Climate — Nymark

— Clean energy
— Electrification
— Carbon capture
— Industrial decarbonisation
— Hydrogen
— Climate analytics
— Climate adaptation
— Circular materials
— Others

A project may have credible engineering, strong climate logic and a market that clearly needs it. But that does not automatically make it financeable, connectable, contracted or resilient to policy change. The next stage is being decided by the systems around the technology: offtake, grid access, permitting, infrastructure, capital structure and the policy floor beneath the business model.

We work with leadership teams across these sub-industries at the point where that gap starts to widen: when a working technology is being asked to behave like a bankable, deliverable business, often against a market and policy backdrop that has shifted faster than the original model assumed.

Three patterns shaping Climate

''Climate technology scales when ambition becomes contracted demand, connected infrastructure and a business model strong enough to carry the transition.''

Soufyan Lamdini

Strategist

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Across European Climate-tech, three questions keep showing up in different forms depending on who is asking. A green-steel company may frame it as whether the offtake book is strong enough before the next financing round. A grid-edge software founder may frame it as how to monetise speed-to-power before queue reform arrives. A carbon-removal or industrial-decarbonisation team may frame it as whether the policy assumptions in the model still hold.

Set side by side, they describe three pressure points reshaping commercial maturity across the sector: where bankable demand comes from, who can move infrastructure faster than competitors, and whether the policy floor a business plan was built on is still where it was when the model was made.

01. Offtake is the new equity

For many Climate-tech companies, demand is no longer proven by market interest. It is proven by contracts. That shift is clearest in project-heavy categories such as hydrogen, green fuels, carbon removal, green steel and industrial decarbonisation. Buyers may like the technology, support the climate logic and want the option to participate. But unless enough of that interest becomes binding offtake, the project often struggles to unlock debt, justify capacity or reach financial close.

The hydrogen market shows the problem clearly. S&P Global Commodity Insights tracked close to 60 major low-carbon hydrogen projects that were cancelled or put on hold in 2025, representing 4.9 million tonnes of planned annual production capacity. The pattern was not that the technology had no role. It was that cost, policy uncertainty and lack of buyers made too many projects difficult to finance.

The same logic now runs across heavy industry and carbon removal. The company that can show contracted demand before final investment decision is in a different position from the company still selling a future market. For scale-ups, this changes the commercial function. The chief commercial officer is no longer just building a sales pipeline. They are helping build the capital stack.

The strongest companies are not simply the ones with the most promising decarbonisation pathway. They are the ones that turn buyer interest into bankable demand early enough for the rest of the business to move.

02. Speed to power

The second pattern is about access to electricity, grid capacity and time-to-energise. As electrification accelerates, the bottleneck is shifting from generation ambition to connection reality. Renewable projects, data centres, industrial sites, storage assets and grid-edge companies are all competing for scarce capacity in systems that were not built for this speed of demand growth.

Beyond Fossil Fuels reported that 1,700 gigawatts of renewable energy projects across 16 European countries were stuck in grid connection queues, more than three times the capacity additions needed to reach EU 2030 energy and climate targets. In the US, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Queued Up 2025 report found that average interconnection timelines for built projects have lengthened materially compared with earlier periods.

That changes what the market values. In parts of Climate-tech, the advantage is no longer measured only in cents per kilowatt-hour. It is measured in months saved, queue positions improved, connection risk reduced, flexibility unlocked or load made easier to serve. The companies that can help customers secure, manage or accelerate access to power are moving closer to the centre of the market.

For scale-ups, this creates a different kind of opportunity. They do not always need to own generation to become strategically important. They can sell into the scarcity around it: software, flexibility, grid intelligence, storage orchestration, demand response, permitting support, site selection and faster time-to-energise.The companies most likely to capture this premium are the ones that understand that power is no longer just an input. It is a growth constraint.

03. The policy floor moved

The third pattern is the movement of the policy environment underneath the business model. For several years, many Climate-tech companies built plans around a supportive direction of travel: subsidies, reporting obligations, carbon prices, tax credits, procurement rules and public funding programmes. That support has not disappeared, but it has become less stable, more selective and more divided across markets.

