Mission Possible: Climate Tech with Ashwin Salvi, AtmosZero

Welcome to ‘Mission Possible: Climate Tech’ with Xan Winterton, a Q&A focused on the Climate Technology Industry.

This Q&A Series will be led by our Managing Director & Head of Climate Tech, Xan Winterton. Xan will be speaking with the movers and shakers across the climate technology sector, the folks that are galvanizing change to make our planet greener, cleaner and dare I say it serener!

This week we have been in touch with Ashwin Salvi, Co-Founder, COO & Global Head of Business Development at AtmosZero.

AtmosZero is reimagining the boiler room for a decarbonized future. Our electrified Boiler 2.0 has drop-in applicability across industry, the built environment, and wherever steam is used today.

What led you to Climate Tech? 

What gets me excited about the climate space is the potential for and importance of global impact. I have been fortunate enough to travel and see how other parts of the world live and experience life. Through that perspective, it’s become clear to me that what we take for granted in one part of the world, such as energy, is a luxury elsewhere and that there is an urgent, growing need for equitable access. I’ve been in the climate space for almost 20 years, working anywhere from fundamental research to product commercialization. Personally, it’s the commercialization side of things that speaks to me, deploying products into the field and solving real problems for customers while also improving the quality of life on a global scale. Working in climate tech is a privilege and an imperative that gets me jumping out of bed in the morning. We simply don’t have the time to keep talking — we must take action and deploy these needed innovations into the field as soon as possible.

What was the mission of AtmosZero when you created it? And what is unique about your business VS competitors?

The mission of AtmosZero is to address the hard-to-decarbonize sectors, such as industrial heat and in particular steam, and to do so in a commercially relevant timeline. Steam touches everything in our lives, from the food and drinks we consume daily, to the clothes we wear, and to the toothpaste we use – it’s truly ubiquitous. Industrial and district heating steam generation accounts for 12% of global GHG emissions (by comparison,aviation around the world accounts for only 3.5% of total global emissions) and steam has largely been made the same way since the industrial revolution 180 years ago – we burn fossil fuels to boil water. AtmosZero is changing that paradigm with our decarbonizedBoiler 2.0 technology.

AtmosZero is focused on climate action, leveraging 95%+ commercially available products to enable quick entry into the market. We’ve gone from a scratch design to an at-scale operational system in only 14 months. Of course, this would not have been possible without an A+ technical team, pulling from experiences in the automotive, national labs, HVAC, policy, and oil and gas industries, ranging from start-up to large industry. Our team’s dedication to our core mission is the source of our success. 

Our technology differentiator rests in our standardized, high-efficiency, modular, drop-in electrified heat pump boiler that eliminates Scope 1 boiler emissions for industrial and built environment applications. Our technology eliminates the two main barriers to commercial adoption for decarbonized steam technologies: high operational and capital cost.

1) Being a heat pump-based system, we are significantly more efficient than current boilers – we create about two units of heat output for one unit of energy input, dramatically reducing the operating costs of today’s electric steam generation. Implementing a heat pump to make steam results in a lowering of overall facility energy consumption, making the entire plant more energy efficient.

2) By being a standardized product, we are mass-manufactured and simple to deploy, eliminating large project capital costs. AtmosZero has created a product that can scale globally – our system looks the same and integrates the same way with your facility whether it’s located in the U.S or the EU. If you’re a global manufacturer with multiple facilities, you can now deploy a standard product with standardized operation, maintenance, and training to quickly decarbonize your steam production.

AtmosZero’s Boiler 2.0 is capital-light and operationally efficient.

What skillsets or attributes of your founding team do you think has helped in AtmosZero’s growth and continued success? 

I think having a well-balanced founding team has been critical for AtmosZero’s growth. The three co-founders (Ashwin Salvi, Addison Stark, Todd Bandhauer) each have 15-20 years of experience in the clean tech and startup world and we can each speak to the bigger picture of what problems we are solving while digging into the technical weeds, courtesy of our respective technical backgrounds. While our

technical backgrounds were certainly helpful when we started fundraising without any hardware built yet, the founding team has also seen what it takes to develop novel technology and transition it out of the lab and into customers’ hands. That experience enabled us to design around the challenges experienced and let us solve for scaling up commercialization. The versatility of our founding team has helped align AtmosZero to customer needs to create a product that fills a distinct market gap.

In addition, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Our network has been incredibly valuable in guiding our company-building, fundraising, and commercialization efforts.

Do you think that the conversations you’re having with clients and potential clients about decarbonization have shifted over the last 5 years and if so how? 

