Ambition is not a dirty word—especially if you’re Bertrand Piccard. The explorer, psychiatrist, and environmentalist aims to “promote sustainability through spectacular actions” to prove that a cleaner future is possible. During 2015 and 2016, he famously circumnavigated the globe in a solar-powered airplane, Solar Impulse, to show off the potential of renewables.
But even more ambitious was what he attempted after he landed. He tasked his foundation with demonstrating that environmental protection and economic profit can go hand in hand. The goal was to find 1,000 interventions that can protect the planet while also making money, shattering the argument that pursuing sustainability must come at a cost.
“The goal is really to show that we can be much more efficient, that we can develop the economy, but in a clean way,” Piccard says. It’s going well. Since the foundation started its project eight years ago, it has logged 1,650 solutions—processes, products, materials, and devices—that can make an environmental difference at a profit. They encompass nearly every field—from water and energy to agriculture and IT—and the foundation is working to bring them to governments, cities, and businesses.
Ahead of speaking at the WIRED x Octopus Energy Tech Summit in Berlin on October 10, Piccard sat down with WIRED to discuss how Solar Impulse’s program works, who’s responsible for making positive change happen, and why the narrative around net zero needs to change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Tell us about these profitable solutions. They sound almost too good to be true.
Bertrand Piccard: Sure. To be selected, a solution needs to exist already. And it needs to be credible, scalable, and profitable, and to protect the environment.
So for example, there is a system of steel staples produced by a Belgian company called Bekaert. Mix these inside concrete when building and you don’t need all these heavy and expensive iron armatures. With the staples you keep the concrete more compact and end up using less concrete and metal, producing less CO2 and pollution, and making more profit.
Another example are LED lamps that you can use for public lighting, where you can have a solar panel and battery. The lighting is then off-grid. You don’t need to dig along the street to put in wires. If you do that, you save 37 percent of the energy bill of the city.
You have interesting ways to take the unrecyclable waste of a city and turn it into construction stones. You have ways to recover the lost heat from factory chimneys and give it back to the factory—it’s then 20 to 40 percent less on the energy bill.
In a city, you can dig channels for geothermal heat, and connect big buildings with heat pumps in the center of the city to this network. This was not possible five years ago; now you can do it.
Once you’ve discovered these ideas, how do you get them adopted? Is it about spreading knowledge? Providing funding?
We give our label—the Solar Impulse Efficient Solution label—to those that deserve it. It’s the only label that certifies the economic profitability of an ecological product, material, system, or device. This helps these companies developing solutions find investors, customers, and partners.
We help the companies directly, too. We put them in contact with investors. We also have created two investment funds, with BNP Paribas and Rothschild Five Arrows, to bring investments in to help companies develop. We also organize meetings between public authorities and innovators, so that companies can find customers—we bring together the people providing solutions with those needing them.
This approach suggests we can innovate our way out of trouble, but some argue that behavior change is really what’s needed to stop environmental destruction. Flying is a good example—that instead of banking on carbon-free flights becoming possible, some say we should just fly less. What do you think of this argument?
I think we need to always reconcile both ways of thinking. You have to clearly degrow pollution, waste, and consumption of resources and energy. But you cannot degrow the economy. You need to pay for education, health, social protection.
It can seem to be a paradox—but it’s not. We are in a quantitative economy where we produce and waste too much. We need to move to a qualitative economy, where you replace what is polluting with what is protecting the environment, by selling efficiency. If you sell systems that reabsorb the heat from the chimney or public parking or subways to heat houses, you save energy, but at the same time, you create jobs and you help startups to develop. What you always have to aim for is efficiency: Do better with less. This is possible in a lot of fields.
Now, you asked me a specific question about aviation. There is too much consumption here because the cost is so low. A lot of people fly because it is cheap. And again, we have massive quantitative consumption. We have to go back to a more selective, qualitative way of flying. But at the same time, we need to develop decarbonized aviation, because the world is not ready to stop flying completely.
What other big areas still need grappling with?
