Fabian Heilemann

Energy Tech 2.0: Price and Resilience, Not Purpose

Fabian Heilemann’s core message was that energy tech’s next wave will not be won through purpose-led purchasing or a “green premium,” but through lower costs, resilience, and greater control over energy. The session opened with the framing that Europeans pay twice as much for energy as Americans and still experienced a blackout across the Iberian Peninsula, setting up the question of whether energy investing needs moral purpose or a broader rethink. Heilemann then explained that his own shift toward climate and energy investing came after becoming a parent around 2017–2018, when he and his brother began focusing on how technology entrepreneurship and investing could contribute to abundant clean energy. Heilemann argued that the market environment has changed sharply from 2020–2022, when policymakers, corporate CEOs, and politicians were more willing to integrate ethically or morally driven decarbonization agendas into budgets and product strategies. In today’s market, he said, “if you ask for a green premium… you can go home,” and described “climate moralism” as dead. He attributed this partly to the difficulty of changing human habits and partly to political shifts, including Trump’s return and the rise of an anti-woke, anti-climate-denial movement. At the same time, he stressed that the physics of the climate crisis have not changed and that the economic effects are becoming more visible, including disaster losses that have more than doubled in ten years and uninsured climate and extreme-weather losses that are becoming relevant at GDP level. The talk then reframed the next climate and energy movement as “egocentric” rather than moral: people are motivated by heat, wildfire risk, fuel prices, monthly bills, wealth conservation, and resilience. Heilemann noted that roughly 77% of global GHG, CO2 and equivalent emissions are directly or indirectly connected to energy, across electricity, heat, industrial steam and hot air, mobility, shipping, aviation, and areas where sustainable fuels may be required. He also highlighted rising AI-related electricity demand, saying data centers consume about twice Poland’s electricity today and are scaling toward one Japan by 2030. Geopolitically, he pointed to Ukraine, the rapid construction of the Wilhelmshaven LNG terminal, inflation spikes, and the Iran war as lessons that can shift regulation, pragmatism, and public perception. For investors, Heilemann summarized the practical approach as “follow the electron.” He mapped opportunities across upstream raw materials, nearshoring and circularity; energy generation such as fusion, space solar, and enhanced geothermal; storage, decentralization, resilience, and bidirectional EV charging; transmission, grid analytics, dynamic line rating, and microgrids; and optimization through front-of-meter and behind-the-meter flexibility and energy management systems. He closed with the idea of a “European Electro State” that breaks dependence on fossil energy and structurally unstable producing states. While climate tech investment had fallen after the 2021–2022 peaks, he cited a rebound to 6,000,000,000 globally, 55% up from last year, and concluded that climate tech must be embedded in market logic: customers buy lower cost, higher resilience, and more energy control, not decarbonization in isolation.