How can we finance development that’s good for the planet and the communities that live there?
A Q&A with Dawn Lippert, Founder and CEO, Elemental Impact
This episode originally aired on June 23, 2026. Watch the full episode on YouTube here.
7 out of 10 Americans don’t want a data center in their backyard, and it’s hard to blame them. But we’re also seeing backlash increase against clean energy infrastructure, which is hurting our ability to transition off of fossil fuels.
Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law found 498 contested renewable energy projects in 2025, a 32% increase from the prior year. They also found a 16% increase in local laws restricting renewable energy development.
Resistance has been at the heart of every environmental movement. You look at the history, you understand the harm, you fight not to let it repeat.
But building the clean energy we desperately need takes something resistance alone can’t deliver. It takes openness to the still-imperfect solutions that represent a huge improvement over the status quo for planetary health.
Building climate tech means understanding multiple truths. No development should harm. And no development at all means we fail to address climate change urgently.
My guest today, Dawn Lippert, has protected the environment for decades and understands industrial tradeoffs. Now she’s calling for an environmentalism which centers on innovating and building faster.
Dawn’s the CEO and founder of Elemental Impact and the Founding General Partner of Earthshot, both influential climate investment organizations. Elemental has helped more than 180 technology companies that have gone on to raise billions in follow-on funding. Their unique model combines catalytic capital from philanthropy with industry partnerships and deep entrepreneur support. Dawn grew Elemental in my hometown of Hawai’i, and its community values shape how she leads.
This conversation will change how you think about infrastructure buildout. Welcome to Future in Bloom.
Steph Speirs
Welcome, Dawn Lippert, to Future in Bloom. Thanks so much for joining us to talk about a litany of things because you’ve had a long and storied career in climate and climate tech. Can you tell us a little bit more about your journey?
Dawn Lippert
Sure, thanks for having me. So I’ve worked in climate and energy my entire career. I’m an environmentalist at heart and started really working on the environment when I was like 5 years old, but just kind of went from there studying environmental studies and a master’s in environment, and then started working on renewable energy. I really saw that you care about the environment and the relationship with people. Working on climate change is one of the key levers right now, and sort of at this moment in time, to be alive at this moment in time and care about these issues, I think it means being engaged in climate.
Steph Speirs
You said that you started in the environment at five years old. What happened when you were five?
Dawn Lippert
I think it was just something that was born in me. My family are not necessarily environmentalists, but I started charging my family a quarter when I left the lights on. I got really interested in waste and what was happening to waste and garbage. And so I have a natural affinity for efficiency,
Steph Speirs
I love that story because I can imagine both a little tiny businesswoman, Dawn, a 5-year-old, charging her family a quarter for all the times they left on the lights. I met you in college, actually, because you started the recycling program at Yale. You looked around and saw that they hadn’t been recycling, and then you designed a recycling bin and then ran the recycling program at Yale.
So you have bona fide environmental credibility. And your theory of how best to serve the environment has changed over time. Can you tell us a little bit more?
Dawn Lippert
So I had the amazing opportunity to work on something called the Hawai’i Clean Energy Initiative when I moved to Washington, D.C. It was a Department of Energy project to transition Hawai’i from fossil fuels to clean energy. And working on that, I was also working on the launch of ARPA-E. A super exciting time, which was our DARPA for clean energy. And what became really clear to me was that we were funding all these really interesting technologies at the national level as we were going through this community transformation at the Hawai’i local level.
A lot of the technologies that were being funded at the national level were not necessarily responsive to what the community wanted to see or needed to see transition. And so I got very interested in how would you create something that was investing in breakthrough technology and doing it from the lens of: what do communities need and want to transition? And that’s where the seed of Elemental was born, which is the technologies, new technologies, whether it’s solar, carbon dioxide removal, agriculture technologies, transportation, they can be a really important part of the solution. They can bring half the solution. The community partners have the knowledge about how to deploy.
They have the oftentimes sort of a veto right. They have the potential invitation to come into communities. So they have the other half of the solution. And that led to the thesis behind Elemental,
Steph Speirs
And you also founded the VC Earth Shot Ventures. Can you talk about these different vehicles and what they do, and asset size?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, we started Elemental, I started about 16 years ago, and it’s a nonprofit investor in climate. Our goal is to be the most catalytic investor in climate. And the value of doing that as a nonprofit, we take in grants from philanthropy and government and others, and then we invest in companies, usually about 15 companies a year, check size around 500k to a couple million dollars per project, typically. And we’ve been funding first-of-a-kind in early projects for 15 years.
