Moving from Innovation to Deployment: Overcoming the Challenges of Scaling Climate Infrastructure

Over the past several years, significant volumes of venture capital ($10’s of billions) have been raised and deployed into a broad set of high potential climate ventures. The most promising of these companies are now reaching the point of commercializing their solutions and must move from the innovation stage into the deployment stage of their evolution.

This transition requires tackling many challenges including especially raising the capital ($100’s of billions to $1 trillions) required to support the scale up of solutions and navigating “First of a Kind” Project financing, First Factory funding, and accessing private & public growth capital. These requirements punctuate the challenges of raising these forms of capital and illuminate the missing elements and disconnects that exist today in the rapidly emerging climate capital stack.

This session explored these timely and critical topics and offered insights and recommendations for companies, investors, policy makers and researchers.

Speakers:
Jim Matheson, Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School
Mario Fernandez, Head of Catalyst, Breakthrough Energy - Catalyst
Lee Scott, Senior Associate, Trellis Climate
Jonah Wagner, Senior Advisor to the Director, U.S. Department of Energy Loan Programs Office (LPO)