I pay a lot of attention to what's going on
in environmental sustainability.
In most of the places that we live,
if you wanna reflect back 10 or 15 years,
the climate literally is changing.
There is no planet B!
And I believe that my kids,
when they are adults and when they are actually at a point
in their career where they can make a difference,
it will be too late to have made a difference.
For Ryan Popple, business is personal.
Regardless of where you work,
I think you've gotta be asking tough questions
about what are we going to do
to actually solve this problem?
The co-founder and executive director
of EV startup, Proterra, is determined to usher
in the age of clean energy.
The technologies are now largely
in place to solve the climate crisis.
And for his part, he's focused his crosshairs
on a sometimes overlooked contributor
of carbon emissions, buses.
Buses and freight trucks combined, comprise about 30%
of the world's carbon emissions
from the transportation sector.
Replacing internal combustion buses with eBuses is well
in the works and electric buses are poised
to take over half the world's bus fleet by 2025,
but there is one problem.
Almost all of them are in China.
As of 2019, China had already amassed a fleet
of over 420,000 electric buses.
Europe was at just over 2,000. The United States about 600.
Today, electric buses make up less than .1%
of America's public transportation fleet.
So now we gotta ask ourselves, "Well, if China was able
"to get it done, and eliminate 200,000 barrels of oil
"per day by switching their bus fleets to electric,
"then we oughta be able to get it done as well."
The problem though is
that we will not see the political will or consensus
in the United States or Europe to quickly move away
from fossil fuels to clean technology.
The good news is that
while diesel buses have been getting more expensive,
3 to 4% per year, electric buses keep getting cheaper
and they keep getting better
and they're a much better user experience.
We wanna win using market forces
and be completely independent,
whichever way the political winds are blowing.
After college, I served in the US Army
and that's really what transformed my view
around energy security.
Just seeing how volatile some parts of the world are,
in particular parts that we're very much dependent
on for fuel production or petroleum supply.
Every day the world needs about 100 million barrels of oil
and so that is absolutely an unsustainable situation.
The answer to energy security is going
to be finding alternatives to petroleum.
It's not going to be trying to produce more petroleum.
After his tour of duty,
Ryan went to business school and landed himself a job
at Tesla in its early years.
My reason for being at Tesla was not
because I was a sports car enthusiast.
It was because of the clean tech aspect of what Tesla did.
You cannot solve the congestion problem simply
by making cars cleaner.
A big piece of the sustainability story
around Proterra is the benefit of mass transit.
This was a way to get clean EV technology
into the absolute mass market,
right now, and not wait for electric cars to be cheap enough
for everyone in the economy to afford them.
Today, Ryan heads the charge
for zero emission battery-electric buses in North America.
Manufacturing its own vehicles
in facilities in California and South Carolina,
Proterra has sold over 900 electric buses
to transit agencies throughout the US and Canada.
Based on the promise of lower operating costs and less noise
and pollution than diesel buses,
the company says its city bus can go about 350 miles
on a single charge, over twice the distance
of an average city bus's daily mileage.
Throughout the EV world,
the best products are going to be those products
that were purpose-built and designed
from scratch to be an electric vehicle.
We make our own chargers.
We make our own battery modules. We make our own packs.
We vertically integrate into any technology where we find
that the existing supply chain isn't good enough
for where we're trying to go
from a performance-based system.
To make the cost-benefit more attractive
to local deficit hawks,
Proterra has innovated a battery-leasing program,
allowing cities to go electric at the same price point
as a standard diesel.
When you buy a diesel bus,
you don't pay upfront for 12 years of diesel fuel.
That would be hundreds of thousands of dollars
of capital expenditure.
So what we do is, we break the battery out of the cost
of the vehicle and then they pay for the battery over time,
like it was the fuel.
And that's enabled a lot of cities
that might not necessarily have the capital
to make the switch, to be able to do so now.
Proterra is already moving beyond city buses
to electrify other types of large vehicles.
They've recently begun delivering electric school buses
with its partner Thomas Built Buses.
The company has secured over $500 million
in private investment to date,
much of it from major auto makers,
which seems to vindicate Ryan's pro-business approach
to sustainability.
Technologically,
we are at the moment
where we can start really scaling clean energy.
Solar, wind, energy storage, energy efficiency,
electric vehicles, charging stations,
these are the high-growth industries in the 21st century.
If investors can make better returns investing
in clean energy technology,
then it really doesn't matter whether
or not you convince anyone that it's the right thing
to do or the wrong thing to do.