Last week I joined more than 60,000 attendees at San Francisco Climate Week 2026 — the Bay Area’s sprawling, nine-day convergence of climate leaders, founders, investors, policymakers, and advocates. With 650-plus events spread across the city, SFCW has become one of the largest climate gatherings in the world, and this year’s edition made clear just how fast California’s clean energy ecosystem is evolving.

Over several packed days, I attended panels and summits covering everything from next-generation battery technology and data-center power demands to wildfire-driven insurance crises, net-zero transportation, climate foresight tools, and the economic engine of the clean economy. Here’s what stood out:  Despite headwinds from Washington, D.C., California’s clean economy continues to generate innovation, jobs, and economic growth. That reinforced the importance of the work we do at CleanStart–helping innovators turn bright ideals and ambitious goals into deliverable action through bringing those ideas to the market.

Battery Innovation Summit: Where Deep Tech Meets Deployment

The Battery Innovation Summit, held April 22–24 during Climate Week, was a standout. This wasn’t a generic climate panel — it was a commercialization-focused convening of 300-plus leaders from across the battery, energy storage, electrification, and power infrastructure sectors. Founders, engineers, investors, OEMs, utilities, and policymakers gathered to align around what actually matters: deployment and scale.

The summit zeroed in on a theme that was impossible to ignore across Climate Week: data centers are reshaping the energy conversation. The explosive growth of AI-driven computing is creating massive new electricity demand, and the battery and grid storage sectors are racing to respond. Discussions explored how deep-tech batteries — from long-duration storage breakthroughs to novel chemistries — can serve e-mobility, grid reliability, and the data-center buildout simultaneously. For clean energy advocates like CleanStart, this convergence is a reminder that the energy transition is no longer just about replacing fossil fuels — it’s about building entirely new energy infrastructure to support a digital economy that didn’t exist a decade ago.

Investable startups, supply chain strategy, and the manufacturing-to-deployment pipeline were recurring themes. The message was clear: the technology is ready, but capital, permitting, and supply-chain coordination remain the bottlenecks.

Climate Foresight and Resilience: Making Complexity Legible

At the Climate Foresight & Resilience event, hosted at 9Zero and presented as part of SF Climate Week’s programming, the conversation turned to how investors and builders can make better decisions in a world where climate outcomes are too complex for intuition and too dynamic for static models.

Anthos presented on causal intelligence — the idea that capturing expert knowledge as computable causal models can reveal where leverage actually lives in complex systems. Cool Climate Collective shared their internationally recognized Three Futures Test, a foresight framework that stress-tests climate ventures across divergent scenarios to build portfolios grounded in resilience rather than optimism. And Resilience Investments introduced a framework for putting California’s public assets to work in a new model for wildfire risk reduction, grid resilience, and the state’s insurance crisis.

For CleanStart, these tools matter. The clean tech startups and innovators we work with need more than great technology — they need frameworks for navigating regulatory uncertainty, wildfire risk, and shifting capital markets. Foresight isn’t a luxury; it’s infrastructure for decision-making.

Wires & Fires: Electricity, Insurance, and California’s Economic Future

One of the most sobering sessions I attended was Wires & Fires: The Intersection of Electricity, Insurance Markets, and a Resilient California Economy, presented by Pleiades Strategy and the Natural Resources Defense Council as part of the Pleiades Salon series.

The panel laid bare a difficult reality: Californians are caught between rising electricity costs and skyrocketing insurance premiums, both driven by climate change. Ratepayers are absorbing billions in wildfire safety and liability costs. Insurance policyholders face higher bills or outright cancellations as wildfires threaten their communities. The FAIR Plan — California’s insurer of last resort — is growing rapidly, potentially becoming the state’s largest insurer. And at the end of the line, local and state governments are covering firefighting, disaster response, and rebuilding costs while investing comparatively little in prevention.

The expert conversation brought together energy, insurance, and policy perspectives to explore how California can build a cleaner, safer grid and a more insurable state. For anyone working in clean energy in California, this session was a critical reminder that the energy transition doesn’t happen in isolation — it’s entangled with wildfire policy, insurance markets, and economic affordability in ways that demand cross-sector solutions.

Achieving a Net-Zero Transportation Future

Transportation is the leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and one of the largest expenses for American families, consuming roughly 15 percent of most household budgets. The Money, Planning, People, Policy panel — also part of the Pleiades Salon — tackled the question of what it actually takes to build a net-zero transportation system.

