When big corporations want to reduce their carbon footprint, they might appoint a chief sustainability officer to create company-wide initiatives to achieve their goal. But what about smaller companies, like IT security company Infoblox or pet food producer Grandma Mae’s?
That’s where Clearloop comes in. With funding from companies of all sizes, it’s been setting up solar infrastructure in communities where there’s a lack of clean energy. Clearloop, which is owned by solar company Silicon Ranch, currently has six projects in Tennessee and Mississippi, each of which powers several hundred to a few thousand homes. The company’s next project will be in Louisiana.
Laura Zapata, Clearloop’s CEO and co-founder, told Tech Brew that she chose to focus on the southeast US because it’s a “carbon-intense” area. Tennessee and Mississippi each contribute less than 1% of the country’s total renewable energy—meaning Clearloop is able to make a tangible difference. Researchers discovered harmful quantities of the pollutant black carbon, or soot, in Mississippi last year, and federal utility company Tennessee Valley Authority is building eight new gas plants in the region, where there are fewer government-led incentives to produce renewables.
“We should all have access to clean energy,” Zapata said. “Turning on the lights shouldn’t have a worse effect depending on where you live because of how we make electricity.”
And it’s not just about getting clean energy to parts of the Sun Belt for Zapata: Clearloop also aims to spur economic development for towns like White Pine and Paris, Tennessee, which can experience an influx in employment when they’re “put on the map” alongside the names of the companies that fund their solar infrastructure.
“[The towns are] all looking for ways to show that they’re looking for economic development opportunities,” Zapata said. “They want to show [they’re] open for business.”
As for the companies that fund Clearloop projects—including Microsoft, Intuit, Rivian, Uber, and REI—Zapata described their involvement as a trade-off.
“We can get their climate dollars, help deploy more renewable energy resources, get more projects off the ground,” Zapata said. “They get the carbon or the environmental attribute, whether they count it as a REC [Renewable Energy Certificate] or a carbon offset.”
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The same goes for Vanderbilt University, which financed one of Clearloop’s Panola County projects.
Some of Clearloop’s projects are crowdfunded by many companies and some are funded by just one or two. Others are the result of a larger collaboration that Clearloop organizes, like another of the company’s Panola County projects, a partnership among more than 30 companies, including Uber, Infoblox, and Grandma Mae’s.
From the project, Grandma Mae’s received a carbon offset commensurate with the watts of solar it funded; that offset counteracts the carbon emitted to transport its pet products to retailers and customers.
Because the small company doesn’t own the plant where its pet food is produced or have control over the supply chain, working with Clearloop allowed Grandma Mae’s to achieve its sustainability goals without having to change the way its products are made.
“It was hard to find [sustainability initiatives] that would work for a smaller company trying to do this kind of thing,” Nathalie Berman, a regulatory and training coordinator who handles sustainability for Grandma Mae’s, said. “We really thought the best option would be an offset.”
Anya Gibian, Grandma Mae’s marketing director and the other half of its sustainability team, said that working with Clearloop also made sense administratively, given its small workforce.
“[Clearloop provides] lots of information and lots of assets that we can use,” Gibian said, “that don’t require us to do a full amount of research and take up like a whole week to do it.”
And Grandma Mae’s is pleased with what their funding made possible: The solar farm built with money from Grandma Mae’s and other companies will prevent almost 830,000 pounds of carbon emissions.
Making tangible climate tech like solar farms that bring more renewable energy to the grid in the southeast is the type of “real-deal physical infrastructure” that Zapata told Tech Brew she set out to make happen when she co-founded Clearloop.
“We need more perspectives and more innovation in this space. And the innovation needs to be boots-on-the-ground innovation—not just different ways to bring capital together,” Zapata said. “We need all hands on deck.”