sight. “They call themselves business continuity or water efficiency or agricultural precision technologies or supply chain management in the face of weather volatility,” Koh explained.
In this way, the scope of adaptation technology balloons far beyond what is traditionally climate-coded. Lightsmith recently invested in a Brazil-based digital health company called Beep Saude, which enables patients to get rapid, in-home diagnostics, vaccination services, and infusion therapies. It falls under the umbrella of climate adaptation tech, Koh told me, because rising temperatures, increased rainfall, and deforestation in the country have led to a rapid increase in mosquitoes spreading diseases such as dengue fever and the Zika virus.
Naturally, measuring the efficacy of solutions that span such a vast problem space means a lot of customization. “Your metric might be, how many people have asked for water in a drought-prone area?” MacDonald told me. “And with health, it might be, how many children are safe from wildfire smoke during fire season? And for ecosystems, it might be, how many hectares of ecosystem have been saved as a means to reduce storm surge?” Insurance also brings up a host of additional metrics. As Francetic told me, “we measure things like lives and livelihoods covered or addressed. We measure things like losses covered or underwriting dollars spent on this.”
No matter how you categorize it or measure it, the need for these technologies is not going away. “The drivers of adaptation and climate resilience demand are physics and time,” Koh told me. “Whoever develops climate resilience and adaptation technology will have a competitive advantage over any other company, any other society, and the faster that we can scale it up, and the smarter and more equitable we are about deploying it, the better off we will all be.”
High winds down power lines. But high waters flood substations — and those are much harder to fix.
There’s a familiar script when it comes to hurricanes: The high winds snap tree branches and even tree trunks and whip around anything else that’s light enough or not bolted down — including power lines and distribution poles. While this type of damage can lead to large-scale outages, it’s also relatively straightforward to fix. In many cases the power comes back on relatively quickly, more like days rather than weeks or months.
But when it comes to flooding, especially in areas that do not regularly deal with big storms, the damage can be more severe, long-lasting, and difficult to repair. This is largely because what’s at risk in these scenarios is not power lines but substations. These messes of transmission and distribution lines that channel high voltage power to homes and businesses are vulnerable to rising water, and repairs can’t begin until the floodwaters recede. Often they have to be replaced entirely, which is expensive and can lead to further delays as there’s a nationwide shortage of transformers. Just one substation can support thousands of homes — a single point of failure that, when it floods, takes all its customers down with it.
Duke Energy, whose grid in the Carolinas was pummeled by Hurricane Helene, has said the damage to its system encompasses “submerged substations, thousands of downed utility poles, and downed transmission towers,” and noted that much of the affected area is “inaccessible due to mudslides, flooding and blocked roads, limiting the ability to assess and begin repairing damages.” In an update published Saturday, it stated that while more than 2 million customers had seen their power restored, about 250,000 customers across North and South Carolina remained without electricity more than a week after the storm.
Workers are “encountering more severe damage on a larger scale than we’ve ever experienced,” Duke Energy storm director Jason Hollifield said in a statement. (Duke didn’t respond to my request for comment.) One Duke employee told the local television station in Asheville, North Carolina, which saw more than three months’ worth of rain fall over three days, that a local substation would have to be completely rebuilt, a process that could take months. In Western North Carolina, the area’s Representative Chuck Edwards has estimated that 117,000 customers still lack electricity, and that while some of them will likely get it back by Sunday, others “whose properties are inaccessible or not able to receive power may be without electricity for an extended period of time as Duke Energy works to rebuild critical infrastructure.”
To prepare for the onrushing Hurricane Milton, Duke is staging thousands of “line technicians, vegetation workers, damage assessors and support personnel” in Florida, the company said. The same problem remains, however: Line technicians will not prevent substations from flooding.
While the exact effect of climate change on hurricanes and other storm categories is an area of intense debate among climate scientists and meteorologists, there’s a rough consensus that warming will cause the storms to be wetter. That means utilities will have to update their old disaster response playbooks, or else prolonged outages when an especially wet storm arrives over a flood plain.
In most hurricanes, utilities are able to pre-position workers to restore power quickly, working on knocked down poles and wires, explained Jordan Kern, an assistant professor engineering at North Carolina State University. “When trees fall on distribution lines, those are, in normal situations, easy to repair,” he told me. But, Kern said, “If the substations are flooded, you can’t do anything until the flood waters go down. They can be without power for a long time.”
Wetter hurricanes will likely mean more severe and less predictable flooding happening far away from the coasts, bringing with it risks that utilities and local governments may be less prepared to face, with costs that will ultimately be born by anyone who pays for electricity, as expensive repairs and hardening of electrical infrastructure will likely be born by ratepayers.
“Rates will necessarily rise” to deal with the higher costs of adaptation and repairing infrastructure more complex than a wooden pole, Tyler Norris, a PhD student at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, told me while driving towards Asheville to help out family impacted by the storm.
While Helene has been an especially damaging storm, the risks of wetter storms and inland flooding away from the coastal areas that are prepared for frequent hurricanes have become more apparent in recent years. While Hurricane Irene in 2011 made landfall on Long Island, its most devastating effects were felt inland due to heavy rains, especially in Vermont.
North Carolina in particular has seen a rash of nasty hurricanes in the past 10 years or so, giving Duke ample recent experience with big storms — and some indication of what a warming world could bring.
During 2018’s Hurricane Florence, which knocked out power for around a million Duke customers, “at least 10 substations required de-energization due to flooding or flood risk where heavy rainfall and resulting inland flooding,” according to a 2022 Duke climate resiliency report. The report was meant to look at the effects of climate change to the Duke system by 2050 under two emissions scenarios outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one assuming emissions start falling by 2040, the other assuming continued (some might say unrealistically) high emissions.
Under the extreme scenario, the “overall vulnerability priority of Duke Energy substations to climate-driven changes in precipitation and inland flooding is high,” the report said, while under the “middle of the road” projection, “transmission infrastructure faces a medium priority vulnerability.” In both cases, however, “without adaptation planning … substations are at the highest potential risk, with extreme heat and flooding being the greatest concerns for existing assets.”
Duke said at the time that it had “implemented permanent flood protection measures at new substations located in flood plains and substations with a prior history of flooding.” For its existing fleet, priority was being given to those substations considered particularly “at-risk,” however the flood protection plan had “not yet been universally implemented at all existing substations in the flood plain.”
“What they characterized there falls significantly short of what we just saw,” Norris said. While he noted that Duke had listed risk to substations from inland flooding as high (albeit only under the extreme scenario), it had listed the risk to the distribution of power, i.e. poles and wires, as “low” under both scenarios. “There’s been a dramatic misestimate of risk here,” Norris said.
For Duke customers, especially in the more isolated parts of Western North Carolina, they may simply have to wait for workers and parts to arrive. Repairs that could normally happen quickly will likely happen slowly as workers struggle to reach areas whose roads have been washed away. Duke said that it’s now focusing on restoring the “backbone” of the transmission and distribution system, and then is moving on to restoring fallen poles in less densely populated areas.
And it will likely happen again. Kern noted that inland flooding especially is notoriously hard to predict compared to coastal flooding from hurricanes. “Flooding is so idiosyncratic,” he said. “It’s hard for anyone to predict how flooding will affect a region. Let alone electric utilities.”
