Nicolette Maury (Avani Solutions)

May 27, 2025

min read

Evan: Why is Australia behind on the climate-tech front?

Nicolette: There’s two big factors that are kind of structural. One is that we’re a resources economy, and a lot of those resources are mining resources that are fossil-fuel based. So there are really strong industries that potentially strand to lose if we shift things too far.

The second is actually government policies that Australia historically hasn’t done very well with. If you think about things like sustainability disclosures, which we’re just putting in place here that have been in place for years in Europe — or grants — a lot of European countries have some really significant grant programs for sustainable technologies.

What problem is Avani solving?

The high level problem we’re solving is that buildings operate highly inefficiently, and we know that commercial real estate accounts for about 40% of carbon emissions.

The Avani solution reduces the cost and the carbon emissions of operating building portfolios, whether it's from owners like Brookfield Properties or occupiers like Aldi Supermarkets. We do all that through connecting directly to all of the systems inside of buildings, extracting all of the relevant data, and turning them into insights we action back into the building. So basically we help the building adapt in real time to the environment around it, to the stability or the greenness of the grid, to the temperature, [and] to the preference of its occupants.

To give a climate focused example, we work with Aldi supermarkets to take in signals of the level of renewables in the grid, and when the renewables are high we ask the fridges and freezers to super cool themselves to the bottom of their range. And then when the renewables low, we can let it coast so that they're using far less energy at those times of day. So basically enabling the building to react in real time to perform better.

What climate-specific challenges do you face?

I think many climate tech companies have had this issue of a mindset around: how do I demonstrate value but also bring people on this journey of, ‘Hey, doing the right thing by the climate is financially important and socially important at the same time.’ Probably part of the challenge is an uncertainty — particularly for climate tech companies — around legislation compliance: 'What is going to happen not just in Australia but around the world?' I know some companies that are active in the US obviously got lots of challenges with some of the recent changes. But even here, when you think about in our case, one of the main resources that we look at is energy.

And so with the unpredictability of the energy grid — in a way that’s part of what our product solves — we know that to electrify more buildings, we need more grid infrastructure, and we’re a long way from that.

And any general challenges?

One of the challenges is demonstrating both the financial and sustainability impact of taking preemptive action. So we use baselining algorithms to determine what would have happened — but it is hard to say, ‘Hey, by turning off your air conditioners at this point in time, you have not emitted certain amounts of carbon,’ or ‘You’ve not used certain amounts of energy.’

[Another] big challenge for us, is the mindset of, ‘Why should I change the way I've been doing things for the last 50 years?’

Is that mindset common everywhere?

Well it's any industry that's going through a big disruption, and we're seeing it almost everywhere now with AI. It's a change journey. And part of our role is to help make it as easy as possible and prove the benefits as quickly as possible.

How do you do that?

A couple of ways. One is we start by getting a very quick read of where the opportunities are at very light touch, so that we can basically say to them, ‘We estimate that we can start to save you money immediately in these 2 or 3 areas.’ And so that at least gets them started.

But also by showing... typically a lot of what we do is we test something out and then roll it out. And because we're connected directly, we can test something in one location and then roll it out over 50, 100, 500 locations immediately. So it's a way of helping build people's confidence that they can see the results somewhere, and then they know they can scale it up very quickly.

What makes you optimistic about the future?

Part of it is my natural optimism. And Climate Salad [too] has helped a lot with this, which is just creating this network of people who encourage each other and who share stories of what's happening and who spark creativity in each other. So I see enough really clever people doing really awesome stuff to go, ‘You know what? There is there's absolutely a lot going on here. There's really exciting and tricky problems being solved by startups here around the world.’ So I just feel like as humanity, there's a lot of power behind this. Even if it feels hard day to day.