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In Between the Tech

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Host
Welcome to Mouser Electronics' In Between the Tech podcast. Today we dive into the expansive world of clean tech or clean technology. This field encompasses a range of innovative solutions aimed at reducing environmental impacts. Holly Stower, Group Lead at the Cleantech Group joins Mouser as she shares her insights from working with multiple companies on building innovative solutions in sustainable technology ecosystems.
 
Tell us a little bit about the Cleantech group and how it fits in the Cleantech industry.

Holly Stower 
Cleantech Group is the global leading authority on sustainable innovation. We sort of paint Cleantech with a pretty broad brush. We've got six main topics of interest, so that's energy and power, materials and chemicals, transport and logistics, resources and environmental management, waste and recycling, and agriculture and food. 

We are a research driven company, and I'll get to how we practically do that in a second. But we also help companies, large corporates, the public sector, investors and others to identify and engage in cleantech ecosystems. So, these sustainable technology ecosystems and work out how innovative solutions and opportunities that they have available to them. This is all relating and within context of the world's biggest environmental challenges, be that climate change, adaptation, nature and biodiversity as well. So, how we deliver that is we have a research offering, a consulting offering, but our research is based off our platform called i3, and that's where we track investment. So, we track investment as sort of a proxy for growing, emerging, and destructive sustainable technology markets. And that sort of helps us piece together a quantitative picture of what's going on with these markets. We then go out and speak to founders. We speak to multiple founders every week as well as their investors and the corporates that buy their technologies or partner with them to really work out what's going on behind the numbers.

These, our sort of expertise is then delivered through sort of an online subscription through tailored consulting as well and advocacy. So, we've got our Cleantech for focused in Europe groups, which advocate for clean tech markets and really help politicians understand what these technologies are, their opportunities and the possibilities and some of the barriers that exist. And so, the last thing we do is we also run events. So, we bring together everyone that we speak to throughout the year in our three main events throughout the year. So, we just had our Cleantech Forum North America, which is in San Diego. And then coming up in May we've got our Cleantech Forum Singapore, and then Cleantech Forum Europe, which rotates different cities. 

Host
For those unfamiliar with the blue economy, can you tell us what that is and how it relates to our clean tech topic?

Holly Stower
the blue economy refers or broadly refers to a sustainable ocean economy. So that is all economic activities associated with oceans, seas, and coastal regions. In the context of Cleantech, is sustainable technologies that do one of five things. So, they reduce the negative impact of existing ocean-based industries. So, for example, sustainable fishing or low carbon shipping or new maritime fuels. These technologies can positively impact the oceans via restoration or protection activities. So, for example, coral reef propagation or farming or monitoring ocean technologies. Others protect oceans from land-based pollution. So, it's less direct, more indirect. So, think plastics recycling or wastewater treatment as well, or they improve our understanding and then enable sustainable activities. So, satellite monitoring, embedded sensors into the ocean to monitor ocean currents or ocean warming or ocean acidification. And then lastly, adaptation technologies. So that is innovations that are protecting from ocean derived extreme weather, including flooding, storms and coastal erosion. So, things like sea defenses. There's a great company called ECOncrete that blur the lines of what these innovators do, and they have these ecologically positive concrete sea defenses where not only are they protecting communities from flooding and extreme weather events, but they also are great habitats for wildlife to thrive. So, both mitigate and adapt technologies.

Host
For our design engineering audience. Could you please tell us the types of technologies and either industries or applications that encompass the blue economy and Cleantech?

Holly Stower
the largest sector is really maritime and shipping. That's about 50% of the economic activity around the blue economy. And those technologies are maritime decarbonization from software to streamline logistics and ports all the way through to low carbon maritime fuels. So, for example, fuels that are converted from capturing carbon into fuels.

But overall, the global marine ecosystem is really set to generate through to $6 trillion in economic connectivity by 2030. So, it's a big sector, but that also includes areas like tourism, energy, think offshore wind, water, think desalination technologies all the way through to some emerging markets like in the voluntary carbon markets for carbon offsets where we see a huge emerging market in things like seaweed growing and then onshore related industries such as aquaculture.
So, reducing the impact of fishing by making these activities on land. And plastics recycling, as I mentioned earlier, amongst many others. So, it's a really big ecosystem, but because it depends on these diverse and multidisciplinary stakeholders, we found it really useful to sort of group them together. We saw a real emergence of lots of dedicated investors that want to have positive impact on the ocean. So, it made sense for us to create this landscape of blue economy technologies and really work out some of the barriers that corporates and the public sector can work on reducing to enable a sustainable ocean economy, especially as you have this huge, predicted growth rate. 9:45

Host
Could you give us a short history of how technology entered into this sector and where it is today?

