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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.

Most FOAK founders I talk to have the same problem. The technology is validated. The team is smart. The funding is in place. And yet — the project moves at half the speed it should. Milestones slip. Priorities blur. People are busy, but not on the right things. I won’t tire of repeating that building a FOAK is not a technology problem, but an execution problem. And it is exactly what The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) by McChesney, Covey, and Huling is about. I want to be clear: this is a corporate management book, not a cleantech book. It was written for sales teams and factory floors, not for founders building first-of-a-kind hydrogen plants. But the core insight maps directly onto FOAK reality, and I found myself highlighting page after page. Here is what I took from it — and why I think every FOAK founder should read it. The Real Problem: The Whirlwind The authors' central observation is simple, brutal and very familiar: your most important goals will always lose to urgent day-to-day demands. They call this "the whirlwind" — the relentless operational pressure that consumes your attention and energy even when you have a clear strategic objective. In a FOAK context, the whirlwind is made up of permitting delays, supplier problems, investor updates, team issues, and a hundred other fires that are legitimate and real. The challenge is not eliminating the whirlwind. It is executing your critical goals inside it. As the authors put it: "The challenge is executing your most important goals in the midst of the urgent." If you have ever ended a month wondering where it went — despite working 60-hour weeks — you have lived this problem. Discipline 1: Focus on the Wildly Important Goal (WIG) The first discipline is ruthless prioritisation. Not two priorities. Not five. One, maybe two, goals that matter above all others at this stage of the build. For a FOAK founder, this might be: secure the off-take by Q3. Close the Series B by end of year. Commission the pilot by a specific date. The discipline here is refusing to let the whirlwind redefine your WIG week after week. The authors are direct: the more goals you chase, the less you achieve. This is counterintuitive for founders who believe that doing more is always better. It is not. Discipline 2: Act on Lead Measures, Not Lag Measures This is the most practically useful discipline in the book, and the one most FOAK teams get wrong. A lag measure is the result you want — revenue, commissioned capacity, an off-take signed. You can only observe it after the fact. A lead measure is the behaviour that predicts the lag measure — customer meetings per week, supplier qualification sessions completed, investor calls made. The authors use an analogy I found sharp: managing by lag measures is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. You see where you have been. You cannot steer by it. FOAK founders are often obsessed with lag measures — they track milestones and KPIs that tell them whether they have already succeeded or failed. The 4DX approach is to identify the one or two lead measures that, if consistently executed, will predictably move the outcome. Then track those, relentlessly. In my experience, the teams that scale fastest are not the ones with the most detailed Gantt charts. They are the ones who know exactly what two or three activities, done weekly, will determine their outcome — and protect those activities from the whirlwind. Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard The team needs to see whether they are winning or losing in real time. Not in the monthly board report. Every minute. The authors argue that when people see a simple, visible score, engagement changes. This matters for FOAK teams, which are often dispersed across sites and work with contractors and partners who do not share your sense of urgency. A physical or digital scoreboard tracking your lead measures — updated daily or weekly — sounds almost too simple. In practice, most FOAK teams do not have one. They have project management software nobody looks at and spreadsheets nobody trusts. You need one that you can track easily, just as you track the score while watching a football game. Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability The final discipline is a weekly rhythm: a short, focused team meeting (20–30 minutes) where every team member reports on the commitments they made last week, and makes new ones. The key distinction the authors draw is that these are not status updates. They are commitments — specific, deliverable, and chosen by the team member, not assigned by the manager. The authors found that people follow through on commitments they make to themselves at a dramatically higher rate than on tasks they are handed. For FOAK founders managing contractors, technical partners, and a stretched internal team, this rhythm can cut through the coordination chaos that kills timelines. It is not a new meeting. It replaces your existing check-in with something that has teeth. Why This Book Matters for FOAK Founders There is a reason most FOAK projects take twice as long and cost twice as much as planned. Part of it is technical complexity. Part of it is regulatory and supply chain unpredictability. But a significant part — the part that is within your control — is execution discipline. FOAK is, by definition, doing something that has never been done before at this scale. There is no playbook. Every week, something breaks down, something is late, and someone needs a decision. In that environment, without deliberate execution discipline, every team defaults to fighting the most recent fire. The strategic goals drift. The 4 Disciplines give you a lightweight, battle-tested system for holding your team's attention on what actually matters — even when the whirlwind is screaming. The framework is simple enough to implement without a change management programme, and rigorous enough to make a real difference. Read it alongside your technical project management. Then ask yourself: what is my WIG right now, what are my two lead measures, and when did I last make a specific weekly commitment to move them? If your FOAK is stuck between a working pilot and a factory that delivers — and you want to work through the execution blockers with someone who has been there — let's talk.

