A New Landscape for Climate Investment

By 2030, Wright Electric, a New York-based start-up, plans to introduce a 186-seat electric aeroplane with a 1280km range for commercial use. Its battery technology, which will be used in about a dozen engines to propel a single aircraft, is a major step toward achieving zero-carbon emissions in air travel.

But the technology is just half the story of how a group of entrepreneurs and engineers, led by Wright founder Jeff Engler, are helping revolutionise air travel. The second half is about how groups called climate-technology accelerators and incubators are helping entrepreneurs turn potentially transformative ideas into practical use, not only with investment and philanthropic capital, but through mentorship, networking, and advisory services.

For investors looking for on-ramps to clean-energy impact investments, accelerators and incubators provide visibility into the landscape of promising start-ups and opportunities to deploy capital.

These groups, which have exploded in numbers in recent years, are the bridge between the academics, engineers, and scientists who conceive of solutions to the world’s environmental problems and the corporations, municipalities, and nations that are looking for ways to meet ambitious climate goals.

“Big corporations and cities have developed these strategic energy action plans—they may need 50% of their fleet to be electric by 2030 or reduce greenhouse gases by 50% by 2040—but they don’t know how to get there,” says Bob Irvin, executive director of Joules Accelerator, in Charlotte, N.C., which elevates climate-tech start-ups in North Carolina and South Carolina.

“Typically entrepreneurs need a corporate partner to get to scale,” says Emily Reichert, chief executive officer of Greentown Labs, one of the nation’s largest incubators with an accelerator program based in Somerville, Mass.

This public-private symbiosis is increasingly being recognized by lawmakers as the key to greening technology across industries. Seventeen states have created 23 so-called green banks—not official banks, but accelerators that channel investment capital to speed up the adoption of climate technology.

“Collectively they have deployed $1.9 billion of green-bank capital to cause $7 billion in total investment,” says Jeffrey Schub, executive director at the Washington, D.C.-based Coalition for Green Capital, which is an incubator for green banks.

While the roles of accelerators and incubators can overlap, and often the terms are used interchangeably, typically an incubator provides physical space—offices, conference rooms, or laboratories—and the relationships with start-ups can endure for years.

For example, start-ups in Greentown Labs’ incubator program have use of 100,000 square feet of office and laboratory space and an open timeline. “Our accelerator program is more of a boot camp with limited time, and is almost completely virtual,” Reichert says.

An accelerator’s role is to provide anything from mentorship to investment capital, typically over a period of weeks or several months. Some will invest in start-ups, while others will serve as matchmakers between entrepreneurs and investors.

Nate Kirchhofer, chief executive officer of BioZen Batteries, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based start-up developing environmentally sound batteries capable of powering massive operations such as solar-power fields, worked with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which has an in-house six-month accelerator program.

“LACI helped us hone our pitch, and we raised money by being part of the program,” says Kirchhofer, an electrochemist. “One of the main benefits was the networking and tons of contacts—the possibility to talk to investors, mentors, and meet similar early-stage, like-minded clean-tech founders.”

An original watercolour illustration for the cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 1997 — the first book in J.K. Rowling’s hit series—could sell for US$600,000 at a Sotheby’s auction this summer.

The illustration is headlining a June 26 sale in New York that will also feature big-ticket items from the collection of the late Dr. Rodney P. Swantko, a surgeon and collector from Indiana, including manuscripts by poet Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes books

The Harry Potter illustration, which introduced the young wizard character to the world, is expected to sell for between US$400,000 to US$600,000, which would make it the highest-priced item ever sold related to the Harry Potter world. This is the second time the illustration has been sold, however—it was on the auction block at Sotheby’s in London in 2001, where it achieved £85,750 (US$107,316).

The artist of the illustration, Thomas Taylor, was 23 years old at the time and a graduate student working at a children’s bookshop. According to Sotheby’s, Taylor took a “professional commission from an unknown author to visualise a unique wizarding world,” Sotheby’s said in a news release. He depicted Harry Potter boarding the train to Hogwarts on platform9 ¾ platform, and the illustration became the “universal image” of the Harry Potter series, Sotheby’s said.

“It is exciting to see the painting that marks the very start of my career, decades later and as bright as ever! It takes me back to the experience of reading Harry Potter for the first time—one of the first people in the world to do so—and the process of creating what is now an iconic image,” Taylor said in the release.

Meanwhile, to commemorate the 175th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s For Annie , 1849, Sotheby’s recently reunited the autographed manuscript of the poem with the author’s home, Poe Cottage, in the Bronx.

The cottage is where the author lived with his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, from 1846 until he died in 1849. The manuscript, also from the Swantko collection, will remain at the home until it is offered at auction at Sotheby’s on June 26 with an estimate between US$400,000 and US$600,000.

The autographed manuscript will remain at Poe Cottage until it is offered at auction at Sotheby’s on June 26.
Matthew Borowick for Sotheby’s

Poe Cottage, preserved and overseen by the Bronx County Historical Society, is home to many of the author’s famous works, including Eureka , 1948, and Annabel Lee , 1927.

“To reunite the For Annie manuscript with the Poe Cottage nearly two centuries after it was first composed brought to life literary history for a truly special and unique occasion,” Richard Austin , Sotheby’s Global Head of Books & Manuscripts, said in a news release.

For Annie was one of Poe’s most important compositions, and was addressed to Nancy “Annie” L. Richmond, one of the several women Poe pursued after his wife Viriginia’s death from tuberculosis in 1847.

In a letter to Richmond herself, Poe proclaimed For Annie was his best work: “I think the lines For Annie much the best I have ever written.”

The poem was composed in 1849, only months before Poe’s death, Sotheby’s said in the piece, Poe highlights the romantic comfort he feels from a woman named Annie while simultaneously grappling with the darkness of death, with lines like “And the fever called ‘living’ is conquered at last.”

Poe Cottage, preserved and overseen by the Bronx County Historical Society, is home to many of the author’s famous works, including Eureka, 1948, and Annabel Lee,, 1927.
Matthew Borowick for Sotheby’s

In the margins of the manuscript are the original handwritten instructions by Nathaniel P. Willis, co-editor of the New York Home Journal, where Poe published other poems such as The Raven and submitted For Annie on April 20, 1849.

Willis added Poe’s name in the top right and instructions about printing and presenting the poem on the side. The poem was also published in the Boston Weekly that same month.

Another piece of literary history included in the Swantko sale could surpass US$1 million. Conan Doyle’s autographed manuscript of the Sherlock Holmes tale The Sign of Four , 1889, is estimated to achieve between US$800,000 and US$1.2 million.

A New Landscape for Climate Investment

Investors are looking for on-ramps to clean-energy impact investments.