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 cathode line and every factory budget. This is where a large share of capital intensity, operational complexity, and embedded emissions comes from. This layer determines how expensive a factory really is once energy use, HSE requirements, and permitting are factored in. It determines how exposed “European” batteries remain to imports and geopolitical risk. And it determines how much CO₂ is embedded in every battery long before it leaves the factory gate. You can build cell assembly plants in Europe and still import cost, emissions, and strategic vulnerability if this layer stays external. Over the next few weeks, I will unpack this part of the battery story, using one very concrete industrial project as a reference point. Not as a promotion, but as a way to talk about how batteries are made, financed, and scaled in Europe. If Europe gets the chemistry layer wrong, the gigafactory debate risks becoming an exercise in industrial theatre rather than industrial strategy.

EU eased CO₂ regulations for automakers at the end of last year. Almost immediately, parts of the LinkedIn community declared the EV transition dead: OEMs will return to ICE, Europe will lose the race, and incumbents will be finished. I argued the opposite. The legislation did not reopen a real path back to combustion. It was a gambit - giving away something to score a bigger victory. In practice, it pushed European carmakers toward EVs. That is exactly what is now being confirmed by a recent article in the Financial Times. Having spent so much effort to reverse the EU regulations and getting nothing for it, Stellantis, Renault, Kia, all confirm that they are doubling down on EVs. This gives me hope that this year we will hear more about new, cheaper EVs, new factories and battery plants opening, rather than more political haggling.

I used to think that US sanctions were reserved for criminals, dictators and Russians. Well, a few months ago, an ICC judge authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan. Then she was sanctioned. Her bank access was frozen. Amazon and Microsoft shut down her accounts. She was treated like an international criminal. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for all working with the USA, this January should have been. With Trump openly threatening tariffs and economic retaliation against anyone opposing the US takeover of Greenland, what should hardware businesses do? You do not want to discover mid-factory build that your supply chain is suddenly blocked or prohibitively expensive. Contracts, suppliers, banking access, and digital infrastructure can be switched off overnight, and you don’t have to do anything wrong. I would go as far as saying this: the US is becoming uninvestable and uncontractable for long-cycle hardware projects. The idea of a neutral, rules-based global business environment is gone. Has your business or project been hit by geopolitics lately?

What's the biggest myth  #FOAK  founders believe about getting their first  clients ?  “If the technology is good enough, customers will find us.” Sometimes they do. Most of the time, they don’t. I’ve seen world-class  #climate  and industrial technologies stall for years — not because the product failed, but because founders were pitching everyone, hiring the wrong sales profiles, and waiting for “inbound” that never came. Cold emails. Demo days. Visibility. All useful — occasionally. But not a strategy. After watching the same mistakes repeat, I distilled what actually works into a 5-step framework for how FOAK startups find their first real clients. It starts with a simple shift most teams miss: not all clients behave the same. Some are hungry. Some are cautious. Some are indifferent. Treat them the same — and you lose years. I’ve laid out the framework in the slides below. It’s not flashy and it’s not marketing theory. It’s how first conversations turn into real contracts in FOAK environments. If you’re building something that has to work in the real world — this will save you time. Let me know which step hits closest to home!

For a long time, I wanted to believe in carbon capture. It sounds like the perfect solution.
Keep the industry running, clean up emissions later, no lifestyle changes required. Until I ran the numbers. Myth #1: Carbon capture is a climate solution. In reality, it’s an energy problem. To permanently remove and store CO₂: • DAC needs ~2–3 kWh per kg of CO₂ • Point-source capture needs ~1–1.5 kWh per kg of CO₂ And there’s a catch: those kilowatt-hours must be clean — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear — or the whole system becomes circular nonsense. Those same clean kWh could: • decarbonise power grids • electrify industry • displace fossil generation directly In almost every case, they deliver more climate impact doing that than being spent on capturing already-emitted CO₂. Then came the second epiphany. Myth #2: Carbon capture fails because there was no market. Until this year, CO₂ had no real price. Now it does. With CBAM, carbon lands at roughly €70–90 per ton for exposed industries. That finally creates a forcing function. But it also exposes the hard truth: • DAC at €500–1,000 per ton is still economically detached from reality • Point-source capture at €40–80 per ton might work — if those costs are achieved at scale, not just in pilots This is exactly what the Yara industrial CCS project is attempting to prove this year. And that’s why I’ll be following it closely this year and next. When I run carbon capture through my own frameworks: • It passes the climate impact test • It fails the energy efficiency test • And until CBAM, it also failed the market test Two failures out of three is enough. So here’s my current take: Carbon capture may be necessary. But necessary does not mean investable. For now, my bet remains negative — and the burden of proof is on execution, not belief.