We started doing that because we saw that the gap for these technologies and companies often was getting them on the ground with communities, deploying with community partners. And that was a big gap in the capital stack for climate projects. And it happens across whether you’re working in energy, agriculture, water, carbon, industry, or nature-based solutions. Those early projects are key financing gaps, no matter what sector you’re in. And some of the donors that we worked with at Elemental said, “We want to invest with you, we really like your eye for companies and talent.” And so we started Earth Shot Ventures with some of those folks, and it’s been really exciting. Earthshot Ventures, we double oversubscribed our initial plan for the first fund, and the thesis for Earthshot Ventures was to prove that, given where we are in time now, we can deliver the best venture returns in the space and make a positive climate impact.
Steph Speirs
What are some of the solutions that you are personally very excited about, but you think are undervalued by the market right now?
Dawn Lippert
2026 is a really interesting time to be investing in this space. There’s a lot that’s undervalued by the market because what the market is valuing is speed to power and scale, especially in the energy sector. And so I think some of the things that we see as key imperatives still are in the regenerative agriculture space. We invest in a company called Nitricity, which is an interesting one that is developing essentially a low-carbon fertilizer. So, like liquid nitrogen, instead of made from natural gas, made from renewable energy. We invested in that first-of-a-kind plant in California. That enables organic agriculture and enables community-sized fertilizer plants. These are huge fertilizer plants that are shipped across the country or across the world. This is sort of a community-based model that has local economic impact, etc. So those are some of the things that we’re really excited about.
Steph Speirs
And in 2026, we’ve seen in climate financing a drop off in early stage financing, really more of a shift to infrastructure financing. And the kinds of companies that are still getting funding are ones that either have excellent profitable unit economics or are the ones serving the increase in electricity demand. Can you talk about other trends of what you see in your company portfolio?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, it’s very much true that I think in 2022 and 2023 were seeing sort of a resurgence across all of these different sectors, whether it’s agriculture, maritime, carbon dioxide removal, water technologies, all of it was having a moment driven by some regulatory support, but also other kinds of financing incentives and just an overall zeitgeist and agreement in the space. And we’ve seen that certainly do a U-turn in 2025 and 2026. So where there’s still a ton of momentum is around energy and also around anything that’s using AI to make things more efficient or sort of improve existing practices like AI-native applications for construction, for mining, for industrials, like all kinds of different things. And then in energy specifically. So energy supply, energy storage, all those kinds of things we’re seeing in real time.
So I think the story that we’re seeing in 2026 is this real bifurcation of the market and to some of these extremes, huge acceleration around energy, largely pulled along by the demand from major tech companies for power and the desire to have speed to power, much of which is going to be renewable. And then these other sectors have different kinds of more complex market drivers that are not as clear right now.
Steph Speirs
And so for those companies that are the non-energy companies that maybe aren’t serving large energy loads, how do they make it through this moment? How are you seeing them actually find their way through?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, I mean, I think what you said about unit economics is really key. So some of those companies are just cheaper, better, faster. And so that will continue to be really important right now. So we have companies, for example, Plantable, that produce alternative proteins in Texas. You remember we had that egg crisis a couple of years ago. They create a protein that can be a substitute for eggs or other kinds of ingredients like that in baked goods. The product just makes a ton of sense. It’s better, it’s cheaper, and it has a more secure supply chain.
And they have a manufacturing plant in El Dorado, Texas, which is employing so many people in the county and actually has raised the median income in the county by 60%. So this is just sort of real economic development on the ground, as well as a product that makes sense cheaper, better, faster. So that’s certainly part of the story for those kinds of companies, getting to those strong unit economics right now. In other cases, we’re seeing companies be really effective globally. So they might be selling in the EU or other places that have strong market dynamics right now.
And then I would say the third thing we’re seeing is companies finding creative ways to sell into the data center world and supply chain. So one example of a company there would be like Noon Energy, which is the energy storage company that Elemental invested in. And we funded their first-of-a-kind project and have been working with them on that. And then just a couple of weeks ago, they announced a big deal with Meta to do a huge amount offtake for their next couple of years of production. So we’re seeing companies, you know, be creative in how to work with some of those customers that have strong balance sheets and are really motivated.
