Heard Around The Grove
By Blake Newcomer • March 9, 2026
This week we're announcing a special series conducted with Cleantech Group to break down their Global Cleantech 100 report across four deep dives. Each conversation gives you a working framework for a corner of the climate economy: Investment Landscape, Critical Minerals, Energy, Earth Observation.
This is a student-loan-debt-free-university-grade rundown of Cleantech. Get it while it's hot!
Anthony DeOrsey, Research Manager — The Cleantech Investment Landscape
"Cleantech is struggling" is a misread. Strip out the 2021–22 aberration and the underlying trend is still clearly upward.
- Cleantech is a theme, not an industry. Otherwise you can get caught inaccurately pattern-matching. No one wants that
- Grow / Flow / Slow framework: How Cleantech Group sees the promise of certain themes & technologies
- Adaptation and resilience is the most underpopulated opportunity relative to the actual market size
Diana Rasner, Group Lead for Materials — Critical Minerals
The Western world largely chose to hand off its critical minerals supply chain to China, and is now urgently trying to rebuild it. The bottleneck is midstream refining, where China controls roughly 80% (YES, EIGHT-ZERO) of global capacity.
- Upstream: find where to mine
- Midstream: process rock into metals
- Downstream: Final processing, Battery recycling, more!
- Shout out: Mangrove Lithium is producing battery precursor materials without the China leg of the journey entirely, using direct lithium extraction to refine on-site
- Shout out: Nth Cycle's modular electrochemical units scale incrementally with the ecosystem rather than committing to a giant factory before the feedstock exists
Zainab Gilani, Energy and Power Associate — The Energy Industry
Every energy technology maps to three buckets: Generation, Grid Management, and Storage. Only then can we begin to talk about anything else.
- Generation: generate the electrons
- Grid management: move the electrons
- Storage: because generation and demand don't run on the same schedules, store the extra electrons for future use.
Let's pause to appreciate the simplicity of that framework. What a breath of fresh air.
- China deployed roughly 300 GW of solar in a single year; lithium-ion battery costs have fallen from ~$150/kWh in 2021–22 to ~$70/kWh for stationary storage by 2025–26
- Sodium-ion batteries are the chemistry to watch: sodium is abundant, manufacturing infrastructure overlaps with existing lithium-ion production, and the fire risk profile is more benign
Sunena Gupta, Lead Analyst — Earth Observation
Earth observation breaks into two buckets: Data Acquisition and Data Analytics. The companies winning are the ones collapsing the gap between them.
- Data Acquisition: Get high quality data from satellites or sensors. Innovations within those technologies is exciting
- Data Analytics: Take that data and get to the right decision asap
Another breath to appreciate the simplicity. Ah.
- SAR for floods, hyperspectral for minerals, thermal infrared for wildfire: satellite type follows use case, not the other way around
- Edge computing moves processing onto the satellite itself, compressing observation-to-action time from forty minutes to near real-time — Sunena calls this a future table stake
Feedback
Have any thoughts about what you'd like to see? Let's build together
Roundtables
Curated, pitch-free roundtables that spark real collaboration between and your prospects. GTM solution for long and complex sales cycles.
Cohort-based event series
Small groups (10-15 people) + industry expert speakers + 4-5 targeted sessions = accelerated career development. Want to participate or present? Reply to this email.
Podcast Guests
Would you or anyone you know like to be a guest on The Grove? Reply to this email to get the conversation started.
With love, Blake
See you next week!
Member discussion: