Welcome to Climate CEOs — where climate tech leaders navigate growth, capital, and quiet doubts. Built from work with 300+ climate CEOs and 25 years of meditation. Read by 40,000+ climate operators and investors annually.
1. Stop pretending: solar + batteries does not equal 24/7 Power
Industrial customers don’t buy sunshine. They buy uptime.
Bruce Anderson, a 40-year solar veteran and founder of 247Solar (modular solar thermal + storage for 24/7 power and industrial heat):
Don’t claim 24/7 if you can’t handle intermittency.
Solar PV + batteries is not baseload. If it fails after sunset, buyers will see through it.
Keep the magic narrow. Buy the rest off the shelf.
If you reinvent everything, you die slowly and expensively.
Pick a beachhead, not a buffet.
Start with customers who feel the pain most and need exactly what you built, not everyone with an energy bill.
Customers buy risk reduction, not elegance.
Reliability, fallback options, modularity, and financing beatclever tech. Even if you went to MIT.
Headcount is not a flex.
More people can mean more burn, not more progress. Save the bragging for revenue and staying alive.
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⚡ So what?
If you’re building in energy, this Climate CEOs podcastepisode is 40 years of scar tissue in 42 minutes.
…Speaking of hardtech in energy…
2. 95 industrial decarbonization startups you should study.
We have a problem. And a mispriced opportunity inside it.
Impact Mismatch:
25-30% = GHG emissions from industry
10-15% = Climate VC dollars going to industrial solutions
Industrial decarbonization is underfunded because it's hard.
But difficulty is a moat if you can survive long enough to prove it.
Here’s why.
The Friction:
Heavy CapEx: High barrier to entry and investor wariness.
Legacy Drag: Decades-long replacement cycles of “brownfield” infrastructure.
Technical Risk: Hardware scaling is non-linear and unforgiving.
The Edge:
Defensibility: Hard tech is the ultimate AI hedge.
Funding Mix: Add more debt, grants, vendor financing, and offtaker prepay.
Order-of-Magnitude Advantage: Solve for 5x gains, not 5% increments.
The Offtake Option: Reframe financial and career risk as a low-cost corporate hedge against future regulatory and supply-chain volatility.
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⚡ So what?
Get inspired by these 95 startups innovating for industry below.
Shout-outs to Dexmat, Nth Cycle, Cemvita, and Vaulted — four companies in EFI’s climate CEO peer group orbit. And to Alessa Berg for curating the 95 ventures.
