For the past decade, clean-tech entrepreneurship has been driven by a powerful assumption: that if the technology works and the capital is available, scale will follow. Better batteries, smarter grids, electric vehicles and cleaner power generation would naturally accelerate as innovation compounded.

What many founders are now discovering — often too late — is that the real constraint isn’t software, funding or even regulation. It’s materials.

The energy transition is not a digital transformation. It’s an industrial one. And industrial systems move at the pace of geology, permitting and physical supply chains — not pitch decks and product roadmaps.

The transition was planned for demand, not supply

Global decarbonization targets assumed that critical commodities — copper, lithium, nickel, graphite, rare earths, uranium — would simply be available when needed. That assumption shaped everything from EV adoption forecasts to grid-expansion plans.

But commodity supply does not respond like demand. You can’t spin up a copper mine or a processing facility in 18 months. Most take a decade or more from discovery to production. Years of underinvestment, coupled with rising geopolitical friction and permitting complexity, have left supply structurally behind demand.

The result is a widening gap between climate ambition and physical reality.

For entrepreneurs building hardware-dependent businesses, this gap is no longer abstract. It shows up as delayed projects, rising input costs, missed delivery timelines and margin pressure that no amount of software optimization can fix.

Sign up for the Money Makers newsletter to get weekly, expert-backed tips to help you earn more money — from real people who founded and scaled successful businesses. Get it in your inbox.

Why just-in-time procurement broke down

Modern startups were raised on just-in-time thinking. Inventory was a liability. Capital efficiency was paramount. If something was needed, it could be sourced globally at the right price.

That model worked in a world of surplus capacity and frictionless trade. It fails in a world where:

• Supply chains are concentrated in a handful of jurisdictions
• Export controls and industrial policy shape access
• New capacity takes years, not quarters, to come online

Just-in-time procurement optimizes for efficiency. The energy transition requires resilience.

Founders who treat critical materials like interchangeable inputs are discovering that price volatility is not the real risk — availability is.

The real innovation gap is materials planning

When clean-tech ventures struggle to scale, the default explanation is often execution: not enough capital, slow permitting or policy uncertainty. Rarely is the question asked early enough:

Do we actually have a realistic plan to secure the materials our business depends on?

Materials strategy has historically been treated as a downstream function—something procurement handles after the product is designed. In today’s environment, that mindset is backward.

Access to commodities is not an operational detail. It is a strategic variable that shapes what can be built, where it can be built and how fast it can scale.

The companies gaining an edge are the ones that recognize this early. They are engaging suppliers upstream, locking in long-term supply, designing products around realistic material constraints and treating procurement as a core part of strategy rather than a back-office function.

Demand is easy. Supply is hard.

One uncomfortable truth about the energy transition is that demand has been easier to create than supply.

Incentives, subsidies and consumer enthusiasm can drive rapid adoption. But mines, refineries and infrastructure expand slowly. Capital markets, meanwhile, have often favored asset-light business models, leaving the most material-intensive parts of the system underfunded.

This imbalance creates a risk that the transition becomes slower, more expensive and more uneven than planned — not because the technology failed, but because the physical foundations were never adequately secured.

For entrepreneurs, this means timelines built purely on market adoption curves are increasingly unreliable unless they are matched with credible supply assumptions.

How founders can turn procurement into an advantage

Entrepreneurs don’t need to become mining experts, but they do need to rethink how materials fit into their business models. A few principles matter:

• Start materials planning early. Before scaling production, founders should identify which inputs are truly critical, where supply comes from and what realistic lead times look like under different scenarios.
• Prioritize access over spot pricing. In constrained markets, long-term relationships and contractual security often matter more than short-term cost optimization.
• Design for flexibility. Products that can adapt to alternative materials or suppliers are inherently more resilient than those locked into a single constrained input.
• Assume volatility is structural. Commodity markets tied to the energy transition are likely to remain volatile for years. Planning for stability is the risky assumption.

None of this fits neatly into a traditional startup playbook—but neither does building hardware at global scale in a resource-constrained world.

From efficiency to control

The next phase of clean-tech entrepreneurship will favor companies that optimize not just for speed and capital efficiency, but for control over critical inputs.

This doesn’t mean abandoning innovation or global trade. It means acknowledging that physical systems still matter — and that access to materials is becoming a defining competitive advantage.

The energy transition will not be won by the companies with the best slide decks or the most elegant code. It will be led by those who understand that the future still runs on commodities — and plan for that reality from the start.