Steph Speirs
A lot of these climate tech companies are finding success in figuring out a way to scale by selling to hyperscalers or tech companies. And what ways are you seeing that customers change in this really important inflection point in data center growth?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah. So, working directly with several of these data centers, data center companies, and large tech companies, and what we’re seeing that there’s a moment right now where they can collaborate on piloting and testing new technologies. And the key thing for them is speed and getting them into the data center environment. So we’re working with a number of these large tech companies, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, on three key things. One is new materials that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. So steel, cement, concrete, copper, and other things like that. Also, energy systems and water systems, and so cooling that can reduce the water use, etc.
It’s a really interesting time to figure out how we can use data centers to help entrepreneurs commercialize technologies faster, and at a time when the federal government has really pulled back, and there’s been a real U-turn from the federal government in terms of support, this can be a very effective pathway for commercialization for companies. And it just requires organizing ourselves to pilot those technologies, etc. So we opened a program to pilot technologies, fund pilots between $500 and $500,000, and $5 million in either a data center, kind of a new data center environment, a retrofit environment, or a testing environment that’s related to data centers, so that companies can have a clearer pathway to selling into these folks. And that’s a really important signal right now for companies to get investment.
Steph Speirs
So there’s a Gallup poll out there that says three out of four Americans do not want a data center built in their backyard. That’s a higher percentage of Americans than have said they don’t want a nuclear power plant in their backyard. So there’s obviously increasing backlash against data centers. Part of why we started the Solving the AI Power Problem series at Future and Bloom is because we think that there’s not enough conversation about the solutions that, to your point, the data centers don’t need to extract from communities; they don’t have to do that. Can you help us visualize what kind of technologies you’re most excited about that can change the trajectory of these data centers?
Dawn Lippert
I think it is really important to recognize that, and recognize also that the data center piece is very hyperlocal. Right. It might be a good solution for one community, not a good solution for another community. One of the key things for climate is to figure out how to use data centers to bring forward technologies that can then be used in hospitals, in schools and cities that can be commercialized to create affordable energy more broadly and use data centers as sort of the first entry point for those technologies and hopefully increase the availability of affordable energy, clean energy, reduce pollution, emissions, etc. that has broader community benefits.
So one example is we funded a company called Fervo. It recently went public, was a very exciting geothermal company, and we funded their early project. And then it was really a relationship with Google that created an inflection point for that company in terms of providing demand and helping them scale up. And then a couple of years ago, with Fervo, we made another investment from the Elemental side, again from our nonprofit working on the workforce. So, working on apprenticeships for rural Utah, for folks to work in geothermal and move into this workforce. When we did that, the university in southern Utah made geothermal one of their core economic growth pillars for the region. There’s a lot of enthusiasm around economic development potential and the jobs there. So it’s sort of this interesting trifecta of a new technology, potentially a big tech company, or a data center that can be part of the demand that pulls it through, and then a really clear nexus to community benefit where it fits in a community. And that can be economic development, jobs, and other community benefits.
Steph Speirs
Yeah. One of the most important numbers that I think people don’t know about data centers and jobs is that there’s a lot of talk about how data centers don’t create a lot of permanent jobs. And that is actually true. But the jobs that are created are the energy jobs that are powering the data centers. The number of jobs is increasing and significant. And that’s what I think exactly what you’re talking about is like, the power sources for these data centers are where the opportunities are, not necessarily the data centers themselves.
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, that’s right. And I think what we really care about is that for a lot of those companies, we see the companies that are creating and providing that power. A lot of those companies are new companies that will become some of the biggest companies in the world, I think, because they’re deploying geothermal, deploying energy storage, all of these new energy technologies that are on the rise. And what we care about is that those companies have built into their DNA how to work with community partners from the early days. We have a chance for these companies to look very different from the existing legacy companies that dominate our energy picture, whether it’s utilities or oil and gas companies. And so if we build into their DNA early, how do you do local workforce development? How do you do community benefits in a new way? I think we have a really exciting opportunity around the next generation of companies being ones we’re really proud of and that we actually want in our communities.
Steph Speirs
Yeah. And the opportunity you’re talking about is how do we make sure that we build this new energy system that doesn’t replicate the worst parts of the old energy system?
Dawn Lippert
Along with every investment that we do through Elemental, we pair it with a ton of support and coaching. Those investments specifically go to fund a community partner, whether it’s in the workforce, university, environmental group, or community group. And so, really building those skills early in companies. Once you sort of start doing that, it’s a one-way street, and companies say, oh, this creates a lot of business value for us. There’s real win in doing this. But it’s not necessarily a muscle that entrepreneurs have from the beginning. And I think it’s really important to build it in.
