Expert Voices: Otherlab's Saul Griffith talks electrification

Saul Griffith, the engineer and inventor behind Otherlab, has advice for climate tech investors: "Go bigger, and plan for longer."

• "Invest in the inevitable. Software won't do shit to solve climate change. We need to do steel, cement, aluminum, massive amounts of electrification, agriculture, food."

Why he matters: Griffith's San Francisco-based Otherlab has spun-off startups like Gradient, Sunfolding and Canvas.

• He's also an enthusiastic advocate for the electrify-everything movement (check out his book), and he co-founded electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which recently welcomed Stacey Abrams as senior counsel.

Griffith's responses were edited for clarity and length.

What, in your view, was the big story in clean energy/climate tech this week?

• I don't really read climate tech investing news because it feels like out-of-touch software bros pretending that they are saving the world. So the less obvious news story of the week for me was this one. ["The Energy Transition Will Be Volatile," from the Financial Times]
• I think this article is important because (finally) the business media are understanding that the free market cannot move fast enough on this transition to keep our climate within reasonable bounds. This is why the [Inflation Reduction Act] and other policies like it taking shape around the world are so important, and will continue to shape climate tech investing.

What would you add to the narrative?

• We are about to have the five hottest years on human record. The climate news will only get darker, and things like the Canadian fires are bringing the reality of climate change, as opposed to the science, to everyone.
• We are at the beginning of the emergency, not the end, so everyone needs to be thinking about the scalability of their solutions and whether their supply chain can ramp up.  I like this report from Rewiring America, "Pace of Progress," (obviously I have some bias) because it puts real targets of the scale and ambition required around the everyday things in our lives.

By contrast, what's going undernoticed?

• I still can't believe there isn't a giant conversation about refrigerants. We are going to need a lot of heat pumps, and they should be run on things with low global warming potential such as propane and supercritical carbon dioxide.
• Building codes and other regulations are slowing down and preventing this critical transition. We live in a world regulated for fossil fuels, and our regulatory environment simply isn't up to the task on this transition.
• One example is rooftop solar. America has a dysfunctional set of building codes and electricity network regulations that mean that rooftop solar in the U.S. is at least 3 times more expensive than it is in Australia. Fixing the regulatory environment needs to be on every climate tech investor and entrepreneur radar.

One tip for climate-tech investors or founders:

• Try to find a way to build your company without venture. The venture timeline (7-10 year expectations on returns) is simply incompatible with hardware.
• Also, plan for extreme global financial events. It's going to take 10 years at least to build your business. We've had two to three major financial meltdowns every decade for the last few decades (2000 crash, 2008, debt limit threats, inflation, etc...). These will likely kill most hardware start-ups if they happen to be raising at the wrong moment.

Four fun things:

💼 First job: Working the pro-shop of a crappy little golf course when I was in high school. My first full-time job was in a steel mill making reinforcing steel bars. I love big industry as a result.

👑 Proudest investment: I really love what Channing Street Copper is doing.

🤦 Facepalm investment: I'm really good at doing things 10 years too early, like electric aircraft. My real facepalms are the things I was doing that I didn't continue to do that became really big later.

💡 In three-ish words, the change you would make to climate tech investing: Bigger, longer, with a side of regulatory reform.