Emin Askerov
Cleantech FOAK Advisor

We don’t have a cleantech innovation problem — we have a FOAK execution problem. Over the past year, I’ve been building something I wish I had when I started scaling my first climate tech venture: a practical, experience-based framework for getting First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects off the ground. In my latest article, I’ve pulled together my 50+ posts into a structured overview that maps the FOAK journey—from the moment you decide to leave the lab to the day your NOAKs are r

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.

Corporate Venture Capital can help you with building a FOAK - much earlier than you think.

Over the past twelve to eighteen months, the automotive industry has behaved in a way that commentators find deeply unsettling: it has cancelled things. Depending on one’s accounting preferences, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five EV programmes have been scrapped, postponed, or politely redefined across 2025 and early 2026. For some observers, this was sufficient to declare that EV demand had finally met its limits. And yet, 2025 recorded more than 20 million EV s

The FT article on GM’s lithium manganese-rich (LMR) push reads, on the surface, like a familiar innovation narrative: bold leadership, unproven chemistry, long timelines, big upside. That framing misses the point. GM is not choosing LMR because it is elegant. GM is ending up at LMR because its option set has collapsed. Let’s look at the context. US support for EVs has weakened. Incentives are being rolled back. Sales are falling well short of expectations, with EV volumes dow

Choosing the wrong geography can kill a FOAK, but being forced to choose too early almost certainly will. Lyten is moving manufacturing from the US to Sweden and Poland, while trying to keep its FOAK in Nevada. Freyr started in Norway, shifted to the US, and eventually walked away from batteries altogether. In today’s increasingly fragmented world, choosing a location for your FOAK can be central to survival. And too many founders are being pushed to make that choice before t

Today is the first monthly check-in on the 23 FOAK climate tech projects  I said I’d track publicly in 2026! FOAKs get talked about more and more, which is definitely a good thing! I’m following up on the developments of the largest and most interesting FOAK projects in climate tech. I first go over the good news, then the bad, and you’ll get an updated table at the end! The good news (actual execution happened) H2 Green Steel (now Stegra)  signed a long-term supply agreement