The other week I had the privilege of moderating the “Bridging Silicon Valley Innovation to Central Valley Scale” panel at the inaugural Capital Valleys Forum, a flagship event of Sacramento Climate Week 2026 held at UC Davis’s Aggie Square campus.

I’ve been in rooms where founders pitch technology that could reshape how we farm, move water, and power rural communities. I’ve also been in rooms where growers and water managers explain exactly why that technology never made it past the demo. What made the Capital Valleys Forum different is that those people were finally in the same room — and the conversation was structured to actually go somewhere.

The Translation Problem Is Real

The panel I moderated focused on a challenge I see every day at CleanStart: the gap between a promising clean technology pilot and a deployment template that Central Valley agricultural operators can realistically adopt. It’s not that the innovation doesn’t exist. It’s that the path from a funded demo to a repeatable, bankable project is full of friction — procurement complexity, permitting delays, workforce gaps, and a chronic lack of intermediaries who speak both languages.

That’s the work CleanStart does. We sit at that translation layer, connecting clean energy entrepreneurs with the mentorship, market access, and regional networks they need to move from concept to scale. So moderating this panel felt like a natural extension of conversations we’ve been having for years — just with more of the right people at the table.

What Stood Out

The Forum was capped at 80 participants, and you could feel it. This wasn’t a conference where you sit in the back and check email. Six working panels ran through the day, covering everything from pricing under instability and resilience-linked valuation to workforce pipelines and de-risked capital structures. Every session was built to produce something concrete — investable signals, partnership commitments, execution playbooks.

A few things stuck with me from our panel specifically. First, the appetite from Central Valley operators for structured technology adoption pathways is far greater than most Silicon Valley founders realize. Second, Sacramento’s position as the policy capital gives us a unique advantage in packaging climate solutions for export — not just within California, but nationally. And third, the role of regional intermediaries and accelerators in de-risking deployment for both sides of the equation came up repeatedly. That’s validating for the work we do at CleanStart, and it sharpened my thinking about where we can push harder.

Looking Ahead

The Capital Valleys Forum was organized by Cool Climate Collective, they built something genuinely useful on the first try. Aggie Square was the right venue — two miles from the Capitol, designed for exactly this kind of applied, cross-sector work.

I’m already looking forward to next year. The connections made on May 8 are already turning into follow-up conversations, and I expect several of them to produce real partnerships in the months ahead. If the first Forum proved the concept, the second one should raise the stakes — deeper into specific commodity sectors, more Central Valley operators at the table, and clearer metrics for what deployment at scale actually looks like in this region.

If you’re a climate tech founder, investor, grower, or policymaker working at the intersection of innovation and Central Valley agriculture, keep Sacramento Climate Week on your calendar. And if you want to get involved with CleanStart’s work in the meantime, reach out. We’ve got plenty to do between now and next May.

Thomas Hall is Executive Director of CleanStart, a clean technology nonprofit accelerator based in California’s Central Valley.