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 before the meeting. And that was my doing. Board meetings can make or break a company. The decisions taken in the boardroom determine your strategy, your critical decisions, and how much more cash investors would be willing to put in. Sometimes, the very existence of your company might hinge on one such meeting. This was discussed at length in the wrap-up of a conversation about "down rounds" - when a company is forced to raise equity at a lower valuation than its previous round. A one tough conversation to have. How do you ensure a favourable board meeting outcome? Back to the summer of 2012. The meeting in question was about the reshuffling of ownership of combined heat and power plants inside a corporation. You could call it a down round, since it would reduce the value of assets in some subsidiaries. Understandably, the leadership of most power plants was strongly opposed to losing control, while my task was to push through a decision to consolidate ownership in a new entity. This was a snap board meeting, called in the middle of the summer of 2012. My boss was on vacation, so I had to go in his place. On the phone call, he gave me some advice that was crucial to our eventual success. He told me to arrange a meeting with every board member before the official meeting, go through our arguments, understand their positions, and try to reach a consensus before anyone enters the boardroom. I did exactly that, meeting with every board member, except the chairman. But that was okay, as two other board members briefed him after meeting with me. I've also met the managers of the subsidiaries and negotiated the transfer with all but one. A week later, at the board meeting, six of the seven CHPs were transferred to a consolidated company. The one that was left out did not cause a major debate in the boardroom. The directors generally agreed that the last one should be left out, as it was serving a military research facility, while all others were strictly civilian. The meeting lasted less than an hour, with me giving a short introductory presentation, my opponents voicing their well-known objections, and the chairman formulating a decision. Everyone left the room happy, and I had just created a new company of five CHPs. Later, in all my other board meetings, I strictly followed this framework. Never just call a board meeting, give your presentation and expect a favourable decision. That's a recipe for disaster, especially if the decision is difficult, like a down round. People usually don't take bad news well, and their first reaction is to fall back on what's familiar and protect what they have already invested. Expecting them to quickly see the situation and follow up with more money is a fantasy. The key is to pre-orchestrate it. Hold one-on-one conversations with board members. Clearly show available options and tradeoffs. Make them see the situation from your point of view. Remember that these meetings are not so much about you and your problem, but an opportunity to understand investor motivations and capabilities at this point in time. Regardless of what you think you know about your investor, their current situation might be very different, and their decision might unpleasantly surprise you. When you fully understand each director's current position, you may hash out a decision right there and gain the support of all of your board members, or at least a majority. Now, you might think, "I know my investors well, and anyway, I don't have the time to meet all of them one-on-one!" True, any founder knows that their time is the most scarce resource that they have. What is also true is that as a founder, and especially as a leader of a scale-up, you have to spend your time on things that matter most to your company. Board meetings are rarely called to rubber-stamp some large purchase or your management's remuneration. These are often make-or-break decisions. Failing them could mean you lose your company. Rank your priorities. There is a way, though, to free up some time for a founder while still meeting and prepping all the board members. If you have a trusted advisor, or a deputy (usually a director for strategy or finance) who knows your business very well, who is known and trusted by your board, and whose negotiation skills are battle-tested, you can rely on him or her to do the one-on-one meetings with board members. For many years, I fulfilled this role for my boss, and later, when I became a CEO, I had my finance director take it on. The one-on-one meetings are a concrete example of what people really mean when they talk about "building trust" and "communication skills". Having a non-formal communication, where people can openly ask questions and not publicly and legally commit to a decision immediately, helps a lot. Having someone who has done this many times over is even better. Today, as an independent scale-up advisor, I help scale-ups establish trust and clear communications with their boards. I fill this advisor position and help to pre-orchestrate your board meetings so that they become places where decisions are made, rather than postponed. If you are in the middle of preparing for your next board meeting and feel you could use a little help, a call would be a great place to start.

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 picture is messier — they  need to raise over €2 billion  more to finish construction, and investors are reportedly haggling over control — but modules in the ground matter. ATOME  Villeta  closed $420 million in debt financing  for their $650 million green fertiliser plant in Paraguay, with backing from IFC and up to $95 million from the European Investment Bank. They also claim  100% offtake secured . Hat off to the team! For a project most people haven't heard of, this is a textbook FOAK financing milestone: multilateral lenders, full offtake, definitive documents signed. Watch this one.  Net Zero Teesside continues to grind forward. The East Coast CCUS Cluster has now  awarded over £1.5 billion in sub-contracts  to UK suppliers, with construction accelerating. Commercial operations still targeted for 2028. The  political noise around Chinese steel  sourcing is annoying but irrelevant to execution — what matters is that contracts are being let and work is happening on site. Form Energy  keeps stacking commercial deals. After the 30 GWh Google/Xcel project in Minnesota, they  signed a 12 GWh supply agreement with Crusoe  for AI data centers, plus announced their  first international deal (Ireland).  The demand signal from hyperscalers is unmistakable. The real test remains: can the Weirton factory produce at scale and on spec? ACME Group  Odisha  signed a massive 10-year green ammonia offtake  with SECI for 370,000 tpa. That's a significant commercial agreement — but the Odisha plant still needs to get built. ElevenEs  didn't make the news this month, with construction underway, and nothing major to report. Still,  Nemanja Mikać , ElevenEs CEO, published an interesting post on why they decided to skip turn-key solution for their mega factory - read it  here .   The Bad News and Warning Signs  Stegra's financing gap deserves a second mention — on the warning side.  Needing €2 billion+ on top  of what's already been raised, with investors fighting over governance, is not a comfortable place for any FOAK. The  Koç Group partnership  helps, but this project is not yet fully funded (and if I know anything about working with Turkish investors, this is going to be a tough one!). Electrolyser installation is great; running out of money before the first steel is not.  Brevik CCS (Heidelberg Materials) had no project-specific construction news this month. Heidelberg  reaffirmed its CCS strategy  while simultaneously closing plants to cut costs. Strategy reaffirmation updates while closing plants is definitely a warning signal.  The Noise NEOM Green Hydrogen Company  — another month of  market reports ,  stock commentary,  and  geopolitical positioning  pieces. Zero construction updates. This project can't shake its reputation as a market research PDF generator.  Kairos Power  appeared in  Senate hearings ,  policy discussions , and  investment articles . No construction or commissioning news for the Hermes reactor. Policy momentum is not the same as pouring concrete, and might actually work against you.  Commonwealth Fusion Systems  announced a  strategic partnership with Realta Fusion  on magnetic mirror technology. Interesting scientifically, irrelevant to construction progress.  There was also a lot of noise from a pastry company posing as a battery company, but I forgot the name or why it should matter. Sorry.   Key Takeaways - Stegra installing all 740 MW of electrolysers is the most significant physical FOAK milestone this month — but the €2B+ funding gap means the project is in a race between construction progress and capital markets patience. - ATOME Villeta is a FOAK financing case study worth studying: multilateral debt, full offtake, manageable scale ($650M). Not every project needs to be a megaproject to matter. - AI data center demand is now the dominant commercial pull for long-duration storage and clean power FOAKs. Form Energy is the clearest beneficiary, but this trend will reshape project economics across the board. Overall FOAKs I monitor seem so far either insulated from the unfolding global crisis or even benefiting from it, like ATOME and ElevenEs. Next month: expecting Stegra financing resolution news (hopefully), potential Form Energy factory production updates, and we'll check in on whether Kairos Hermes has anything physical to show. See you in May!

