EnergyLab Ignite

Ignite is EnergyLab's climate tech accelerator: eight weeks, funded by the NSW Government, taking no equity and giving no funding. It runs two evenings a week with mentor sessions alongside. I joined a cohort of ten as the youngest participant they have ever accepted.

How I got in

I applied without a climate idea.

Most people arrive at an accelerator with a company, or at least a thesis about an industry. I arrived with a track record of building things in other people's industries: quoting software for tradespeople, a supply chain database for modern construction, evaluation harnesses for language models. The pitch was the motion rather than the destination.

They took that bet knowing exactly what it was. I was not there to defend a plan. I was there to find one.

What I have done since

When I came into the program I did not know much about decarbonisation, and listening to everyone else's ideas, it all sounded very foreign to me. Then I studied fourteen areas of decarbonisation one at a time, until I was pretty sure I understood the gist of what the people around me were building and could narrow down to the few problems I cared about.

The one I ranked first was renewable site selection. My problem statement: developers of solar and wind sites cannot reliably tell if their site will be able to connect to the grid until after they make the purchase, resulting in lost capital and delayed abatement.

I am not convinced the early stage is where the pain is. My thesis now is that the implementation of these projects is a much bigger concern than the technology itself, and that is the area I am exploring. I have talked to a couple of people who develop and assess renewable energy projects along the way.

Where it stands

Nothing here is a product yet. Climate technology is a domain where the problems are physical, the constraints are real, and the people who understand them best are usually not the people building software. The question I am carrying through the program is the one I came in with: where in this industry is there a problem that is genuinely worth solving, that someone would pay to have solved, and that I could actually build? The program ends in October with a pitch.

I would rather leave with a real problem and no company than with a company and no problem.