As fires, floods, and furnace-like temperatures batter the country—and the world—it’s evident that decarbonization needs to happen, like, yesterday.

In 2019, transportation accounted for 29% of all US greenhouse-gas emissions, the most of any sector, and the majority of that came from passenger vehicles. Transitioning drivers to EV ownership would significantly reduce that figure, but in order to achieve that goal, the country needs a lot more EV chargers—fast.

“Having coast-to-coast highway networks is very important,” Rachel Moses, director of commercial services at Electrify America, an EV charging company that Volkswagen created as part of the settlement from its emissions scandal, told Emerging Tech Brew. “It might not be that a driver will ever do a cross-country route, but they need to know that they have the ability, if they want to.”

With both public and private entities gearing up to spend tens of billions of dollars building out this critical infrastructure, here’s how EV charging companies told us they approach putting a charger in the ground.

Charging criteria

For starters, charging companies need a willing site host, and there needs to be (enough) electricity.

The latter is not usually an issue for L2 charging stations, which need up to eight hours to fully charge a car and make up 82% of public chargers in the US. But it can be for DC fast chargers (DCFC), which charge a car in 60 to 90 minutes and require more power as a result.

Once those hurdles are cleared, charging companies told us the most important consideration is a simple one: Is this a place where people would actually want to charge their car?

Accordingly, she said Electrify America has focused on convenient places “that have nearby amenities, that people felt safe [in], and that they were able to do something—go to grocery stores, go to the bank, go to malls while they’re charging.”

• Electrify America is also legally required to build at least 35% of its stations in low-income or disadvantaged communities. (It’s at 50%.)

But not all well-suited sites are created equally. It makes little sense to build an L2 charger, with its hours-long charge time, on a highway, or a lightning-fast DCFC in an apartment complex. One DCFC installation runs about $100,000, and Brendan Jones, president of Blink Charging, told us you can build about five L2 chargers for the price of one fast charger.

Bottom line: “We used to talk about the chicken and the egg all the time, and now the reality is that the cars are coming, and the EVs are going to sell. And now you’ve just got to get the chargers in the ground,” Jones said. “So you shift your dynamic—now you’re not just looking at, ‘Is this an EV-centric market,’ you’re going to go, ‘It doesn’t matter—all the markets are going to be EV-centric.’”

Click here to read the full piece.—DM

It’s that time of the month again, where we beat you over the head with statistics demonstrating how red-hot the venture funding markets continue to be. In technical terms, growth decelerated...but the important point is that these already record-breaking total funding figures are *still growing*.

To wit: Global venture funding was ~$50 billion last month, per Crunchbase figures, up slightly from $48 billion last month, and up much more than slightly (~56%) from last September. That brings the Q3 2021 VC funding total to $160 billion, a (very relatively) small uptick from $158 billion in Q2 2021, up 78% YoY.

• Funding grew 95% YoY in Q2, 102% in Q1, and 21% in Q4 2020.

Here are some of the biggest rounds for emerging tech companies in September:

Aulton New Energy, a China-based EV battery-swapping startup, raised a $232 million series B. Aulton has partnered with Chinese automakers to develop 20 car models, spanning passenger and commercial, that can take advantage of its battery-swapping stations.

• It operates in almost 30 cities, and has ~50,000 registered users.

SmartLabs, a Boston–based lab-building startup, netted a $250 million series B. The “laboratory as a service” company helps clients, including biotech startups as well as 100-year old camera-maker Nikon, build and operate cutting-edge R&D labs.

Spiber, a Japan-based biotech company that primarily researches...synthetic spider silk…, raised ~ $220 million private equity round. The company creates synthetic, spider-silk-inspired proteins via a fermentation process, and combines the strands to form what it says is a cozy, soft, stretchy, and climate-friendly fiber that can be used for clothing.

View this story on-site.—DM

If an Elon Musk projection holds up (which, historically speaking, is quite a big if), SpaceX’s broadband internet service Starlink will emerge from beta sometime this month.

The service aims to provide high-speed internet to remote and rural areas, and it has been in beta since October 2020. In August, Musk said Starlink has shipped 100,000 terminals to users across 14 countries. Terminals require a one-time payment of $499, and the service is $99 per month thereafter.

Perfect timing: Speedcheck‚ a non-profit organization that helps consumers understand their internet speed, released a report in late September that details Starlink’s performance over a six-month period.

• The median download and upload speeds were 50 Mbps and 13 Mbps in the US, and similar in Canada.
• For comparison, fiber networks range from 250 to 1000 Mbps upload speed, and 250 to 1000 Mbps download, while cable services range from 5 to 50 Mbps upload and 10 to 500 Mbps download.
• A separate test, from Speedtest.net, found a significantly higher median download speed for Starlink across the US in Q2 2021, at 97 Mbps. But it’s still lower than fixed broadband, which had a median download speed of 115 Mbps.

​​And while the FCC defines high-speed internet as 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload (25/3), a bipartisan group of senators recently argued that 100 Mbps for both ought to be the new standard.

Bottom line: With slower speed and a higher price, those who have the choice are likely to select traditional options over Starlink for the time being. But the key word there is “choice”—as of 2019, 14.5 million Americans lacked access to 25/3 internet, per the FCC’s most recent Broadband Deployment Report.

View this story on-site.—DM

Stat: GM unveiled Ultra Cruise, a new driver-assist program it claims can handle 95% of driving scenarios—it’ll roll out to some cars in the US and Canada in 2023.

Quote: “It’s a huge jump from the science perspective to have a first-generation vaccine against a human parasite.”—Pedro Alonso, director of the WHO’s malaria program on the first-ever WHO-approved malaria vaccine

Read: An obituary for Robert Schiffmann, the microwave evangelist who just died at 86.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Ford is has enlisted neuroscientists to help it keep drivers from zoning out.
• Apple is reportedly scrapping all AR/VR projects to go all-in on crypto.
• You can now play “fantasy startup investing” via an NFT game.
• Hackers stole the source code for Twitch.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Why Amazon, Apple, Google all back a seamless standard for smart homes
• AI-ethics pioneer Margaret Mitchell on her five-year plan at open-source AI startup Hugging Face
• A London borough is using 3D digital mapping to city plan