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 sound in theory. The claim that debt issuers should be comfortable with it is not. Here's the problem: regardless of how many shells you create, you still have only one sea to sail in — one income stream from which all debt must be repaid. If your secret sauce doesn't work, you don't have sales. No sales, no debt service. The shells are legally separate; the revenue is not. You could, of course, structure the first two shells so that lenders can recover value by selling the envelope and MEP to the industrial property market if the project fails. That might work, in the same way that leveraged real estate speculation sometimes works — until it doesn't. In a distressed sale of a half-built FOAK facility in an industrial zone, the "envelope" you paid for doesn't sell at book value. Any lender who's been through a clean tech write-down knows this. The article's author doesn't provide a single real-world example where the three-shell approach was successfully implemented. I think that's telling. This reads as a thought experiment — a useful one, but not a proven playbook. That said, the underlying logic of categorising FOAK assets by risk is worth taking seriously. Not because it will unlock debt financing for your FOAK, but because it forces you to ask which parts of your FOAK don't actually need to be built from scratch. Vianode's FOAK is the example I keep coming back to. Instead of building an envelope, they rented one. That single decision removed significant CAPEX from the equity requirement and compressed their timeline by more than a year — without any complex shell structuring or debt instrument. No lender needed convincing. No legal structure needed to be negotiated. The three-shell framework, cleaned of its debt-financing optimism, is essentially pointing at this: before you raise equity for your factory, ask what you actually need to own. The answer is usually less than you think. If you're working through your FOAK capital structure and trying to figure out which costs are truly unavoidable, that's exactly the kind of question I work through with founders. A call is a good place to start. https://trellis.net/article/the-wrong-way-to-finance-a-factory/

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 ambitious targets, delayed gigafactories, and subsidy structures that benefit incumbents more than they build capability. Northvolt's difficulties, the collapse of Britishvolt and Italvolt — these are not accidents. They are symptoms of a structural misdiagnosis. The diagnosis has been: Europe lacks battery manufacturing scale. The prescription has been: build bigger factories faster. Both are wrong. The question worth asking instead is: what can industry actually do right now, without waiting for policy to move? I want to argue the answer lies not in more gigafactories, but in rethinking the manufacturing architecture entirely.   The real problem is where mistakes are made Battery cell production has three stages: mixing, electrode coating, and cell assembly. If you want to understand why European gigafactories struggle, you need to understand what happens in the middle step. The Fraunhofer Institute's 2024 ramp-up report is unusually candid about this. Electrode coating — where active material is applied to metal foil in precise, uniform layers — is where the overwhelming majority of manufacturing errors occur. Tiny variances in slurry viscosity, coating speed, or drying conditions cascade into batch-level defects. Entire production runs get scrapped. The process window is narrow, the feedback loops are slow, and the knowledge required to maintain yield is tacit — it lives in the hands and judgment of experienced engineers, not in equipment manuals. High scrap rates during ramp-up are the central economic challenge facing European cell manufacturers today. But the cause matters as much as the symptom. The scrap problem is not an equipment problem or a chemistry problem. It is an accumulated process knowledge problem. Europe has been making batteries at scale for less than a decade, compared to Korea and China's two-plus decades. That gap doesn't close by building more factories. It closes by deliberately accumulating the right knowledge in the right places.   Why copying the Asian model doesn't work Europe's response to date has been to replicate the Asian manufacturing model: large, vertically integrated gigafactories producing one or two standard cell formats at scale, targeting automotive OEMs as the primary customer. This creates a second structural problem on top of the first. These gigafactories are architecturally dependent on a single customer segment — automotive — in a market that is volatile, consolidating under price pressure, and increasingly served by Chinese and Korean manufacturers with structural cost advantages. When an OEM cuts its EV targets or delays a platform, a gigafactory doesn't just lose revenue. It loses the demand signal that justifies its entire existence. Meanwhile, a substantial and largely unserved market sits right beside them. Heavy machinery manufacturers. Maritime equipment producers. Bus manufacturers. Military and defence customers. Each of these customers has specific cell format requirements, volumes that rarely exceed a few hundred megawatt-hours per year, and no viable European supply option today. Gigafactories cannot serve them. The minimum viable order size, the format rigidity, and the scheduling logic of mass production all make these customers commercially invisible to the current model. Yet in aggregate, they represent a deep, resilient, policy-insulated demand base — exactly what a nascent European battery industry needs to survive automotive market volatility.   The Airbus model, applied correctly Europe has a proven template for competing against vertically integrated industrial giants: distributed manufacturing across national specialisations, bound together by shared standards, governance, and integration capability. Airbus didn't try to replicate Boeing. It built a structurally different architecture — and won. Applied to batteries, the logic is the same. There is no physical law requiring electrode manufacturing and cell assembly to happen under the same roof. That co-location reflects an Asian industrial tradition, not an engineering necessity. Separating them is not fragmentation. It is specialisation — and it unlocks a different competitive position entirely. The proposal I keep coming back to is this: decouple electrode manufacturing from cell assembly , and build each part of the chain according to its own logic. Cell assembly is more mechanical, more flexible, and more amenable to being located close to end customers. Small, distributed assembly units — designed around the specific format requirements of heavy industry, maritime, defence, and mobility customers — can serve the market that gigafactories ignore. Lower capital outlay. Shorter lead times. Commercially viable at volumes too small for a gigafactory to care about, but too large and too specific for customers to source reliably from Asia. Electrode manufacturing is the harder, more capital-intensive, more knowledge-dependent part of the chain. It should be treated differently — concentrated, specialised, and built around genuine process expertise rather than spread thin across every cell assembly site in Europe.   The Korean question The Korean battery ecosystem is not monolithic in its orientation toward Europe. Some players are actively looking for ways to embed themselves in the European market — to access subsidy structures, secure long-term demand, and hedge against concentration risk in Asia. That creates an opening that European policy, so far, has largely failed to exploit. My argument is that electrode production should initially be sourced from Korean manufacturers — not as a concession to dependency, but as a strategic entry point. Korean players have spent two decades accumulating the process knowledge Europe needs. Engaging them as electrode suppliers to European cell assembly operations creates a working relationship and a dependency that runs in both directions: they need European market access; European assemblers need their electrode expertise. Over time, this relationship should evolve into joint ventures — electrode foundries co-located in European industrial clusters, with Korean process knowledge and European market access combined by design. Regions like Valencia, with low energy costs, major port infrastructure, and proximity to Mediterranean industrial customers, are natural candidates. The critical structural requirement — the one that has been absent from EU battery policy so far — is explicit knowledge-transfer obligations built into the JV terms. Not proximity-based hope that skills will diffuse across the fence, but contractual commitments that European engineers are trained, embedded, and eventually capable of running the electrode process independently. This is how the knowledge gap closes. Not through policy mandates, but through commercial structures that make skill transfer in both parties' interest.   