'Grow Food On Mars': LA Startups Tackle Climate Change With Inventive Solutions
'Grow Food On Mars': LA Startups Tackle Climate Change With Inventive Solutions
Dozens of startups are inventing ways to keep LA cool with products and services that aim to avert environmental disaster – and yield profits
The entrance to Laci’s La Kretz Innovation Campus, which mentors local startups. Photograph: Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator
Rory Carroll in Los Angeles | @rorycarroll72
Tuesday 18 July 2017 07.00 EDT
Drought, floods, wildfires and heat waves – climate change and extreme weather events are wreaking havoc in California, especially in Los Angeles. The city has recently baked in record temperatures with a long, hot summer still stretching ahead.
It is the new normal: climate models predict the number of extreme heat days, defined as more than 95F, will triple by the middle of the century.
Little wonder Hollywood is churning out desert dystopias in films such as Mad Max: Fury Road and The Bad Batch.
Reality, however, has an overlooked subplot: geeks are inventing ways to keep LA cool – and possibly mint fortunes in the process.
Dozens of startups have turned the city and nearby regions into a laboratory for products and services which they hope will avert environmental disaster and yield business models replicable across the globe, even beyond.
“We would welcome opportunities for off-planet growing,” said Brandon Martin, vice president of business development of Local Roots, which turns shipping containers into hydroponic farms. “We’d love to be the first company to grow food on Mars.”
He was completely serious. Engineers from Elon Musk’s Space X have studied how the company uses sensors, algorithms and machine learning to transform 40ft containers into the equivalent of three to five acres of farmland while using 97% less water.
“We want to be a billion-dollar company as soon as possible,” said Kipp Stroden, another Local Roots executive. “We’d like to feed at least a billion people in the next 10 years.”
Time will tell if that is hubris but it reflects the confidence of startups which think solving some of LA’s environmental challenges will open other markets in a heating planet.
“LA is essentially a giant opportunity to demonstrate their technologies,” said Mike Swords, vice president of government relations for Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (Laci), a public-private nonprofit which mentors startups. “If you can demonstrate that your company can help solve problems here there’s a good chance you will export it to other urban areas around the world.”
Kipp Stroden at the entrance to one of Local Roots’s container farms. Photograph: Rory Carroll for the Guardian
LA’s biggest climate challenges were extreme heat and drought and increased fires, said Matt Petersen, who was the city’s first chief sustainability officer before recently taking over the reins at Laci. “Trees are job number one, and cool surfaced roofs and streets are key strategies as well,” he said.
LA’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, has set bold targets to reduce the so-called urban heat island effect, improve air quality and ease congestion. Voters approved two measures which will generate $150bn in the next decades – a sum exceeding Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, according to some estimates – to replace traffic gridlock, a major source of heat and pollution, with cleaner transport and shaded, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks.
“It’s a city that has taken the climate change challenge seriously,” said Adrienne Alvord, western states director of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
California’s governor, Jerry Brown, and the state legislature, meanwhile, champion a cap-and-trade programme and ever more ambitious renewable energy targets – big-spending rebuffs to the Trump administration’s environmental policies.
The result is an El Dorado of subsidies, favorable rules and fast growing markets for cleantech companies.
“It has the attributes of a gold rush,” said Mike Hopkins, CEO of Ice Energy, which makes air conditioning units that store energy and can cool homes without using electricity. “It’s a bit of a wild west, the rules are still being formed. Those who innovate and take risks, win.”
A potential big winner is GuardTop, an asphalt coating manufacturer which makes CoolSeal, a reflective street surface which can reduce temperatures by more than 10F. It is being piloted around LA.
You can see other green technology on display even before entering Laci’s La Kretz Innovation Campus, a 3.2-acre site in LA’s downtown arts district.
The car park boasts a canopy of solar panels which feed a microgrid supplying a third of the campus’s energy needs. A bioswale collects and recycles rainwater. Amid the Teslas and other vehicles sits a triple-function generator which can turn biomass, including banana peels and coconut shells, into electricity, heat or cool air. A “living wall” of 2,100 plants looms over the reception.
The incubator was founded in 2011 with money from the federal government, the city and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), and moved to this campus in 2015. It has outposts in Silicon Valley and Northridge and plans to open one in Mexico City.
“We want to bring the best cleantech companies from around the world, especially startups, and help them grow,” said Swords, the spokesman. “This level of coaching and mentoring is an incredible deal. Every single one of the companies plans to scale. They hope to sell their products all over the world.”
In return, he said, LA and its water and power utility will get the chance to acquire technology to combat climate change.
The DWP has a tradition of thinking big: a century ago it siphoned water from the Owens Valley to LA, a controversial rerouting fictionalized in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.
Mike Swords, at the LA Cleantech Incubator’s ‘living wall’. Photograph: Rory Carroll for the Guardian
Laci will survive even if the Trump administration ends federal funding, which was important but not essential, said Swords.
The buzz on the Laci campus was unmistakable. Pick My Solar, which helps householders choose solar panels, has grown from five to 30 employees in a year. “With the heatwaves and brownouts people are thinking a lot about energy,” said Kyle Graycar, a company analyst.
Green Commuter, another company, says it is the US’s first all-electric vanpool. “We reduce the cost of commuting, the amount of traffic and CO2 emissions,” said Bart Sidles, as he drove one of the company’s Tesla SUVs up Alameda Street.
River LA, one of the incubator’s nonprofits, is also feeling emboldened: it has been tasked with helping to spend $100m in water bond money to transform the Los Angeles River, in places a sorry trickle, into a lush waterway.
Torrential winter rains ended California’s drought but Local Roots, the farming company, believes continued water shortages plus a growing population and pressure to reduce transport costs will make their container farms a common sight in parking lots across the US and beyond. One container can produce 4,000 heads of butterhead lettuce every 10 days using just 25 gallons of water daily, said Stroden, the executive.
Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the nonprofit Climate Resolve, cautioned that LA will inevitably heat up. “We could all turn into vegans driving electric vehicles and we’d still see this.”
Low-income residents will suffer most – several studies have shown the inequitable impact. Poorer neighborhoods near the coast such as Compton will enjoy relative coolness but be vulnerable to gentrification, potentially pushing residents to the city’s hotter, eastern side, said Parfrey.
Even so, he was optimistic. Technologies were getting cheaper and smarter. “The antidote to climate despair is working on solutions.”