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The end of consumer electric vehicle tax credits isn’t great, but clawing back federal funding has been even worse.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill took a huge bite out of the climate economy. One segment that emerged largely unscathed, however, is advanced climate tech. Companies working on nuclear, geothermal, battery storage, biofuels, and carbon capture may be shaken by the volatile business environment and a tad worried about provisions such as foreign entities of concern rules that could make their supply chains more complicated. But as of now, they can pretty much proceed with business as usual.
There is one big exception to that, however: The growing ecosystem of electric vehicle charging startups. Not only did OBBBA take a hammer to consumer EV tax credits, Trump also paused funding for key federal charging initiatives on his first day in office. While the startups I talked to were notably blasé about the former situation, executives are seriously worried about how attempts to clawback funding for charging infrastructure will impact the industry as a whole.
The outlook isn’t entirely bleak. Highway fast charging — generally the domain of larger companies such as Tesla, Electrify America, and ChargePoint — has actually seen solid growth so far this year despite the obstacles. But figuring out how to make charging work in urban centers and outlying communities has been a hot market for venture-backed companies over the past few years. And now some of them are facing a moment of reckoning.
“Cities are still pushing forward, but I would say there is a capital-C caution that’s being applied,” Tiya Gordon, founder of the curbside EV charging company It’s Electric, told me. “I think they feel that they need to get it right, and this is true for us as well as a startup. There’s not a margin for error in this environment.”
It’s Electric’s core innovation is siphoning off spare electrical capacity from buildings in cities to run its curbside Level 2, a.k.a. non-fast-charging EV charging network, negating the need for what can be a lengthy and complex grid interconnection process. The company then shares a portion of its revenue with the building owners who agree to the arrangement.
Just days before Trump took office, the startup was awarded $2.2 million from the Department of Transportation’s Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program to deploy curbside charging in Washington, D.C., legally obligated money that the new administration is now trying to rescind. That award remains in legal limbo. “We are proceeding as if we can’t count on that,” Gordon told me. “It’s sand through your fingers in an hourglass.”
That funding came on top of the company’s numerous awards from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, an interagency collaboration between the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation created under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Now the Joint Office has been effectively dismantled as former employees took deferred resignations and Trump has tried to revoke the funding awarded to It’s Electric and other startups.
All of this threatens to shut down a significant source of capital for It’s Electric, as Gordon told me nondilutive funding — largely from federal and state grants — represents nearly half of the company’s total capital raised to date.
Gordon said she sees states stepping into the breach, as climate leaders such as California and New York have thus far stood by their EV expansion plans. But Gordon has already noticed cities employing more diligence than ever when it comes to selecting partners. “They’re really going deep, they’re really taking time, they’re not rushing into any awards. So time is a big factor that represents caution,” she told me. And when it comes to the amount of chargers that cities seem to be looking to build, “the numbers are a little bit more modest.”
She mainly credits this pullback to the whiplash that Trump’s attempt to rescind funding for EV charging has caused. Compared to that, whatever deceleration the end of EV tax credits will cause in consumer uptake is a secondary concern.
“Honestly, that doesn’t really impact us at all,” Jeffrey Prosserman, CEO at Voltpost told me of the tax credits. His company retrofits lampposts in cities and suburbs, turning them into Level 2 EV charging platforms. “At the end of the day, EV adoption will either increase X or Y percent in a given year, but it’s going to continue to increase year over year. We’re past the tipping point, going from early adopters into the mainstream,” he told me.
EV prices are still falling, large businesses still want to electrify their fleets, and self-driving cars — which are far better suited to electric drivetrains — are still getting people excited, all of which should continue to fuel demand for a charging buildout. So while Prosserman acknowledged that nixing the consumer tax credits could “slow adoption by a couple percentage points,” he’s optimistic that the next political cycle will see a resurgence in support.
Like Gordon, however, he is quite concerned about the holdup in funding for both the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure program, or CFI, and its sister initiative, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, or NEVI. “It creates challenges for the EV charging companies like Voltpost, but it really fundamentally creates challenges for the cities and the general public who expected to have access to charging through these programs,” he told me. “That’s not to say that there isn’t a path forward. It’s just that the path that effectively the entire sector was operating on for the last few years has been reconfigured.”
