Europe spends a lot of time talking about battery gigafactories. We discuss cell chemistries, subsidy schemes, factory locations, and how many gigawatts of capacity will be built by when. All of that matters. But a part of the battery value chain rarely makes it into these conversations, even though it has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and credibility. Battery chemicals. Not cells or packs, but the solvents, electrolytes, and precursors that sit upstream of every cathode line and every factory budget. This is where a large share of capital intensity, operational complexity, and embedded emissions comes from. This layer determines how expensive a factory really is once energy use, HSE requirements, and permitting are factored in. It determines how exposed “European” batteries remain to imports and geopolitical risk. And it determines how much CO₂ is embedded in every battery long before it leaves the factory gate. You can build cell assembly plants in Europe and still import cost, emissions, and strategic vulnerability if this layer stays external. Over the next few weeks, I will unpack this part of the battery story, using one very concrete industrial project as a reference point. Not as a promotion, but as a way to talk about how batteries are made, financed, and scaled in Europe. If Europe gets the chemistry layer wrong, the gigafactory debate risks becoming an exercise in industrial theatre rather than industrial strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the door closed, China found a window. It’s been over a year since Europe introduced tariffs on Chinese-made EVs. The Economist published an article that is blunt in its conclusion - this policy failed. So much is clear by looking at the volume of Chinese car exports to Europe over the last year—a dip, followed by a rise, not only in hybrids, but in EVs too. I wonder what figures European automotive lobbyists used when trying to convince the European Commission that Europeans don’t want to buy EVs? It seems that instead of revving up factories and seizing the advantage of the temporary dip in Chinese EV exports, EU automakers decided to spend more time in Brussels. Can’t blame them - cafes are much nicer than factory floors.

No one likes Brussels. But we should. The news of the week is the European Commission's decision to ease 2035 emission targets for European car-makers. Funny enough, Brussels managed to offend both ends of the automotive opinion spectrum - those who believe that the European automotive players should switch to electric vehicles ASAP, and those who push for extending the sales of internal combustion engines. At the beginning of the week, right after the announcement of the easing of the ban, my LinkedIn was flooded with laments for Europe. People were calling it a huge setback and a death sentence for the European auto industry. Then, towards the end of the week, a different chorus of voices rose, this time from the automotive giants themselves, who also blamed the new regulations for increasing costs and deterring investment! “This package doesn’t do the job”, said Antonio Filosa of Stellantis, “disastrous”, echoed Hildegard Muller, president of VDA. So what’s the deal here? First, OEMs can continue selling ICE cars and release 10% of their 2021 CO2 by 2035, instead of going to zero. A clear blow to EV transition, and a win for ICE. But to comply with the 10% requirement, emissions must be offset with low-carbon steel and sustainable fuels. Which, in the words of Matthias Schmidt, an industry analyst, would make European ICE cars “haute couture Swiss watches of the motor industry”. When I worked as a lobbyist, I saw how immense industry pressure could be on the rank-and-file lawmakers. You have many who are paid far more than you and have access to all the consultants and resources you’ll never have, trying to convince you that their point is correct. You do your own research, but you are understaffed and out of time. Then, there is a political dimension too. Your bosses manoeuvre for power, and they can cut deals in the backrooms that will nullify your effort. So the Brussels decision seemed to be a gambit - sacrifice some CO2 targets, but make exploiting this option too expensive. On the face of it, the ICE industry wins. In reality, they’ve been duped, as they now realise. Hope that after spending so much firepower on pushing through a deal that ultimately hurts them, they’ll go back and double down on EVs. Especially since Brussels have announced the same week a carrot of €1.8B for the battery industry.