Steph Speirs
And you talked about working with tech companies in partnership. Can you talk a little bit more about this coalition and what it looks like?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah. So what it looks like is there are a lot of different technologies that companies want to pilot across data centers. So think about green cement. Does Meta have to do their own green cement pilot, and Google with the same company, and Amazon and Microsoft? I mean, that’s really challenging for the company. It’s not a very efficient path to scale for them. And so we can find ways that they can share a sense of what success looks like, what the benchmarks are that they want to see. Performance benchmarks, which we’ve published, are: here’s the performance benchmarks that we’re looking for from technology, and then pilot in the way they all have access to that data, and we’re sharing with the broader market. We can just really accelerate the commercialization timeline and make it much easier for entrepreneurs to go to market.
Another real challenge for entrepreneurs often is that they don’t necessarily want just one of these big tech companies investing in them. They want to be able to work across them. And so this is a way that they can work across those different companies as well. So I’m really excited about the potential for entrepreneurs to have a faster path to market, and then that enables the cost to come down for all the rest of us, and then they can go on to sell to cities and hospitals, schools, and all these other different customers that they want to sell to as well. The data centers, in a lot of ways, are this easier purchaser. They have a strong balance sheet that can then get financed, and the company can really get to scale and come down the cost curve.
Steph Speirs
I think anyone working in the climate or energy industry would see partnering with hyperscalers to deploy climate tech as sensible. There are a lot of environmentalists out there who would call it greenwashing, and would say: don’t work with them, they’re reaping a lot of benefits from extracting from the environment. As an environmentalist yourself, how would you talk to those folks and let them know why this is worth doing?
Dawn Lippert
My sense is that partnering with hyperscalers or with big tech companies can get us there much faster in terms of decarbonization and community benefit. So I’m a believer that we can really shape what can happen in these markets. And this is actually a very unique time in history. We’re at the beginning of this wave of build-out. And there aren’t that many times in life where you get to be at the beginning of something that’s really huge and will change how landscapes look for decades and generations to come. This isn’t one of those moments. And it’s around data centers. So for me, I think it’s, and for our team, we absolutely wrestle with these issues. I think that we would have the wrong team if we were not wrestling with this. I think that’s key to doing this well is thinking really deeply about the technologies we choose, the entrepreneurs we work with, and the guidelines under which we’re deploying, and to be really at the table to help the hyperscalers. Many of the hyperscalers have their own carbon goals, their own water goals, and community goals about how they want to engage. And they need tools and technologies and access to entrepreneurs to be able to enable that. So I think for us it’s a real recognition that this is coming. Data centers are being built, and we have an opportunity to shape them to be built in the most responsible way that we can.
Steph Speirs
Yeah, as you know, I’ve worked on environmental justice for a long time. And when I think about figuring out how to change our future to be a more livable one, it requires replication of solutions. We have to get those solutions out there; we have to deploy them. I’ve worked in D.C., laws don’t get written generally by congresspeople. They’re handed over to overworked congressional staffers by think tanks or advocacy groups. And the overworked congressional staffer takes that draft and runs with it. And that’s how laws get written in order to affect the future: we have to put forward a draft of what that future looks like.
Dawn Lippert
I think we need lots of different kinds of partnerships to build this picture, too. One of the hyperscalers that we were talking to recently was saying, “We actually want you to hold us accountable.” The reason they selected Elemental to work on this and came to us with this idea was because of our track record and our DNA working with communities. Last year, 47% of data centers and clean energy projects were canceled. So the pushback is real, and I think there are some really serious concerns around it. What Elemental is really good at is building, and that we’re really good at working with entrepreneurs. We’re really good at building. So, can we take our skill set and apply it to this space that is going to have a lot of building coming down?
The other thing that’s interesting to me is that we actually did this 10 years ago with the utility sector. We used to run a utility collaborative at Elemental when utilities were the ones buying all the clean energy. It seems so quaint now. There’s a really established and sort of mature set of nonprofits that work alongside utilities that have a ton of expertise in technology and impact measurement, all these other things, and sort of help move the utility industry toward clean. We don’t have that yet for a lot of the tech buildout and the hyperscalers; it’s just so new, and it’s moving really fast.