The discussion brought together experts and policymakers working on the front lines of transportation transformation — from local transit funding fights for Muni and BART’s future in the Bay Area, to the uncertain trajectory of electric vehicle deployment, to rethinking land-use planning at a fundamental level. The panel emphasized that achieving net-zero transportation requires mobilizing four critical ingredients: money, planning, people, and policy. None of them can be skipped.

This is core territory for CleanStart. Our work on clean transportation — from CARB’s incentive programs and the SHIFT initiative to emerging clean aviation technologies — is part of this larger systems puzzle. The panel reinforced that turning climate ambition into actual infrastructure is messy, urgent, on-the-ground work.

The Clean Economy: Opportunities Rising

I also attended E2’s The Clean Economy: Opportunities Rising event, co-hosted with the SF Chamber of Commerce, Chambers for Innovation and Clean Energy, and the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI). Held at 9Zero, the evening featured a fireside chat with Kate Gordon — former Senior Advisor to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and to Governor Gavin Newsom — and E2 Executive Director Bob Keefe, who discussed his new book Clean Economy NOW.

A panel followed featuring Nancy Pfund of DBL Partners, Samantha Grassle of Elemental Impact, and Apoorv Bhargava of WeaveGrid, alongside CARB Chair Lauren Sanchez, who highlighted state action driving innovation — including the leveraging of California’s bedrock Cap-and-Invest program. The panel was moderated by CELI Executive Director Richenda Van Leeuwen.

The through-line was clear: despite headwinds from Washington, D.C., California’s clean economy continues to generate innovation, jobs, and economic growth. Smart state policy, coupled with private and public investment, is creating real opportunities. For CleanStart, this panel underscored why our work connecting clean tech startups with the policy and capital ecosystem is so important.

9Zero: The De Facto Hub of Climate Week

If there was a single physical center of gravity for SF Climate Week 2026, it was 9Zero Climate Innovation Hub at 350 California Street. As the Official Hub of SFCW for the third consecutive year, 9Zero hosted dozens of events and welcomed thousands of visitors through its doors — and that was just the daytime programming.

After hours, 9Zero became the de facto networking hub of the entire week. Hallway conversations, impromptu introductions, and late-evening exchanges over drinks connected founders with investors, policymakers with engineers, and advocates with operators in ways that no single panel or keynote could replicate. Some of the most valuable conversations I had all week happened in those informal moments at 9Zero — the kind of serendipitous connections that make in-person gatherings irreplaceable.

For a community of founders, investors, scientists, and innovators working to drive climate action, 9Zero embodies exactly the kind of collaborative infrastructure the clean energy ecosystem needs.

Key Takeaways for CleanStart

Across the sessions I attended, several themes kept surfacing:

The data-center energy boom is reshaping clean energy priorities. Battery storage, grid reliability, and long-duration technologies are no longer “nice to have” — they’re essential infrastructure for a digital economy. Clean energy providers need to think bigger about scale and speed.

California’s wildfire, insurance, and energy affordability challenges are deeply interconnected. Solving any one of them requires addressing all three. The clean energy transition must account for ratepayer costs, infrastructure resilience, and insurance market dynamics simultaneously.

Net-zero transportation demands more than technology. Funding, planning, workforce development, and policy alignment all have to move together. The Bay Area’s transit future — and California’s broader EV and clean transportation strategy — depends on this coordination.

Foresight and resilience frameworks are becoming essential tools for climate capital. Investors and builders alike are moving beyond optimism-based planning toward scenario-tested, systems-aware strategies.

California’s clean economy is growing despite federal headwinds. State policy, particularly CARB’s leadership and the Cap-and-Invest program, continues to drive innovation and attract investment. The business case for clean energy in California is strong and getting stronger.

Get Involved

SF Climate Week demonstrated that the clean energy transition is accelerating — and that California remains at the forefront. Here’s how you can stay engaged:

Connect with CleanStart: Learn more about our work advancing clean energy, clean transportation, and clean technology in California at CleanStart.org. Sign up for our newsletter and join an upcoming CleanStart Perspectives webinar to hear directly from the innovators and policymakers shaping the transition.

Contact your state legislators: Policies that support clean energy investment, grid resilience, insurance reform, and transportation electrification need champions in Sacramento. Let your representatives know these issues matter to you.

Explore the Climate Week community: Climate Week Sacramento is right around the corner.  If you missed SFCW this year, start planning for 2027. Organizations like 9Zero, E2, and the Clean Energy Leadership Institute offer year-round programming and community for anyone working on climate solutions.

Want to get involved in Climate Week in Sacramento!  Sign up now for the Capital Valleys Forum on May 8th and visit Sac Climate Week’s site. 

Capital Valleys Forum

Sac Climate Week