After 9 days of the free trial of 2026, can someone please tell me how to cancel the subscription? This week was entertaining: suddenly everyone became a geopolitics expert.
 Mostly AI / data / everything-cool profiles explaining global affairs — often from countries that haven’t had a serious geopolitical shock in 50 years. Fun. Briefly. My own introduction to geopolitics was less theoretical.
In 2014, I was CIO for five power plants in Russia. One ran on a Siemens turbine due for maintenance. Crimea happened. Sanctions followed. Maintenance cancelled. Down payment frozen. That’s geopolitical risk — not as a post, but as an invoice. Today, one of my projects depends on Chinese suppliers while targeting Latin America. With the US rediscovering hemispheric discipline, that risk just moved from “remote” to “operational”. FOAK projects already live with enough uncertainty.
Geopolitics has a habit of showing up uninvited — and charging interest. How are you factoring this into your projects right now? The picture is of me, part of the sailing team, going into my first storm, just off the coast of Istanbul. Couldn’t find a better one.

This year, I’m doing something simple and public. I’ve put together a list of 23 First-of-a-Kind climate tech projects that are supposed to hit meaningful milestones in 2026 — commissioning, certification, first operations, or first proof that the business case holds outside a slide deck. I’ll be monitoring these projects throughout the year and sharing monthly updates on what actually moves, what stalls, and what quietly changes scope. Below is the starting snapshot. FOAK projects I’ll be tracking in 2026 What this table already tells us 1. Steel, hydrogen and CCS dominate — again (facepalm) Heavy industry decarbonisation is still where FOAK capital clusters: • DRI steel, • hydrogen supply chains, • carbon capture and storage. That’s not because they’re easy — but because people thought they would be easy. 2026 might well become the year where dreams of hydrogen, CCS and green steel finally crash against hard reality. Green steel though, might avoid this fate in the EU, thanks to CBAM going full-steam. 2. Integration risk outweighs technology risk Very few of these projects are betting on unknown physics, although many CCS and hydrogen do believe they can change its laws.
Most are betting on: • EPC discipline, • supply-chain reliability, • permitting, • offtakers having nerves of steel, • and the ability to survive delays without balance-sheet collapse. In other words: classic FOAK failure modes. 3. Regulation and certification loom large Projects like aviation hydrogen, nuclear, CCS hubs — they don’t fail in labs.
They fail in when regulatory approvals last longer than investors’ patience. Which brings me to the ones I’ll be watching especially closely. FOAK Projects I’m personally watching — with raised eyebrows Lyten taking over Northvolt’s facilities
 This is one of the most interesting experiments on the list.
Not a greenfield dream — but a brutal attempt to make someone else’s broken factory work with a new chemistry.
If this succeeds, it will say more about execution than battery science. ZeroAvia 
This year feels existential.
Certification timelines, cash burn, and customer patience will all collide.
Hydrogen aviation doesn’t get infinite “almost there” years. Climeworks 
Direct Air Capture is past the storytelling phase. Last year dismal results put forward simple and uncomfortable question:
Can Mammoth operate reliably, predictably, and economically — or does scale just magnify the problems? NEOM Green Hydrogen
 A masterclass in ambition and capital availability, or, I’d say, ability to separate capital from investors. 
Also a masterclass in how many things must go right simultaneously.
I’m not watching for technology — more for governance, interfaces, reality checks, and how to keep a smooth face in a loosing game. Commonwealth Fusion
 Fusion is like Schrödinger’s cat - it is simultaneously alive and dead. This year I’m watching how CMF will be inflating its promises as it inevitably heads for collapse. How I’ll use this list • Monthly status checks • Quiet changes in scope and language • Delays vs real progress • And, occasionally, calling things what they are No cheerleading. No doomposting. 
Just FOAKs as they are — fragile, expensive, necessary. If you’re building, financing, or betting on FOAKs:
you already know the truth (or should) — execution is the product. More to come this month.

When I was working in Russia, January was always a dead month. Mandatory 8–12 days of holidays at the start of the year, followed by another one or two weeks of “extended” vacations. Clients, investors, suppliers — all happy to reconnect, but preferably sometime after mid-January. Even those back in the office moved slowly. Europe doesn’t have the same formal shutdown.
But culturally, January is still a soft month. That is — unless you’re working on a FOAK. In FOAK years, I was always short on time with the one thing that actually mattered: the team.
Investors needed updates.
 Suppliers needed decisions.
 Customers needed reassurance. The people doing the real work somehow kept getting deprioritised. Until January. That quiet window was often the only moment to sit down properly: align the team, clean up plans, reset KPIs, surface issues that had been accumulating quietly in the background. Not PR. Not strategy decks. Just operational alignment. I came to think of January as front-loading the year. Because by spring, investors want last year’s numbers.
 By summer, you’re deep in suppliers and customers.
 By autumn, you’re on the conference circuit.
 And by winter, you’re fixing problems that started while you were distracted. FOAK doesn’t slow down — but January gives you a rare chance to get ahead of it. How do you use this month when building physical projects?

