The Four Eras
Every era of climate investment has been misdiagnosed while it was happening, and the misdiagnosis was never harmless: it decided how the next era's capital behaved. Nowhere more consequentially than in Europe and Germany, where each era's bill arrived in full — the solar industry lost in the first, the Energiewende champions strained in the second, the growth-stage insolvencies of the third.
Three eras in, the pattern is readable, and it reduces to one line: an era is not defined by its technology. It is defined by whether the capital structure, the policy regime, and the operating model are aligned with the physics of the asset class. Every era so far broke on a misalignment nobody was measuring.
Era 1.0 supposedly failed on technology.
It didn't. Solyndra's chemistry worked; Ivanpah's concentrating solar worked. What killed the first wave was a cost curve: silicon solar fell roughly 85% between 2006 and 2012, driven by Chinese state-backed manufacturing scale, and the deflation reversed the strategic premise inside the fund holding period. The era had been priced as the next semiconductor cycle. It turned out to be a commodity manufacturing cycle, where the winner is whoever has the cheapest electricity, the deepest subsidies, and the largest fab.
Europe did not watch that from a distance. Germany lived it first and hardest: the EEG's feed-in tariff built the world's leading solar industry, and Q-Cells was the largest cell producer on earth in 2008 — insolvent by April 2012, sold to Hanwha, with SolarWorld following in 2017 and an industry of well over a hundred thousand jobs hollowed out inside a decade. The subsidy created the market, the market created the champion, and the cost curve took both. A subsidy-built demand curve and a state-scaled supply curve are two different games — and China was playing the second.
The era's best investors were not fools. Kleiner Perkins turned $1bn into $3bn on selected bets; Tesla, Enphase, and Nest all emerged from exactly this period. Both things are true: individual conviction produced winners, and the aggregate pool lost half its capital. The differentiating variable was never technical soundness — it was capital-structure compatibility. Seven-year fund mechanics applied to companies that needed twelve to fifteen years and billions in capex. The vehicle was wrong for the physics.
Era 2.0 supposedly failed on policy.
Wrong again, and this misreading is the expensive one. By any industrial measure 2.0 succeeded enormously: annual global low-carbon investment rose from roughly $50bn in 2005 to $2 trillion in 2024. Solar, storage, EVs, and wind crossed cost parity in most markets. And Europe built as much of it as anyone — Ørsted turned a fossil utility into the world's leading offshore wind developer, German renewables crossed half of national electricity generation, and the industry produced real exits at real prices: Sonnen to Shell in 2019, Viessmann's climate division to Carrier in 2023 for €12bn, a heat pump business valued like the strategic industry it had become.
What failed was one assumption inside the business models: that policy support, once granted, persists. Unit economics of the 2014–2023 vintage carried an implicit ten-year policy-continuity assumption, and that assumption is now visibly false on three continents at once. The industries are intact; the durability assumption is dead. Those are different failure modes, and conflating them — "cleantech failed again" — is how capital learns the wrong lesson twice.
Era 3.0 had everything.
The capital, the policy frameworks, the demand — and it produced the insolvency record the sector is still absorbing: Eigensonne, Compleo, Northvolt, Britishvolt, Lilium, Volocopter. The market grew and the scaling companies died, and both are one story. The growth landed with actors already past the execution threshold — state-backed champions, mature utilities, established developers. The failures landed in the band between: the Series B–D companies that were supposed to become the next champions. Zoom out and you see a boom. Zoom in and you see a graveyard. Same picture, two altitudes.
Underneath sits the mechanism no operating plan of the era was built for: demand stopped being a function of economics. The German household that panic-bought a heat pump after February 2022 was not buying LCOE — it was buying independence from a hostile gas supplier. German heat pump sales hit a record 356,000 units in 2023 and roughly halved in 2024. Same product, same economics, same climate: the households cancelled not because electricity prices moved, but because lobbying softened the Heating Act and the signal of state commitment changed. The signal beat the spreadsheet.
Which makes the era's favourite diagnosis — "these teams can't execute" — a category error. This was the era the sector finally attracted the operators it had always wanted, with every tool Era 1.0 lacked in its best version ever. Better tools than 2.0, better teams than any era before it — and the worst growth-stage failure record of all three. When accomplished teams fail simultaneously across six unrelated segments, the explanation is not a talent collapse. The environment had become harder to read than the available instruments could measure — and execution is simply the layer where every unmeasured force lands.
Era 4.0 — Resilience Tech — is not the third under a new name.
The difference is testable: labels move marketing; era shifts move capital. What is already visible is capital moving — the NATO Innovation Fund deploying actively, EIF resilience allocations expanding, dedicated European resilience-tech funds appearing before the category even has a settled name. And the largest funding instrument in EU history already carries the era's name: the Recovery and Resilience Facility, €723.8bn at the centre of NextGenerationEU. Europe's public capital wrote "resilience" on the door years before the private market named the category.
It is also the first era in which the capital owner and the asset class actually fit: long-horizon holders, multi-decade vehicles, robustness priced in from day one. But its success is conditional, not assured. Eras are not survived. They are selected — by every deployment decision that either read the alignment first, or didn't.
The full essay on Under Load goes further: the complete evidence base — the European casualty roster, the Northvolt anatomy, the demand oscillator, the six failure modes of Era 4.0 — with twenty sources.