Thomas Breen Photo
In progress at ClimateHaven: Tools used to extract "valuable materials" from lithium-ion batteries.
Paul Bass Photo
Justine Lee at WNHH FM: From Citibike to VC to green-tech incubator.
Justine Lee has returned to New Haven to turn climate hope into reality.
Lee is optimistic that entrepreneurs can turn new ideas for “green tech” into companies that help the world reach the goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Half of the new technology needed to meet that goal has yet to be invented, she estimated.
So this past month the 1995 Yale grad came to town to help companies start up and grow to produce that technology.
Lee has taken over as president and CEO of ClimateHaven, the climate change-focused incubator that opened last year at 770 Chapel St.
The center already has 20 green-tech companies gestating there with over 100 combined employees developing ideas hatched at Yale and University of Connecticut. The center has attracted $1.5 million in funding from Yale and the state and federal governments.
“I have a 20 year old in college. She’s a pretty even-keeled kid, but a lot of her friends are very concerned, not just about the environment, about the way the world is going these days, about what the future holds, whether they should have children, whether this is a world they want to bring their kids into. I can’t solve all those problems for them. I can’t solve climate change for them. But what I can do is work on things that I believe make an impact on the world that we live in, and innovative technology,” Lee said during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
“The problem we’re trying to solve [at ClimateHaven] is how to get these startups over the the so-called Valley of Death, where they struggle to get funding, get traction, find partners, leverage expertise, build companies, so that they can deploy their technology, hone it, find the right go-to-market strategy.”
Lee knows from experience what it takes for early-stage tech companies to hone a growth strategy and attract needed capital: She helped them do that in a previous job as partner and chief operating officer at a firm called 25madison Ventures Fund. She also helped build Citibike and affiliates become fixtures in American cities.
In the “Dateline” conversation, Lee described how she tapped that experience in working with the owner of Climate Haven tenant Revert Technologies to plan “use cases” to demonstrate to potential investors how its “smart plug” can help specific businesses collect data on electricity usage then use machine learning to figure out how to save money by predicting peak and off-peak hours. ClimateHaven itself is trying it out to serve as one of the test cases.
Another company she described, WindLoop, is developing a process for recycling decommissioned wind turbine blades.
“We have massive deployment of wind farms and offshore wind. Due to lifespan and also some tax incentives for replacing them, there’s currently no good technology for recycling these massive wind turbines,” she said. The company is “currently working on a less expensive, efficient way for shredding them and then dissolving them so they can be reused.”
Click on the video below to watch the full discussion with ClimateHaven CEO Justine Lee on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” including use demonstrations of the term “over my skis” and a discussion of a joint project with the Regional Water Authority to create a “water hub.” (Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”)