Watt It Takes - Vibrant Planet CEO and Co-Founder Allison Wolff

Vibrant Planet CEO and Co-Founder Allison Wolff

03/16/23 • 58 min

Forests make up a third of all land on Earth, and they're one of our major defenses against a warming world. 45% of the carbon stored in land exists in forests.

Today, our forests are struggling to adapt to human activity and a rapidly changing climate. Deforestation and wildfires continue to ravage habitats like the Amazon. In the U.S.destructive wildfires have increasingly ravaged the West. To protect these valuable ecosystems and carbon sinks, we need to radically change the way we restore, conserve and expand these landscapes.

And that's exactly what Vibrant Planet CEO and co-founder Allison Wolff is doing.

Allison and the Vibrant Planet team are modernizing forest conservation and restoration with a product called Land Tender, a digital platform that leverages data to help Forest Services, municipalities and tribal lands better manage their conservation and restoration efforts. Allison describes it as the operating system for forest restoration.

By digitizing forest conservation and restoration, Land Tender makes it easy for municipal fire districts, conservations districts, nonprofits, and NGOs to coordinate and plan with each other.

Different interventions like removing vegetation and prescribed burns can be mapped over time using machine learning and AI to adjust treatments accordingly.

Emily spoke with Allison about the process of merging nature-based climate solutions with cutting edge technology, how she developed Land Tender, and Allison’s long career pushing big tech companies to make positive choices for people and the planet.

Watt It Takes is brought to you by Shell Ventures. Shell Ventures specializes in unlocking deployment opportunities to help their portfolio companies scale, access customers and commercialize their solutions. Visit shell.com/ventures to learn more about how they can help your company reach the next level of growth.

Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Forests make up a third of all land on Earth, and they're one of our major defenses against a warming world. 45% of the carbon stored in land exists in forests.

And that's exactly what Vibrant Planet CEO and co-founder Allison Wolff is doing.

By digitizing forest conservation and restoration, Land Tender makes it easy for municipal fire districts, conservations districts, nonprofits, and NGOs to coordinate and plan with each other.

Different interventions like removing vegetation and prescribed burns can be mapped over time using machine learning and AI to adjust treatments accordingly.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Previous Episode

Via Separations CEO and Co-Founder Shreya Dave

Industrial processes are one of the hardest sectors of the economy to decarbonize. Fossil fuels have been the go-to way of powering the facilities that make paper, plastics, food, beverages, and chemicals.

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions from industry means changing the way companies produce their raw materials.

The problem: sometimes the hardest sectors to decarbonize are the ones that may not believe in climate change at all, and thus don’t feel the need to change their practices.

And that's what Shreya Dave, CEO and co-founder of Via Separations, is changing.

Shreya and the team at Via Separations are making it attractive for their customers to decarbonize by providing a cheaper alternative to an often overlooked source of emissions: chemical separations and purification.

The traditional way of separating desirable materials is very resource-intensive. Shreya likens the whole process to separating pasta from water in a pot. The water, which is the waste product, is boiled off using heat from fossil fuels to get to just the cooked pasta, or the desirable material, at the bottom of the pot.

Via Separations is changing the way separations are done by developing and deploying filtration systems that act like a pasta strainer, filtering out the waste product using less energy and producing less emissions.

The energy savings can't be understated. Chemical separations and purification make up a whopping 12 percent of the country's yearly energy consumption. That's on par with all the energy used in gasoline powered cars and trucks in the U.S. every year.

Emily spoke with Shreya about the work needed to scale the tech, the importance of speaking to customers about their needs, and the industries Via Separations is going after first.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.

Next Episode

Leap CEO and Co-Founder Thomas Folker

The U.S. is on track to deploy 550 gigawatts of new renewables on the grid by 2030. That's a massive amount of solar, wind, and other renewables powering buildings, EVs, appliances, and industrial processes in our increasingly electrified world.

Last year electric vehicles (EVs) hit a massive milestone by making up 5% of all new car sales in the U.S. And Bloomberg estimated that more than half of new car sales could be EVs by 2030.

That future looks bright, but to keep the headlights on and the wheels turning, the grid will have to be prepared to provide power at triple its current capacity by 2050. Fossil fuel peaker plants have been filling in the gaps left by renewables during times of peak demand. But to reach net-zero by 2050, the U.S. will need more sources of firm power that don't come from coal or natural gas.

Thomas Folker, CEO and co-founder of Leap, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company, is working to solve that problem.

Leap has built the platform needed to turn all of our various grid-connected devices into virtual power plants that can be called upon during times of high demand. Thomas and the team at Leap are helping to prevent the use of fossil fuel power plants called peaker plants, many of which only run during times of high energy and don't actually run on a daily basis.

Virtual power plants, or VPPs, aggregate the combined power of EVs, rooftop solar, residential and commercial batteries and other distributed energy resources, or DERs, and make that energy available to areas of high demand. Leap's API makes it simple for these smart, grid-connected devices to collectively act as virtual power plants, and their platform allows their customers to sell that energy to buyers.

I spoke with Thomas about leveraging software solutions to solve hard, real-world problems on the grid. We also talked about how his early roles helping build energy projects both big and small gave him a realistic view on what it takes to make lasting change.

To hear more stories of founders building our carbon-free future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review on Apple podcasts.