Climate Tech Pivots to Europe

Europe has long outpaced the U.S. in setting ambitious climate targets. Since the late 2000s, EU member states have enacted both a continent-wide carbon pricing scheme as well as legally binding renewable energy goals — measures that have grown increasingly ambitious over time and now extend across most sectors of the economy.

So of course domestic climate tech companies facing funding and regulatory struggles are now looking to the EU to deploy some of their first projects. “This is about money,” Po Bronson, a managing director at the deep tech venture firm SOSV told me. “This is about lifelines. It’s about where you can build.” Last year, Bronson launched a new Ireland-based fund to support advanced biomanufacturing and decarbonization startups open to co-locating in the country as they scale into the European market. Thus far, the fund has invested in companies working to make emissions-free fertilizers, sustainable aviation fuel, and biofuel for heavy industry.

It’s still rare to launch a fund abroad, and yet a growing number of U.S. companies and investors are turning to Europe to pilot new technology and validate their concepts before scaling up in more capital-constrained domestic markets.

Europe’s emissions trading scheme — and the comparably stable policy environment that makes investors confident it will last — gives emergent climate tech a greater chance at being cost competitive with fossil fuels. For Bronson, this made building a climate tech portfolio somewhere in Europe somewhat of a no-brainer. “In Europe, the regulations were essentially 10 years ahead of where we wanted the Americas and the Asias to be,” Bronson told me. “There were stricter regulations with faster deadlines. And they meant it.”

Of the choice to locate in Ireland, SOSV is in many ways following a model piloted by tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta, all of which established an early presence in the country as a gateway to the broader European market. Given Ireland’s English-speaking population, low corporate tax rate, business-friendly regulations, and easy direct flights to the continent, it’s a sensible choice — though as Bronson acknowledged, not a move that a company successfully fundraising in the U.S. would make.

It can certainly be tricky to manage projects and teams across oceans, and U.S. founders often struggle to find overseas talent with the level of technical expertise and startup experience they’re accustomed to at home. But for the many startups struggling with the fundraising grind, pivoting to Europe can offer a pathway for survival.

It doesn’t hurt that natural gas — the chief rival for many clean energy technologies — is quite a bit more expensive in Europe, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “A lot of our commercial focus today is in Europe because the policy framework is there in Europe, and the underlying economics of energy are very different there,” Raffi Garabedian, CEO of Electric Hydrogen, told me. The company builds electrolyzers that produce green hydrogen, a clean fuel that can replace natural gas in applications ranging from heavy industry to long-haul transport.

But because gas is so cheap in the U.S., the economics of the once-hyped “hydrogen economy” have gotten challenging as policy incentives have disappeared. With natural gas in Texas hovering around $3 per thousand cubic feet, clean hydrogen just can’t compete. But “you go to Spain, where renewable power prices are comparable to what they are in Texas, and yet natural gas is eight bucks — because it’s LNG and imported by pipeline — it’s a very different context,” Garabedian explained.

Two years ago, the EU adopted REDIII — the third revision of its Renewable Energy Directive — which raises the bloc’s binding renewable share target to 42.5% by 2030 and broadens its scope to cover more sectors, including emissions from industrial processes and buildings. It also sets new rules for hydrogen, stipulating that by 2030, at least 42% of the hydrogen used for industrial processes such as steel or chemical production must be green — that is, produced using renewable electricity — increasing to 60% by 2035.

Member countries are now working to transpose these continent-wide regulations into national law, a process Garabedian expects to be finalized by the end of this year or early next. Then, he told me, companies will aim to scale up their projects to ensure that they’re operational by the 2030 deadline. Considering construction timelines, that “brings you to next year or the year after for when we’re going to see offtakes signed at much larger volumes,” Garabedian explained. Most European green hydrogen projects are aiming to help decarbonize petroleum, petrochemical, and biofuel refining, of all things, by replacing hydrogen produced via natural gas.