Steph Speirs
Because the checks and balances matter, you need the technology to be deployed, but you also need the rules to be standardized such that everyone and every entrepreneur knows with certainty what the market looks like, and every investor can invest with certainty as well. I think the rules and the policy are incredibly important. When I first met Elemental, it was investing just in Hawai’i and California. And now you’re investing globally. Can you tell us a couple of your big lessons from entrepreneurship, things that you wish you knew 16 years ago?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, it’s such a good question. So first of all, I think the number one thing for me is getting to learn from other entrepreneurs has been such a gift. So we invest in entrepreneurs, we have a CEO and leadership summit every year, in which more than 100 of our entrepreneurs come to Hawai’i. And it’s a way to give back to Hawai’i, but also connect people to the culture there. But I’ve learned so much from all of the entrepreneurs that we work with over many years. So I really believe in building a community of people who are doing something really hard. And if people don’t believe in this, they’re probably not building in climate, they’re probably building in social media or a dating app or something else. I guess one of my other learnings over time is just how important the team is. You know this. You’re an amazing team builder, and I’ve worked with some of the folks that are with Elemental for many years now, you know, sometimes a dozen years or so, and just having a team around that is joyful to work with every day makes all the difference in the world to me. And joyful doesn’t mean always being happy, but it means sort of like finding, like, sort of innate joy and drive in the mission.
Steph Speirs
Joy is a state, whereas happiness is a feeling.
Dawn Lippert
There you go. Yeah, yeah. And we’ve thought a lot. Joy is one of our values. We’ve thought a lot about that. Another one of our values is to be brave, keep innovating. And so finding people around me that are part of that team, part of that mission, and are brave and can try new things. I mean, think about the work we’re doing in data centers. That is a really new thing to try. We think it can be really impactful, but it takes courage to try something new and different.
Steph Speirs
We have been yelled at for trying to talk about solutions in this space. We get yelled at by people who think we’re not, who yell at us because we want to regulate data centers. We get yelled at by people for saying we should not care and be advancing any solutions regarding AI. You will get yelled at.
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, yeah. And I think for us, again, having a team that’s resilient to that says if not us, who? And then I think also having just amazing teachers, I’ve been really fortunate. And the reason I moved to Hawai’i was to work for my mentor. His name is Maurice Kaya. He was the Secretary of Energy for Hawai’i for about 20 years and led the first renewable portfolio standard and the early geothermal development. A lot of this early development just really took me under his wing. So I’ve always just tried to find people that I can learn from and that hold me to a really high standard. And I’ve been really fortunate to have amazing teachers and mentors along the way.
Steph Speirs
I think one of the reasons why Hawai’i is such a special place to house Elemental is because it’s a place that’s suffused with indigenous values where native Hawai’ian beliefs are mainstream. And they are about making sure that you’re a good steward of the planet. The planet is not the land; it’s your ancestor. How has that informed the way that you’ve grown Elemental? What have you learned from Native Hawai’ians?
Dawn Lippert
I mean, I think Elemental is a totally different organization than if we had been born somewhere else. And I don’t think it would even be Elemental in the way that it is. And in Hawai’i, when you live on an island, everything’s interconnected, and when you do a project, it has to have community support. That’s the only way to do it. People have tried to ram things through, and they get reversed. Right. Because ultimately, you need community license. And that was what I learned really early in starting Elemental. And we started building that into how we work with companies. And a lot of the companies were coming from other places around the world because Hawai’i was really a leader, especially in 2007, 2008, 2009, when clean energy was cheaper in Hawai’i than fossil fuels. But that wasn’t the case in most other geographies.
And so all the best companies in the world, whether it was in either wind or solar energy storage, electric vehicles, or agriculture, were coming to Hawai’i to come to market early. And so we learn these lessons on the ground, and then guess what? It turns out that’s true everywhere. It’s just that it’s sort of in a magnifying glass in Hawai’i because it’s a small place, and so we learned it there. But I think it’s completely intertwined with the DNA of Elemental. It is sort of the learning from doing that work in Hawai’i. And then there’s also a really important value that’s been one of our values from the early days at Elemental, which is the value of Kuleana. And that’s reciprocity, and it’s both a responsibility and a privilege to do the work. And I think if you view your work as something that you’re entrusted to do and trusted with, and it’s something that you’re stewarding, it’s not yours. It’s something that you have a responsibility to steward; it really changes the frame of how you do work.
Steph Speirs
Yeah, privilege and a responsibility that makes it seem like it is an honor to do the work. And it often does feel like an honor to do this work because you know that it’s in the service of something worthwhile: a livable planet, a thriving livelihood for people. There are also really hard times. And, you know, you talked about the lessons, having gone through those hard times, can you take us back to, you know, some of the lowest moments of Elemental and what that taught you? Because I don’t think we talk about failure enough as entrepreneurs.
