Deadline: November 1, 2024
Applications are open for the BNEF Pioneers Program 2025. For more than a decade, the BNEF Pioneers program has identified a group of game-changing technologies or innovations annually – each with the potential to accelerate global decarbonization and halt climate change. Pioneers can be innovators serving the energy, transport, materials, manufacturing, consumer and agriculture sectors; or providers of solutions and technologies that help increase understanding of the climate, scale carbon capture, utilization and storage, and promote climate adaption.
In 2025, the program will focus on three global climate challenges and will award the Pioneers prize to innovators with scalable, impactful and equitable solutions to these challenges. BNEF will also select one or more wildcard winners, unrelated to the chosen challenges. These wildcard applicants can address any issue that helps the world address climate change, and they encourage submissions for all climate-tech solutions that lie outside of the three challenges outlined below.
Challenges
- Challenge 1: Making light industry more sustainable: One-third of industrial emissions are derived from ‘light’ industries such as pulp and paper, food and beverage production, textiles, and glass and ceramics. This Pioneers challenge is looking for technologies that address the environmental impact of this group of lighter industries. These could include – but are not limited to – innovations in heat pumps, thermal energy storage, circular economy, new processes for dying, drying, and distilling, as well as more environmentally friendly feedstocks.
- Challenge 2: Innovations in energy storage: Energy storage is likely to play a significant role in balancing power markets and enabling 24/7 clean power. BNEF estimates that demand for energy storage technologies could reach almost six terawatt-hours by 2035. In addition, the development of lower-cost, higher-performance batteries are a key component of future market growth for the electric vehicle industry and could be an important lever to decarbonize commercial transportation including long-haul trucking and aviation. This Pioneers challenge is looking for any innovation in the storage of electrical, thermal, mechanical or chemical energy with applications in power, transport and/or industry.
- Challenge 3: Boosting climate adaptation capabilities: Whether the world is brought onto a 2-degree emissions pathway or not, climate change is already impacting, and will continue to impact, the world. Technologies that improve societies’ ability to manage the effects of climate change will be vital in maintaining human quality of life in the coming decades. The UNEP estimates that up to $387 billion per year needs to be spent on climate adaptation in developing countries this decade. This Pioneers challenge is looking for any innovations that include but are not limited to – improved climate adaptation capabilities in agriculture, water, energy, human health, and climate-induced-disaster response.
(Energy storage technologies with applications in challenge 1 “Making light industry more sustainable” can apply to either challenge 1 or 2, and BNEF will sort the application into whichever challenge it feels is most relevant)
- Wildcards: Beyond these three challenges, they select a group of wildcard Pioneers. They encourage submissions for all climate-tech solutions outside of the three challenges outlined above and choose entries addressing multiple issues that will help the world decarbonize.
Benefits
Winning BNEF Pioneers benefit from a number of opportunities:
- Be recognized as a BNEF Pioneer 2025, a leading innovator with a product or service capable of driving the low-carbon transition forward.
- Receive one year of access to the BNEF Web product and all their insights.
- Join the prestigious group of Pioneer alumni.
- Get the opportunity to attend and a chance to speak at our eight global BNEF Summits and participate in startup pitching events hosted by BNEF.
- Appear in BNEF public reports, research and videos.
Eligibility
- Early-stage companies: Climate-tech companies that can be for-profit or non-profit, private, public or subsidiaries.
- Pilot projects and joint ventures: Any innovative pilot projects or joint ventures working on net-zero challenges.
- NGOs, laboratories and innovation communities: NGOs, university or state-sponsored labs, and any other innovation groups creating net-zero products or technologies with commercial implications.
Application
Applications will close on November 1, 2024.
For more information, visit BNEF Pioneers Program.