Yes, absolutely! I’ve been seeing much more focus on climate action in the last couple of years. The market for heat and in particular steam has been growing as GDP increases and the demand for various goods surges along with it, especially with the calls for climate action and significant GHG emissions reductions growing louder. Organizations and governments all over the world have made commitments to net zero carbon operations and products starting as early as 2025. The demand for decarbonized steam is particularly strong as it is a vital energy carrier for a large crosscut of industries – ranging from food and beverage to chemicals, pulp and paper, pharmaceuticals, district heating, etc. The only solutions available today are electric resistive or electrode boilers, technologies that have gained significant market traction. However, these technologies increase the cost of steam compared to fossil-fueled boilers due to the higher cost of electricity and their ability to only create one unit of heat output for one unit energy input. And yet, the demand is still growing for electric boilers as companies align around decarbonization. Since the AtmosZero boiler is a heat pump, it moves heat from one place to another instead of creating it from scratch, producing roughly twice as much heat output for one unit of energy input. This approach significantly improves the efficiency of making steam and can save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to today’s technology.

You’re aiming to deploy your first product to New Belgium Brewing in Q1 2025 – what has been one of the biggest hurdles you’ve had to overcome to get to this stage?

New Belgium Brewing has been such an excellent partner in launching our product. They are trailblazers in the brewing industry and are laying the foundation for how to create a sustainable, environmentally conscious product. Our two teams have been working very closely together as we prep New Belgium Brewing’s Fort Collins facility for the installation of the Boiler 2.0 system in early 2025.

With these first-of-a-kind projects, communication is key between all of the stakeholders – including contractors, customers, suppliers, vendors, construction managers, facilities teams, and product teams. When coordinating among that many partners, there is no such thing as too much communication! 

In addition, customer demand is at an all-time high. On top of the industrial demand for decarbonization technologies, district heating networks are also under significant pressure to eliminate GHG emissions. These networks are facing a costly and very intrusive retrofit – the primary path for decarbonization is to rip out the existing steam network and replace it with a hot water system. That means digging up entire city blocks and university campuses over the span of many years at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars all because there hasn’t been another cost-effective decarbonization solution readily available. We’re working hard to get our product into the market so we can offer another path forward, one that can deploy in days vs. weeks, months, or years for alternatives and at 1/10th the cost of replacing steam infrastructure. Working at the pace that we have been to get a product to the market has been an exciting journey to navigate. Our team has been aligned with the mission to decarbonize industrial steam from day 1, so we’re ready for anything this journey throws our way!

Tell us about your approach to talent acquisition and culture? Has it changed over the past few years? If so, how?

Our company is hyper-focused on climate action and so are the people. We all have one goal in mind; to deploy a solution that can address a large source of global emissions while also solving real-world challenges for our customers. Because of this, our team is extremely mission-driven and highly collaborative – we all want to see a positive impact from our work. This culture is part of what drives high-quality talent to seek us out and work with us. They see our approach as well as customer demand and understand that this product is solving a real commercial need.

Ultimately, the folks who engage with us want to see their effort and vision come to life and make a difference – and that’s what we do. That makes recruiting easier.

Who in particular within the Climate Technology space inspires you?

The builders. The executors. The operators. These are the folks who make a vision come to life, a task that is not for the faint of heart but is ultimately the one that leads to real problems being solved. I believe in learning by doing and using real-life data to guide decisions – that’s why builders, executors, and operators resonate with me.

What’s the failure you have learnt most from in your career or personal life? 

I think failure is too binary of a measure because even with success there can be “failure” (e.g. signing a new customer but not getting all the contract terms you desire). What’s more interesting are the shades of grey in between the absolutes of success and failure – that’s where the learning is. What I typically find is “failure” is due to a lack of preparedness. Whether that involves not studying well enough for an exam or not being open-minded enough to see a new perspective, the more experience and practice you can gain, the better it will help prepare you for the next scenario. That’s a lesson I seem to keep learning.

If you could be any kind of tree what would you be?

Definitely not Birch trees, darn things try to kill me, super allergic. I’ve really been diggingJacaranda trees lately – they are super colorful and unique!

If you had to pick who would be your climate crush?

Oh, interesting question! There are so many incredible people and companies out there making a real-world difference it is hard to say. I’ll leave it at the folks who are working in the non-sexy climate solutions but can lead to significant impact in the short and long term are truly incredible. Let’s go deploy!

What’s your eco-life hack?

I try to view the way I live my life with a perspective of related GHG emissions. That’s led me to be less wasteful of resources (food, water, energy), consume less (I’m generally not a shopper), and buy used when I can (I own a 3rd hand, 12-year-old Prius that I barely drive as I prefer to walk or use public transit). Reduce, reuse, recycle right?