Dawn Lippert
Originally, we were really operating mostly in Hawai’i and taking companies from all over the world, demonstrating with them in Hawai’i, first-of-a-kind projects in Hawai’i. And then when we decided to expand to California and other places on the mainland, that made people really nervous in Hawai’i. It was like, are we going to sort of lose the essence of what Elemental is? And people felt really connected to the work that we were doing. And so we took that challenge really seriously. Melissa and I made a spreadsheet of like 200 people that we need to talk to. We went and had one-on-ones with like 200 people leading up to that decision to expand and say, we really see this as a way to expand our impact both in Hawai’i and globally.
And so growth for us is not about leaving Hawai’i, it’s expanding both here and globally, but trying to build something really globally important that has roots in Hawai’i and really working to sort of explain that to people. But that was a really tenuous and challenging time for us. And there have been other times when we’ve done something that I thought was the right thing to do, but was not socialized with people that opposed it. And those were times that created real conflict in the community and real angst. And I think it also taught me a lot about how you can still stand up for things you believe in and do those things, but really try not to surprise people, especially people in positions of power, with your views.
Steph Speirs
If happiness is the gap between expectations and reality, how you set those expectations really affects how it lands for people. Another question I have about your entrepreneurship journey is, I wonder if you can take us through a case study. It’s really helpful to put ourselves in a decision maker’s shoes because there are so many moments as a leader where you could go either way. Like, it’s not clear in that moment which is the better option. And it’s a good teachable moment. Do you have a situation like that you can help us think through?
Dawn Lippert
When you look at it, you kind of have the whole world of opportunities to look at, and then you’re making investment decisions about what’s the highest impact that you can do with your dollar and your time and your team, and your political capital that comes along with it. And so what comes to mind is about four years ago, we were looking at a company in the mining sector, this is at Earthshot Ventures. And the company’s called Cobalt Metals. And it was a really interesting opportunity. The thesis was that they could use AI along with human intelligence to find the metals and minerals that are core to the energy transition. So think cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, and find them much more efficiently and effectively using AI, and then own those resources and mine those resources. One of my partners at Earthshot, in particular, had been really involved in organizing against some mining projects previously. We’re all like kind of energy and climate people in our whole careers. It was a mine in Alaska.
Steph Speirs
And they protested that mine because of the environmental damage?
Dawn Lippert
Because of the environmental damage. And it was in a kind of a key salmon run region. And environmental groups have long been really suspect of mining and, in general been in opposition to mining. And mining can be really environmentally damaging for waterways, for sort of like surface ecosystems. And so we see this sort of mining investment come across that we think is a really interesting investment. And the idea was that we can do this in a different way that’s more responsible. If we know where more of the minerals are, we can mine those that are in environmentally sensitive areas. But then how do we really know going forward that if we find a great resource in a really environmentally sensitive area, that you would not be sort of on the wrong side of history there? Mining also has a history of human rights abuses. If you’re an equity investor, you’re an investor for a long time in these companies.
Steph Speirs
It’s like a marriage.
Dawn Lippert
You have some. It’s like a marriage, and you have some influence, but you don’t control what the company does, especially as a minority investor. And so this was kind of a key decision for us.
Steph Speirs
Okay, so let’s talk about pros and cons. Cons are very clear. Potentially being on the wrong side of history, environmentally, going against your values because of the way mining has historically been done. You said it was an interesting investment. Think about what are the pros there?
Dawn Lippert
And I would say another con, too, is just the reputational risk, both initially, but then also, if something went wrong, there’s a reputational risk. Right. And kind of significant there on the. On the what could go right side, I mean, when you’re a venture investor, when we’re venture investors, we’re looking mostly like what can go right. And I think that’s super important, asking what can go right is super important in venture. And you’re looking for companies that can have huge profits, financial outcomes, and huge climate benefits.
The pros on this side were that we know we’re going to need in the next 20 years more copper than that’s been mined in all of human history. Even if we do lots and lots of recycling, which we are investing in, which we absolutely want to do, we also will need new resources. And we know the same is true for lithium, for nickel, for all of the grid technologies we want to invest in, for the solar technologies, for the electric vehicles, all of these technologies take all of these metals. Right. And so we sort of thought, okay, well, if we’re going to be investing in grid technologies, and no one would argue like you shouldn’t invest in a grid technology necessarily from an environmental footprint standpoint, you need to be kind of intellectually honest about where that comes from up the supply chain.
Steph Speirs
Okay, so you are weighing the pros and cons here in this investment. What do you decide to do?
