The global energy transition faces a fundamental challenge: meeting growing demand while reducing environmental impact. Renewable energy adoption must first overcome challenges with scaling and infrastructure to grow worldwide.
Robert Murphy, CEO of Othersphere, believes solving this puzzle requires location-specific, data-driven insights that make new energy projects financially viable. “If it’s not cheap enough to compete in the market, it won’t grow,” Murphy explains.
Othersphere equips developers with advanced analytics to identify optimal locations for sustainable infrastructure. By modeling millions of locations around the world in parallel, they’re solving the energy demand challenge, providing insights that help users soundly and profitably scale their projects.
Murphy’s Industry Journey
Growing up in Calgary and the Middle East, Murphy has always been around the oil and gas industry, giving him a deep appreciation for energy’s complexity. “Energy underpins everything we do in a way a lot of people appreciate and a lot of people don’t sometimes understand,” Murphy notes. “It’s economics, science, geopolitics, social factors all at once.”
His career path through Washington DC policy circles, renewable energy consulting, and corporations like Chevron provided crucial perspective. Each experience reinforced the importance of financial viability in scaling sustainable solutions.
“Seeing the reality that these lower carbon, climate-compatible solutions have to make financial sense to be sustainable in the broader sense of the word was critical,” Murphy reflects on an early career setback during the 2008 financial crisis.
Seeking to strike a balance between profitability and sustainability, Murphy took his understanding of the industry, policy, and data to the startup private sector. By leveraging his previous experience, he built Othersphere, unlocking the economic power of accessible data insights for infrastructure development.
Othersphere: From Ad Hoc Analysis to Data-Driven Infrastructure
Throughout his career, Murphy noticed a persistent problem: energy infrastructure development relied on outdated tools and processes. “At Enbridge, for example, building renewable energy assets or pipeline systems and analyzing where they would go, we were doing it in quite an archaic way,” he explains.
Traditional methods involved “a mix of Excel and maybe bringing in some GIS tools at some point, but in a pretty ad hoc way.” Worse, industrial planners often use top-down models that assume gradual linear change in technology, missing the changes that are actually occurring on the ground. These inefficiencies sparked the idea for a more data-driven approach to infrastructure planning.
Leveraging previous startup experience and securing initial funding from Breakthrough Energy, Murphy founded Othersphere to systematically identify optimal locations for energy infrastructure. He put together a fresh team to take on the industry’s fundamental challenge: supporting climate goals while also making sustainable infrastructure financially viable.
Making Location Intelligence Accessible
Othersphere created a spatial economics platform that analyzes millions of potential project locations simultaneously. “We make the ideal location searchable and easy to find,” Murphy explains.
To help project developers and hardware OEMs find sustainable long-term infrastructure, the system evaluates sites based on three criteria: economics, emissions, and fit with local surroundings. This helps them plan in a way that is both climate-compatible and economically sustainable and scalable—seeking opportunities to build high-performance, low/zero GHG projects that minimize any ‘green premium. ’
For commercial developers, this approach revolutionizes the way they identify opportunities. Rather than relying on relationship-driven prospects or limited high-level evaluations, the platform indexes the whole world for infrastructure, providing comprehensive analysis that identifies financially viable locations for development.
The company’s Explorer tool delivers these insights through an accessible interface that serves various stakeholders. “We’ve tried to make it so that anyone in an organization can come in and start to understand and digest these insights,” Murphy notes. This accessibility helps align financial, technical, and community teams around optimal project locations.
Scaling with Data-Driven Economics
Their first target was the hydrogen market, which has extreme potential but faces serious economic realities. “When you look at the green premium for most kinds of low-carbon hydrogen production around the world, there’s not many places where it’s outright just competitive without policy support.”
Using Explorer, developers can search the world for potential project sites, assessing financial fits down to the individual location. There, they’ll find a scatter plot of the levelized cost of hydrogen and carbon intensity of dozens of production pathways for hydrogen at that site.
Developers can then take this accessible, exportable data back to their teams to kickstart the project financing process with greater confidence. “We’re basically running billions of project models in parallel,” Murphy explains. “You can pull them out as Excel files, and they are basically in the form you could take off to the project finance firm.” This holistic data means reduced perceived risk from any potential investor.
The result is quicker movement through the financial stage and shorter project timelines. “The idea is to help the downstream stakeholders understand project risks and get more comfortable with them more quickly because a lot of resistance to fund projects is driven by the perception of risk as much as the actual risk,” Murphy says.
Future-Proofing Data Center Projects
Othersphere’s next target is the more complex market of data centers. With the boom in AI and the vast amounts of energy required to sustain the industry’s growth, development requires extensive commercial modeling and GIS work.
For these more complex use cases, Explorer streamlines the project analysis to provide insights into today’s energy economy—and tomorrow’s. Murphy says, “We’re showing them how to identify all the right criteria for location selection—not just where is a good place to build today, but where it will be a good place to build tomorrow.”
For data centers, factors such as energy availability, cost, and carbon intensity are well-known factors in project viability. But projects are also dependent on lower-profile factors such as temperature variability. Even a minor 1-2 degree change over the long term will have a meaningful impact on operations and how developers plan for cooling costs. These factors also determine the cooling systems they install at the outset.
This foresight could save project developers millions in costs, all through Othersphere’s platform. “We’re trying to give these organizations planning superpowers just without having to invest a huge amount of time, people, and data expenses in the process,” Murphy explains.
Building a More Sustainable Energy Future
Looking toward the future of clean tech, Murphy sees Othersphere as empowering developers to build a profitable and sustainable future. “Our role is supportive,” Murphy emphasizes. “We’re trying to shape the tools industry uses and the lens they look at in terms of what success looks like.”
As technology improves and development evolves, Murphy sees two potential paths for infrastructure growth in the 22nd century. The optimistic scenario involves solving clean tech’s fundamental problem, efficiently providing material prosperity globally while minimizing environmental impact: “How much omelet can we make while breaking the fewest amount of eggs?”
The alternative resembles business as usual, where development proceeds inefficiently and many areas miss opportunities for advancement. Without widespread access to data, developers remain stuck to ad hoc models, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities
Murphy believes Othersphere can help steer toward a better outcome by providing tools for large-scale optimization, ultimately leaving a positive mark on local communities. He notes, “I feel that a project should benefit the local community as much as its end users. “
Beyond economic considerations and global trends, Othersphere creates meaningful positive change that transforms the planet for the better. “What kind of world do we want to live in—and leave for our kids and their kids going forward? A lot of that goes back to the tools and the priorities we set today,” Murphy reflects.
Transforming Energy Infrastructure Through Data
Robert Murphy’s experience across the energy sector has crystallized into a clear vision: data-driven decisions are essential for addressing global energy challenges. Through Othersphere’s spatial economics platform, developers can identify locations where industrial and energy infrastructure makes financial sense while meeting environmental and community needs.
Whether a global developer or a commercial property owner, taking a data-driven approach to energy infrastructure is the way to effectively evaluate opportunities. The most successful projects align economic viability with strategic site selection, using comprehensive data to support long-term success.
As Murphy puts it: “We want to provide well-being to everyone, and we need to do it in the lowest-footprint way possible.” By focusing on where projects make financial sense, the energy transition becomes both sustainable and scalable.