Prime Blog

Welcome to the Prime blog, where we share event highlights, reflections from our team, and exciting updates about our organization!

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Lara Pierpoint Hosts New Climate Podcast: The Green Blueprint

We are thrilled to announce The Green Blueprint, a new podcast hosted by Lara Pierpoint, Managing Director of Trellis Climate, in partnership with Latitude Media, about the architects of the clean energy economy.

We’ve already invented many of the technologies we need to decarbonize the global economy. But much of that tech is still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to get financed and built at scale.

So what can we learn from the people who are bringing new technologies from the lab to the market, constructing first-of-a-kind projects, building companies, challenging and transforming incumbents, and finding the right kind of investment to support their scaling?

The show profiles the people who are doing the dirty work of scaling clean technologies: founders, investors, engineers, policymakers, and organizational leaders who are solving a complex set of challenges in the quest to scale quickly.

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Lara Pierpoint Moderates Panel at Carbon Removal Summit

Lara Pierpoint, Managing Director of Trellis Climate, took part in the 2024 Carbon Removal Capital Summit in San Francisco. This summit, organized by Santander CIB in collaboration with the XPRIZE Foundation, brought together global leaders and experts in carbon management to discuss pivotal strategies for rebalancing Earth's carbon cycle.

Lara Pierpoint moderated a panel titled Innovative Financing Models for Carbon Removal Projects, alongside four incredible women who are unlocking new approaches to finance CDR, including Annalise Downey, Head of Climate Consulting at Sylvera, April Allderdice, CEO of MicroEnergy Credits, Nicole Pasricha, Head of Climate and Impact at ALMA, and Shirin Jamshidi, Director of Investments, Asia, Middle East, North Africa at the DFC.

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Trellis Climate Attends New York Climate Week

Members of the Trellis Climate team, including Managing Director Lara Pierpoint, Principal Emily Lewis O'Brian, and Principal Lee Scott, spoke at several New York Climate Week events while also attending a dozen sessions focused on the critical capital gap faced by climate technologies as they scale for impact. The Trellis team’s active participation in these conversations around First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) climate projects brought forward invaluable insights on the challenges and opportunities for accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy by supporting FOAK projects.

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Barriers and Levers for Catalytic Capital in India

The report "Regulatory Barriers and Levers for Deploying Foreign Catalytic Capital in Impact-Focused Enterprises, Funds, & Facilities in India" is a collaborative effort led by Desai & Associates in partnership with Prime Coalition, with support from The Lemelson Foundation. It explores pathways, both direct and indirect, for channeling US and European catalytic capital into Indian social enterprises.

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Additionality in Theory and Practice

For over a decade, Prime has led the way in catalyzing climate solutions that can mitigate or remove gigaton-scale emissions. Our latest white paper, “Additionality in Theory and Practice,” explores this core value that has shaped our work since 2014. 

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Climate Adaptation Funding in Africa

As Prime's Impact Fellow for Spring 2023, Chidalu Onyenso led a research paper on the funding challenges and opportunities for climate adaptation efforts in Africa. The research builds upon Prime's ongoing capacity-building efforts to address critical climate adaptation goals.

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Margaret Lee’s SXSW Panel Featured on Activate’s Podcast

Margaret Lee joined this live-recorded podcast episode originally taped at SXSW 2024, joining Cortney Newell, Senior Director of Development at Activate, Olivia Strader of LH Capital/Lyda Hill Philanthropies, and Pat McGrath from the Schmidt Family Foundation as they discuss “how philanthropic organizations can uniquely contribute to the advancement of climate tech by leveraging their resources, convening power, and innovative funding strategies.”

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Emily Lewis O’Brien from Trellis Climate Speaks at ARPA-E

Trellis Climate’s Emily Lewis-O’Brien recounts her experience speaking at the 2024 ARPA-E Summit in Dallas, Texas, joining a number of fellow catalytic capital providers for a panel called Bridging the Scale Gap with Concessionary Capital.

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Catalyzing Development of First-of-a-Kind Climate Projects

Prime Coalition's 2022 report highlighted the scaling issues climate startups face, especially in obtaining infrastructure finance. It pointed out the lack of capital to commercialize climate technologies, including development capital for pre-construction activities. In 2023, Trellis Climate examined this capital gap further, deploying philanthropic catalytic capital as a solution. This note summarizes the insights from Trellis' work.

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Highlights from Prime Coalition’s Events at SF Climate Week

Prime Coalition was honored to join the 15,000+ guests and 750+ organizations participating in this year’s San Francisco Climate Week (SFCW). The Prime team hosted and participated in 4 key events at SFCW, including two Prime hosted events, which were our Climate Finance Reception and our CRANE Tool launch at the panel discussion, Understanding the Future Impacts of Climate Tech — Today.

Additionally, Lara Pierpoint, Managing Director of Trellis Climate, also spoke at two other events, including LabStart’s discussion on how organizations are supporting climate tech entrepreneurs and the Scaling Hardtech Climate Solutions: a FOAK (First of a Kind) Summit. We’re excited to share our topline highlights from each of these events.

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Barriers to the Timely Deployment of Climate Infrastructure

To understand what exactly is needed for climate technologies to move beyond their hatchling stages into large-scale deployment, Prime Coalition, Schmidt Futures, and Blue Haven Initiative came together to launch a research project at Prime: Barriers to the Timely Deployment of Climate Infrastructure.

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