Holly Stower 
A lot of technology has really emerged from the necessity to operate in some harsh environments. So, a lot of innovations really come from either trying to get efficiency gains in shipping, and that's where we really started in just go with around 2018, 2019, with a lot of these port logistics software trying to shift real paper-based and high human input activities and digitize them for the first time. It's considered a traditional industry. So, being able to one, just digitize and today input things like AI and machine learning to streamline further provides that logistics. And now we're really going on onto the hard stuff, the hard tech trying to change maritime fuels, different engines, different forms of propulsion. So, shifting from having fossil fuel-based engines to things like sails, like really large sails for cargo ships, for example. 

The blue economy is increasingly varied and as I said, we track investment and I think what struck us when we researched this topic is the amount of early-stage funding, which is a really key indicator for emerging markets. So, things like - my favorite - is around ocean protection and nature protection. So, a lot of technologies that governments are paying for or that are businesses created from ocean protection regulations can monitor nature and make sure that offshore activities aren't disruptive. So, things like using acoustic sensors when undertaking subsea infrastructure installation and acoustic sensors can listen to whale song. And in monitoring that whale song, you know if your activities is really disrupting whales, if you have other marine life present and take that one step further, you can then use that acoustic sensing data, input it into an AI based software program to be able to work out which whales, which different types of whales, how many whales, and if those whales are returning as well. 

Host
You mentioned AI, can you expand upon AI's role in Cleantech?

Holly Stower
We did a piece two years ago, we looked at clean AI. I think AI has a positive and negative impact when it comes to clean tech and sustainable technology. On the negative side, you need significant amounts of energy and water to cool data centers, which are the engine around AI. So, there's a lot of activity around decarbonizing these data centers. So, AI is being used more and more within Cleantech in really useful and meaningful ways through energy and power to balance grids. As you have more renewable powers and battery storage that comes online, AI can sort of stop outages and surges and yeah, really streamline those processes and energy and power. From the stuff that my team looked at, in resources and environment, we saw some really great things in waste and recycling, and these are markets that really struggle. So, in, I think this might be a very old stat now, the recycling rate in New York was less than 10% and that's a good percentage.

So, of everything that you put into a recycling bin…all the yogurt pots you clean, only about 10% of that is actually turned into anything new. The rest might be burned or landfill. So, you have this low value product, and what these recycling recovery centers really struggle with is paying for the people to be able to sort that waste. What AI can do when paired with robotic arms is to autonomously sort … identify and sort that waste. That does it faster. Those machines can work 24/ 7 and the user gets data on what is actually being recycled. You can then feed that back to the producers of those plastics and waste. So, for example, Coca-Cola feed that information and they can actually validate claims that X amount is being recycled or not. So that's one of the ways in waste in recycling. Another way you can think about in probably nature restoration.

So, it's very early stages of being able to monitor company's impact on nature, but AI is a real enabler there. So using satellite data and the AI can really be a great engine to analyze and assess lots of different forms of lots of data very quickly and how it specifically relates to one company. So, that company can assess whether the impact that they've had in a certain area may have had a positive or negative impact on nature or if there's any risks in their supply chain from the impact on nature as well. So many, many, many applications with AI and clean AI, I think all the bad press that AI gets, it's starting to be embedded in a really meaningful way in clean tech and sustainable technologies.

Host
Given your research focus, what are some key factors that can accelerate clean tech adoption?

Holly Stower
We work with a lot of corporate clients to do exactly that as well as clients in the government. So, speaking on the corporate side, there's multiple different ways that you can support cleantech. So one of the first steps would be to look at problems that you've got within your own business and then look, if you can look to cleantech or sustainable technologies, if you can provide efficiency gains for said technologies, say for example, if you have lots of different offices and your energy, water bills are high, you can use a building management system to be able to manage that building more efficiently, saving you money and energy. And often at times if you have a better HVAC or more efficient HVAC system, your human capital is also very happy as well. 

The other areas corporates can engage is really with investment providing corporate venture capital investment or strategic investment. How we approach that and work with companies to do that is we help them run challenges. So, they say, we have certain challenge, we are looking to work with X company. We'll help them validate that challenge, look at the Cleantech ecosystem and say, this is the list of companies that could solve that challenge in all of these different ways. Those companies will then come to pitch and then we can help them select and launch a pilot scheme where they can trial out that technology and how it would work for that business. 

In terms of governments, we've worked with governments to map out their local ecosystems. So, where they have startups in the area where they have investors in the area and where they have significant businesses in the area, we can identify where there might be tech gaps for them or things that their local startups might need, whether that's access to grants, connections with corporates to buy their technology, or if there is regulatory red tape for example.

Host
If you're looking for more content on clean technology, be sure to visit Mouser's Empowering Innovation Together page to explore articles, videos, and more on the subject. Up next in Mouser’s exploration of the newest technologies is AI-based engineering tool visit, mouser.com/empowering-innovation.