Anthony Milewski, The Oregon Group founder, writes for The Entrepreneur
Clean-tech startups are hitting a scaling wall because material supply, not technology or capital, is now the real constraint.
Key Takeaways
- The energy transition is industrial, not digital, and moves at the pace of physical supply.
- Just-in-time procurement fails when critical materials are scarce, slow and geopolitically constrained.
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.
