A climate tech pilgrimage
Eight venture capitalists flew to China for what was a cross between an investor roadshow and a religious pilgrimage. It may sound like the start of a joke, but it’s exactly what happened in July.
Hailing from London, Berlin, Copenhagen and Barcelona, the traveling party, all of whom make early-stage investments in clean energy startups and collectively oversee $6 billion in assets, met founders and toured production facilities at around 10 companies from Shenzhen to Shanghai.
They saw cutting-edge battery cells, newfangled hydrogen-powered turbines and breakthrough solar technology, plus the state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities capable of cranking out huge volumes of those products.
The idea was to get an on-the-ground feel for just how big China’s lead is in the energy transition, and how it has built such a near-unassailable position in so many green industries. The VCs also wanted to see, as I report in my
for
Bloomberg Green, if there were any remaining pockets of the clean energy transition where European and US companies still stood a chance of being competitive.
The answer? Yes, but only if Western companies include working with Chinese ones as part of their plans to scale.
China is the world’s number two economy, but it’s a leader in virtually every aspect of the
, including investment, installation and manufacturing. It’s the top producer and deployer of batteries. Ditto for electric vehicles. The country also dominates the supply chain for the critical minerals that underpin many essential green technologies, refining 91% of the world’s supply, according to BloombergNEF.