Lauren Pamma had been at the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit for around 24 hours and had not heard anyone say the word hydrogen.
A year earlier, at the same event, the hydrogen or EV question was still live enough to fill panels. This time it had gone. She allows that she may have been in the wrong rooms, and that there were e-fuels conversations the day before that she did not attend. But everyone she heard was talking about electrification, and she calls the shift encouraging.
What replaced the hydrogen argument was a narrower one about chemistry: solid state against sodium against lithium-ion. Pamma, who runs the transport programme at the Green Finance Institute, was more interested in the tone of that argument than in its content.
The winner no longer needs picking
Investors had been holding back, in her account, because nobody could say which technology was going to win.
That nervousness has largely gone, and the message she heard several times at the summit explains why. It does not matter which one wins, because there will be a need for all of them and a need for investment in all of them.
The stranded asset fear has faded along with it. Solid-state cells are coming, but enough of the technology in current production transfers across that money going in now stays relevant. Investors are not, as she puts it, left with stranded assets.
Solid state is still the one everyone likes the sound of. "It's like this mythical thing in the future, isn't it?"
The Inflation Reduction Act is the harder problem
On the US legislation Pamma is blunt. It has made investment in the UK very challenging.
UK-based companies tell her they are finding it easier to attract investment overseas, and that they are looking at the United States as the place to expand rather than at home. If the UK does not come out with a response quickly, she sees a real risk to the automotive sector here.
Her framing of what a response should aim at is not the one usually offered. Britain is never going to compete with China on scale, or lead the market on battery production, and she says so without hedging. The useful question is which capability the country actually needs, and how to attract it and build the supply chain around it.
The jobs at stake set the size of the problem. The whole of the UK automotive sector is around 800,000 jobs. The specialist automotive sector, on its own, is still 20,000. That smaller number is where she puts the emphasis, because it is where early-stage technology gets brought through and made commercially viable before anything reaches mass market.
Investors want the ends of the chain, not the middle
Appetite is not spread evenly. In the conversations the Green Finance Institute has been having, mining and raw materials at one end and recycling at the other draw the most interest. Cell assembly and the midstream processes attract less, treated as the more commoditised part of the business.
The institute is arguing against that split. Opportunities run along the entire supply chain rather than sitting at gigafactories alone, and building one takes everything from SMEs to large companies: chemicals, metals, a range of other segments, each with a different risk and return profile attached.
Britishvolt's collapse complicated the pitch. It definitely spooked people, Pamma says. But those who read into what actually happened came to a narrower conclusion, which was that the problem lay in the organisation and how it was managed rather than in the absence of a product. When the institute spoke to people, the company had a battery that was apparently potentially going to be good, was being tested, and had some customers. The failure has not been taken as evidence that the industry cannot be invested in.
Two products, close to pilot
The first is for charging infrastructure: a utilisation-linked loan, where repayments track how much the charge point is actually used. The point of tying the two together is to get chargers into places that are not commercially viable now but should be later.
The second is a battery investment facility, and it addresses a gap Pamma describes precisely. The existing UK grant funding is good, and it has brought companies out of universities and started them scaling. Then those companies hit a valley of death when they try to commercialise and take the technology to the next level.
So the argument to government is to use the capital it already has, not as grants, but in a way that crowds in private investment. Government said in the green finance strategy it published in March that it wants to work with the institute on blended finance solutions, and Pamma is hoping batteries become the pilot.
What the money should look like is the open question, and it is being put to the people who would have to match it. An investor roundtable in a couple of weeks will ask the private sector directly what shape government support needs to take before they will invest in the sector. Should government take the first loss. Should it guarantee part of the investment. The answers go back into government with a request for permission to run the pilot.
This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.