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: 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: 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: 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…”