Making it bankable One of the persistent frustrations in European battery investment is the financing gap between what policy promises and what the capital markets will actually fund. The problem is structural: gigafactory-scale projects require enormous capital commitments against demand projections that are inherently uncertain years into the future. Automotive offtake is volatile. Technology risk is real. The numbers rarely close comfortably. The hub-and-spoke model, structured correctly, changes this calculus. Small cell assembly units serving identified customers with specific format requirements and signed offtake commitments are fundable at a scale that doesn't require betting hundreds of millions on automotive demand forecasts five years out. The electrode supply from an established Korean partner de-risks the technology question — investors are not being asked to fund a process that has never been demonstrated at scale. The JV structure creates a credible path to local knowledge accumulation, which de-risks the long-term sovereignty question. What remains is to structure the demand commitments from heavy industry, maritime, and defence customers who cannot currently access European cell supply and have strong incentives to do so. Those customers exist. The Korean partners willing to engage on the right terms exist. The cluster infrastructure exists in several European locations. The missing element is a willingness to build the first spoke — to demonstrate that the assembly model works commercially, and to create the foundation on which the first electrode JV can be justified.   What can we do without waiting for policy? The hub-and-spoke model does not require the IAA to be redesigned, the EU-Korea FTA to be renegotiated, or a new European Battery Alliance working group to convene. It requires a small number of European cell assemblers willing to build for underserved customers, a Korean electrode partner with reasons to engage, a cluster with the right cost and logistics profile, and customers ready to commit to offtake. None of that is a policy ask. All of it is a commercial decision. Europe has a habit of waiting for the right policy environment before moving on industrial strategy. The Asian battery industry didn't wait. It built, iterated, accumulated knowledge, and created the structural advantages that European policy is now trying to legislate away. That approach won't work. The alternative is to build something structurally different — not a slower, more expensive version of what Korea and China already have, but an architecture that fits European strengths: distributed collaboration, specialised supply chains, and a deep pool of underserved industrial customers who need a supply partner they can trust. That architecture is available. The question is whether European industry will build it before the window closes.   I work with European battery founders and industrial companies on supply chain structure decisions — particularly how to approach the electrode manufacturing challenge without the full CAPEX burden of vertical integration. If the model described here is relevant to a decision you're facing, I'm happy to think it through.

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't existed before. The policy worked because the carrot was big enough to change behaviour. The IAA — the EU's proposed International Procurement Instrument for EVs and batteries — is attempting the same logic. Tie public EV subsidies and procurement to local content, and manufacturers will localise to access the demand. On paper, the numbers are compelling. Germany alone has allocated €3 billion to its new subsidy scheme, covering an estimated 800,000 vehicles through 2029. France runs a parallel €1 billion programme. Italy is offering up to €11,000 per vehicle. Add public procurement — electric buses, municipal fleets, government vehicles — and the total addressable market for "IAA-compliant" EVs is enormous. The carrot exists. So why am I not convinced it will build a battery industry? The Russian wind analogy breaks down in one critical place: who is being incentivised to transfer technology, and whether they have any reason to do so. In Russia, the technology holders were Western OEMs — Siemens Gamesa, Vestas — who wanted market access badly enough to actually train local engineers, license manufacturing processes, and set up genuine local production. They transferred skills because the alternative was exclusion from a large market. In the IAA case, the technology holders — Korean cell makers like LG Energy Solution and Samsung SDI — are largely exempt . The EU-Korea Free Trade Agreement means Korean suppliers can access European subsidies without needing to meet the same local content rules as Chinese competitors. They have every incentive to maintain European sales while keeping actual manufacturing and process knowledge at home. The IAA, as currently structured, does not force a technology transfer moment with the companies that actually know how to make cells. What about the Chinese makers? CATL and BYD will lose access to the subsidised slice of the market. That's real — but I'd argue it's not the segment they were planning to win anyway. Public procurement was never going to go to CATL; that was always politically impossible. And on the private consumer side, the question is whether Chinese-made EVs can compete on price without subsidies. Given that BYD's European revenue grew 216% year-on-year in 2024–25 largely through direct consumer sales, the answer appears to be: yes, they can price-match without the subsidy. CATL is also hedging aggressively. Their €7.6 billion Debrecen plant is designed precisely to qualify as "Made in EU" for the purposes of the IAA. If they succeed — and the race to hit 70% EU content is genuinely uncertain — they keep their market position and the IAA has simply induced them to build a factory in Hungary, not to transfer knowledge to European startups. The deeper problem: skills don't transfer by proximity. The Russian wind example worked because the local content requirements came with mandatory joint ventures and technology licensing . The carrot forced collaboration that built actual competence. The IAA creates market access conditions, but not knowledge transfer conditions. An LG Energy Solution plant in Poland, producing cells with Korean engineers and Korean process knowledge, may satisfy EU content rules — while a European battery startup trying to scale its first gigawatt-hour is still struggling to find experienced cell engineers who've seen a production ramp before. The EU battery ecosystem's real deficit is not capacity. It's the accumulated process knowledge of how to make cells reliably at scale — yield rates, formation protocols, electrode coating know-how. That knowledge lives in Korea and China. The IAA, as designed, does not create a mechanism to bring it to Europe. The question I'd ask policy makers:  What's the mandatory skills transfer clause? Without it, the IAA may create a very expensive set of Korean and Chinese gigafactories on EU soil, staffed with imported expertise, that satisfy the letter of local content rules while leaving European battery startups exactly where they are today: technically capable, commercially under-capitalised, and without a manufacturing path that doesn't run through an Asian partner they can't fully control. The carrot is real. The logic is sound. But demand-pull without skills-pull is half a policy. If you're a European battery startup navigating what the IAA means for your supply chain and commercialisation strategy, this is exactly the kind of decision I help founders think through. Book a call.

