Contrary Research Rundown #104
The past, present, and future of wind energy, plus new memos on Figure, Helion, Wrapbook, and more
Research Rundown
In the latest essay from Foundations & Frontiers, we explore the past, present and future of wind energy, from its humble beginnings to its current status as a major player in the global energy landscape.
For centuries, humans have harnessed the power of wind, from sailing ships to grinding grain. However, the modern era of wind energy began in the late 19th century with the invention of the first wind turbine. Today, wind power supplies 2.3K TWh of electricity globally, accounting for 7.8% of global energy production. But the path to this point has been far from smooth, marked by technological challenges, economic cycles, and ongoing attempts at innovation.
“Wind power has traditionally been a boom-and-bust business — booming in times when energy prices soar, and going bust when they fall. As alternatives like solar experience plummeting production costs, and base power solutions like nuclear or geothermal are finding new opportunities for resurgence, it's an open question as to whether wind will continue to boom in the near term, and what its role will be in the global production of energy over the long term."
From the first wind turbine built by James Blyth in 1887 to power his cottage in Scotland, to the massive offshore wind farms of today, each step forward has been driven by technological innovation and economic necessity.
The early 20th century saw significant improvements in turbine efficiency, largely thanks to advances in aeronautics. The introduction of propeller-like blades with airfoil shapes dramatically increased the power output of wind turbines:
"These design improvements, born of the early 20th century, were enough to increase the tip-speed ratio — the rotational speed of the blades, given the speed of wind — by three times over the 19th-century turbine designs of Brush and others. This improvement translated directly into greater power output."
However, the widespread adoption of wind energy has been cyclical, often driven by energy crises and fluctuating fossil fuel prices. The oil embargo of 1973 sparked renewed interest in wind power, leading to significant government investment in research and development. Yet, as oil prices fell in the mid-1980s, so did support for wind energy.
Despite these challenges, technological advancements continued. The introduction of new materials like fiberglass and carbon fiber in the 1990s allowed for larger, more efficient turbines:
"By 2023, the average height of wind turbines had nearly doubled since 1998, with the tallest now standing at over 200 meters. Meanwhile, the maximum power output had nearly quadrupled from then. Whereas in the late 1970s, NASA struggled to produce a turbine capable of reliably producing more than 2MW of power, as of 2023, the average wind turbine in the United States had a nameplate capacity of 3.4 MW."
Today, wind energy stands at a crossroads. Onshore wind farms have become commonplace in many countries, with China leading the way in total generating capacity. However, the future of wind energy may lie offshore, where stronger, more consistent winds promise even greater power generation potential.
"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that America's offshore wind resource can generate more than 13,500 TWh of electricity annually — three times America's annual consumption of electricity."
Offshore wind farms, while promising, face significant technical and economic challenges. The harsh marine environment requires more robust, expensive equipment, and the logistics of installation and maintenance are complex. Recent setbacks in the U.S. offshore wind industry highlight these challenges:
"By 2023, however, the buildout of offshore wind energy looked increasingly like just another chapter in the wind industry's boom and bust saga. Higher than anticipated costs led BP and Equinox to cancel their planned offshore projects off the coast of New York, and Danish Ørsted to cancel its project by New Jersey."
The rampant appetite for energy, including to quench the energy thirst of AI, will continue to push people to look for alternatives, and wind is most certainly in the running. In our full essay, we dive into the cutting edge, the rapidly evolving regulatory environment, and improved manufacturing techniques. Read it here.
Wrapbook, whose motto is to “empower the project economy,” provides digital payroll, budgeting, accounting, and onboarding solutions for companies in the entertainment sector, bringing Hollywood bookkeeping into the 21st century. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Software Engineer I - Remote (Canada)
Engineering Manager II (Money) - Remote (Canada)
Persefoni is an AI-powered carbon accounting SaaS platform that helps companies and investors measure and disclose their carbon emissions, thereby responding to these increasing stakeholder and regulatory pressures. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
DevSecOps Engineer - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Senior Quality Assurance Engineer - Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Helion, a Washington-based fusion research company that aims to be the “first to fusion,” is among the companies leading the charge of achieving commercial viability. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Fuel Cycle Operations Engineer - Everett, WA
Director of Information Technology & Security - Everett, WA
Figure aims to develop general-purpose humanoids that make a positive impact on humanity and create a better life for future generations. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Robotics Controls Engineer - Sunnyvale, CA
Teleop Software Engineer - Sunnyvale, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Docker | Remote ( Canada, Mexico, US) - Senior Analytics Engineer, Senior Data Analyst, Director of Product Management (Monetization)
Axonius | Remote (Tel Aviv office) - Senior Backend Engineer (Axonius X), Senior DevOps Production Engineer, Senior Full Stack Developer, Senior Security Operations Engineer
Glean | Palo Alto, CA - Software Engineer (Fullstack), Software Engineer (Machine Learning), Software Engineer (Backend)
Captions | New York, NY - Data Scientist (Product), Android Engineer, Software Engineer (Web)
Cribl | Remote (US) - Engineering Manager (Cribl Stream), Windows Platform Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer (Cribl Lake), Senior Software Engineer (Cloud)
Mistral AI | San Francisco, CA - Applied AI Engineer, Developer Relations Engineer, Research Engineer, AI scientist
Databricks is introducing the Meta Llama 3.2 series of models which includes smaller models for low-latency, low-cost enterprise use cases, as well as multimodal models that enable visual understanding tasks like document parsing and product description generation.
AlphaChip, Google’s method for developing high-quality chip layouts, has generated “superhuman chip layouts” used in every generation of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) since its publication in 2020, accelerating the design cycle and yielding higher-performance chips.