Dawn Lippert
So we decided to make the investment, and we invested in KoBold. And this is before they made their first big discovery, too. So there was risk there as well. What happened later that year is they told insiders that they had found basically what we now know is one of the largest undeveloped copper resources in the world, which is a resource called Ngomba. It’s in northern Zambia, right on the border of the Democratic problem in Congo. And this resource is in a very well-known mining region. And people thought that there was a big resource in this particular area, but it was really difficult to find without AI plus human intelligence, and geologists mixed with engineering, mixed with the AI folks, and working in that really interesting trifecta is what enabled them to find this incredibly high-grade seam. So most copper mines, a lot of copper mines being mined today, are like half a percent or 1% copper. This area is 5 to 8% copper, this seam.
I’m still, of course, really concerned about what are the impacts of something like this are. So a couple of weeks ago, I actually went to Zambia with KoBold to check it out and get on the ground and see what it means for the people side, what it means politically. I do think that by taking a totally different greenfield approach to it, we can have very different outcomes in mining. So there will always be trade-offs. There are trade-offs to everything we’re building right now in clean energy and housing. All of these things have trade-offs. But I’ve gotten much more comfortable with the trade-offs. And I’m actually really glad that we’re at the table with our perspective on community development and how important that is. And they just built a maternity ward of a hospital, they’re building schools, they have this huge agriculture extension program to increase the yields of farmers. They’re financing local suppliers like Zambian companies to provide for drilling and rigs and things that the companies have not had access to with other companies in the region.
And geopolitically, it’s really important that we have an American presence in these regions where KoBold is the only American company present. So I think there are a lot of reasons that I feel hopeful that this can be kind of an inflection point.
Steph Speirs
Yeah, and you said that there are trade-offs. All infrastructure, all development has trade-offs. A lot of environmentalism since the 1970s has been about stopping harm and thus has been synonymous with don’t build, we need to conserve the land. And there’s a new breed of environmentalism cropping up now that’s talking about how we have to build infrastructure that gets us off of fossil fuels, and how we hold ourselves accountable to make sure that we do it in a way that’s different than the development that has extracted from vulnerable communities.
Dawn Lippert
I think one of the challenges has been that we haven’t really been that honest about the trade-offs. We’re sort of like, oh, it’s like, it’s all like win, we’re just going to build solar, and it’s like everyone’s going to win. But there are real trade-offs to doing that.
Steph Speirs
Solar uses critical minerals, too.
Dawn Lippert
Solar uses critical minerals, and it might be in sensitive habitats or land that could be used for agriculture or all these other things.
Steph Speirs
These other wind turbines are hard to recycle; these kinds of problems.
Dawn Lippert
To have credibility, we have to be super honest about what those trade-offs are and then work like hell to innovate around them as well. Right. We have lots of really interesting innovations around, you know, pollinators and ag, and realize that we are in a really existential time around climate, and we have to build to get out of it. And so it’s not just a question of like, you know, do we build a mine or don’t we build a mine? Or do we build solar, or do we build nothing? It’s like, okay, we can build solar, we can build, as you know, do more drilling for oil in the Gulf. Right. So I think there are real trade-offs. It’s not that we’re just doing a project or nothing. It’s you picking a project, you’re picking something else.
Steph Speirs
The status quo is more oil and gas. And what, and some people think just because we don’t have a perfect solution with zero trade-offs, it’s not worth doing a solar or wind solution, or some other, or nuclear. And the fact of the matter is, the status quo is oil and gas, and that will continue to do much more damage. Countless study after study has shown that it is much more damaging to our planet than a lot of the downsides of renewable or clean energy.
Dawn Lippert
And I think where philanthropy is really struggling now is that the traditional philanthropic playbook has been much more around advocacy. And sort of the environmental playbook has been around, how do we sort of block some of these projects that are really bad, like chemical projects, oil projects, gas projects.
Steph Speirs
For good reason.
Dawn Lippert
For good reason. And what’s been interesting from my perspective, seeing it from the entrepreneur’s lens, is that entrepreneurs who started companies because they really think they’re doing the right thing for the environment have faced a lot of pushback, often from environmental communities. And that’s really confusing for an entrepreneur. I literally started this carbon dioxide removal company to solve this waste problem, or this agriculture company to solve this problem. And then you’re sort of telling me I’m the enemy. And how do we actually get through that and ensure that we’re supporting entrepreneurs who have a better solution? And there might be trade-offs; it might not be perfect. And it’s also new. And new has its own challenge just because new technology creates fear. And so we have to, I think, very much get through that. A lot of the sort of large environmental groups that have… It’s hard to build consensus or even support for new technologies where there are unknown about what some of their impacts will be because they’re new. I think we need a sort of different kind of environmental movement in order to build at scale, like we all know we need to now, to address what’s happening in climate.