Building first-of-a-kind (FOAK) cleantech projects is the main thing we can do now to avert catastrophic climate change. We have all the innovations we need, but we fail to deploy them at a sufficient scale. FOAK projects are not about innovation - they are about execution in the most complex, high-stakes environment imaginable.  Over the past year, I've documented this process, drawing from my own and other founders’ hands-on experience to create a comprehensive, step-by-step guide for cleantech founders and operators. This is still  a work-in-progress , but enough material has piled up that I wanted to structure it and give it an overview. Here’s an overview of the key stages, each linked to detailed articles for deeper insights.  1. Laying the Groundwork for the FOAK Journey Why are you doing it? Will it make a noticeable reduction in CO2, methane, or other gases? Will it genuinely help avert climate change, or will it simply postpone it? How should you start? When do you know that you are ready? Every FOAK journey begins with a solid foundation. Understanding the unique challenges and opportunities in cleantech is crucial. Here, I cover how to move from an innovative idea in the lab to a scalable business model, aligned with real-world energy needs and market expectations. The key articles so far: When are you ready to scale?   The 1% check Why most climatetech startups don’t deliver 10x returns A framework for choosing scale-up business model Do you have a drop-in solution?    2. Financing FOAK  Most of the online articles on FOAK contain funding advice and most of them are written by VC’s whose partners never had to execute a FOAK. In my posts, I examine VCs and strategic investors’ perspectives, provide actionable advice on how to de-risk FOAK, how to avoid strategic investors’ traps, when to take VC’s advice and when not.  From Series A to Series B What do VCs get wrong in cleantech? Navigating the capital stack from lab to NOAK The pitfalls of FOAK capital stack   How to de-risk your FOAK   How important is intellectual property for a scale-up What strategic investors are looking for   How strategic investors can kill a startup   When to listen to VCs and when not   Grants for FOAK  3. Securing Off-take Agreements Off-takes are revered in the FOAK space. They give investors certainty, validate your product, and reduce your next customers' anxiety. Off-takes are more than contracts. They’re signals to investors, anchors for financing, and roadmaps to NOAK. What most available articles fail to provide are the step-by-step instructions and insights to get an off-take. I’ve written a series of posts about each step you need to take to secure an off-take, and provided negotiating tips and tactics from my own experience and those of other founders.  What do you need to know about off-takes? A primer. The road to off-take - what are the main stages of getting there Step one - MOU Step two - letter of intent Step three - term sheet Step four - off-take term Step five - off-take price How to sell to utilities - a case study  4. From Pilot to FOAK to NOAK: Scaling Up You’ve validated the tech—now you need to prove it at commercial scale. These posts cover what it takes to build a pilot, transition to demo, and finally deploy your FOAK. I dive deep into each stage, providing actionable and clear frameworks for execution. What are the three key steps to build a FOAK? How big should your FOAK be? Pilot stage framework Demo stage framework Do you need an EPC for your FOAK? How to select an EPC   Beyond FOAK  5. Building and Managing Your Team You can’t FOAK alone. And your early-stage startup team is not up to the task. These articles share what I’ve learned about building teams that can execute when speed, risk, and ambiguity are all high. What skills are usually missing? Why is it important to hire a chief operating officer? What mistakes did I make in hiring for my FOAK? FOAK management means managing chaos. Are there ways to control it? I am still working on this section and will add new posts on hiring and managing FOAK teams soon.  What skills are usually missing in FOAK Hiring mistakes - my case study CTO - Why do you need him? Simplifying FOAK management   How ATOME built its leadership team The 5-Step Framework for Building FOAK Teams That Deliver  6. Building a supply chain It is said that modern warfare is defined by supply lines, and this is equally true for businesses. Simply managing your supply chain is a big challenge. Building it is a whole new challenge. Sometimes, mapping your suppliers and bringing them together will be straightforward. Sometimes, your supply chain might not exist yet, and you’ll have to build it up from scratch.  How to build a supply chain How supply chain chaos can sink a startup  7. Real-World Case Studies: Lessons from the Field Learning from others' experiences is powerful. These stories show what works—and what to avoid. FOAK lessons from nuclear energy Building wind turbines in the shadow of a nuclear giant Dangers of ramping up battery manufacturing - Fraunhofer report review Redflow - flow batteries failure Canoo - electric minibus failure DAC FOAK success story Vianode - sustainable graphite success story (video) Explore the Full FOAK & Scale-Up Blog Directory For a comprehensive collection of articles, case studies, and resources on FOAKing and scaling cleantech innovations, visit the full blog directory: 👉 FOAK & Scale-Up Blog Directory Whether you're at the ideation stage or preparing for your NOAK deployment, this resource is designed to guide you through each step of the journey with practical, experience-based insights. What would you like to see in an expanded version? What FOAK and scale-up challenges should I cover more?

