May was a month of shovels both hitting the ground and being laid to rest, restructuring, and hydrogen projects demonstrating how initial market positioning determines whether you get an FID or get fired. Also, some familiar names are stumbling in familiar ways. The Good News Kairos Power Hermes 2 broke ground in Oak Ridge in late April/early May, making it the second advanced reactor under construction in the US alongside TerraPower. The project aims to power Google data cen

Why Volt Rush is a good read whether you are in cleantech or simply wondering where all those materials come from.

The four risks that late-stage investors press you on hardest at your pilot, demo, and FOAK rounds — obsolescence, competition, commercial, and execution. Get a clear answer to each, and you'll cover most of what's in their heads when they sit across the table from you. What they don't tell you is that there is a fifth risk, specific to each investor, that determines whether they sign.

Check out what Kairos Power, Stegra, ATOME and others have been up to in their FOAK journey.

The IAA is supposed to lay the foundation of European battery security. Will it get it right?

Most founders think "execution risk" is one risk. Investors don't. They're worried about four: construction, ramp-up, supply chain, and team. And the reason so many FOAK pitches feel competent on paper but somehow fail to reassure is that founders answer as if it's one question. This week's piece walks through each of the four, with examples from ATOME's Villetta project, JR Energy Solution's nine-month electrode factory build, and what shifted at InterBattery in Seoul last m

The boardroom isn't the place where major decisions are hashed out. It's a place where major decisions are officially signed off. More like a ribbon-cutting ceremony. That I learned only when preparing to present at my first-ever board meeting, in the summer of 2012. I expected a full presentation, followed by a discussion, and then a decision. And while on the face of it all went according to this plan, one important thing was off - the decision had already been agreed befor

March brought a mix of real construction milestones, big financing closes, and the usual parade of announcements that may or may not lead anywhere. Let's sort the signal from the noise. The Good News Stegra (H2 Green Steel) delivered the headline of the month: all electrolyser modules are now installed at their 740 MW green hydrogen plant in Boden, Sweden. That's a real, physical milestone on what is arguably the most important green steel FOAK in the world. The financial

There's a new idea I came upon on how to finance FOAK factories: break the facility into three separate "shells" — the envelope, the piping and MEP, and the secret sauce — and finance each according to its risk profile. The envelope and MEP can supposedly attract debt; only the secret sauce needs equity. The math is appealing: a $100M equity requirement collapses to $35M. I've read the argument carefully (see the link to the original article). The logic of asset unbundling is

I spent Wednesday evening at a roundtable in Valencia on European battery sovereignty. The discussion was sharp, honest, and at times uncomfortable. I left with a clearer sense of both the problem and a path forward that doesn't require waiting for Brussels to fix the IAA, renegotiate the Korea FTA, or launch another battery alliance. This is my attempt to pull the threads together. The question that matters most European battery policy has been trapped in a cycle of ambitiou

Can demand-pull industrial policy actually build a battery industry? I've seen this movie before — not in Brussels, but in Russia. Around 2015, the Russian government wanted a domestic wind industry. Their solution was elegant: offer a feed-in tariff roughly double the prevailing energy price, but only if your wind farm hit 60% local content. Later raised to 80%. Within a few years, there were turbine blade factories, nacelle assembly lines, and local supply chains that hadn'

Your FOAK isn't stalling because of the technology, funds or the supply chain. It's stalling because of the team. Not the wrong people. The wrong leadership. I've seen this across wind and battery scale-ups: a founding team that was fast and decisive in the lab starts to fragment under the pressure of commercial scale. Here is the 5-Step Framework for uBilding FOAK Teams That Deliver.

Last year, I visited JR Energy Solution for the first time — walked the factory floor, saw multi-chemistry electrode production, watched how a Korean contract manufacturer handles global shipping logistics for electrodes and cells. This week I'm back. The only thing that changed here is that more people are working, and all are much busier, while back in Europe, the battery picture looks different enough to warrant explaining what changed and what it means for JR's fit. Three

I spent the past week at InterBattery in Seoul — walking the floors, sitting across from engineers and business development teams, and following up on partnerships between European battery startups and Korean manufacturers. Here is what actually happened, and why it matters for how you should be thinking about your battery supply chain right now. It Was Bigger. Meaningfully Bigger. 75,000 visitors. That is not a rounding-up-to-sound-impressive number — the difference in energ

Can EU battery industry be competitive with China? Yes, sort of.

February was the best month for climate FOAKs since I started tracking them. A $1B battery contract. A nuclear core installed on schedule. A European steel FOAK crawling back from the brink. And one company generating more noise than any serious project — without a single credible update from the construction site. Monthly tracker inside.

The Transport & Environment article asked the right question: Can Europe go electric and remain sovereign? Their answer — it all depends on batteries — is correct. But the analysis stops where the real problem starts. The conversation in Brussels focuses on gigafactories, local content rules, and tariffs. These matter. But there is a layer of the battery value chain that nobody is talking about: the startups. Europe has genuine battery innovation. New cathode chemistries, nov

Your FOAK isn't stalling because of the technology. It's stalling because of execution discipline. Or the lack of it. I've been re-reading *The 4 Disciplines of Execution* — a corporate management book, not a cleantech book — and it maps onto FOAK reality more precisely than most things written specifically about cleantech scale-up.

If a board member asked you today — "How do we manage the security and continuity risk in our Chinese partnerships?" — what would your answer be?

Upstream battery innovations, coupled with strong regulations, might let Europe avoid competition from China.