The Ledger
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Fernandez: $70B infrastructure funds hold 15-year zero-loss records across all projects
“There is 70, 60, seventy billion dollar infrastructure funds that have a 15 year track record that have never lost money on any project they've invested in.”
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: Startups lock in offtake prices before engineering reveals 2x CapEx
“We find that many times off-takes are priced in a way before engineering, you know, failed one, failed two, engineering have been done, and it's based on optimistic CapEx assumptions. Now, when the companies go through the engineering process and they actually…”
Fernandez: Post-COVID, large EPC contractors no longer offer lump-sum turnkey contracts
“The reality is the EPC CapEx world changed dramatically after, after COVID, right? Things that used to be very secured, large scale EPC companies that used to be able to give you a, you know, lump sum turnkey contract are just not doing that anymore in, in con…”
Fernandez: FOAK climate projects cannot access traditional project-level debt
“As far as debt goes, we haven't seen it. We've seen people be able to raise debt at the corporate level via, via venture debt or via corporate debt. Now, those are very low leverage numbers, right? They're not the 80, 95% that, you know, you will get in solar.”
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: EPC Contractors Refuse Small, High-Risk Climate Demo Projects
“Most of the time, the team has to build it themselves. No EPC contractor really wants to get into this smallish projects, high risk projects, right?”
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: Getting cement offtake agreements beyond five years is very difficult
“In cement, Where it's so short term, it'd be really hard to get anybody to sign more than a five-year agreement, right?”
Fernandez: Infrastructure investors in FOAK assets play for follow-on platform scale
“What we've seen is most of these infrastructure investors really play for the platform, right? I'm putting X hundred million dollars in the first project. What I really want to do is put a billion dollars into your next two or three projects, and a lot of them…”
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 …”
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.”