Emin Askerov
Cleantech FOAK Advisor

An intro to short fantasy novella.

Why AI power demand won't materialise at the scale imagined.

Adaptation and mitigation are often viewed as competing for capital. In fact, they are not.

This was my second Battery Day in the Netherlands. Last year I came for the first time and was surprised at how much battery innovation is happening here. This year the event was bigger, much better organised, and had over 600 participants. It also gained an international dimension — with Matthieu Hubert from ACC giving a keynote on the French sector, and a dedicated session on cooperation with China. A few takeaways: 1) Scaling Dutch startups means going international. The g

Michael Liebreich’s recent provocation on the Pragmatic Climate Reset raises many important points. One that stood out to me is that the climate movement has lost credibility by clinging to maximalist narratives while failing to deliver practical benefits. This inspired me to reflect on my own journey — ten years in climate tech yet still facing the gap between professional work and personal choices.

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.

Two different points of view on climate investment. Both wrong.

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

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.

The humble transformer is at the heart of the electric grid. And for decades, it’s been a tailor-made marvel. Engineers loved the craft, utilities loved the high price that they passed on to consumers, and factories loved having “just the right” unit. But times changed, and the transformer industry didn’t. Until now. Meet One Power, a U.S. company taking the most boring, glacial, and conservative part of the grid… and flipping it on its head. Not by reinventing the tech, but

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.

Don’t play with the government. That’s a rule my father taught me. He built his business in the 90s and early 2000s in Russia. He knew first hand that the government will screw you over faster than your private sector partner and in worse ways. For a long time, I thought that this rule applied only to authoritarian states like Russia, where the law is weak. The current passing of the “Big Beautiful Bill” in the US now shows that it is true for the West as well. The Inflation

A new, comprehensive guide to FOAK in cleantech

I'm deep into research on large-scale solar heating vs. heat pumps – and the findings are fascinating. At the household level, heat pumps dominate. They’re fast to install, scalable, and increasingly efficient. But when you move into industrial heat and district heating at a serious scale, the picture flips. Solar thermal projects start pulling ahead. At scale, solar heat beats heat pumps on operating costs, emissions, and resilience. Once built, the sun’s energy is basically

Airbus just quietly moved the launch of its hydrogen-powered plane from 2035 to 2045. In corporate speak, that’s not a delay—it’s a polite way of pulling the plug without admitting failure. After €1.7B spent, even Airbus is starting to realize that hydrogen aviation may be a science project, not a business. I called this a year ago, when Universal Hydrogen filed for bankruptcy after burning through $100M. That was a 20-minute or $100M crash course in hydrogen physics. Airbus

LineVision experience in selling to Utilities

What am I working on?

Do we really have an AI energy problem? Or is it just hype (as usual)?

Why you shouldn't lose faith in Europe