Trellis Climate Attends New York Climate Week
After hundreds of handshakes, dozens of subway rides, and not a small number of bagels, the Trellis Climate Team is returning from the whirlwind of New York Climate Week. We spent our time zig-zagging across the city, speaking at several events, including CarbonSmart, Financing Your Climate Startup, FOAK Pitch Night, Non-Dilutive Grant Capital for Clean Economy Deployments, Expansion and Impact, and Energy Storage Capital Challenge: Aligning Capital for ‘First-of-Many’ Storage Projects in New York.
Lara Pierpoint, Managing Director of Trellis, speaking at The Energy Storage Capital Challenge event (left) and at the Non-Dilutive Grant Capital event (right).
We also attended many more events, soaking up the insights from this unprecedented convening of climate experts. Here are some of our key takeaways from these rich events and conversations:
FOAK is so hot right now! When Prime released its report Barriers to the Timely Deployment of Climate Infrastructure in 2022, there were very few people talking about the acute capital gap faced by climate technologies as they scale up. This has changed. The Trellis team alone attended at least a dozen events focused on FOAK challenges and many more where it was discussed. We’re excited to see growing recognition of this problem and desire for new solutions to address the gap.
There have been few replicable solutions for FOAK financing to date. While the need for building FOAK projects was at the forefront of many events, there are very few examples of successes to replicate and scale. However, the ecosystem is converging around catalytic capital as a key tool to financing FOAK projects. For example, one NYCW event challenged breakout groups to come up with solutions for scaling up climate technologies, and over half of the groups identified philanthropic catalytic capital as a critical tool. At Trellis Climate, we intend to demonstrate many more such examples of catalytic capital at work.
It’s going to take an ecosystem to scale solutions at the speed the climate needs. Across the city we heard leaders from across the climate spectrum talking about their role in scaling climate infrastructure and the partnerships necessary to get projects built. This vast ecosystem includes startups and corporates; infrastructure finance, venture capital, insurance, and catalytic capital; non-profits, governments, foundations, industry associations, and accelerators. We all need to be collaborating and un-siloing to realize the net zero future.
It’s a tough capital environment out there. While 2020-2022 were boom years for climate tech, we’re seeing a significant cooling off of capital markets. In particular, there is a dearth of Series B/C capital, which companies often rely on for building FOAK projects. It’s likely we’ll see some climate startups shutting down as the market corrects from the fervor of investment in early stage climate technologies over the last few years. At Trellis, we’re committed to deploying catalytic capital to ensure the highest impact solutions make it through.
After such an exciting week, we’re feeling re-energized about the importance of Trellis’ role in the ecosystem: providing catalytic capital to FOAK climate projects. We’re excited to continue our work with diverse partners, both new and old, to help tackle the climate crisis.
