I spoke with a European founder developing his own battery cells. Just getting permits for the mixing and coating stages pushed his project back by three years. Those two stages alone would make up over 60% of total capex. That’s why building dedicated electrode toll-manufacturing foundries for scaleups makes so much sense — they can shortcut years of permitting and tens of millions in investment. At higher volumes, though, around 5–8 GWh, it flips. The economics start favour

I stumbled across Martin Gallardo’s post and decided that it would be worthwhile to rewrite my comment into a full post. The consulting business has never been so good, but with the advent of AI, people were predicting that it would soon go out of business. I believe that these comments are made by people who either had a very negative experience hiring consultants (I had that experience, too) or have no idea what they are talking about. I’ve seen three very different ways

Crossing one valley of death is hard enough for any startup. For aviation startups, there are three!

Climate VC funding fell more than 3x from its peak in 2021

Over the years, I’ve distilled some patterns into a five-step framework for finding your clients—tailored to the realities of FOAK and climate tech.

How to build a supply chain for your FOAK

The lessons of Natron Energy collapse

In the end, it had to be a political decision. After half a year of sifting through more than twenty locations and countless meetings with local officials, our future 8 GWh factory came down to two options. Tatarstan: a highly industrialised region east of Moscow, with a strong industrial park, permits ready, and—most importantly—right next to our main customer, Kamaz. Kaliningrad: a Russian exclave in Europe, wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, on the unfini

Cleantech startups usually sell to mature industries, and these don't like new stuff. How can founders overcome change inertia? Ports, especially municipally owned ones, are notorious for resisting any change to how they operate. Here is a story from Polina Vasilenko on how to sell floating solar to municipal ports.

Alternative business model for a battery factory

How diverse teams are really built.

What founders sometimes fail to realise is that as you scale up, you will spend less and less time working on your product and more and more time with your investors.

This post is about how Duke went from idea to operational factory in under 9 months—and what practical lessons it offers for cleantech scale-ups.

Image is AI-generated. Scaling up sustainable aircraft is like scaling up nuclear power—a comparable challenge in terms of regulatory obstacles, timelines, and the weight of responsibility. At least, that’s how it seemed to me, looking from the outside. I was sure that the climate tech community could learn many lessons from the aviation startup experience, so I’ve asked an expert. I’ve just finished recording the next episode of WattsUpWithStartups with Dirk Singer, aviation

Why do many cleantech startups stall before they even start? They skip the hard part: talking to customers. When  Polina Vasilenko  founded  HelioRec | BCorp , a floating solar startup, she didn’t just build prototypes and pitch investors. She went to the ports, the future clients. Image credits: HelioRec One hundred fifty conversations later, she had the data she needed: ✅ Ports want to decarbonise ✅ Rooftop solar isn’t enough  ✅ Wind turbines? “Not beautiful” for city ports

Scaling a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) climate venture isn’t about ideas. It’s about execution infrastructure. And that infrastructure begins with people

Why pay more to achieve less? Really, why? Yet, you see this everywhere in climatetech. How come? A reduction in man-made CO2 emissions measures the success of all climate technologies. But many of them require two other climate technologies as inputs - wind and solar energy. Green hydrogen, SAF, and e-fuels all require huge amounts of clean energy. To reduce emissions using these technologies, you first have to build a wind or solar power plant, then add the costs of these t

Cleantech scaleup climate impact assessment framework.

My full breakdown is now live: What’s working, what’s missing, and what scaleups, especially in cleantech and manufacturing, can do today without waiting for Brussels.

Would you consider using second-hand equipment for your pilot/demo/FOAK?