Last September, at a Dutch battery conference, I asked a panel of speakers — all of whom were working with China one way or another — whether they had any contingency plans for a blockade or a Taiwan invasion. The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when someone says something everyone has been avoiding. Nobody had a plan. That silence is what this post is about. The Partnership Everyone Is Chasing After the failures of Europe's local champions — Freyr, Britishvolt, Northvolt, ACC and Verkor still struggling to complete their gigafactories — the consensus has shifted. The way forward, many now believe, is a Chinese partner. The PowerCo-CATL deal, the InoBat-Gotion project, and dozens of quieter startup tie-ups all reflect the same logic: if you can't beat them, build with them. This logic is not unreasonable. But it carries two problems that rarely get discussed with the seriousness they deserve. Problem One: The Technology Transfer Isn't Happening The stated rationale for most of these partnerships is access to Chinese manufacturing knowledge and process technology. In practice, very little of it appears to cross the table. A T&E analysis of several key European partnerships found no meaningful technology transfer taking place on the ground. Europeans — from startups to Volkswagen — seem largely content to let Chinese partners run their operations, which raises an uncomfortable question: if the knowledge stays in Chinese hands, what exactly are you building toward? For a FOAK project, this matters acutely. Your scale-up roadmap assumes you are accumulating capability. If the capability remains with your partner, you are building dependency, not competence. Problem Two: Your Equipment Has a Back Door This is the one that keeps me up at night on behalf of my clients. A recent FT piece on US restrictions against Chinese EVs highlighted something that deserves wider attention in the European battery space. The restrictions are not primarily about tariffs. They are about connectivity. You can use Chinese glass and plastics. You cannot use Chinese communication chips — because a modern EV carries dozens of cameras (including driver-facing ones), radars, laser sensors, and substantial onboard processing power. Around 90% of data from Chinese EVs is routed to servers in China. Battery management systems can be accessed over the air. Screen shot from a video game Cyberpunk 2077, showing hacking options for a car. Not so science fiction anymore The implications for national security are serious enough that Poland is moving to ban Chinese-made vehicles inside military bases, and British officials have been advised not to hold sensitive conversations in cars with Chinese electronics. The fact that China was the first country to restrict foreign vehicles' data transfers lends considerable weight to these moves — it suggests the risk is well understood in Beijing. Now bring this back to your FOAK facility. The same connectivity architecture that creates a surveillance risk in consumer EVs exists in the Chinese-made process equipment sitting in your plant. CNC machines, battery formation systems, BMS diagnostic tools — many carry OTA update capability. That access doesn't disappear because you signed an equipment supply contract. The Question Nobody In European Battery Space Is Asking At that Dutch conference, my question was met with polite deflection. People acknowledged the theoretical risk, then moved on. The underlying assumption seemed to be that geopolitical disruption was either too remote to plan for or too large to do anything about. Neither is true. There are concrete steps that FOAK founders and their investors can take: auditing the OTA exposure of installed equipment, building contractual and technical firewalls into partnership agreements, developing supplier alternatives for the most critical systems, and defining what a production continuity plan would look like if Chinese supply or remote access were suddenly interrupted. None of this requires abandoning Chinese partnerships. It requires treating them with the same rigour you would apply to any other material project risk. The Real Question for Your Board If a board member asked you today — "How do we manage the security and continuity risk in our Chinese partnerships?" — what would your answer be? If you don't have one, that's worth fixing before the question becomes urgent. Supply chain sovereignty and geopolitical risk are areas I help FOAK founders stress-test during scale-up planning. If this is a live issue for your project, let's talk.