I love my Mac. It's seamless integration, the way everything just works, the illusion of perfection. But every once in a while, my Mac freezes. The spinning wheel appears. A polite message informs me that “the system has been unexpectedly shut down”. So every time I hear someone talk about a software-defined vehicle, my brain does this: I’m driving down a German autobahn at 250 km/h, in the left lane. Everything humming, and then the dashboard lights up: The system has unexpectedly crashed. Reboot in progress. That’s usually where I wake up, drenched in sweat. Software-defined vehicles (SDV) are presented as inevitable. As if resisting them is like resisting gravity or USB-C. So I dug deeper: • What’s actually behind SDVs? • Does anyone make real money from them? • And, most importantly, do users even want them? Here’s what I found. First: SDVs are not cheaper to produce Despite what some decks suggest, there is no solid evidence that SDVs reduce manufacturing cost. Yes, they reduce the kilometers of wiring.
Yes, you may consolidate the electronic control unit. But then: • you add high-performance compute • expensive chips • redundant safety architectures • massive software teams • cybersecurity • OTA infrastructure • compliance overhead. Any wiring savings are quietly eaten by silicon and software. Now add one more thought experiment: remember the last global chip shortage? What happens next time, when all OEMs depend on central compute to ship cars? Exactly. Second: SDVs do reduce lifecycle costs This part is real. Early fault detection, OTA fixes instead of recalls, better post-sale service management.
Fewer angry dealer visits. From an OEM perspective, this is meaningful. But let’s be honest about who really loves this: 
👉 Insurance companies. - Better data.
 - Better risk models.
 - Better pricing.
 - Lower uncertainty. Sleep well, actuaries! SDV has your back. Third: customers don’t want “digital cars” They want: • navigation that works, • charging that doesn’t lie, • an app that doesn’t log them out, • software that doesn’t feel like a beta test. And they want all of this… for free. The audacity! Why won’t customers pay subscriptions so Volkswagen can live like Netflix? Why won’t they understand that heated seats are a content strategy? Because customers already have:
- Netflix.
- Spotify.
- Apple Music.
- Cloud storage.
- Five forgotten app subscriptions. They are not emotionally ready for Car+. I’m not ready, that’s for sure! Who makes money from SDVs? Who actually makes money from SDVs and their fashionable cousin, connected services? It is not the consumers, not the OEMs (at least not directly), and not the app stores in cars. The only group consistently smiling are 👉 Commercial fleets. Fleets care about: • uptime, • total cost of ownership, • predictive maintenance, • compliance, • risk reduction. They pay.
They renew.
They don’t complain about UX animations. Boring. Rational. Profitable. The Luddite conclusion SDVs are not a gold mine. They are more like an operating system upgrade for OEMs: • reduce operational pain, • shift cost curves, • improve control, • make recalls less terrifying. But they do not magically unlock subscription riches. And they certainly don’t make cars cheaper. So yes, SDVs are probably inevitable. Just don’t tell me they’re cheap, customer-loved, or a money-printing machine. And please…
before we ship them at scale… Let’s make sure the reboot message never appears at 250 km/h. Don’t ask me how.

There’s an old anecdote I keep returning to. The rabbits in the forest are tired of being hunted by foxes and wolves. They gather the courage to approach the wisest creature they know—the owl—and ask for help. The owl thinks for a moment and says: “You have to become hedgehogs.” The rabbits look puzzled. “But how?” And the owl replies: “I’m a strategist, not a tactician.” About five years ago, BP hired McKinsey to help steer the company away from oil and into renewables (you know where it goes). The effort lasted four years—exactly as long as the CEO who initiated it. Shell made similar moves. Both transformations collapsed the moment leadership changed. Yesterday, I was reading the FT’s long read on BP and Shell’s failed attempts to reinvent themselves as clean-energy companies, and thinking, is it ever possible for oil and gas companies to pivot to clean energy, or are these efforts doomed to fail? A quote from one executive captures the key difficulty: “I don’t get it. I don’t know why we’re investing in this—the returns are so low.” BP and Shell tried to become electricity companies. But utilities operate on completely different economics: lower margins, longer, slower cycles, and value creation that takes a decade or more to materialise. It took Shell’s LNG business 10–15 years to become its crown jewel. No one seems to be prepared to wait that long for renewables. And no amount of consulting work—no matter how expensive—could compress that journey into a single CEO’s tenure. You can tell the rabbits to become hedgehogs, but maybe your DNA just won’t let you grow the spines.