Serial entrepreneur Norman Crowley is looking to bounce back from the pandemic with a new investment, aimed at lowering carbon emissions in the mining industry.
Mr Crowley’s Cool Planet – a multifaceted group of climate-change-focused companies – has invested €8 million in the development of new technology that he says can be retrofitted to mining vehicles, converting them from diesel-powered to electric.
Cool Planet is still recovering from its experience of the pandemic, Mr Crowley said.
Among other things, the group makes software, electric vehicles and provides educational services. But in 2020, Cool Planet incurred before-tax losses of more than €10 million with accumulated losses widening to more than €16 million by the end of the first pandemic year, according to its most recent set of accounts filed earlier this year.
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Mr Crowley said the sudden halt that the pandemic brought to a number of its clean energy projects and the climate education side of the group’s business had deeply impacted it. He said the group laid off about 80 people in 2020.
Energy-efficiency projects
“We had €70 million of energy-efficiency projects that were being delivered by 200 people across 23 countries,” Mr Crowley said. “That was St Patrick’s Day of 2020. Then everywhere around the world, we had to stop doing projects, completely overnight, like literally overnight, It was a nightmare.”
Cool Planet is hoping to bounce back with what it describes as “pioneering technology” aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions within the mining industry.
Cool Planet’s technology centres on a power train, Mr Crowley said, that can be “retrofitted into a range of diesel-powered light-mining vehicles”, converting them to electric. Two mining companies are currently trialing the technology he said, one at a site in Portugal and the other in Ireland.
Involving 15 separate patents, Mr Crowley said the project was a way to “use all the stuff” the company has learned since setting up its own Wicklow-based electric car manufacturer, AVA Electrifi, which reworks classic cars as EVs.
“AVA makes these expensive, sexy vehicles,” the millionaire businessman said. “This is the next evolution basically, because it’s fine to be making these sexy vehicles but really, if you’re making six sexy vehicles a year, you’re not reducing carbon in the world.”
Green transition
Mr Crowley said: “The problem with mining is it accounts for between 4 and 7 per cent of all the carbon in the world. Then 50 per cent of all of that carbon is diesel from the vehicles.”
However, despite the significant global environmental impact of mining and other extractive industries, he said the world economy needed the sector to help fuel the green transition. “We need mines because we can green the world with batteries and solar and all of that [requires] metals,” he said.
Cool Planet has not yet filed accounts for 2021 but Mr Crowley said it is likely to have lost another €2 million last year as its business recovered.
But he said Cool Planet had returned to growth in 2022, restarting the expansion of its headquarters at Powerscourt House in Co Wicklow, which was paused at the outset of the pandemic.
“We’re doubling the space,” he said. “Basically, the car factory is doubling in size. The software side: we’re putting in the canteen and the gym and all that kind of stuff that’s going on.”
Cool Planet has hired 50 people this year, he said.
