View, Inc. (VIEW)

Company website Stock Analysis

Million Sq. Ft

View has installed and designed windows for 75+ million square feet of buildings

42^%

Increase in Cognitive Ability

View’s smart glass helps increase the productivity of indoor inhabitants by 21% and cognitive ability by 42%

1050

Patents

View has 1,050 patents

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The Path to Drawdown: Dynamic Glass

Buildings account for 32% of energy use and 19% of energy-related GHG emissions worldwide. Much of this energy-use and emissions come from heating the interiors of buildings in the winter and cooling them in the summer.

One way of making buildings more energy efficient is to install “smart glass” or “dynamic glass.” This is glass that dynamically changes its opacity to reduce or increase the amount of light and heat that’s allowed to pass through. This means reducing the amount of light and heat buildings in the summer and maximizing them in the winter. This technology replaces static glass that’s prevalent in commercial buildings in industrialized countries.

Dynamic glass can be designed to adjust to electricity, heat, or light: it changes color and tint in real time in response to the light or heat that it’s exposed to, or when the user flips a switch. It has the potential to save energy for both thermal and lighting systems in buildings and transportation.

Today, high production and installation costs are obstacles to wide adoption. But Project Drawdown is hopeful that a rapid scaling is possible and projects its growth between now and 2050:

<::marker> In 2018, 42 million square meters of dynamic glass were being used in commercial floor area
<::marker> If 50% of buildings become net-zero emissions by 2050, they would require 341 million square meters of dynamic glass.

If the world can achieve this scenario, dynamic glass would help avoid 0.3 gigatons of GHG emissions compared with high performance static glass.

About

View Operating Corporation (stock ticker: VIEW), a technology company, makes and sells smart building products. Their flagship product is View Smart Glass, a dynamic glass based on electrochromism. The company is headquartered in Milpitas, California.

VIEW's Role in Drawdown

View’s smart glass is made of regular glass but with a series of thin nanocoatings that react to a small electrical charge, creating different levels of tint. View’s smart glass is controlled by artificial intelligence that takes into account the building’s orientation, surrounding obstructions, local weather and the arc of the sun to optimize the amount of natural light that comes into the building throughout the day.

View estimates that buildings installed with their smart glass save 20% (p. 17) in HVAC and lighting energy costs, reduce energy consumption by 10%, enhance building security, and improve the experience of people inside the building.

Beyond their smart glass product, View's portfolio includes a range of building efficiency and security products. View Net is a cloud-connected network infrastructure that can incorporate and power smart building devices. View Immersive Experiences transforms View Smart Glass windows into transparent, digital, and interactive surfaces. View Sense can measure and optimize light, humidity, temperature, air quality, dust, and noise. And View Smart Protect is an intrusion detection solution that can be deployed on View Smart Glass windows to improve the security of a building by detecting glass breakage.

VIEW: What We Like

We’ll update this section once View makes sustainability information available.

What We Want to See Improve

Electrify Manufacturing

One of View’s main stated objectives is to solve climate change. To that end, we think their smart glass is a great solution for reducing energy use in buildings. But the company itself needs to reduce their carbon footprint. We think one meaningful way of achieving this is to power their manufacturing facility in Mississippi with renewable energy.

Disclose Sustainability Metrics

Once View matures, we’d like to see them publish an annual sustainability report that contains key sustainability metrics like their direct and indirect GHG emissions, emissions avoided through their products, and the amount of energy consumed by source.

Set Emissions Reduction Targets

Coupled with using renewable energy for their manufacturing, we want to see View setting aggressive targets for reducing the emissions from their operations, transportation, and supply chain. We urge them to eventually commit to achieving zero emissions by the year 2050.

Related Dynamic Glass Stocks in the Climate Index

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Allocated	Company	Description
0.09%	View, Inc. (VIEW)	View, Inc. makes smart glass that reacts to sunlight, weather, and other factors. Dynamic glass helps cut building energy use and emissions
0.02%	Crown ElectroKinetics Corp. (CRKN)	Crown Electrokinetics makes pigment-based film that can be embedded between sheets of glass to control its opacity. Dynamic glass can cut energy use
0.02%	Research Frontiers (REFR)	Research Frontiers makes smart glass with nanotechnology that can be dimmed depending on sunlight, reducing building energy use and emissions.