Most analyses of FOAK failures mention faulty technology, overambitious bets, financing squeeze, or supply chain hiccups. 80% of the time, that’s simply not true. The real reason is that the team stops working. Most of the analysis is done by outsiders, who have no idea of the internal team dynamics, and the team itself rarely speaks about what really happened. I've seen this pattern enough times that I no longer find it surprising. A founding team that moved fast and made good decisions in the lab starts to fragment under the pressure of commercial-scale execution. Factions form. Decisions stall. Blame circulates. The founder spends twelve hours a day putting out fires that shouldn't exist. And the project bleeds months — months that, in FOAK, you don't get back. No amount of pizza parties, team-building retreats, or company values workshops will fix this. I've attended plenty of those events. People smiled. They went home. Nothing changed. What follows is the framework I've built — from scaling from 3 to 300-person wind turbine operation at Rosatom, to running a battery gigafactory development at TVEL, to advising FOAK founders across Europe — for building teams that execute when the stakes are real. Why Team Leadership Is the Most Important Framework There is one thing that underpins all other frameworks I write about. Your strategy and business plan will be shaped by co-founders, advisors, and key executives — not just you. Your pilot-to-FOAK journey will be built by engineers, contractors, and project managers. Your off-take agreements will be negotiated by your commercial team. Your supply chain will be assembled by procurement and operations. Your investor relationships will be managed alongside a board. Every framework I've described — financing, off-takes, EPC selection, supply chain, FOAK planning — will be implemented by your team. You'll take an active role, yes. But the success of each one depends entirely on how well your team executes. So how do you make sure they do? By walking through the five steps below. Step 1. Be Your Company's Culture I once interviewed Mark Hoppe, a VP at SkySails — a German hardware scale-up that makes kites to capture wind energy — and something he said made my eyes pop. Not a single employee had ever left the company voluntarily. "There are no failures, just learnings," he told me. "We are a company that always wants to learn, and everyone is committed to learn more every day." SkySails went through a painful downsizing at one point. They rebuilt. But the culture held — because it wasn't built on perks or posters. It was built on how the leaders behaved. There is an old Russian saying: a fish rots from the head. The English version says the same thing. Every problem in your organisation traces back to the top. What you say, what you do, and how you act are noticed and filed away by your team. When they see a consistent gap between your words and your behaviour, no amount of inspiring speeches will convince them to follow your values. The only way to build a real culture is to become its living embodiment. Here is what that looks like in practice. First, sit down alone and write out how you want your team to behave. Should they follow orders or show initiative? What principles should guide them when there's no superior around to tell them what to do? Write those answers down. Then put the page away and choose to live it — every day, whether or not anyone from the team is watching. Don't hold a values workshop. Don't laminate anything and don’t stick it to the wall. Instead, look for moments in everyday interactions — a Monday meeting, a factory floor walk-through, a one-on-one — where you can demonstrate what company values looks like. Not by announcing "this is the culture of our company," but by pointing to what you would do, and expecting the same. I wanted my team to take ownership of deadlines. So at one Monday meeting, after assigning tasks, I asked everyone to suggest their own deadlines. Before they answered, I told them I believed they were responsible professionals, free to choose how and where they would do the work. That single change signalled more about the culture I wanted to build than any speech ever could. The flip side matters equally. When someone acts contrary to your values, interrupt them immediately and explain why. You don't need to punish on the spot. But you need to signal clearly that you won't tolerate the behaviour. And when someone does follow your example, make it visible. Reward it publicly. Show the team which behaviours lead to recognition and advancement. Do this consistently — when people succeed and when they fail — and your team will pick up the pattern. The informal rules that hold great teams together are not written down. They're modelled on the leader. Step 2. Account for Cross-Cultural Differences My Dutch colleagues were genuinely perplexed about Russian attitudes to lunch. I was facilitating a technology transfer deal between a Dutch startup and a Russian partner, and my Russian team was spending weeks at the Dutch facility. For the Dutch, lunch was a light meal. For the Russians, it was a three-course event. This particular conflict was resolved quickly — the Russians got a two-course meal. The real problem started after the canteen. The Dutch work in flat hierarchies. Everyone voices an opinion, and everything is up for debate. Russian companies run on strict top-down command. A subordinate thinks twice before questioning a superior. So when the engineering teams sat together, Russian engineers gave disproportionate weight to whoever ranked highest on the Dutch side. The Dutch, unaware of this, debated freely among themselves, leaving the Russians unsure whom to listen to. These problems don't announce themselves. They creep in through misread silences, inexplicable friction, and decisions that stall without obvious reason. Northvolt famously had people from over 100 countries working on their scale-up. That is modern and ambitious. It is also a profound source of coordination problems if you don't address it deliberately. The best tool I've found for this is Erin Meyer's The Culture Map, which Steven Le Poole presented to me when we were working on a wind turbine technology transfer from the Dutch startup Lagerwey to Russia. Meyer maps cultural differences across eight scales: how people communicate (low-context vs. high-context), how they give feedback, how they lead, how they decide, how they trust, how they disagree, and how they handle time. For each culture you work with, go through these scales. Where you and a colleague land on the same side, no adaptation is needed. Where you're on opposite ends, acknowledge it explicitly — tell people how you behave, why it matters for the company, and what you expect. Cultural rewiring takes time and has limits. The goal isn't to homogenise. It's to name the differences before they become conflicts. One important caution: make sure you're distinguishing between cultural differences and actual underperformance. The two are not the same. Don't excuse the latter by blaming the former. Step 3. Set Up an Onboarding Process to Build Trust When Alan Mulally arrived at Ford as CEO in 2006, he inherited one of the most dysfunctional leadership teams in American corporate history. His first act wasn't a restructuring. It wasn't a strategy presentation. It was a weekly meeting where every senior executive had to show up in person, report the truth about their part of the business, and listen to everyone else do the same. The first weeks were pure performance. Every slide came back green. A company losing billions of dollars apparently had no problems at all. Then one executive showed up with a red slide — a serious problem, disclosed openly in front of the whole team. In Ford's old culture, this was career suicide. Mulally didn't raise his voice. He didn't punish. He thanked the executive. A week later, the slides came back red and yellow all over. The leadership team had learned that trust was real. Ford went from a $17 billion loss to a $9 billion profit within two years — the only major American automaker that didn't need a government bailout. Mulally didn't fix the cars first. He fixed the team. The academic foundation for what Mulally did was laid by psychologist Bruce Tuckman in 1965. Tuckman described the path teams follow toward high performance: forming, storming, norming, and performing. New teams start polite and cautious — that's the forming stage. It's a facade, not real trust. Inevitably, conflict surfaces. That's storming, and it's healthy. Then relationships normalise, trust develops, and finally the team performs. A smart founder uses onboarding to speed up the forming stage — so the team can get to storming quickly, move through it, and start building genuine trust. In practice, onboarding is almost always the thing startups skip. At various Rosatom subsidiaries, "onboarding" was a 600-page document nobody read. That was it. You don't have time for that. Here's the compressed version: Before day one. After the contract is signed, send the new hire a structured onboarding folder. It should include: the founding story and current strategy; an investor-grade financial model; the cap table; an org chart with bios and KPIs for key people; recent board materials; the commercial pipeline; a product and operations overview; and practical matters such as phone numbers and the expense policy. Everything should be digestible in three to four hours. If it's not, trim