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The Gist
The Gist is the monthly newsletter of The Ad Hoc Group that covers everything at the intersection of climate tech and policy. Subscribe at the link here to have The Gist mailed to your inbox each month.
The Ad Hoc Gist: Who Pays For a Resilient Grid?
The grid is reaching a breaking point. Utilities say they need a trillion dollars for upgrades by 2030. Regulators say: prove it. Somewhere between California’s wildfire zones and Florida’s hurricane corridors, we’re entering a period where every investment decision carries real political and economic consequences.
The core question is no longer whether we need a more resilient grid. It’s how much resilience is enough and who pays?
On last week’s Open Circuit podcast, my partner Julia Hamm joined hosts Stephen Lacey, Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah to cut through the noise and explain what’s happening behind the scenes. Julia and Jigar also went at it a bit, which I always find entertaining! Read this month’s Gist for the key takeaways.
The Ad Hoc Gist: How Urbint’s $325M Exit Proved Many VCs Wrong
Itron recently announced its $325 million acquisition of Urbint, marking a significant exit in the climate resilience software space. The deal comes at an interesting time. Climate tech M&A exits are down 25% year over year, yet acquisitions now represent 92% of all exits in the sector.
We sat down with Urbint founder and CEO, Corey Capasso, one of AHG’s first clients, to discuss what this exit signals for founders selling to utilities and how the utility market has transformed from a graveyard for startups into fertile ground.
The Ad Hoc Gist: AI is Transforming Weather Forecasting
Weather forecasting is undergoing a period of rapid transformation driven by AI and surging demand for more precise, local, and actionable information. In an age of increasingly destructive extreme weather, the right weather intelligence can be the difference between safety and calamity.
In this month’s Gist, we spoke with meteorologist Sunny Wescott and Matt Stein, CEO of Salient Predictions, about why utilities still get caught off-guard by predictable storms, how AI is reshaping risk assessment and complementing physics-based models, and what it really takes to embed weather intelligence into daily operations.
Blog
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People as Moat – Ad Hoc Expands into Search
In climate tech, we talk a lot about, well, technology. But talk with most CEOs and they’ll share that the hardest part of their job is figuring out how to hire and retain the right people. In my experience, a company’s ability to hire and effectively onboard the right people is what differentiates successful businesses from those that falter. Because, as a CEO, you can have a great vision, but if you don’t have the right people, you can’t execute it.
Press
Supporting the Next Wave of Climate Tech Startups
A wave of extreme weather this year has left Jim Kapsis questioning whether utilities are prepared for more frequent, intense weather events in the future. There's a growing group of startups that are more than ready to provide solutions, but they've struggled to break into the space. They need help figuring out a business model that works in the unique market that is the utility industry.
Jim's response? A new company called the Ad Hoc Group, founded in 2016 with the goal of helping those newcomers succeed.
Climate Disasters are Revealing a Blind Spot
Where Angelo Campus grew up in northern California, evacuations and power outages caused by wildfires were routine. At college, he worked in a lab developing small solar-powered electric grids for places hit by natural disasters or high fire-risk areas to reduce the odds of an errant spark from a conventional transmission line. After graduation, he founded a startup called BoxPower to commercialize the technology, setting up his first system in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Anti-China Fervor Casts a Dark Cloud Over Solar and U.S. Climate Goals
In Congress, there is sudden bipartisan momentum to reinstitute tariffs on Chinese components. The U.S. solar industry is alarmed.
Podcast
Hear more from our leadership on My Climate Journey and Technopolis.