Welcome to our new ‘What’s the story?’ series, where we highlight the top trends, events and storylines in a particular industry. But why, you ask?
Having a cool idea, launch, funding round or zero to hero story is one part of a successful PR campaign. The other part is knowing where you fit. How is your story relevant to what’s been happening over the past month, or year?
In this blog post we’re taking a closer look at storylines around cleantech, so let’s dive straight in!
Climate tech versus cleantech: who are the key players?
Cleantech includes any technology that attempts to limit our environmental impact by reducing the amount of energy we use. An easy example is renewable energy like solar and wind. A growing positive of cleantech is that it’s becoming price-competitive with fossil fuels.
Climate tech is about “decarbonizing the global economy”, and spans from addressing food and land to carbon capture. Here’s a few climate tech companies to keep your eye on:
Greener agriculture. Improper farming practices are more impactful than you may think. Agriculture accounts for 10 to 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, partly due to millions of wasted tons of fertilizer. Ceres is giving farmers and growers the tools to detect issues and opportunities before they’re visually obvious, as well as measure the health of a crop to make better decisions.
Smart green energy projects. What stops impactful energy solutions from ever seeing the light of day? A disconnect between customers and providers, something EnPowered is changing. With the solution and customer usage details in hand, EnPowered reduces the barrier to entry on a UX and cost basis for customers.
Carbon reduction. Carbon offsets are a way for companies and countries to ‘buy’ their way into being more environmentally friendly. But companies like Carbon Engineering and CleanO2 actually pull carbon from the atmosphere, converting it into fuel and soap respectively.
Clean energy is great - but it’s literally not enough
Some renewable energy and green tech projects are cleaner than others. It takes a lot of materials and energy to manufacture electric vehicles, windmills and solar panels. How can we produce clean energy that's really clean?
There are companies that have found a more productive and positive way of producing clean energy:
Hydro turbines. As with any other areas of cleantech, there are trade offs to hydropower that are less than ideal. Natel Energy markets their turbines as the most ‘fish-safe’ around, and a low environmental impact.
Eco-friendly engineering. Achieving compliance, functionality and green is a tough balance to strike in engineering. Alden helps their clients overcome this, from design to modeling and testing, to regulatory compliance. Like Natel, they also work to correct any negative side effects on the surrounding environment.
Smart geothermal. Some of the risks of producing geothermal energy include fracking, GHG emissions, earthquake risk, water use, produced brine or solids, and aquifer contamination – all of which Eavor claims to have avoided. Eavor is able to harness geothermal energy without overly invasive processes, and claims to be “benign enough to literally fit in someone’s backyard.”
Internet of Things drives cleantech forward with data
Cleantech powers up the Internet of Things to make our world more useful. Through better data collection, tracking and analytics, we can run cities, buildings and companies more efficiently, saving energy and resources.
Here are some companies taking a more informed approach:
Smart distribution systems. Sensus’s Xylem technology allows customers to make more timely and informed decisions regarding their electric, gas and water systems. Beyond this, Sensus’s solutions range from leak management to pressure management, optimizing use communicating with all systems to ensure optimal use.
Industrial IoT connectivity. Whether it’s emergency power or higher education organizations, Blue Pillar supports large-scale environmental efforts on an industrial scale. Their industrial IoT network-based solutions are flexible, scalable, and can be added to industrial systems retroactively too – at a lower financial and operational cost than competitors.
Smart networks, sensors, and more. From the city of Paris to Florida’s power and light, Itron’s customers are making a difference with Itron’s impressive portfolio of “smart networks, software, services, meters and sensors”.
Is your cleantech company making waves (or wind, solar, nuclear, you get it) that could make headlines? Does your c-suite have big ideas that could make them a major thought leader in green technology?
Let’s chat. Contact our tech marketing & PR agency to help your clean or climate tech company get the coverage you need.