Steph Speirs
I think it also requires us to make sure those environmentalists are in the room with industry because those industries and a lot of these environmental nonprofits often don’t talk to each other. You know, they’ll write their own reports without consulting the other side. And what we need is that cultural translation. Going back to data centers. You know, as data center backlash is increasing across the country, so is backlash against all of the technologies you pointed out that are meant to get us off of fossil fuels like solar and wind; that backlash is also increasing. And so fundamentally, I think the reason why I think just going out as advocates and saying “you can’t build the data center,” puts us down the wrong path because it will get built. It will just get built in another community that doesn’t have the time and resources to show up to the permitting meeting. If history has taught us anything, if we look at Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, we know that large polluting industrial facilities will find a community with less power and build there. And so if we don’t set the standards, if we don’t deploy the technology that will make these centers better, we are just going to replicate what’s happened before.
Dawn Lippert
Yeah. And rates are going up independent of data centers. Right. So what we’re seeing is that the grid is old. We have major oil and gas market disruptions right now globally. But the infrastructure upgrades needed, the transmission upgrades needed, all of this is part of what’s contributing to rates going up more broadly. And so data centers can be a solution because it helps amortize the cost of all those upgrades over a much larger customer base. And we have seen in many cases tech companies are willing to lean in and pay their own way, pay for infrastructure upgrades, etc.
Steph Speirs
We can replicate the solutions that actually help communities. Like, there’s a pilot where a data center is buying batteries for the surrounding homes and businesses so that they can create a virtual power plant that can help the grid flex when there’s peak energy demand. And data centers themselves could flexibly lower or increase their usage based on the grid's needs. Right. So there are all these solutions out there.
Dawn Lippert
Yeah. And we’ve invested in several of these kinds of companies that are working on this, in a distributed kind of compute and bringing in distributed resources for grid flexibility. Companies like Weave Grid are doing this with EVs and other sorts of grid assets. Companies like Span invested in Emerald AI, which is doing this with Nvidia around a pilot data center that’s flexible. So there are some really creative solutions. It’s really on, I think the innovators and entrepreneurs need to show that they deliver for local communities too. So it’s not just like, you know, I think sometimes we sort of talk about what the benefits are, and then it’s really hard to show those real benefits on the ground. So that’s our job.
Steph Speirs
Yeah. And we have to make sure the real benefits, like community benefits, are such a squishy topic and phrase that people throw around a lot in energy. And it can mean giving an EV charger to a community, or it can mean an actual share of revenue. I don’t think communities are interested in just talking; they need to share in the wealth in order to be bought into an infrastructure project. And even then. Every community is different. As you said, they’re not a monolith. So coming up with solutions at work for communities, including them in the conversation, having entrepreneurs demonstrate that it is good for the surrounding community, like these are all parts we can play. The future is unwritten, and we hold the pen.
Dawn Lippert
Yeah. There’s so much we can do to write that future and then share really clear, specific proof points of where this is working. And it has to be super local. And it is local.
Steph Speirs
What do you wish everyone knew about the climate tech industry?
Dawn Lippert
I wish people knew the caliber of innovators working on these problems.
Steph Speirs
In a time in which climate is not popular, what makes you believe that it’s still important to be able to reference or educate people about climate?
Dawn Lippert
Things that are good for the climate actually have lots of other benefits. So it’s job creation, it’s domestic supply chains, it’s energy security, national security, it’s reduction of local air pollution, and human health. So we use climate as an umbrella term. But these other things are things that impact people every single day, not just in the future.
Steph Speirs
What’s one person, book, or mentor that’s really shaped your life, and what’s the biggest thing you learned from them?
Dawn Lippert
Yeah, I’ll say my mentor, Maurice Kaya, the one who brought me to Hawai’i, and he taught me to slow down and do things right and do things the right way.
I just really appreciate your leadership and how you brought these stories to so many people in really clear ways. And I always learn something when I’m watching Future in Bloom and learning from you, too.
Steph Speirs
And it has been a real pleasure to watch you go from designing a recycling bin for a large university to building multiple organizations that I know from having firsthand experience watching you over decades is actually improving millions of people’s lives. And it takes leadership to go through that muddle and to lead people towards paths of light. And you are that person.