A post from my future

I am currently enrolled in Terra.do’s popular Learning For Action (LFA) course. Early on, we were given an assignment to contemplate a future world where humans had managed to drastically curb greenhouse gas emissions. Looking back from the year 2040, we were asked to reflect on what role we played in making this better world a reality. I loved the exercise and decided to share my story of those next 20 years, the career path I would be looking back on and the series of decisions I made to be part of the broader solution.

Before there was abundant clean electricity…

When I think back 17 years ago to when I transitioned into what we were calling climate tech, I am truly amazed at how much we have completely transformed energy generation. Clean electricity is now abundant of course, not just in our urban areas or in the wealthiest nations, but increasingly throughout the world. We are now generating enough electricity for all 9B people on the planet using renewable sources like the Sun, the wind, our waterways and we even found a way to tap into geothermal energy so that clean electric power is now available to everyone.

I especially remember when Transportation used to be one of our BIGGEST climate problems. I was particularly fixated on Transportation not just because it was an obvious GHG emissions issue (or more accurately, a whole set of issues), but because I was confident that electrification was the solution and that it would literally help drive the clean energy transition.

As a sector, Transportation has long been a top energy consumer all over the planet and just 15 years ago, the world's cumulative fleets of motorized vehicles were recognized as a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. All that has changed now - for the better. Flash forward to today and we have rapidly phased out fossil fuels for most of our transportation needs. We have learned how to move humans and cargo efficiently and carbon-free using clean electricity.

How I first got plugged in

My journey started pretty simply with my own personal choices.

At the end of 2022, I sold the last ICE vehicle I would ever own and moved to a large city that provided plentiful public transportation options. I still remember how quickly I came to prefer getting around the city by walking, biking or riding the trains and subways. At the same time, I also switched to only renting hybrids and EVs when I needed to travel out of town, and I explicitly chose EV ride share options when visiting other cities.

It turns out that the kind of mobility choices I was making back then quickly spread. Many other concerned consumers had the same motivation - and the vehicle manufacturers responded. Now, cars and trucks are all-electric by default and are sold separately from their primary battery packs giving consumers and businesses much more flexibility in how we finance our individual mobility needs.

Around the same time, I started reading more about EVs and the charging infrastructure that was beginning to roll out across the country. From there, I expanded my research to look at full fleet electrification to better understand what would motivate fleet operators in the public and private sectors to accelerate this transition away from the familiar gas and diesel vehicle choices and the entire petroleum-based “refueling” infrastructure.

My first climate tech job

My professional network was growing quickly too and with help from a second-degree connection, I ultimately landed a product leadership role at a promising early stage climate tech company that was advancing EV charging and fleet electrification.

I was able to use my experience in enterprise-scale software development to help develop a winning product strategy for our company. Over the next five years I led the team to deliver a robust platform aimed at fleet operators who needed to plan and execute their own EV fleet transition programs.

We started off selling our solution to smaller, private companies with modest-sized fleets of 25-50 vehicles. A big part of our offering was tapping into government subsidies, incentives and rebate programs to help reduce the financial burden of converting fleets, and helping fleet owners realize a lower total cost of EV ownership.

As our customer base and revenues grew, we scaled up to eventually do the same for some of the largest private and public fleet owners in North America. By the time our company was acquired, we had directly impacted countless decisions to convert hundreds of thousands of ICE vehicles to full electric fleets.

The transportation sector evolves

Entire municipalities have converted their buses, taxis, mail trucks, sanitation, police, ambulatory, fire and emergency vehicles to EVs - despite the pressure from incumbent parties pushing for convert them to “more efficient” gas versions instead or conducting fleeting experiments around “clean” natural gas and “renewable biodiesel”. Schools and universities now run all-electric fleets now too and those school buses have become a valuable energy backup resource to provide more resilience for our electric grid.

That first company mostly focused on selling to companies with passenger fleets that included rental cars, ride sharing, livery services, airport and hotel shuttles, private coaches, tour buses, etc. But I knew that was only a part of the story.

From moving people to moving stuff

Expanding from there, I wanted to look at freight logistics and the various transport modes for moving goods and cargo vs. just people. My next venture led me to explore everything from short-haul drayage vehicles carrying goods to and from our ports, LTL and long-haul trucking fleets, rail, and even a portion of air transport that could operate using clean, electric-powered crafts.

I began to notice larger patterns in how businesses approached electrification and we adjusted our product accordingly to help accelerate EV adoption. It didn't hurt that we were seeing many more OEMs expand their vehicle inventory and that the charging infrastructure itself was growing and becoming more reliable with each passing year.

Thanks to our company and many more like us, ground-based freight transport (rail, long-haul trucks, drayage, first- and last-mile delivery) in most countries have embraced battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and now move about freely as they are never more than 80 kilometers from a bank of reliable superchargers.

Still more work to do

Despite all the advances we've made to electrify transportation, we still have to keep going.

In these more recent years, I have expanded my thinking again and have started to look at ways to further accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles beyond the streets and highways. Even as I've further honed my product management skills, I've also begun to look more broadly to think how hypothesis-driven research, rapid experimentation, iterative and incremental development can accelerate climate strategies across the entire transportation sector.

We need to scale solutions quickly and I want to pull together policy experts, power and battery innovators, environmental scientists and financiers to collectively help influence private business and public sector leaders to keep our momentum going.