Team size: Five+

How has the increasing consciousness of climate change and sustainability affected your company and the team’s priorities?

While the energy sector gets much of the limelight when it comes to climate change impacts, many other industries are already recognising physical and transition risks from climate change. Infrastructure development, real estate, and insurance are areas that already have had to adjust to very real climate-related impacts.

Enter Crypto. Though not a silver bullet, this multi-feature utility has the potential to help decarbonise unreliable power grids, optimise economic incentives for everyone and be a driver for countries to meet climate goals faster. Crypto miners can helps address the deficiencies that renewables like solar and wind suffer from wherein the energy supply that they generate is either overabundant or non-existent. Crypto mining, by design, can put that overabundance that would otherwise go unused, into productive use. The net impact of this is the incentivisation for more solar and wind power to be built thus retiring the use of fossil fuels faster. This is particularly useful given that 66% of the primary energy used to create electricity is wasted by the time the electricity reaches consumers. In my view, over time, crypto mining will mature as it gets more acceptance, empowering the technology to act as a driver of new renewable developments in locations that were previously considered uneconomical.

The “Merge” is arguably one of the most anticipated events yet in cryptocurrency history, when the Ethereum blockchain will switch from a disturbingly energy-hungry method of validating transactions to a new strategy that uses a fraction of the electricity. The transition is supposed to slash Ethereum’s energy consumption by a whopping 99.95 %.

More specifically in India, so far, most corporations have been opting for the easy and the obvious to lower their carbon footprint. The easiest of these is perhaps recycling water and other materials. The most common operational change is replacing fossil fuel-based power generation with renewable energy. And this is not just because of decarbonisation, but because renewables are emerging as the cheapest form of energy and offer a high return on investment. However, with growing scrutiny on their role in climate action, companies can no longer just cut emissions in its own operations. They also need to scrutinise their value chains and create tools, models, solutions, and support innovations to scale up climate action. Besides renewables, another key area attracting investments is energy and resource efficiency, which is using IoT solutions to track energy losses and using analytics and fault diagnostics for energy optimisation.