“What It Takes To Deliver Climate Ventures and Projects That Work”

We were delighted to host a webinar last week as part of London climate Action Week – a key date in the global climate calendar.

Huge thanks to everyone who joined and to our expert speakers for an insightful and engaging presentation.

It was great to see a fantastic turnout, reflecting the growing appetite for conversations around this topic.

We’ll be hosting more events in the coming months, led by our specialist expert partners experienced in Consumer, Climate, Health & Life Sciences, Technology & Data, Future of Work and Property.

More details soon, in the meantime, a summary of key takeaways from last week’s Climate event…

Hosted by our Climate Partner, Lee Billingham – an engineering and energy transition leader with a track record of helping organisations across complex energy, maritime and infrastructure environments: lee@pa-capitalpartners.com

Lee introduced the session with an overview of why value is lost in climate ventures and projects, and what we can do about it:

• Climate impact depends on delivery not just ambition.
• Every failed  venture and project is a triple loss: founders, investors and the climate.
• Recurring failures are underestimating execution, over-reliance on climate narrative and fragile supply chains/operational complexity.
• Execution is the bridge from investment ambition to commercial returns and climate goals.

For founders, better outcomes can be achieved by:

• Solving real customer problems.
• Competing on performance, cost, reliability and climate impact.
• Building delivery capability early.
• Validating in the real-world before scaling.

For investors, better outcomes can be achieved by:

• Providing patient, industrial-aware capital.
• Go slow early to go predictably faster alter.
• Support governance, sequencing and early engineering depth.
• Avoid software-style scale expectations – ‘hardtech’ scales differently.

Rachel Gavey led the session on Climate and Sustainability Goals.

Rachel is a Sustainability and Energy Transition Specialist, Co-Founder of Sustain:able – rgavey@rgaveyconsulting.co.uk

Rachel highlighted how climate ambition has to be viewed across the whole project lifecycle – idea, funding and delivery.

• How projects are perceived as ‘viable’ is shifting – projects must be commercially attractive today and aligned with transition pathways, resilient to future regulation and credible in how it will be sourced and delivered.
• Early-visibility of supply chains is important, as can materially change the risk and impact profile of a project.
• Investors are looking at beyond headline climate outcomes to how those outcomes are achieved.
• Many ESG risks actually materialise during delivery, when cost and schedule pressures occur.
• Success is no longer just time, cost and scope – it’s whether a project stands up commercially, environmentally and socially over the long term.
• Intentional early-thinking is often what enables smoother, faster delivery later.
• The common thread is alignment: climate, supply chain and governance considerations need to be built in from the start.

Gerry McGurk led the final session on Climate Venture Project Delivery.

Gerry is a Major Projects Leader and Founder of Rockall, a capital projects client-side consultancy – gjmcgurk@rockall.uk

Gerry spoke about how ideas create opportunity, funding provides resources and projects converts both into outcomes.

• Capital projects are central to building a low carbon energy and infrastructure system, but they are difficult to deliver successfully.
• Climate ventures are, in effect, projects: they are temporary undertakings created to deliver a unique project, service, or result, with a defined start and finish, specific objectives, and constraints on time, cost and scope.
• Climate related projects are often even harder to deliver because they involve first-of-a-kind technology deployment, reliance on external funding, complex value chains, and evolving government policy.
• Three critical, interdependent dimensions must be aligned in a climate project: the big idea (developed and championed by the founder), the funding (reflecting investor and lender interests), and the project itself (which turns the idea and capital into full-scale delivery).
• Too often, the project dimension is missing, underdeveloped, or introduced too late.
• Success depends on starting with the end in mind and maintaining an end-to-end focus through the project lifecycle, identifying and addressing key decisions and risks early.

As our Climate lead partner, Lee is looking forward to engaging with founders, operators and investors in the Climate sector who are serious about execution and ready to strengthen their investability.

If you’re building something that can meaningfully reduce emissions or accelerate sustainability, Lee would welcome a conversation – contact Lee directly at lee@pa-capitalpartners.com