Cleantech Startup Failures

9,000 chargers deployed but couldn't charge its way to profitability.

Turning waste into energy — and $1.2B in value into ashes.

The carbon NASDAQ that watched its entire asset class evaporate in 18 months.

Battery supply chain traceability startup died when regulation it depended on was delayed.

Promised to charge your EV in 5 minutes. Took 12 years and $200M to prove it couldn't scale.

Cooling air couldn't cool the burn rate on this energy storage pioneer.

Bill Gates-backed produce freshness startup wilted when food supply chains stabilized.

Hydrogen's supply chain innovator collapsed when green hydrogen economics imploded.

Ocean carbon removal startup that sank under regulatory and market headwinds.

Australia's most efficient electrolyzer startup ran dry when the hydrogen economy stalled.

Brilliant satellite tech, wrong underlying asset: when the forest credits burned, so did Pachama.

Science-based carbon advisory met the brutal reality of clients canceling sustainability budgets.

Nineteen years of textile recycling R&D ended in administration, not revolution.

Built the Moody's for carbon credits just as the entire market stopped buying carbon credits.

Overstated lithium recovery rates by 33 points — Argonne's tests killed the Series B.

The carbon API startup that API'd its way into a market that no longer existed.

A $380M green hydrogen bet ended when institutional capital fled the sector entirely.

Mushroom packaging pioneer found that fungi couldn't outcompete styrofoam on cost.

The waste-tech unicorn that SPAC'd its way to bankruptcy in just 14 months.

Brazil's carbon marketplace dream collapsed when its own forest projects faked the data.

AI lithium exploration with a 34% false positive rate — a fatal error in critical minerals.

$450M and 20 years couldn't make garbage-to-fuel commercially viable.

Retroactive carbon credit invalidation wiped out a mining offset platform overnight.

Tried to be the Franco-Nevada of carbon just as carbon entered a nuclear winter.

The $1B carbon empire that built its fortune on credits that never existed.

Grid-scale batteries deployed, grid-scale software failures undeployed the company.

Smart battery software outsmarted by OEMs building it themselves.

Nineteen years building consumer carbon trust, destroyed in months by its parent company's fraud.

Clean energy financing pioneer killed by the Fed's interest rate sledgehammer.

Dynamic electricity pricing's poster child became a cautionary tale after Winter Storm Uri.

A SPAC-fueled home battery dream that shattered on supply chain reality.

26 years of carbon offset history ended when Jamie Dimon decided the climate wasn't urgent enough.

Fish-safe turbines that couldn't survive the slow current of US hydro permitting.

The DAC pioneer that got absorbed by the oil industry it was meant to fight.

Britain's bioplastics pioneer dissolved when cost reality met sustainability ambition.

Clean energy home financing pioneer undone by predatory lending regulations it helped invite.

One government policy cancellation wiped out a decade of community solar investment.

Ghana's clean cooking startup couldn't price its way out of poverty-market economics.

The peer-to-peer energy grid that regulators never let fly.

IPO'd at €180M on green energy. The energy crisis turned their model inside-out.

Plastic-to-fuel startup burned out when pyrolysis economics met contaminated reality.

Clever lampposts, fatal procurement cycles — the EV charging startup killed by council bureaucracy.

Brilliant energy disaggregation tech that couldn't hit the accuracy bar utilities demanded.

Shell's virtual power plant bet got crushed by a challenger energy giant.

Shell's EV charging bet dissolved into a rebrand — another startup identity erased by Big Oil.

The plastic recycling unicorn that Hindenburg Research exposed as vaporware.

Flexible solar that flexed brilliantly in the lab, but snapped in the market.

Enterprise energy compliance SaaS squeezed out by Schneider and Siemens behemoths.

Canada's DERMS champion couldn't scale fast enough to survive its own investors.

Smart meter analytics that couldn't survive the pilot-to-contract valley of death.

Berlin smart meter analytics startup starved by Germany's own delayed rollout law.

Peer-to-peer energy trading crushed by the regulatory middleware it couldn't escape.

The solar gadget that promised the sun and delivered nothing.

The solid-state transformer dream that melted under hardware cost reality.

25 years and $300M couldn't bridge the lab-to-factory gap for lithium-sulfur batteries.

Dutch energy tax rules killed peer-to-peer electricity trading before it could prove itself.

Demand response's biggest name got blindsided by the regulation it helped create.

Energy storage software trailblazer acqui-hired for its IP before the market fully matured.

The Airbnb of solar panels hit a regulatory wall in 21 states simultaneously.

Off-grid solar pioneer ran out of capital building energy access for rural Africa

The UK's fastest-growing renewable energy supplier entered special administration with 1.7M customers when wholesale gas prices surged 400% and its fixed-rate model collapsed.

Blockchain-incentivized air quality monitoring network stalled when Algorand price collapsed

Obama visited the Ener1 battery factory in 2011 — one month later the primary customer (Think EV) filed bankruptcy, and six months after that Ener1 filed Chapter 11 with $118M in DOE loans

Gothenburg's green acrylic startup couldn't scale bio-based plastics economics to commercial viability

Kenyan electric motorcycle startup stalled as battery swap infrastructure proved too expensive to build

Chilean recycling marketplace unable to monetize civic engagement into a viable business