But that timeline is certainly not a given. Despite its many incentives, Europe has not been immune to the rash of global hydrogen project cancellations driven by high costs and lower than expected demand. As of now, while there are plenty of clean hydrogen projects in the works, only a very small percent have secured binding offtake agreements, and many experts disagree with Garabedian’s view that such agreements are either practical or imminent. Either way, the next few years will be highly determinative.

The thermal battery company Rondo Energy is also looking to the continent for early deployment opportunities, the startup’s Chief Innovation Officer John O’Donnell told me, though it started off close to home. Just a few weeks ago, Rondo turned on its first major system at an oil field in Central California, where it replaced a natural gas-powered boiler with a battery that charges from an off-grid solar array and discharges heat directly to the facility.

Much of the company’s current project pipeline, however, is in Europe, where it’s planning to install its batteries at a chemical plant in Germany, an industrial park in Denmark, and a brewery in Portugal. One reason these countries are attractive is that their utilities and regulators have made it easier for Rondo’s system to secure electricity at wholesale prices, thus allowing the company to take advantage of off-peak renewable energy rates to charge when energy is cheapest. U.S. regulations don’t readily allow for that.

“Every single project there, we’re delivering energy at a lower cost,” O’Donnell told me. He too cited the high price of natural gas in Europe as a key competitive advantage, pointing to the crippling effect energy prices have had on the German chemical industry in particular. “There’s a slow motion apocalypse because of energy supply that’s underway,” he said.

Europe has certainly proven to be a more welcoming and productive policy environment than the U.S., particularly since May, when the Trump administration cut billions of dollars in grants for industrial decarbonization projects — including two that were supposed to incorporate Rondo’s tech. One $75 million grant was for the beverage company Diageo, which planned to install heat batteries to decarbonize its operations in Illinois and Kentucky. Another $375 million grant was for the chemicals company Eastman, which wanted to use Rondo’s batteries at a plastics recycling plant in Texas.

While nobody knew exactly what programs the Trump administration would target, John Tough, co-founder at the software-focused venture firm Energize Capital, told me he’s long understood what a second Trump presidency would mean for the sector. Even before election night, Tough noticed U.S. climate investors clamming up, and was already working to raise a $430 million fund largely backed by European limited partners. So while 90% of the capital in the firm’s first fund came from the U.S., just 40% of the capital in this latest fund does.

“The European groups — the pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, the governments — the conviction they have is so high in climate solutions that our branding message just landed better there,” Tough told me. He estimates that about a quarter to a third of the firm’s portfolio companies are based in Europe, with many generating a significant portion of their revenue from the European market.

But that doesn’t mean it was easy for Energize to convince European LPs to throw their weight behind this latest fund. Since the American market often sets the tone for the global investment atmosphere, there was understandable concern among potential participants about the performance of all climate-focused companies, Tough explained.

Ultimately however, he convinced them that “the data we’re seeing on the ground is not consistent with the rhetoric that can come from the White House.” The strong performance of Energize’s investments, he said, reveals that utility and industrial customers are very much still looking to build a more decentralized, digitized, and clean grid. “The traction of our portfolio is actually the best it’s ever been, at the exact same time that the [U.S.-based] LPs stopped focusing on the space,” Tough told me.

But Europe can’t be a panacea for all of U.S. climate tech’s woes. As many of the experts I talked to noted, while Europe provides a strong environment for trialing new tech, it often lags when it comes to scale. To be globally competitive, the companies that are turning to Europe during this period of turmoil will eventually need to bring down their costs enough to thrive in markets that lack generous incentives and mandates.

But if Europe — with its infinitely more consistent and definitively more supportive policy landscape — can serve as a test bed for demonstrating both the viability of novel climate solutions and the potential to drive down their costs, then it’s certainly time to go all in. Because for many sectors — from green hydrogen to thermal batteries and sustainable transportation fuels — the U.S. has simply given up.