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'

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.

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

My friend Jean Gravellier once drove me around the Dunkirk area. I’ve seen the ArcelorMittal steel plant, the nuclear power station, and locations for future battery gigafactories. “Why there?” I thought. So many polluting industries, all in one place? There are many reasons, but one is permitting - businesses with a higher environmental footprint go where it is easier to get approval from local governments. There is a reason that many battery companies in Europe are in Hunga

Once or twice a year, if you stay long enough in climate and battery scale-ups, you encounter a technology that politely asks you to forget thermodynamics, manufacturing constraints, and twenty years of painful industrial learning. Like a lot of other things, this year’s entry arrived early. The battery world is currently excited about Donut Lab solid state battery. Let’s outline the plausible range of outcomes: 1 Worst case: it’s a scam. Svolt has already called it out (yo

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street treats recruitment as an execution discipline rather than an exercise in intuition. The core argument is simple and uncomfortable: most hiring failures are not caused by a lack of talent in the market, but by sloppy decision-making. Interviews reward confidence, charm, and familiarity. Real performance, however, shows up later — in execution, judgment under pressure, and consistency over time. The book proposes a s

Europe spends a lot of time talking about battery gigafactories. We discuss cell chemistries, subsidy schemes, factory locations, and how many gigawatts of capacity will be built by when. All of that matters. But a part of the battery value chain rarely makes it into these conversations, even though it has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and credibility. Battery chemicals. Not cells or packs, but the solvents, electrolytes, and precursors that sit upstream of every c

How frameworks help to avoid hype traps.

An intro to short fantasy novella.

Chinese EV Exports rose despite tariffs.

What scrapping the Europe's EV target really mean