NEVI is a $5 billion program that aims to build out a national charging network along highways, while CFI allocates $2.5 billion to deploy charging infrastructure in cities, towns, and hard-to-reach areas. Both were stood up in 2021 by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Politicians, industry analysts, and transportation officials alike have heavily critiqued these programs over the years for appearing to lack urgency, as building a network from scratch has proven to be an enormously complex and cumbersome undertaking. The former executive director of the joint office, Gabe Klein, said at a conference last year that the NEVI program wouldn’t really hit its stride until sometime between 2026 and 2028. Then Trump entered the White House and paused funding for both initiatives, creating a major roadblock for “the entire U.S. EV sector,” Prosserman told me.
Much like It’s Electric, Voltpost started the year by winning its own CFI funding to deploy its chargers in the broader Washington, D.C. region and also secured a number of awards through the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. With all of that money now tied up in lawsuits challenging Trump’s attempts to freeze the programs, Voltpost’s plans for growth have slowed. “We’re taking a more conservative approach for this year,” Prosserman told me, saying that while the company will eventually seek to raise a Series A it’s “not actively raising that Series A right now, given the macro situation.”
Prosserman said he’s been disappointed to see the general pullback in climate tech venture funding in the first half of 2025. “You have a group of investors who frankly said they are mission aligned, but are now taking a pause, not a stop, given the macroeconomic conditions, and having to wait until the dust settles to see how to reconfigure their portfolios,” Prosserman said. For now, he told me that Voltpost is leaning into its private-sector partnerships such as those with AT&T and Zipcar.
Not all charging companies have experienced this whiplash of funding awards and rescissions, though. SparkCharge, which makes portable, battery-powered fast chargers for commercial fleets and businesses, hasn’t received any NEVI or CFI grant money. The startup primarily serves customers by dispatching off-grid chargers on-demand or setting up stand-alone deployments, which are not core focus areas of either program.
The startup’s Chief Financial Officer David Piperno told me he’s glad that SparkCharge hasn’t relied on such capital, as it’s managed to “become a profitable enterprise with zero incentives, no state funding, no government funding.” That, he said, has allowed the company “to take a different approach to EV charging and be more innovative and have a variable pay-as-you-go model.” So far that seems to be working out pretty well, as it announced $30.5 million in new funding in May through a combination of equity financing and a venture loan.
Reaching former President Joe Biden’s goal of installing 500,000 publicly accessible EV chargers by 2030 still might be a longshot, though, especially as long as the Trump administration continues to target all things EV-related. And yet, charging executives remain relatively upbeat about the sector’s long-term fortunes.
“If you drive one of these vehicles, compared to what you had before, it’s just a superior car, right?” Piperno said, arguing that should continue to power steady consumer growth, even if it doesn’t happen as quickly as experts once predicted. While growth in EV sales increased by 40% in 2023, that slowed to just about 10% last year, as concerns over the availability of charging infrastructure, price, and range persist. “I think everyone thought that [the EV adoption] curve was going to be a lot faster. But I think that’s really normalized over the past few years already, and we don’t, quite frankly, see it normalizing much more than it has.”
At least now, executives told me, there’s more certainty regarding the policy landscape than at the beginning of the year. That holds especially true for startups that are willing and able to operate under the assumption that they might never see much of their recently awarded federal funding — at least anytime soon.
“The expression was, wait and see, wait and see, wait and see,” Gordon told me of Trump’s first months in office and the uncertainty around EV incentives and funding programs. “And now we waited and we saw, and it’s gone. And so we mourn and we move on, right?”
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Some of the industry’s biggest names are joining forces to keep the momentum moving forward.
Climate tech funding has slowed in the face of federal government pushback — but it has certainly not stopped. As the administration has cranked up its hostilities against everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines, companies and investors are responding by getting strategic, forming new coalitions to map, fund, and shape progress in the absence of public support.
Last month I covered the launch of the Climate Tech Atlas, an interdisciplinary effort that includes venture capitalists, nonprofits, and academics working to map out the most salient climate tech opportunities and help guide external research and funding in the sector. There’s also the All Aboard Coalition, which unites big name investors to help plug the missing middle finance gap. Sector-specific investment vehicles are popping up too, like the Oneworld BEV fund, a partnership between major airlines in the Oneworld Alliance and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to advance the commercialization of sustainable aviation fuels. All three of these new initiatives were announced in September alone.
“We are in a unique moment right now,” Carmichael Roberts, a managing partner at BEV told me via email. “Over the past decade, the climate tech ecosystem has made enormous progress driving innovation across every sector of the economy. That puts us in the position to step back and ask first, what areas are still crying out for urgent innovation?”
