Alena Fargere

Alena Fargere came to investing the long way around, through the science. She describes herself simply: "Well, I'm a nerd." She studied engineering, picked up a master's in economics and public policy at Sciences Po, and then earned a PhD at École Polytechnique on using hydrogen to decarbonize transport, which is the not-very-glamorous problem of how you move trucks, trains, ships and planes without burning fossil fuels. She spent six years inside the hydrogen industry at the gas company Air Liquide and advised the World Energy Council before she ever wrote an investment cheque, and that order matters, because it means she reads a renewable-gas project as an engineer first and a financier second.

Alena Fargere then left industry to join the founding team of the SWEN Impact Fund for Transition, which she calls the first European fund dedicated to renewable gases, meaning biogas and hydrogen rather than the solar and wind everyone already finances. When she came on the show in 2022 the first fund was €175 million and the team had deployed it in two and a half years instead of the planned five, backing more than a hundred production and distribution sites across Europe, and they were already raising a successor roughly twice the size. Her own investment thesis is refreshingly unromantic about money: "There is no lack of capital on the markets today. The main challenge is to redirect the existing capital into new technologies."

Alena Fargere's whole pitch for hydrogen is that it is a system fix, not a single-sector bet. Most of us, she admits herself, get sector-tunnelled and chase a local optimum that is not the global one, whereas hydrogen can touch production, storage, heavy transport, industrial heat and even aviation fuel all at once. The catch she is honest about is cost: clean hydrogen still carries a green premium, the extra you pay for the clean version, and her view is that the job of public money is to close that gap early so that learning-by-doing and scale can drive the price down the way they already did for solar, which went from three times the price of grid electricity to parity in country after country.

Alena Fargere recorded her episode as the optimist's half of a hydrogen debate, the practitioner answering the week's skeptic, and her best line was the rebuttal itself. Faced with the charge that hydrogen is pushed by the fossil-fuel industry and by what critics call its "useful idiots," she did not dodge it, she flipped it. And underneath the cleantech economics there is a very human reason she keeps going, which she gave away in the rapid-fire round and which is, quietly, my favourite thing she said:

“I prefer to be a useful idiot acting rather than a very intelligent pessimist not doing a thing.”

Alena Fargere has since moved on from SWEN Capital Partners, where she was a Principal until 2023, and now puts that same engineer-then-financier instinct to work as an independent investor and as a board director at Lhyfe, the listed green-hydrogen producer she had backed and praised on the show, where she chairs the social and environmental responsibility committee. If you want the wider water-and-energy world she operates in, my Leviathan database tracks the companies and the money around it.