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Massachusetts is home to numerous clean energy and climate technology startups. With its strong academic institutions and supportive, forward-thinking government programs, Massachusetts is a breeding ground for fresh ideas to decarbonize and to diversify the climate economy. However, in order for these companies to scale up, they require strategic investment and/or acquisition from leaders in the climate tech space; the question then becomes who are these industry leaders?

A team of researchers from the Alliance for Climate Transition and Syracuse University’s Dynamic Sustainability Lab set out to create the world reference for companies leading the energy transition. The companies identified on the list have significant global impact in terms of revenue and are proven innovators both through their own research and development projects and through investment and acquisition of innovative technology.

These companies range through a variety of markets including electrification, energy storage, and renewable energy generation, but they share the characteristic of being the drivers of the clean energy transition on a global scale, and they all have proven their dedication to progress in the clean technology space. The Top 20 list and report resulted from research of publicly available company information and consulting with industry thought leaders to determine criteria and ranking metrics. The list will be announced at this year's Boston Climate Week at the ClimaTech event.

Through the research process many questions came up including how to define clean/climate technology, global leadership, and innovation. These ideas can be complex to simply define and even more difficult to quantify, but ACT feels that the methodology used to create the list aligns with the goal of identifying global leadership in the energy transition and fills a gap as a list for this niche is missing in the climate tech ecosystem. 

There were challenges in the creation of the list especially when determining a company’s “clean” revenue or capex. Sometimes straightforward, standardized scores were available, other times scores were determined through examining the company’s public records, and in cases where multiple data points were available scores were averages. Companies with more transparency often benefited as any missing information resulted in lower overall scores as the company could not be ranked in that category. 

We are proud to say that 16 of the 20 companies have a presence here in Massachusetts. This includes companies like Schneider Electric who have their North American headquarters in Boston and an innovation center in Andover, GE Vernova who are headquartered in Cambridge, Mitsubishi Electric’s Research Laboratory which is in Cambridge, and Saint-Gobain who have multiple research centers in the state. Governor Healey has made it a goal for Massachusetts to become the center of global climate technology innovation, so hopefully the number of top companies present here will continue to grow and all of them will expand their presence in Massachusetts. 

The report dives into the methodology behind the rankings, what each of the Top 20 companies produce, insights into the data through visual analysis, and an additional lists examining the largest tech companies that are buying clean energy and the developers of clean energy projects. Ideally, the first publishing of this Top 20 list creates discussion among the ecosystem that ACT can take into account to create even stronger versions of the list itself and complementary reports going forward. 

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