News from Alphabet re Makani Airborne Wind
Statement attributable to Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X and Chairman of the Makani Board:
Makani's time as an Other Bet is coming to an end. Saying goodbye to a business is always hard and these decisions are never taken lightly. My role is to assess the rewards for succeeding relative to the risks and costs of continuing to try to succeed. After considering many factors, I believe that the road to commercial viability is a much longer and riskier road than we'd hoped and that it no longer makes sense for Makani to be an Alphabet company.
Since we acquired Makani in 2013 we've been very proud of the team's radical new approach to making wind energy cheaper and more accessible. While the team was at Alphabet they made some outstanding technical progress - including successfully flying a utility-scale kite system off the coast of Norway last summer - so we're really glad to see that Shell is exploring options for taking Makani's technology forward in some way.
While most of the team will move on to their next adventure, a small team will stay on for a few months to package up what they've learned so others can build on it.
X and our graduates will continue to make long term investments in far-out technologies that harness our strengths. Moonshots are, by definition, something that's never existed before so the path to success is always long and uncertain. Over the last decade we've developed a range of frameworks and metrics to help us work out if we're on the right path. These signals and metrics evolve as the context around our moonshots change, but when these signals tell us that the risks will outweigh the potential upsides, we remain committed to walking away and redirecting resources to more promising areas.
While it's tempting to say that all climate-related ideas deserve investment, remaining clear-eyed and directing resources to the opportunities where we think we can have the greatest impact isn't just good business; it's essential when it comes to a problem as urgent as the climate crisis
(Astro is the CEO of X, and also Chairman of Makani's Board. He also plays an advisory role for recent X graduates Loon, Wing, and until today Makani. Please note: Astro does not oversee all the "Other Bets".)
Many in the wind industry believe that it's a long road to large scale energy generation via airborne wind. It's 5-10 years away according to BNEF and a European Commission report highlights that it remains unclear whether the technology can ultimately reach cost competitiveness. It's also worth noting that the cost of wind and solar energy have gone down dramatically in the time Makani have been developing their technology.
X remains committed to working on climate mitigation and adaptation moonshots, building on a decade-long track record where we think about the problem broadly, not just in terms of generating power. X has created Wing's all-electric delivery drones to reduce carbon emissions and air pollution, Dandelion drills to bring geothermal power to homes, and Malta which stores renewable energy in giant vats of molten salt. Our computational agriculture team is currently exploring the enormous opportunities we have to reduce emissions and waste through our food system which accounts for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. We even worked on a project called Foghorn which made carbon neutral fuel from seawater but we need someone to solve the problem of creating large amounts of carbon-neutral hydrogen cheaply (not our expertise!) before we can move forward.
More broadly across Alphabet, we've invested billions into sustainability - from matching 100% of the electricity consumption of our operations with renewable energy, creating sustainable workplaces to manufacturing better devices and building technology that enables everyone to take action towards a more sustainable world.
Alphabet | https://abc.xyz