it. The first two weeks. This is listening time, not doing time. The new hire should meet everyone they'll be working with through structured introductions in which both parties explain their roles, goals, and how they interact with the rest of the company. Set aside at least two hours per meeting. Don’t rush it - your goal is to help people get through the forming stage quickly, which means giving them more time to learn about each other upfront. At the end of week two, have a long conversation with your new hire: what did they observe, what's unclear, where can the company improve? The first three months. Expect the storming phase to hit. There will be cultural mistakes, communication failures, and conflict. Older team members will storm into your office, frustrated about the new hire. That's fine. That's part of the process. If it isn't happening, you should be worried — it means the polite facade is still in place. The goal is to move through it, not around it. Step 4. Set Up a Goal-Tracking System One thing that makes competitive sport compelling to watch is that you can tell who's winning at a glance. For the teams on the field, the scoreboard is also a powerful motivator — they know instantly whether they need to push harder or protect what they have. This basic feature is almost completely absent from most FOAK projects. The only scoreboard I saw in years of corporate work was a sign at the entrance to a uranium mining facility: "Days Without Accidents." It was gloomy, and it also measured the wrong thing — what McChesney, Covey, and Huling in The 4 Disciplines of Execution call a "lag measure." A lag measure tells you what has already happened. By the time you see it, it's too late to act. What you need are lead measures — the specific activities that predict outcomes. The percentage of supplier-readiness audits completed is a lead measure for whether you'll commission your factory on time. The number of customer validation tests in progress is a lead measure for eventual off-take conversion. Operator error incidents per shift are a leading measure for scrap rates. Your scoreboard should show three layers: Your Wildly Important Goal (WIG). The one dominant objective that determines whether this stage of the FOAK succeeds or fails. Commissioning date. First product batch delivered. Series B closed. It should be instantly readable — green, yellow, or red — so anyone in the room can know in under ten seconds whether you're on track. Two to four lead measures. Updated weekly. Colour-coded. Actionable by the team without waiting for permission — milestones resolved, integration tests passed, key equipment arrived on site. Key lag measures. Overall factory/project completeness, CAPEX spent, and commissioning readiness. These go at the bottom. Important, but not what the team acts on day-to-day. The scoreboard doesn't work if it lives in a slide deck that surfaces once a month. Put it on a factory wall, at the entrance to your office, in the canteen. If the team arrives on Monday morning and the scoreboard hasn't been updated, they take it as a signal that leadership doesn't consider the goals to matter. That signal is very hard to reverse. One more rule: every team should have its own scoreboard, with its own WIG and lead measures that connect clearly to the company's overall WIG. Ownership requires visibility. When people can see in real time whether they're winning or losing — and what they can do right now to move the score — they behave differently. Step 5. Streamline Meetings and Reporting — Then Delegate The meeting problem There's a widely circulated meme that Star Trek civilisations are advanced because their meetings last under three minutes. I've sat through enough FOAK meetings to find this genuinely aspirational. Different management schools offer very different advice on cadence. Scaling Up by Verne Harnish recommends daily operations meetings and weekly executive strategy meetings. Measure What Matters by John Doerr settles on weekly or bi-weekly. Rework by Fried and Heinemeier Hansson pushes hard for asynchronous communication wherever possible. Here's what I've learned, building a 300-person wind turbine operation from scratch. When I was Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer at NovaWind, we had twelve teams working simultaneously — construction, procurement, staff training, cybersecurity, and more. Each had between five and thirty people, spread across Moscow, with frequent travel to wind farm sites and to our Dutch and German technology partners. Most of the processes they managed took more than two weeks to complete. Holding weekly meetings meant people often had nothing new to report. So we moved to bi-weekly meetings, which created enough breathing room for genuine issues to surface — and enough structure to address them. The trade-off was a weekly reporting template. Three slides, developed with the Roland Berger team under the leadership of David Frans and Daria Koroleva. Slide one: tasks set two weeks ago, progress against them, tracking against plan. Slide two: tasks for the next two weeks. Slide three: issues where the team needed help from someone outside their group. This third slide had a deliberate design choice behind it — there was no punishment for raising a problem on it. The result was that teams went to great lengths to solve problems before they had to appear on slide three. Knowing a problem would be visible to the whole organisation was incentive enough. All twelve reports were bundled weekly and sent to every team. This created both healthy competition and unsolicited collaboration. Problems that required input from multiple teams were often resolved before management needed to get involved. We kept a four-person project management task force whose sole job was to compile the slides, moderate conflict-resolution sessions, and ensure that reporting was on time. They had no authority to make decisions. But they were indispensable for keeping everyone on the same page. The decision problem When I later moved to TVEL — part of Rosatom — I encountered the opposite failure mode. Endless meetings. Every decision, from budget approvals to canteen menus, was pushed up the chain of command. People weren't using meetings to exchange information. They were using them as cover for inaction, distributing blame across so many approvers that no single person could ever be held responsible if something went wrong. Large established organisations can survive this for years. In FOAK, the moment your team stops making tactical decisions independently and starts pushing everything up to you, you have months — not years — before the project implodes. The solution is decentralised command I learned this from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin — a book about leading Navy SEAL teams in Ramadi, Iraq. While this book is obviously not about cleantech and FOAK teams, it was one of the most practically useful books I've read for scale-up contexts. Willink observed that if every decision travels up the chain of command, the organisation becomes slow, reactive, and fragile. Three things are required for decentralised command to work. First: full accountability at the top. Delegating authority only works if you — the founder — take complete responsibility for what your team does or doesn't do. If a team member fails, it is your fault: you didn't explain clearly, didn't train properly, didn't provide the right resources. If you're not 100% committed to this, delegation quickly becomes a mechanism for assigning scapegoats. People see through it. They stop owning their decisions. And you're back to making every call yourself. Second: commander's intent. Your mission must be absolutely clear to everyone — from your deputy to the newest intern. Why are we doing this? What do we aim to achieve? What are the constraints? What's off-limits? If your team understands the intent completely, they can adapt when conditions change, make aligned decisions without waiting for approval, and come up with solutions you wouldn't have thought of yourself. When I needed to build electric go-karts and organise a televised race in six months to demonstrate our battery technology, I gave two people — my marketing director and my technical director — the mission, the budget, the constraint (safety first, test thoroughly), and the strategic context (crucial for the next investment cycle and a key off-take conversation). I took reports once a month. Six months later, ten electric go-karts raced on camera. Third: radical simplicity. Your plan must be explainable to the most junior person on the team. If they can't understand it and act on it when something unexpected happens, your plan is too complex. Ask them to explain it back to you. If they can't, go back to the drawing board. One Last Thing When people on your team face a problem and come to you for help, they want you to solve it. Don't. Instead, refer them back to the goals, the constraints, and the available resources. Then ask them what they would do. In my experience, about 90 per cent of the time, they come up with a good enough answer themselves. After two or three visits like this, they stop coming — because now they have the tools to figure it out on their own. That is the goal. Not a founder who has all the answers. A team that doesn't need to ask. If you're building a FOAK and you're starting to feel like the only person holding things together — let's talk. That feeling is a warning sign, not a badge of honour.

