Technology 5 min read By Alice Ashford
Satellite Operator Says Climate Tech Must Prioritise Adoption Over Moonshots
The head of the world's largest greenhouse gas monitoring satellite constellation argues that scaling adoptable technology matters more than chasing a single breakthrough, as extreme weather raises the stakes for accurate emissions data.
Climate technology investors are too focused on the search for a single transformative breakthrough and not enough on making existing solutions cheap and practical enough to be widely adopted, according to the operator of the world's largest satellite constellation tracking greenhouse gases.
Writing in a commentary for Fortune during Climate Week, the head of GHGSat said fifteen years in the sector had convinced him that scaling a technology matters more than trying to reinvent an industry. The appeal of the moonshot narrative is easy to understand, he wrote, because a dramatic new story is simpler to sell to venture capital. But the harder and more valuable work lies in ensuring that proven solutions are actually taken up by the industrial and government customers who need them.
The emissions-monitoring field is not immune to the temptation of the perfect technology. When the team began designing its second-generation methane-detecting satellite, it initially planned a sweeping overhaul, sketching out new spectrometer architecture and new component technology in an effort to incorporate every lesson learned from customers and policymakers. That approach, the author acknowledged, would have produced a much larger and far more expensive satellite, closer to a scientific instrument than a service that customers could afford to renew each year.
Instead, the company made what it described as a less glamorous decision. It concentrated on the features that mattered most, delivering a market-leading improvement while keeping the technology affordable enough for industry to adopt at scale. That judgement was informed by fifteen years of building and launching its first-generation constellation, which began with the satellite Claire in 2016. Claire was the first spacecraft capable of tracing emissions to individual facilities, allowing monitoring to be carried out more frequently and at lower cost than existing methods. It displaced other solutions and created a new market segment, and the company learned that industrial and government customers wanted data at scale without prohibitive expense.
The constellation quickly grew to more than sixteen satellites to meet rising demand for emissions data. When planning the second generation, the team could have pursued finer spatial resolution, the ability to trace emissions to a tighter patch of ground. It was technically achievable, but it would have carried a bigger price tag. Instead, the company invested heavily in the metric customers said mattered most: detection threshold, or the ability to see smaller emissions from space and catch more leaks. The result is a second-generation constellation that will offer double the detection sensitivity of the first generation and double the daily coverage per satellite.
The author stressed that the argument is not a call for lower ambition. The challenges in climate technology require bold vision and the willingness to build something that has never been done before. But ambition and humility are not opposites, he wrote, and the discipline to build an adoptable product is what makes ambition durable enough to have an impact. No company in the field can coast on a single triumphant launch, because technology moves quickly and another firm, or an entirely different technology, is always competing for the same customers' attention and budget.
The pressure of that pace can be uncomfortable, but it keeps the sector sharp. Rest on what was built five years ago, the author warned, and another team will out-iterate you. The imperative to keep innovating and scaling climate technology feels more urgent every year as the effects of a warming planet become less abstract. Wildfire smoke now pervades cities that rarely saw it, storms overwhelm infrastructure built for a different climate, and heat waves break records almost every summer. Data on where emissions actually come from, delivered fast enough and cheaply enough to act on, is a critical part of preventing those problems from worsening. The author said he would rather see the field produce ten generations of instruments that outperform the last than one moonshot that misses the market.
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