The one thing I’m leaving behind in 2025: three-five-year thinking for problems that take decades to solve. FOAK work has a way of breaking your intuition about time. Climate hardware doesn’t respect annual KPIs, shareholder meeting cycles, or fund lifetimes. Market acceptance, permitting, supply chains, and learning curves all move to their own rhythms. Yet we keep trying to force them into slide-friendly horizons. I’ve seen too many good projects struggle, not because the technology was wrong, but because the time horizon was mispriced. I, guilty as charged, for trying to fit FOAK schedules for investors’ required payback periods, rather than for real construction and ramp-up time. Going into 2026, I’m trying to be more explicit about this with founders and investors alike: take a long view. 
How do you reconcile long physical timelines with short financial ones in your work?

Art by ©Kira Askerova One constraint I keep running into in FOAK and scale-up work — and more broadly in climate and energy transition — is the planning horizon. Climate change doesn’t just stress our systems - it breaks our intuition about time. Outcomes are shaped over decades, sometimes centuries — not five-year plans, not annual KPIs, not even political cycles. That alone makes climate one of the most complex global challenges we’ve ever faced. Most other existential risks are easier to reason about.
 Pandemics, nuclear escalation, AI misuse, food shortages — they all carry immediacy. Clear and present danger. Fast feedback. Escalation you can see, track, model, and manage. Their signals are loud. With the climate, everything is inverted.
 Causality is delayed. Feedback is weak. Even measurement is contested. We argue over baselines, scenarios, and models — while the physical system keeps moving, indifferent to our debates. At some point, this turns into a more uncomfortable question:
How do you act on a problem whose time horizon exceeds a human life? I sometimes use fiction to explore questions that are hard to stress-test through frameworks or slide decks alone. With that in mind, I’ve published a short speculative novella, Planning Horizon, and made it free to read. It’s a story about startups, climate decline, technology, and revenge. Oh, and yes — there are vampires! The story is free to read, and I publish it under a non-commercial license. Share if it resonates. English and Russian language PDFs are attached.

This year ended very differently from how it started. The biggest thing was moving from Turkey to France, following the centuries-old and well-established tradition of Russian emigration. Not for lifestyle reasons alone, but because I wanted to be closer to where real FOAK (first-of-a-kind) execution is happening — in a region that still combines two things I value deeply: personal freedom and a serious attempt at climate transition. Professionally, three things defined my year: • I started systematically building my FOAK execution frameworks — practical tools meant to help deep-tech founders move from “interesting technology” to something that can actually be built, financed, and scaled. • I published nine episodes of my podcast, WattsUpWithStartups, talking with founders and operators about what breaks (and what holds) when scaling climate tech (big thanks to the NEAH: New Energy Advancement Hub for their support!). I continued working hands-on with founders and investors who are already past the hype stage and dealing with reality, across the battery value chain and in renewables. On LinkedIn, I spent the year writing openly — sometimes critically — about FOAKs, batteries, hydrogen, manufacturing, and execution risk. Here are some numbers: ~3,200 new followers this year, bringing the total to ~6,500 309,000+ impressions, reaching ~90,000 unique people The post on Robotaxis has been named among the best posts on Future Mobility and Market Evolution by Next-Gen Vehicles & Mobility Newsletter (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-linkedin-cw-49-50-future-mobility-market-thomas-allgeyer-gn2rf/?trackingId=b6MiNbfHTKmb%2FQVWId9Z3A%3D%3D) The posts that worked best seemed to be opinionated takes grounded in execution experience. That confirmed something I already suspected: for deep-tech and climate hardware, trust builds faster through clarity and disagreement than through optimism. I’ve shared the links to the three top performers below. On a more personal note: Scaled my kettlebell work from 24 kg to 32 kg Wrote a short climate/fantasy fiction story (I’ll share it over the weekend) Started working on a full-scale book on FOAK frameworks — and learned, once again, that finishing hard things takes longer than the original plan envisaged! Targets for next year: - Grow this audience to 10K - Finish the FOAK frameworks book - Publish 12 podcast episodes - Write a dozen climate/fantasy short stories Thank you to everyone who followed, liked, commented, disagreed, and shared my posts this year! Most of my longer posts live on my website (check it out - link in my bio). Wishing you a calm end of the year, and a 2026 with fewer slides and more things that work on the ground! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Without clean electrons, there are no clean molecules. China is consolidating its leadership in clean technologies by taking a logical next step and going big on clean fuels. The Financial Times published an article on Monday showing that most of the clean-fuel projects (ammonia/methanol/aviation) that have reached FID or are operational are in China. The companies driving these projects are all familiar to anyone who has worked in the wind industry: Envision, Goldwind, and Mingyang. All of them are Tier 1 wind turbine manufacturers, now pushing into clean molecules. A total of 54 commercial-scale clean-molecule projects are either in operation or have received finance. If China completes all its planned projects by 2030, it could produce around 20 million tons of green ammonia, displacing about 10% of the global ammonia market. I have a feeling that this ammonia will be sold at exceptionally competitive prices. So here is another Chinese lesson for Europe - a solid base in renewable energy and batteries is a prerequisite for all other clean technologies. Unless we overbuild wind and solar, we will be importing green ammonia and clean aviation fuels from China. You can’t engineer your way around scale.