In Europe, CBAM has moved from reporting into real pricing. In April 2026, the European Commission published the first CBAM certificate price for Q1 2026, creating a calculable carbon cost for imported goods covered by the mechanism. At the same time, the EU Omnibus package has changed the rhythm and scope of sustainability reporting, including delays to CSRD reporting for later waves and changes to which companies fall in scope.Across the Atlantic, the US clean-energy incentive landscape has also shifted. The 45V hydrogen production tax credit now requires projects to begin construction by the end of 2027, shortening the window for companies that had built longer timelines into their plans.

The result is not that policy no longer matters. It matters even more. But it can no longer be treated as the load-bearing assumption in the business model.Elemental Impact’s 2025 FOAK market sentiment work found that 69% of respondents expected first-of-a-kind capital availability to shrink further through 2026. That points to a more disciplined market: one where investors, buyers and lenders want to know whether the company still works if the subsidy arrives later, the reporting obligation narrows, the tax credit expires sooner or the carbon price moves.

For leadership teams, the task is to rebuild the plan around resilience rather than dependency. The strongest companies are those whose model still holds if the policy environment moves another two notches before financial close.

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In most parts of European Climate-tech, the underlying technology has reached working scale. The harder transition is whether the company built around that technology can behave like the kind of business its buyers, financiers and regulators now expect to see.A solar developer, an LDES manufacturer, a DAC operator, a green-steel producer and a grid-software platform look very different on a balance sheet. But they tend to hear the same thing from a project-finance bank, a hyperscaler procurement team or a CBAM-exposed industrial buyer: come back when the offtake is contracted, the connection is in hand and the policy assumptions hold up to stress-testing. The technology proof, in other words, was the part that turned out to be easier.

The work that unlocks the next stage of growth is usually not just a continuation of what the company has already been doing. Building an offtake book has more in common with multi-year enterprise sales than with a fundraising road show. Compressing time-to-energise pulls in regulatory, transmission and infrastructure expertise that may not yet sit inside the company. Designing a financing structure that survives a policy reset means treating policy as one input among several, not as the foundation everything else depends on.

Each of those is an organisational shift. Together, they require the company to become something different from the venture-backed scale-up it was eighteen months earlier, while the existing team is still being judged on the older set of metrics.

This is the layer we work on. With leadership, alongside the people already running the company. The first conversation is usually less about a programme and more about where the next genuine inflection point sits in the plan: the offtake that needs to be signed, the connection that needs to be cleared, the financing structure that needs to survive credit committee, or the policy assumption that needs to be replaced before it breaks the model.

Where the work happens

Interconnectivity: Environmental Tech
A longer read on what’s shaping the sector.

The Interconnectivity Series
Drawing Cross-Industries Learnings

Climate sets out, at length, what we have been observing as the sector works through its current reset. Why offtake has quietly become the binding constraint on growth, what speed-to-power looks like once AI demand collides with queue dysfunction, and how Climate-tech plans will need to be rebuilt around the trans-Atlantic policy split that emerged in 2025.

Download Interconnectivity: Environmental Tech-->

Climate
From climate promise to contracted scale

Three patterns shaping Climate

Interconnectivity: Environmental Tech
A longer read on what’s shaping the sector.

Our process

Our unique process has been fine-tuned since our beginnings. Learn more about our transdisciplinary approach to growth.

Positive Technology

To help ourselves define and qualify technology with genuine impact, we've created a set of four guiding principles.

Whether you're establishing a new techology or scaling through an inflection point.
We’d love to hear from you.

ClimateFrom climate promise to contracted scale

Three patterns shaping Climate

Interconnectivity: Environmental TechA longer read on what’s shaping the sector.

Our process

Our unique process has been fine-tuned since our beginnings. Learn more about our transdisciplinary approach to growth.

Positive Technology

To help ourselves define and qualify technology with genuine impact, we've created a set of four guiding principles.

Whether you're establishing a new techology or scaling through an inflection point. We’d love to hear from you.

Climate
From climate promise to contracted scale

Interconnectivity: Environmental Tech
A longer read on what’s shaping the sector.

Whether you're establishing a new techology or scaling through an inflection point.
We’d love to hear from you.