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 things have shifted in the European battery scene since my last visit. First, the gigafactory ambitions came down to earth. ACC cancelled two factories. PowerCo revised targets. The only major announcement was the PowerCo–CATL deal in Spain — and that one is notable precisely because it involves a Chinese partner rather than a European-built supply chain. The era of "Europe will build its own gigafactories at scale, on European terms, on European timelines" is over as a narrative. It was never that simple. Second, European startups have matured. They raised rounds. They moved out of labs and into pilot production. The ecosystem looks different now — there are real companies with real chemistry and real pilot data, looking for a manufacturing path that doesn't require them to either burn €150M on their own electrode line or hand their IP to a Chinese manufacturer. That gap — between validated innovation and commercial-scale production — is exactly what contract manufacturers like JRES exist to fill. Third, geopolitics. Conflict in Iran, the continuing war in Ukraine, and rising global instability have forced a serious reckoning with supply chain exposure. I wrote last week about the drone and defence sector arriving at batteries with urgency. It has created a procurement criterion that didn't exist two years ago: provenance. Where was this battery made, and can you prove it? This is where JR Energy Solution becomes structurally important for Europe. JR operates as a battery contract manufacturer — the TSMC of batteries, as I've called it before. 500 MWh of electrode and pouch cell production capacity in Eumseong. Multi-chemistry flexibility. Equipment that stays contamination-free across client switches. A model built to serve exactly the companies that have the technology but not the factory. The Morrow–JRES MOU I watched being signed at InterBattery last week is the proof of concept. Morrow brings a 1 GWh cell-and-electrode facility in Norway and proprietary chemistry. JRES brings electrode manufacturing at scale without the €200M capital commitment. Together, they are building what Europe doesn't yet have: an open, accessible electrode foundry that a startup can use. That template is available to more than one company. The gap between European battery innovation and European battery production is real. It is also closeable — if you know where to look. If you have validated chemistry, solid pilot data, and no clear manufacturing path forward — or if your current path runs through a supply chain you'd rather restructure — this is the conversation to have now. The Korean side is actively building these partnerships. I can make introductions directly. Let's talk. 🇰🇷🤝🇪🇺

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 energy from last year was visible in the halls. Last year, InterBattery felt predominantly domestic: Korean technology, Korean customers, Korean conversations. This year had a distinctly different character. European delegations, American companies, and Australian buyers. The West had arrived — not as curious observers, but as people actively looking for something. What They Were Looking For In conversation after conversation with European partners, the framing was consistent: they want either a 100% non-Chinese supply chain, or at a minimum, manufacturing that does not touch China. Not because of a regulatory requirement that has arrived yet, but because of one they expect to arrive — and because of a commercial and reputational risk they are increasingly unwilling to carry. The mood was not panicked. Companies that had accepted Chinese supply chain exposure as a pragmatic reality two years ago are now running structured programmes to reduce it. Korea — with its manufacturing depth, quality credentials, and geopolitical positioning — is the most obvious destination for that shift. It was deliberate repositioning. If you are a European battery startup and your supply chain still runs through China in ways you cannot fully account for, the window to restructure it on your own terms is open now. It will not stay open indefinitely. The Conversation That Didn't Happen: EVs Almost none of my conversations at InterBattery this year were about electric vehicles. That is worth pausing on, because a year ago, the EV conversation still dominated. What replaced it: drones. The defence and autonomous systems sector has arrived at batteries with genuine urgency — and a fundamentally different set of requirements from automotive. Energy density matters more. Supply chain provenance matters enormously. Local manufacturing, or at least close-geography manufacturing, is becoming a procurement criterion rather than a preference. One partner I spoke to put it bluntly: they need batteries made somewhere they can trust, and they need them soon. For battery startups positioning around EV offtake, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. The drone and autonomous systems market is not the same customer, does not have the same volume ramp timeline, and will not forgive the same technical compromises. But it is a market that is buying now, at margins that are not subject to the same commodity pressure as automotive cells. The Morrow–JRES Partnership: Why This One Is Interesting The announcement I watched most closely was the MOU signed between Morrow Batteries and JR Energy Solution at InterBattery this week. For those who don't know the companies: Morrow is a Norwegian LFP and LNMO cell manufacturer with a 1 GWh facility in Arendal; JRES is a South Korean electrode foundry — Korea's first — operating at 500 MWh with expansion plans that reach multi-gigawatt scale. What makes this particular partnership structurally significant is not the size of the MOU. It is the model. JRES is explicitly positioning itself as the TSMC of batteries — offering electrode foundry services to cell makers who need flexible, scalable manufacturing without the €200M upfront capital commitment required to build their own electrode line. Morrow brings manufacturing infrastructure, additional cell formats and proprietary chemistry. Together, they are building something Europe genuinely lacks: an open, flexible electrode manufacturing capability that startups can access on commercial terms, with technology transfer built in rather than outsourced. It is a proof of concept for how European battery innovation reaches production at scale without either burning its capital on infrastructure or handing its IP to a Chinese manufacturer. If it works — and I think the structural logic is sound — it becomes a template. Why I'm Staying Another Week I am remaining in Korea for another week to follow up on the partnerships that came into view during InterBattery. Specifically, I'm working on connections between JRES and European battery startups that have validated chemistry but no visible path to scaled production. If that describes your company, you have technology that works, your pilot data is solid, but your manufacturing path either doesn't exist or runs through a supply chain you'd rather restructure — this is the conversation to have now, while the Korean side is actively looking to build exactly these relationships. I can make the introductions directly. Reach out.

T&E just published a battery cost analysis, and the headline number is doing the rounds: European battery cells are 90% more expensive than China's best-in-class. Sounds like old news, right? Read the full report . The real number is more interesting. Europe already manufactures 45–70% of an EV's value locally. Motors, transmissions, inverters — largely made here. The only major gap is the battery cell. And even that gap is not structural. It is a scale problem. T&E models suggest that if European gigafactories reach Chinese levels of manufacturing efficiency — lower scrap rates, better automation, more experienced workers — the cost gap narrows from $41–43/kWh today to around $14/kWh by 2030. The remaining difference can be legitimately framed as a sovereignty premium: the insurance cost of not being dependent on a single supply chain in a geopolitically volatile world. That is not a bad deal. The mechanism that makes it happen matters. T&E calls for a component-based local content approach — one that includes cathode precursors and recycled materials, not just final cell assembly. I fully support this. It is the right level of the value chain to target. It also maps directly onto what I have been calling the hub-and-spoke model for EU battery manufacturing — a structure in which large gigafactories serve as hubs, while upstream chemistry and materials are developed and produced by a distributed network of European startups. More on that here. This is not abstract. Companies like Alta Group and Aeroborn are already developing circular-by-design battery materials that capture CO₂ in the process. They are exactly the kind of upstream innovators that a component-based content policy would protect and accelerate. Without that policy, they scale slowly. With it, they become the foundation of a genuinely European battery value chain. The three levers T&E identifies — scrap reduction, labour productivity, and automation — are not policy questions. They are execution questions. Someone has to go into these factories and make them happen. That is precisely the work I do with battery and cleantech scale-ups: translating the policy conditions into operational reality, from pilot to FOAK to commercial production. If you are building in the battery materials or cell space and the path from lab to factory is your current bottleneck, let's talk. Book a free call.