Mark Zuckerberg said he is betting that the limit of scaling AI systems "is not going to happen any time soon", as Llama 4 will train on 100,000+ GPUs and Llama 5 even more than that.
Jack in the Box, a fast food restaurant chain, is looking to upgrade their POS so they can implement voice AI and AI drive-thru.
Anthropic, OpenAI's largest startup competitor, is in talks to raise capital at a valuation of $30-$40 billion, roughly doubling its previous valuation.
TSMC executives were not fond of Sam Altman's ambitious plans to build 36 semiconductor plants and took to calling him “podcasting bro”.
OpenAI is discussing giving CEO Sam Altman a 7% equity stake in the company and restructuring to become a for-profit business. This potential 7% equity stake for Altman could add over $10 billion to his net worth.
OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati announced she is leaving the company. Her departure marks the latest in a series of executive exits from OpenAI since the firing and rehiring of CEO Sam Altman last year.
Hours after her announcement, OpenAI’s chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a research VP, Barret Zoph, announced their were leaving the company as well.
In their earnings call, Accenture noted that generative AI new bookings were $1 billion for the fourth quarter.
74% of enterprise tech buyers expect a budget increase over the next year, up from 55% in the previous quarter.
Rippling is choosing to focus on launching new products rather than going public, joining a growing trend among startup founders.
Rippling also introduced its new AI-based tool, Talent Signal, which aims to reduce bias in employee performance evaluations by using task-specific metrics and analyzing communication data.
On the No Priors podcast, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil talked with Rippling’s COO Matt MacInnis about their new product launch.
Letta, a startup spun out of UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab, has raised $10 million in seed funding at a $70 million post-money valuation to commercialize its open-source MemGPT project, which helps AI models remember users and conversations.
Plaid is doing $308 million in revenue, however, their growth has slowed in recent years. “Plaid's revenues grew only 12% in 2023, down from a 23% growth rate in 2022.” CEO Zach Perret is betting on three new lines of business — credit-risk analytics, fraud prevention, and pay-by-bank — to revive the company's growth.
Reflect Orbital plans to launch a constellation of thousands to tens of thousands of satellites with 50x50 meter mirrors to reflect sunlight onto specific points on Earth, potentially extending daylight hours and increasing solar power generation. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, the firm’s “first” space investment since SpaceX.
Well, it’s not actually Sequoia’s first space investment since SpaceX — that honor would go to Vector Launch, a satellite company backed by Sequoia but filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
Supabase has now raised a total of $196 million, including an $80 million Series C round led by Peak XV and Craft Ventures, as the company's Postgres-centric developer platform sees growing demand driven by the AI boom.
Apple quietly included nuclear energy in their definition of "clean energy". This suggests a shift in Apple's stance on nuclear power, which has traditionally been viewed as controversial, but is now being recognized as a clean energy source.
Naveen Rao, VP of GenAI at Databricks, believes that coding is the killer app for generative AI, as it is already being used to automate many coding tasks and enable design automation.
SpaceX publicly called out the FAA Administrator for making "several incorrect statements" about SpaceX, stating that "every statement he made was incorrect".
Moov, a payments infrastructure company that has raised $77.5 million from VCs including Bain and a16z, has laid off as many as 50 people.
Duolingo is leveraging cutting-edge AI to create new, immersive ways for users to practice languages and build confidence, such as the new Video Call feature that allows learners to engage in spontaneous, realistic conversations with Lily, one of Duolingo's popular characters.
OpenAI is expanding customization features for Advanced Voice Mode, including Custom Instructions and Memory, allowing users to personalize how ChatGPT responds and remember past conversations.
OpenAI is pitching the White House on building multiple 5 gigawatt data centers across the US, which would be an unprecedented scale for data center infrastructure.
Anthropic is testing a new program to pay well-intentioned hackers who find flaws in its model output review systems.
Anthropic is also reportedly on pace to generate $1 billion in revenue this year, representing 1,000% year-over-year growth.
Intel's new Lunar Lake processors can power the Dell XPS 13 laptop for up to 24 hours of video playback on a single charge, a remarkable feat that outperforms even Qualcomm's battery-efficient Snapdragon chips.
China's central bank is taking aggressive steps to boost its lagging economy, including cutting interest rates and offering loans to stock market investors.
Noah Smith makes the argument that nuclear power is a great energy source, but solar and batteries have improved so much that nuclear is now a niche player rather than the "star of the show" for the future energy mix.
The House approved a bill that aims to speed up the build-out of the US semiconductor industry, with chip companies pledging to invest $400 billion in domestic factories after incentives from the 2022 Chips and Science Act.
Telegram has updated its Terms of Service to allow compliance with police requests for user data, such as phone numbers and IP addresses. This change comes after the arrest and release of Telegram's founder, Pavel Durov.
Sam Altman published an article on his website titled The Intelligence Age. In it he states “in the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.” And “With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone's lives can be better than anyone's life is now.”
Canva generates $2.3 billion in ARR, is growing 50% year-over-year, and is profitable. Even with over 4K employees, Canva still has $500k+ ARR per employee.
Jason Droege, an experienced executive from companies like Uber, has joined the team at Scale AI as Chief Strategy Officer.
The world's biggest banks have pledged support for nuclear power, signaling a potential shift in the energy industry.
Jony Ive confirms he’s working on a new device with OpenAI.
We’re thrilled to be hosting our first NYC Tech Talk of the year featuring eng leads and founders from Ramp, Warp, Railway, Together AI & Moment. It's an evening built by engineers for engineers — each company will live demo their latest product innovations for leading builders in NYC. Register here for a chance to join.
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