This year has also seen a number of climate tech companies struggle at key points in their attempts to scale. Sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy shut down in September, while direct air capture leader Climeworks laid off 22% of its staff in May, citing “current macroeconomic uncertainty” and “shifting policy priorities where climate tech is seeing reduced momentum.” Another direct air capture company, Noya, shuttered this August, while the battery recycling company Li-Cycle filed for bankruptcy in May.
Other startups pursuing emerging technologies — from carbon capture to long-duration battery storage, advanced geothermal, and next-generation nuclear — are looking to avoid the same fate. But while federal funding from places such as the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Loan Programs Office once provided an avenue for financing capital-intensive demonstration plants, the Trump administration is now retracting funding, going so far as to cancel contracts with projects previously approved under Biden.
The Oneworld fund, announced in mid-September, is BEV’s first to focus on a specific theme and its first to be backed by an industry coalition. Members of the Oneworld Alliance — which include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific — had already committed to using SAF for 10% of their fuel by 2030, while also “playing an active role in the development of SAF at commercial scale.” Now, with alliance members serving as limited partners in the venture fund, they’ll benefit from the technical and commercial expertise of one of the sector’s most influential VC firms.
When I asked the BEV team to what degree the current political and economic uncertainties were making partnerships like this more valuable, Eric Toone, another BEV managing partner, responded with a refrain I’ve become familiar with — that the firm only backs technologies that “can ultimately compete on their own merits.” Yet it’s undeniable that the federal government tore up its decarbonization agenda at a moment when many climate tech firms’ investments are almost ready for deployment, a stage when government support can make all the difference.
“Many promising SAF technologies already exist, but they are stuck between lab success and commercial scale,” Roberts told me. “This is the moment when they most need capital, technical rigor, and committed offtake to bridge that gap.” While the Trump administration did maintain and extend the tax credit for clean fuels, it also reduced the maximum credit amount for SAF from $1.75 per gallon to $1, while private funding for SAF production and distribution infrastructure remains inadequate.
Given this landscape and the urgency airlines face in meeting their clean fuel targets, Toone told me the firm is open to backing companies “that are further along than what a typical BEV fund might pursue.” And while sustainable fuels are the first technology to benefit from this type of thematic focus, Roberts said that BEV is already eyeing other sectors where it plans to apply this same funding model.
As of early September, the firm is also part of the All Aboard Coalition. This elite group of venture firms is aiming to raise a $300 million fund by the end of October that will match investments in later-stage venture rounds, filling a gap known in climate tech circles as the “missing middle.” Assembled by Chris Anderson, an entrepreneur and primary convener of the TED Talks conference — which has featured many inspiring climate visionaries — the group includes 14 members such as Khosla Ventures, Prelude Ventures, DCVC, Gigascale Capital, and Energy Impact Partners.
“One of the consequences of being in the front row seat at TED all these years is you get persuaded of certain things,” he told me. “And I definitely got persuaded that climate is the outstanding, major problem we really have to fix.”
The bulk of the capital for the coalition will come from outside investors, though some members will contribute as well, Anderson told me. The goal is to incentivize these hotshots to co-invest with each other, providing a one-to-one funding match if they do so.
“First-of-a-kind rounds seem out of reach for a lot of people in the chain,” Anderson explained, referring to the network of investors that must come together to help a company fund expensive new infrastructure. At this stage, its tech has progressed beyond the capital-light, early-stage rounds but is still considered too risky for traditional infrastructure investors to take on. Companies might be seeking $100 million or more from venture firms that are used to writing checks for orders of magnitude less. “Really the purpose of the fund is to create a collective belief that there is a pathway to getting these companies funded. If you have that collective belief, then it’s much easier for a lead investor to step forward and to pull a few other people in.”
Anderson acknowledged that a $300 million fund will not go “nearly far enough.”
“It’s a starter fund. It’s a proof of concept,” he told me. “The world needs to make a couple hundred of these bets at some point.”
Other coalitions, such as the Climate Tech Atlas, are working to steer the sector towards the best bets. This group — which also includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, alongside others such as the nonprofit investment platform Elemental Impact, the consulting firm McKinsey, and Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability — has mapped out the technological milestones it sees as the clearest pathways to decarbonization. The aim is to help investors, founders, policymakers and academics alike direct their energies towards the most relevant and investable opportunities, regardless of political headwinds.