Welcome to the second edition of my monthly check-in on the 19 FOAK climate tech projects  I said I’d track publicly in 2026! Yes, it was 23 projects, but I’ve decided there are too many CCS projects that haven’t been seen in the news for a long time, so they aren’t worth tracking, and I’ve added one.   February was a good month for climate FOAKs, so let’s start with the food news! The good news Form Energy Iron-Air Battery are the headliner of good FOAK news this month, thanks to signing a $1B deal with Google to provide their AI datacenters with long-duration storage. Bravo! https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/26/google-paid-startup-form-energy-1b-for-its-massive-100-hour-battery/   Linglong One (ACP100 SMR)  installed first reactor core module in February, after completing a successful non-nuclear steam-run test in late December. The project seems on track to its planned start in the first half of 2026. That’s some Chinese speed! https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202308/11/WS64d5921ba31035260b81b85d.html     H2 Green Steel (now Stegra)  appointed a new CFO at the beginning of February, as it is seeking to raise another $1.1B, in addition to approximately $8B that have been spent so far. The really good news is that EPC Bellman Group renewed work at the site, after being paused before Christmas. Seems like Stegra is slowly finding a way out of the woods. https://www.zonebourse.com/actualite-bourse/la-start-up-suedoise-stegra-nomme-markus-holm-au-poste-de-directeur-financier-pour-accelerer-la-leve-ce7e5adbd088ff27 https://www.di.se/nyheter/stegra-leverantorer-miljonpressades-i-stoppet/ HYBRIT DRI Demo, another project in Sweden, had its temporary building permit extended to 2031 for its underground hydrogen storage facility.   https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/industrial/hybrit-green-steel-consortium-granted-extended-permit-for-swedish-hydrogen-storage-facility/2-1-1948774 ArcelorMittal Hamburg DRI  demo project for making iron with hydrogen received another $55M of funding from the European Commission. https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/steel-europe-ec-funding-dri-scrap-recycling-decarbonization/   Kairos Power  continues its positive news streak by signing a $27M agreement with the DOE. https://www.neimagazine.com/news/kairos-msr-gains-doe-support/ Commonwealth Fusion is in the good news section this month, but by no fault of theirs. A new NRC regulatory proposal in February could significantly reduce regulatory barriers by treating fusion plants not as nuclear energy facilities but as more research facilities and storage. This should shave off years of regulatory approval, if the proposal is enacted. https://www.powermag.com/nrc-proposes-first-dedicated-regulatory-framework-for-commercial-fusion-machines/ LanzaJet raised $47M in new funding and announced plans to build a SAF hub in UK. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/lanzajet-announces-47m-capital-first-154900936.html?guccounter=1 https://www.innovationnewsnetwork.com/lanzatech-targets-humberside-for-600m-sustainable-aviation-fuel-facility/66131/ Lyten’s Northvolt saga continues, with Lyten completing the acquisition of 16 GWh facility in Skelleftea. https://electrek.co/2026/02/27/lyten-completes-takeover-of-northvolt-battery-sites-in-sweden/ ElevenEs , the first fully European LFP battery startup, announced the closing of its funding round and the start of the construction of its first 1GWh factory in Serbia. I’m adding them to my list! https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/elevenes-held-1st-closing-of-its-series-b-investment-round-backed-by-caterpillar-venture-capital-inc-385a3b8b The bad news and warning signs My table inhabitants didn’t see any direct bad news in February. Looking outside of the table, I would mention the decision by ACC to abandon gigafactories in Germany and Spain, and focus exclusively on its factory in France. This demonstrates again that trying to build several gigafactories at the same time, without getting at least one right first, is doomed to fail. https://newmobility.news/en/2026/02/09/acc-the-pulls-plug-on-eus-battery-ambitions-in-german-and-italian-plants/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=jetpack_social   The noise – companies stirring up news, but making little progress DAC’s have been making a lot of noise in February. Occidental/1Komma5 STRATOS DAC is planned for opening in the 2 nd quarter of this year, with no real update on what is going on at the construction site. https://www.ogj.com/energy-transition/news/55361290/oxys-1pointfive-expects-stratos-dac-plant-online-in-second-quarter-2026 Climeworks made a series of announcements about partnerships around the world and opening its HQ in Canada. https://climeworks.com/press-release/rcjy-climeworks-deepen-partnership-to-scale-dac-in-saudi-arabia In the European battery scene Donut Lab continued its viral marketing campaign, releasing 2 videos of tests of its (in)famous “solid-state” cell to a general confusion of industry experts. I’m not putting any links here, as Doughnut Lab marketing is much, much better than that of any serious battery company, and if you don’t have anything to do with your time, you will easily find many hours of video and text on this.   February key takeaways Three results stand out. First, Linglong One, again making it to my good news list with the installation of a nuclear core – no mean feat! Second, is the $1B contract with Form Energy – this is a remarkable achievement for LDES! Third, is the close of B-series round by ElevenEs, showing that despite the headwinds in the European battery industry, such as ACC cancelling two major projects, there is still hope! I’ll keep tracking these projects every month: what changes, what slips, and what gets renamed to sound like progress. Just tracking FOAKs meeting reality. March update coming first week of April!

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, novel electrolytes, next-generation cell formats. The science is real. The IP is here. But between a working lab prototype and a commercially viable product, there is a manufacturing gap that most European battery startups cannot cross. Here is the problem in concrete terms. If you are a European battery startup trying to scale your chemistry, you have essentially three options for manufacturing capacity: 1 Chinese or Korean-owned gigafactories — locked into their own formats, chemistries, and off-take commitments. 2 A handful of European pilot lines — often oversubscribed, inflexible, and not designed for commercial transition. 3 Build your own. Which means burning €200M+ before your first invoice. None of these is a real path to scale. Europe is trying to win a battery sovereignty game while leaving its most innovative players without the tools to compete. The fix is not more gigafactories. It is an open, flexible, skilled manufacturing base that battery startups can access on commercial terms. A contract manufacturing ecosystem for battery innovation — something that exists in depth in Korea and in China. Europe cannot build this alone in time. It has to partner. But a partnership with Asian manufacturers needs to be structured around technology transfer, not just capacity rental. The goal is to bring know-how into Europe, not just outsource production to it. I am in Korea next week — visiting factories and walking the halls of InterBattery in Seoul. I know Korean companies that are actively looking to support European battery startups through technology transfer and manufacturing partnerships. They are not waiting to be asked. They are waiting for the right introductions. If you are leading a battery startup and your technology is ready, but your manufacturing path is not, reach out. I will connect you with the Korean battery ecosystem directly. Europe can still win this. But not by debating policy alone. It wins by building the infrastructure that lets its best ideas become real products.