Recorded 22 February 2026

Delivering the energy transition increasingly depends on the inputs required: materials availability, processing capacity, & the industrial policy that determines what actually gets built.

Rising demand for critical minerals is driving supply-security concerns, strategic stockpiles, recycling scale-up, & copper innovation. It’s also increasingly shaping industrial investment decisions, particularly in Europe. This week’s headlines illustrate that:

· Policy signal - Project Vault: The US proposed a strategic critical minerals reserve with $12B of financing to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, mainly China. It could work if treated as a resilience stockpile, but $2B of private investment signals returns expectations, which may push it to act like a market instrument not insurance.

· Rare earths - geopolitics most concentrated & recycling as a hedge: Cyclic Materials $75M Series C to scale rare earth recycling & diversify supply beyond primary mining. RE magnet supply chains remain highly concentrated, especially in heavy’s where China has almost a complete monopoly & has tightened export controls since 2023.

· But in battery recycling, a pivot: Redwood Materials $425M Series E, for a growing stationary energy storage business using recovered & second-life batteries. Originally focused on circular battery supply chains, the move reflects tighter recycling margins, rising storage demand & benefits of vertical integration.

The story extends to copper, the metal of electrification. Without significant new supply coming online soon, net-zero risks being short-circuited as it’s highly conductive, durable & recyclable, with few grid-scale substitutes:

· Cu processing: Two biomining deals - Transition Metals Solutions ($6M seed) & Endolith ($13.5M Series A) to improve Cu recovery from lower-grade ores using microbes. The promise; lower energy & access to stranded resources. Challenges; speed, control & industrial scale-up.

· Cu recycling: Recuperate Metals $6M seed to mechanically upgrade Cu scrap & industrial waste into higher-quality secondary feedstocks. If scalable, it could accelerate capacity with lower capex & energy intensity, but impurities, input variability & qualification timelines remain hurdles.

· Cu substitution: DexMat $5M seed to scale production of carbon-nanotube conductive fibre. It won’t replace copper broadly, but could be used in weight-sensitive or high-performance niches like aerospace or satellites.

Materials pressure doesn’t stop at clean-tech supply chains, it’s reshaping heavy industry as carbon policy tightens:

· European steel: ArcelorMittal confirmed a €1.3B EAF project at Dunkirk - currently its only new-build investment. Using scrap steel, DRI/HBI, & some hot metal, it cuts emissions 3x cf. the traditional BF-BOF approach.

· Policy driver - CBAM now operational: Europe is extending carbon pricing to imports making C intensity a real competitiveness factor. It’s creating investable conditions for industrial decarbonisation by narrowing the cost gap between EU producers & higher-emissions imports - favouring lower-emissions production, particularly scrap-heavy EAF steel backed by low-C power.

Recorded Feb 6th 2026. Access to electricity and speed to power remain defining challenges, but the deeper issue emerging is how to ensure deliverable capacity at the exact moment demand peaks, which is increasingly critical for grid reliability.

With transmission projects often taking a decade, substation upgrades costly and contentious, and new generation facing interconnection delays, this week’s deal headlines centre on a core question: how do you create dependable capacity without simply building more generation?

The answers are emerging in layers - from grid-scale storage to distributed assets, orchestration software, market consolidation, and policy reform:

1. Grid-Scale Storage: Terralayr secured $72M in project-finance debt to deploy front-of-the-meter battery systems, highlighting grid-scale storage as one of the fastest deployable reliability resources. Batteries are increasingly treated as predictable infrastructure assets delivering dispatchable capacity without new power plants.
2. Distributed Capacity: Lunar Energy raised $232M in growth capital to scale residential battery deployment. Homes are becoming active grid participants, with distributed storage transitioning from backup resilience products to scalable capacity assets aggregated into VPPs. his shift places flexibility at the grid edge, helping defer costly infrastructure upgrades while improving utilisation of existing assets.
3. Orchestration Layer: WeaveGrid expanded its DISCO (Distribution-Integrated System Capacity Orchestration) platform beyond EV charging to include residential batteries through a partnership with SolarEdge. As distributed assets scale, software coordination is becoming critical, making flexibility visible, controllable, and dispatchable for utilities.
4. Market Validation: Storm Fern provided a real-world test of how storage, distributed assets, and market signals performed under stress, and at scale. Storage and demand response played a central role in maintaining reliability, with volatility increasingly tied to short flexibility gaps rather than prolonged generation shortages.
5. Market Consolidation: NRG’s acquisition of CPower as part of a $12B transaction with LS Power, signals incumbent adoption of flexibility as core infrastructure. The deal adds roughly 6 GW of commercial and industrial demand-response capacity, effectively expanding virtual power plant capabilities within mainstream utility operations.
6. Policy Signal: Virginia passed the first U.S. legislation explicitly focused on grid utilisation, requiring regulators and utilities to measure how effectively existing infrastructure is used before approving new buildout.

Then we move on to discuss:

• Data Centres & Speed-to-Power: Over 50 GW of on-site generation, much of it gas-fired, is being built ahead of grid connections, raising concerns about emissions lock-in.
• Overbuild vs Grid Integration: Off-grid renewables require significant overbuild reinforcing the continued value of interconnected grids that aggregate flexibility across regions
• New Procurement Models: Mechanisms like CTTs and BYOC allow large loads to contract power directly while leveraging distributed flexibility, accelerating deployment without full co-location.