Venture capital has a soft spot for the moonshot story: the single, transformative breakthrough innovation that solves a previously entrenched, impenetrable challenge.
It’s certainly an appealing narrative. I’ve pitched investors, and I know that a new, dramatic story is easier to sell.
But after fifteen years in climate technology, it has become clear to me that it’s more important to scale than it is to try transform an industry. Instead of idealizing the perfect breakthrough, climate technology must focus on ensuring its incredible solutions are also adoptable.
The emissions-monitoring field, where I sit, is no stranger to the temptation of the “perfect” technology. When my team began designing the second generation of our pioneering methane-detecting satellite, we swung for the fences. We sketched out new spectrometer architecture, new component technology—essentially, new everything—with an ambition to take on all of the lessons learned through feedback from customers and policymakers. It was exciting.
It was also the wrong call. Doing it all would have meant a much bigger, far more expensive satellite, ending up closer to a science instrument than a service that our customers could afford to renew year after year. So, we made a less glamorous decision. We zeroed in on the features that mattered most, the ones that would still deliver a market-leading improvement, but which would also ensure that industry would be able to actually adopt the technology at scale.
Fifteen years of experience building and launching our first-generation constellation informed that decision. When we launched our first satellite, Claire, in 2016, we hit the proverbial scalable moonshot jackpot: a transformative breakthrough innovation with a clear business rationale. The first satellite capable of tracing emissions to individual facilities. Emissions monitoring could now be done more frequently, at a lower cost than existing technologies. As we proved the art of the possible in satellite emissions monitoring, we displaced other solutions and created a new market segment. And we learned what industrial and government customers needed: data at scale, without prohibitive expense. We quickly grew our satellite constellation to 16+ satellites, meeting the growing demand for emissions data.
We knew that if a second-generation satellite was going to be useful to our customers, it would need to be scalable too, just like our first generation. So, every decision that we made required discipline. We could have chased finer spatial resolution, the ability to trace the source of emissions to a tighter patch of ground. It was technically achievable, and our incredible team saw a path. But it would have demanded a bigger price tag. So instead, we invested heavily into the metric our customers told us mattered most: detection threshold. We focused on the ability to see smaller emissions from space so that we could catch more leaks for our customers—more actionable data.
The result, our second-generation constellation, will provide double the detection sensitivity of our first generation, and double the daily coverage per satellite—a significant leap, just not the one we originally brainstormed on a whiteboard.
I’m not telling the climate sector to aim lower. The types of challenges that we take on require the bold vision to swing for the fences, to imagine new possibilities, and build something that has never been done before. But what I’ve realized through growing GHGSat’s constellation is that ambition and humility aren’t opposites. The discipline to build a product that is adoptable is not a failure of ambition. It’s what makes ambition durable enough to make an impact.
No one in this field gets to coast on one triumphant launch. Technology moves fast. There is always another company – or another entire technology—competing for the same customers’ attention and budget. The pressure from this pace of innovation can be uncomfortable. But it keeps the sector sharp: rest on what you built five years ago, and another brilliant team will out-iterate you.
The imperative to continue to innovate and scale climate technology feels more urgent to me every year. The effects of a warming planet aren’t abstract anymore. Wildfire smoke pervades cities that rarely used to see it. Storms are overwhelming infrastructure built for a different climate. Nearly every summer, heat waves break records.
Data on where emissions are actually coming from, delivered fast enough and cheaply enough to act on them, is a critical part of ensuring that these problems don’t keep getting worse. I’d rather see this field produce ten generations of instruments that outperform the last and build on progress, than one single moonshot that misses the market.
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