There are solutions for every field, but the problem is we don’t use them. You can have construction that is almost carbon-neutral, but a lot of buildings are still made in an old-fashioned way. Decarbonization of construction is completely possible, but you need 10 percent more investment at the beginning. Of course, you recover this over the years because the operating costs are much lower. But you need a model where constructors receive an incentive to build with higher initial investment to the lower operating cost.
Mobility can be electric. But to really justify electric cars that drive only 5 percent of the day, you need to use their batteries to store energy off the grid, and then when there’s a peak of demand, have them discharge their batteries. For this, you need to clearly give an advantage to all EV drivers to be able to store energy and sell it back to the grid. This is not done yet.
You could use data centers to heat a city. But it’s not done. So everywhere, solutions exist, and we need to push the knowledge that these solutions are profitable, they exist, and they protect the environment.
What role do governments play in this?
It is still allowed today to be inefficient. It’s still allowed to put CO2 in the atmosphere and plastic into the oceans. So, we need to modernize the legal framework in order to really push the legal need to be efficient. If it is a necessity to use all these solutions, people will use them, and they will come much more onto the market and it will help the startups grow, produce all these solutions for everybody, and it will be a major advantage.
So governments have a very important responsibility.
What about finance? That must be important too.
Something that’s key, I think, are new business models that sell use and not property. So, for example, you have people who want to install a heat pump system in a building—they will make a contract with a producer of heat pumps to buy heat over 20 years, but the pump still belongs to the producer, not the final client, which means that there needs to be a financial institution that pays for it. And this is a business opportunity.
There will be much more leasing than direct sales in the future. Another example that I love very much is a company called Pragma Charge. Big transport companies usually use diesel trucks; Pragma Charge, instead of trying to sell these companies replacement EVs, which are more expensive, sells a service: kilometers of transport with electric trucks.
So the company doesn’t have to handle the energy transition, it just gets the final product?
Exactly, yes. India has done it too with electric buses. The government has bought 50,000 electric buses and put them in different cities and villages. But these places don’t have to buy the vehicles, they only buy the kilometers driven—and this works out 25 percent cheaper than it would be using diesel buses.
We have the goal of getting to net zero by 2050. How confident are you that we’ve got the tools to achieve this?
We are not on the path to get there. And I think the narrative used is wrong. We hear it’s going to be difficult. We hear it’s going to be expensive, that people will have to make sacrifices and renounce a part of their comfort and mobility. I think it’s the wrong narrative because it is not attractive.
In Europe, a lot of political parties and individuals are resisting this goal of decarbonization, thinking it’s detrimental for them, for their business. But if instead you tell people we are going to modernize our country, have more efficient infrastructure and systems, they will be enthusiastic. Instead of speaking of the cost of the energy transition, you have to speak about the profitable investment, new jobs, new business opportunities. People need to understand that it will be an advantage, it gives a better quality of life. We really have to present it this way, otherwise we will miss the target.
Finally, what’s next for you?
I’m launching a new project, which is about flying around the world with a hydrogen-powered airplane. It’s very good to speak about solutions, but to actually make solutions known, we need to attract people’s interest. And in climate action, we also need to restore hope. For that, we have to go beyond the obvious, get out of our comfort zone, and really start to work clearly on new technologies.
I believe hydrogen has a future for heavy transport, where batteries would be too heavy. But it’s not enough to say it—we have to demonstrate it. If we manage to fly around the world nonstop with a hydrogen-powered airplane, people will want to do more with hydrogen. It will make hydrogen more popular. And this is what we need, because today, it’s niche. There’s not enough demand because there’s not enough offer, and there’s not enough offer because there’s not enough demand.
The plane now is under construction. It’s called Climate Impulse. It should make a test flight in 2026, and then hopefully fly nonstop around the world, with zero emissions, in 2028.
Hear Bertrand Piccard speak at the WIRED x Octopus Energy Tech Summit at Kraftwerk in Berlin on October 10. Get tickets at energy-tech-summit.wired.com.