What Europe should not be trying to do is beat China at its own game. It should instead try to bypass it. For years, the dominant narrative in batteries has been framed as a race: Europe versus China. Who builds more gigafactories? Who subsidises harder? Who controls raw materials? That framing misses the point. Europe is not positioned to outscale China in commodity chemicals, which underpin the battery supply chain. It is not going to win a volume war on standard NMP or ethylene carbonate (EC) produced at legacy cost structures. And it should stop pretending it can. Global NMP demand is roughly 1–1.5 million tonnes per year, with battery applications driving the majority. EC demand is similarly concentrated in Asia, embedded in a supply chain built over two decades of industrial learning and state-backed investment. Trying to replicate that system plant-for-plant would be capital-intensive, strategically late, and almost certainly futile. So Europe has to change the rules instead — something Brussels is actually good at. Take CBAM. This is not a political gesture. It is a structural pricing mechanism. Embedded carbon in imported chemicals will carry a cost signal. Scope 3 is no longer an ESG footnote. It is a procurement variable. That changes the competitive logic entirely. If imported NMP carries +5 tCO₂ per tonne in embedded emissions, and if that carbon is priced — directly or indirectly — the gap between "cheap Asian solvent" and "European alternative" narrows quickly. At some carbon price levels, it closes. Europe is not attempting to dominate commodity volumes. It is attempting to dominate the carbon-adjusted segment of the market. Call it Europe-first chemistry: chemicals designed for high energy prices, strict permitting, carbon pricing, and traceable supply chains. That is a fundamentally different optimisation problem. And it creates a defensible niche that China, optimised for volume and legacy cost structures, is structurally poorly positioned to serve. Companies like Alta Group are already positioned inside this shift. By redesigning catalysts and solvents to reduce embedded emissions and regulatory burden — while remaining drop-in compatible with existing gigafactory processes — the competitive advantage is not scale. It is a structural fit with European constraints. China wins on volume. That is not going to change. Europe can win on carbon-adjusted economics. That is already beginning. The question is not who produces more tonnes. The question is who produces the tonnes that fit the regulatory future. That future, at least in Europe, is already priced in. I work with FOAK and scale-up companies in cleantech that are navigating exactly this kind of structural transition — where the competitive logic has shifted but the operating model hasn't caught up yet. If that describes your situation, let's talk.

Every FOAK founder I work with eventually asks the same question: Should we approach corporate venture capital (CVC)? The honest answer is — it depends entirely on when. Last week, I was on a call with a founder, discussing who we should reach out to next in our search for funding for their first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant. We were considering reaching out to CVC, since rank-and-file VCs told us they aren’t funding hardware scale-ups and their tickets are much smaller anyway. Our product is a speciality chemical, very high up the battery value chain. All of our potential customers are large chemical conglomerates, so CVC seemed like a natural choice. Then I remembered how I first ran into CVC in 2021. I was the CEO of RENERA, a Russian battery scale-up, 100% owned by Rosatom, a state corporation, and the sister CVC reached out to me for my expertise in batteries as they considered an investment in an early-stage battery startup. I was on full steam ahead with planning my gigafactory and, having looked at the tech, replied that the tech was fine and promising, but would have no impact on my project, as it would reach the necessary TRL/MRL in the next 5-7 years. I had an off-take in negotiations that required me to deliver over 2 GWh of cells much earlier. I gave my green light, and the CVC went on to invest something close to $2 million. My investment program aimed to secure over $200 million. Reflecting back on my experience and reading a recent article on the Hack Summit website (they’ve interviewed many CVCs), I have to say that CVCs aren’t a good fit for FOAK for two main reasons. First of all, they can’t provide the funds you are looking for. Their tickets are the same as most VCs, so a €1-5 million check won’t get your €50 million project very far. Second, having a CVC on a captable won’t guarantee you an offtake from the parent corporation. That you’ll have to do by yourself, as the decision on offtake is always taken by a separate team with completely different KPIs. CVC teams are judged on their portfolio returns, while procurement teams are judged on prices secured, speed and the quality of goods delivered. There is, though, a case where a CVC CAN help you with FOAK. Having a CVC as an investor BEFORE you go for FOAK (at pilot stage or earlier) will provide you with many benefits later on. First, their presence confirms the strategic value of the existing market and enhances your credibility with later investors. CVC interest signals to later investors that a serious industrial player sees strategic value in your technology. Second, CVC can be your champion inside a corporation, as the CVC’s manager’s internal success depends on yours. That’s rare in the corporate world, which sees startups at best as a nuisance and at worst, as a threat. You can leverage that to open doors to better procurement prices, offtake negotiations and early customer feedback. Getting that MOU or term sheet on offtake from the parent corporation can hugely boost your chances of a successful funding round for your FOAK. CVC money won’t bridge your FOAK valley of death. But they can make a good foundation for one. For the FOAK stage itself, the capital has to come from elsewhere: strategic industrials (a CVC parent might take interest), project finance, or public loan programs like the EU Innovation Fund. If you're deciding whether CVC belongs in your FOAK funding stack, this is exactly the kind of question I help founders work through. A free call is a good place to start.

