When I started first year mech eng, I assumed climate change was basically an engineering problem with a funding problem. We have the solar panels. We have the wind turbines. We sort of have the batteries. The job is just to build more of them, faster.
A year into that degree, I'm now sitting on the other side of a spreadsheet at a climate tech VC — and I've had to update that view considerably.
The engineering is genuinely hard, and I don't want to dismiss that. But what surprised me is how much of the bottleneck isn't engineering at all. It's permitting. It's grid interconnection queues that stretch years into the future. It's project finance structures that haven't caught up to the risk profile of newer technologies. It's the gap between "this works in a lab" and "this works at 500MW in a country with unstable policy."
There's a concept people use called "technology readiness level" — a scale from 1 (basic research) to 9 (deployed at scale). Most climate VC money goes into companies at TRL 4–7. The challenge is that going from 7 to 9 requires completely different capital: patient, large, comfortable with regulatory risk and long project timelines. That capital exists, but it's scarce relative to the need, and it moves slowly.
Coming from engineering, I used to think the filter for "which climate solutions win" was technical. Better efficiency, lower cost, cleaner chemistry. That still matters — but it's not sufficient. The companies that actually get things built are the ones that understand the full system they're operating in: the permitting environment, the capital stack, the off-take market, the policy regime. The best founders I've met aren't just great engineers. They're people who understand exactly why their technology is hard to deploy, and have a specific plan for each of those barriers.
I don't have a neat conclusion here. I'm still figuring out what this means for what I want to do — hence switching to commerce next year, hence being interested in the finance side of this problem rather than the engineering side. But it's shifted how I think about climate work: from "how do we make better technology" to "how do we build systems — financial, regulatory, political — that can actually absorb and deploy the technology we already have."
That second question feels harder, and more important. And it has a lot fewer people working on it from an engineering starting point, which seems like it might matter.