Welcome to the latest edition of FairGreen where we discuss LDES commercialization in the context of the energy trilemma.

This newsletter is packed with insights on LDES manufacturing, financing, deployment and bankability.

Q2 2026 brought the commercial operation date (COD) of the Sopte Hybrid Power Plant project (Technology provider: CellCube) in Sopte, Hungary. Antora’s Big Stone and Hydrogen Pro’s ACES projects are currently undergoing commissioning. Here are the 10 major metrics tracked from 1978 to Q2 2026.

Technology Bankability index (TBI) is a composite score that measures the readiness of an LDES technology for debt financing, a source of capital crucial for deployment at scale.

The 3 inputs to the score are:

DMI measures operational maturity and commercial traction of an LDES technology. Operational maturity and commercial traction are functions of projects in operation and projects under construction, respectively. Projects under development are considered too speculative to be a reliable indicator.

For each category of projects, 3 metrics namely, deployed capacity (scale of adoption), geographical distribution (robustness across environments) and project count (repeatability and customer diversity) are scored. In essence, the 3 factors answer the following questions:

IVI measures the degree of risk assurance of a product by evaluating whether the product has obtained independent engineering and technology review reports. These reports also serve as inputs into the underwriting processes of risk transfer instruments and financing packages.

PAI measures the strength of risk transfer which mitigates the risk of insolvency thus improving the bankability of product performance guarantees. PAI ensures performance guarantees have a reliable backstop typically through a technology provider’s healthy corporate balance sheet or technology performance insurance (TPI). TPI is particularly useful for early-stage technology providers whose balance sheet strength might underperform the set creditworthiness threshold.

DMI, IVI and PAI are converted into TBI through weighted logarithmic functions.

The individual scores of each metric is normalized to a 0-100% score. Additionally, the DMI functions have the following upper bounds:

IVI and PAI are binary scores in which each instrument is either present (100%) or absent (0%). The table below shows the weighting and weighting logic of each metric.

Logarithmic scaling is used to calculate the 3 scores to show diminishing marginal validation, that is, each additional unit of validation provides less incremental certainty than the one before it.

DMI is scored on a 0-100% scale and the results interpreted as follows:

DMI is a technology provider-level score as opposed to a product-level score. This is because the more mature technology providers tend to deploy various generations of their product(s) across projects and the deployed product generation is not always identified.

TBI has a few weak points which are listed in the table below with their corresponding mitigation measures.

The LDES Tracker currently contains over 200 operational LDES projects supplied by more than 50 different technology providers. The projects are deployed across 8 major LDES markets including China, USA and Spain.

For the purpose of the TBI, an LDES project is defined as follows:

Find the full list in addition to individual DMI, IVI and PAI scores in the LDES Tracker. The tracker is downloadable which allows you to modify weightings as you prefer.

Of the top 10 LDES technology providers:

Based on the score interpretation scale provided in the methodology section, the top 10 technology providers fit in the following categories:

The number of active suppliers per technology stands as follows:

Supplier diversity is a signal of supply chain development which is crucial for manufacturing and deployment scale up. The rest of the technologies are still dominated by single suppliers.

Commercial deployment validation is key to moving LDES from early markets to mainstream markets.

Technology providers are creating in-house development platforms as an alternative go-to-market strategy. Instead of relying on equipment sale, which poses high risk to the buyer, the new business model assumes almost all technology risk thereby lowering the risk exposure of the customer who comes in as a project offtaker. The downside to the technology provider is the elevated risk exposure due to increased capital requirements for project development.

TBI provides a strong indicator of the level of technology risk which varies inversely with debt financing prospects. The technology providers farthest along the path of bankability are molten salt TES companies such as Sener and flow battery companies such as Invinity.

The most impactful levers for a majority of the reviewed technology providers to improve their TBI are availability of risk assurance (independent validation) and risk transfer (performance assurance) instruments.

Remember that TBI is useful as a screening tool and a comprehensive assessment of technology risk can only be obtained from technical due diligence firms like DNV.

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Until next time :)