Climate tech’s Netscape moment Billions are pouring into the business of decarbonisation

“NERDS WILL invent the future,” declared Vinod Khosla in 2010. The venture capitalist was not talking about the sort of nerds responsible for e-commerce sites, marketplace apps or social-media platforms. Rather, his speech, delivered at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), was intended to inspire brilliant engineers and scientists to pursue climate-related innovation. The “clean tech” investment bubble had recently popped, so it then seemed an unsexy career option. But if top talent took on the hard engineering challenges involved, he argued, early commercial successes and rising public awareness would produce a “Netscape-like” moment, referring to the web browser which ushered in the consumer internet in the mid-1990s. “Ten years from now,” he predicted, “the level of invention will explode.”

The billionaire investor, who has since backed Impossible Foods (which makes low-carbon alternative protein and is valued at $10bn) and QuantumScape (which develops advanced batteries and last year raised $680m via a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC), got the timing about right. The International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental forecaster, calculates that new patents related to core technologies like batteries, hydrogen, smart grids and carbon capture are far outpacing those in other technologies, including fossil fuels.

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