Over the past twelve to eighteen months, the automotive industry has behaved in a way that commentators find deeply unsettling: it has cancelled things. Depending on one’s accounting preferences, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five EV programmes have been scrapped, postponed, or politely redefined across 2025 and early 2026. For some observers, this was sufficient to declare that EV demand had finally met its limits. And yet, 2025 recorded more than 20 million EV sales globally - the strongest year of growth the sector has ever seen. The Shift From Policy To Profit Both realities coexist without contradiction. What we are observing is not the collapse of electrification, but the reintroduction of profit discipline into an industry that had grown accustomed to operating on policy momentum, subsidies, inexpensive capital and, occasionally, competitive theatrics. For nearly a decade, announcing ambitious electrification targets was good politics and good investor signalling. Scaling heavy industry, however, remains indifferent to signalling. When interest rates rose, Chinese competition intensified, and fiscal priorities shifted, finance departments began revisiting assumptions that had previously been treated as destiny. The resulting write-downs — some $65 billion across the sector — were less an ideological reversal than an overdue reconciliation exercise. If one looks carefully at the programmes that disappeared, the pattern is almost tediously logical. Large SUVs, premium sedans, long-range performance platforms — vehicles with expansive battery packs and correspondingly expansive cost structures — feature prominently. These were not the backbone of mass electrification; they were its most visible ambassadors. Meanwhile, entry-level EVs continue to expand, China’s domestic market continues to scale, and fleet electrification proceeds with minimal drama. The industry is not retreating from electrification; it is retreating from electrification that fails to clear a margin threshold. Why This Matters More For Batteries Than For Cars For automakers, this is portfolio management. For battery companies and FOAK gigafactory projects, it is more delicate. Many facilities were financed on the assumption that OEM demand would be both predictable and faithful to announced timelines. Platform launches were expected to proceed more or less as presented at investor days. Trade protection was assumed to provide a degree of insulation. With the partial exception of the last point, those assumptions now look less robust. Technology risk, once the central narrative, has been joined — and in some cases overshadowed — by commercial risk. FOAK battery projects amplify this vulnerability. They are capital-intensive, carry high fixed costs, endure elevated scrap rates in early ramp-up and often operate on thin initial margins while servicing meaningful debt. A 20 or 30 per cent deviation in expected volumes is not a rounding error; it can materially alter project economics. We already see this in contract renegotiations, in gigafactories being repurposed toward stationary storage for data centres, in postponed expansions, and in startups seeking alternative offtake channels, including defence sector. Heavy industry has always known that demand risk is more unforgiving than laboratory uncertainty. The battery sector is now reacquainting itself with that lesson. The Chemistry Selection Will Change - Maybe There are also implications for chemistry strategy. The cancellations have disproportionately affected vehicles built around high-nickel, high-energy-density configurations and large battery packs. Growth, by contrast, continues in cost-optimised chemistries such as LFP, in smaller vehicles, and in stationary storage driven by grid bottlenecks and renewable integration. When projects must justify themselves under stricter capital discipline, cost per kilowatt-hour tends to eclipse energy density as the dominant strategic variable. Technologies without a credible cost pathway will find customer acquisition increasingly strenuous, however elegant their performance curves. Who Will Survive A Classic Industrial Cycle? None of this resembles a systemic crisis. It resembles a classic industrial cycle. Capital flows in with enthusiasm, commitments overshoot, reality intervenes, portfolios are pruned, and durable players consolidate. The EV and battery ecosystem is moving from youthful exuberance toward adulthood. Historically, this phase is uncomfortable but clarifying. Weak structures are exposed; resilient ones strengthen. The companies likely to navigate this reset share certain characteristics: credible cost-reduction roadmaps, diversified customer exposure, modular capacity expansion rather than heroic upfront builds, optionality for stationary storage, disciplined capital allocation, and teams capable of executing under constraints. Those more exposed often display the opposite: dependence on a single OEM, premium-only positioning, long commercialisation timelines, large front-loaded capex, and limited differentiation in cost. Final Thought And A Wild Card Electrification itself is not slowing. What is changing is the type of electrification that survives scrutiny. The winners will not necessarily be the most energy-dense or the most technically ornate. They will be the technologies and business models capable of reducing cost while scaling reliably. Industrial history has a consistent, if slightly unromantic, preference for pragmatism over elegance. There remains, of course, a geopolitical dimension. Any significant disruption around Taiwan would reorder battery supply chains with remarkable speed. In such a scenario, chemistry choices may be influenced less by optimal performance and more by insurance logic. Manufacturers would pay a premium to reduce exposure to concentrated supply chains, even at the expense of theoretical efficiency. Geopolitics has a habit of rearranging technical orthodoxy. For battery startups and investors, the central question is therefore not whether electrification continues. It does. The more pertinent inquiry is whether the underlying business model is resilient to demand volatility and geopolitical friction. The next phase of electrification will reward those who prepared for that environment rather than those who assumed it would never arrive. If you operate in batteries, materials or EV supply chains, it would be interesting to understand how customer behaviour and investment appetite are evolving from your vantage point.

