Making Clean Tech Bankable: Industrial Heat
The hosts:
George Harris, RMI
Daniel Galis, Renewable Thermal Collaborative (RTC)
What is this Ripple about?
What happens when a climate technology works, but nobody knows how to finance the next 20 projects?
Across climate tech, promising technologies can get stuck between proving they work and deploying at scale — proven enough to deploy, but still too unfamiliar for commercial finance. Industrial heat offers a timely example. Heat pumps and thermal energy storage are advancing quickly, but projects can still stall because customers, developers, lenders and insurers are being asked to navigate unfamiliar technologies, contracts, and risks.
One potential answer is Heat-as-a-Service. Instead of asking an industrial company to buy and operate new equipment itself, a specialist provider can finance, own and manage the system while the customer simply pays for the heat it uses. It sounds simple, but making the economics work for everyone involved is not.
This interactive discussion will explore what it will take to turn one-off clean technology projects into repeatable, financeable investments — using industrial heat as a real-world test case.
Why this topic timely or urgent in 2026
Companies may want to cut emissions and energy costs, but clean energy projects compete for capital with investments in their core businesses. Meanwhile, many climate technologies are moving beyond proving that they work to the harder challenge of deploying them again and again.
Developers can take those projects off customers' balance sheets — but doing so can create new financing challenges.
So how do we break the deadlock?
Key questions or challenges being explored
If the technology works, what is actually stopping the deal?
Who should ultimately own the technology — the industrial company, the developer, or someone else?
Who should carry performance risk when a technology is proven but still unfamiliar to lenders?
What data would make lenders and insurers more comfortable with the risk?
What needs to change to make the next 20 projects dramatically easier to finance than the first?
The key tension or debate at the heart of this discussion
The paradox: To on or to off-balance sheet – that is the question.
Heat-as-a-Service can remove the upfront cost and complexity that stops industrial companies from adopting new technology. But shifting ownership to specialist developers can also shift more of the risk to specialist developers with less access to affordable capital.
Can we design a model that works for the customer, the developer, and the financier — and can be repeated at scale?
Who would get the most value from attending this Ripple?
You don't need to be a project-finance expert.
We're looking for founders and developers trying to finance projects; industrial companies interested in deploying clean technologies; VCs helping portfolio companies cross the commercialisation gap; and lenders, infrastructure investors, insurers and others interested in figuring out how promising technologies become investable assets.
Bring a deal, a financing challenge, a question — or simply a perspective.