When I run into a climate technology I don't understand, I love to build out an economic model in a spreadsheet. (video of this message on LinkedIn and YouTube)
As part of our accelerator program, we trained 227 carbon dioxide removal startups on how to build models called Techno Economic Assessments (TEA). Grant Faber led these sessions for hundreds of startups. He's formerly with US DOE and the University of Michigan Global CO2 Initiative, and now he's at Absolute Climate. Grant loves this stuff, his love is infectious so now I love it too.
A simple techno-economic assessment is a big spreadsheet that takes in all your different inputs to the system, things like costs (labor, energy, materials, etc), and then as outputs you see what the system costs to run.
After watching a TED Talk about marine cloud brightening, I got inspired and built out a technoeconomic assessment for it. I'm familiar with carbon dioxide removal methods, but this is about sunlight reflection, it has different pieces and different mechanics that I didn't really understand.
Getting this kind of economics driven lens has been really valuable in my work. What does the system cost to run? What are the big costs? Are there any components with a lot of leverage - if you improve the cost a little bit the system gets a lot better?
If you are working on a technology for climate solutions and you haven't done a techno-economic assessment, or maybe you did a really complex one like two years ago and you never went back and touched it, I encourage you to go back and take a look.
You can do a rough version in an hour. It would be a napkin diagram. But you want to do something in a spreadsheet. You can use your favorite AI to help. Here are great templates that Grant published as part of his work at the Global CO2 Initiative. And I'm happy to share with the marine cloud brightening example if that's helpful for you, just hit reply.
Take the opportunity to map out the techno economics of whatever you're working on, and I look forward to hearing back from you about how it went!
Tito
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