The Ledger
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Fernandez: Climate Startups Succeed by Deploying Tech Directly, Not Licensing
“What we found looking at over 300 projects, 350 projects in the past couple of years, is the fact that the companies that actually deploy their own technology and follow that path
Are the ones that get to success. There are companies that have spent two or thr…”
Fernandez: Skill shortage, not capital, is the biggest FOAK bottleneck
“My, our contention is that capital is an issue, but the biggest issue is the skill set that is required to be able to help the companies see a risk and really assess the risk of that big construction operation of first of a kind.”
Fernandez: Climate tech scaling requires sequential 5-20x demonstration and FOAK steps
“The way we propose to do this is, you know, that company has to follow a path towards that de-risking, and that path in our, ah, experience is you go from a pilot to a five to 20 x demonstration project, and then you go to another 10, 10, 20 times, ah, first o…”
Fernandez: FOAK Project Investors Require at Least Six Months of Demo Data
“What we know is at the end of the day, the investors that come in at the Series C, Series D, you know, most of the time funding or partially funding first of a kind projects, they really want to see six months or more, or performance because things degrade if …”
Fernandez: Proven climate tech remains unfinanceable until de-risked for infrastructure funds
“The challenge is the fact that these companies reach a point where the technology has been proven, but it has not been the risk in the eyes of large scale infrastructure capital, right? Whether that is Infra funds or project finance banks, right? So you need t…”
Fernandez: Demonstration plants are unprofitable R&D exercises, not profit centers
“Many times though, people think they're going to make money off the demo, right? When, in that, in our experience, we found that's not the case. The case is that most, in most cases, the demo is a very large R&D exercise. So money losing, unprofitable R&D exer…”
Fernandez: Breakthrough Energy Catalyst backed a project canceled over integration sizing
“One of the things that we see on, on one of the projects that we committed to that, that was canceled was, you know, the balance of plant. The integration of four systems where the price was very well known in those four different systems, but the integration …”
Yeh: FOAK financing requires government partnerships and non-dilutive catalytic capital
“And I think, for me, one of the key things to understand about folk financing Is that you need to embrace government as a strategic partner and be able to look for new non-dilutive capital sources, including a lot of this catalytic capital there, like, you kno…”
Fernandez: Sequential Climate Hardware Development Takes 3 to 5 Years
“And one of the things we point out that our experience shows that the companies that do it, you know, in a sequential way could take, you know, somewhere between three or five years to get to the first of a kind versus, you know, doing it in a lot less time.”