The FT article on GM’s lithium manganese-rich (LMR) push reads, on the surface, like a familiar innovation narrative: bold leadership, unproven chemistry, long timelines, big upside. That framing misses the point. GM is not choosing LMR because it is elegant. GM is ending up at LMR because its option set has collapsed. Let’s look at the context. US support for EVs has weakened. Incentives are being rolled back. Sales are falling well short of expectations, with EV volumes down sharply after the 2021–22 peak. GM alone has already taken $6bn+ in write-downs tied to its EV transition. At the same time, Chinese manufacturers — BYD being the obvious example — continue to scale. They offer vehicles that are cheaper, increasingly competitive in quality, and vertically integrated across batteries, materials, and manufacturing. They have cemented a structural advantage. For a Western OEM, this creates a three-way constraint: 1 You must reduce costs to compete with Chinese vehicles. 2 You must reduce reliance on Chinese battery supply chains. 3 You must offer consumers something affordable and competitive with an ICE car now — not in a decade. There is no chemistry on the shelf that satisfies all three. LFP is cheap and proven — but dominated by China.
High-nickel chemistries deliver performance — but remain expensive and input-constrained.
Solid-state is not ready at scale for automotive, and probably won’t be there in the next decade. That leaves LMR. LMR is not new. The industry knows it well — and has avoided it just as consistently. Voltage fading, durability issues, and manufacturing complexity kept it out of mass production. Every major battery maker has looked at it and walked away. GM has decided not to. This decision tells you just how desperate things are. Kurt Kelty, hired to spearhead GM’s EV effort, put it plainly:
“If LMR has failed, then I have failed.” That’s an unusually direct statement for a public OEM executive. It reflects the reality: this is not a pilot or a side bet. GM is staking its ability to stay globally relevant in EVs on a chemistry that has never been proven at scale. From a board perspective, this is a brutal position to be in. Do nothing, and you drift into irrelevance outside a shrinking ICE-only US market.
Follow incumbents, and you stay structurally uncompetitive.
Bet on an unproven chemistry, and you absorb execution risk that the industry spent a decade avoiding. None of these options are comfortable and none are obviously wrong. LMR promises a middle ground: lower reliance on nickel and cobalt, cost closer to LFP, performance above it — at least on paper. If it works, GM narrows the cost gap without surrendering control of its supply chain. If it doesn’t, the downside is not limited to a single platform. It reinforces the broader problem that Western OEMs are facing: the gap with China, which is not just about subsidies, but about industrial systems that compound advantage over time. That is what makes this decision interesting — and uncomfortable. I see this as not a story about one chemistry winning or losing. I see this as a case study in how strategic choices look when every safe path is gone. And I don’t envy today’s automotive boards. They are operating in a world where: • industrial policy is unstable, • supply chains are geopolitical, • consumers are price-sensitive, • and competitors are way ahead. In such a world, betting on LMR is not bold; it may simply be the least bad option left. Whether that is enough — and whether it arrives in time — remains an open question. Link to the original FT article (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/178c1115-05ab-45ef-b18f-7dc3869db3ff