“The scale at which the government participates in the development of these new technologies — or puts a thumb on the scale for technologies in particular — will vary,” Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of the policy firm Energy Innovation, which is also a member of the alliance, told me. “But certainly that has no real bearing on the fundamental fact that innovators are out there right now thinking about these grand challenges, and there are exciting new ideas for technologies that can get to that commercial scale in the coming years.”
And indeed, sometimes the most promising ideas can take shape in moments of deep uncertainty. Some of the biggest success stories of recent tech history — Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Square — all got their start during the 2008 financial crisis or its aftermath. “Some of the strongest companies and founders are building in uncertain times,” Dawn Lippert, founder and CEO of Elemental Impact, told me. “That’s very much what we see right now.”
These groups are far from the only private-sector actors coming together to help navigate industry headwinds. When the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew support for the most widely used U.S.-based carbon accounting model for estimating scope 3 emissions, leading emissions accounting platform Watershed partnered with Stanford University’s Sustainable Solutions Lab to launch an initiative that ensures continued access. And recognizing the difficulty that early stage climate tech startups face in securing insurance, the nonprofit GreenRE Coalition and the philanthropic funder Trellis Climate partnered to create a new type of bond tailored to the needs of climate tech startups.
Whether it will all be enough to accelerate or even sustain much-needed momentum in climate tech funding is impossible to predict. But at least the private sector seems to agree that, in this moment, good old teamwork is worth one heck of a try.
His administration has zeroed in on $18 billion of projects that just so happen to be in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries’ hometown.
The shutdown punishment has begun, and it’s aimed at New York City.
Russ Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget announced Wednesday on X that “roughly $18 billion in New York City infrastructure projects have been put on hold to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional DEI principles.” That includes funding for the Second Avenue Subway extension and the Gateway Program, a proposed rail tunnel connecting New York City and New Jersey.
While Vought did not refer to the government shutdown specifically in his announcement, the timing is, shall we say, noteworthy, not least because the Democrats’ two top congressional negotiators — Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer — are both from New York. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later made the link explicit, clarifying in a statement that the real issue with the two projects was a recently released rule — as in, published on Tuesday — “barring race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grants.”
There would be a review of the two projects “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring,” Duffy said, and “until USDOT’s quick administrative review is complete, project reimbursements cannot be processed.” Those reviews “will take more time” thanks to the shutdown, he wrote, reaching his denouement, as “without a budget, the Department has been forced to furlough the civil rights staff responsible for conducting this review.”
The politics behind this gambit are obvious. President Trump has consistently threatened to withhold funding from states, cities, and institutions controlled by or connected to his political opponents.
“I think they very much understand the political dynamics of trying to make an example of New York. They understand where Chuck Schumer lives,” Jackson Moore-Otto, transportation fellow at the Center for Public Enterprise, told me.
The White House wasn’t exactly running away from the political implications of the denial of funding on Wednesday.Vice President J.D. Vance arched a metaphorical eyebrow during a press conference, saying that “I'm sure that Russ is heartbroken about the fact that he is unable to give certain things to certain constituencies.”
Trump has also specifically threatened federal funding for New York City if Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani wins the upcoming mayoral election.
Duffy himself could not have been any more obvious about what he is trying to achieve by slowing down this funding. “This is another unfortunate casualty of radical Democrats’ reckless decision to hold the federal government hostage to give illegal immigrants benefits,” his statement said, while also specifically calling out the two Democratic congressional leaders, saying that the delayed review was “thanks to the Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies [sic] shutdown.”
The legality of this — and its legitimate connection to the shutdown — is not so clear.
“It’s pure political maneuvering if you read the statement closely,” David Super, a law professor at Georgetown, told me. “They’re trying to blame the shutdown for slowing their review, but they’re also effectively saying that they’re considering New York in violation of their standards.”
Super also flagged several constitutional and legal issues with the action.
“The funding allocated through laborious means to the Hudson tunnel and Second Avenue Subway is a property right that entities in New York have,” he told me. “The idea that that can be interfered with because someone wants to do an investigation is a blatant violation of due process.”
While it is possible that purported civil rights violations could lead to funding being blocked, “that would have to be established through procedure, not suspicions that they’re doing something wrong,” Super said.
The new rule Duffy referenced addresses a specific set of programs established under the Small Business Act that are designed to give organizations controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” i.e. “women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups,” a shot at winning government contracts.
The DOT argues that under these programs, “two similarly situated small business owners may face different standards for entering the program, based solely on their race, ethnicity, or sex,” and that the rules and legislation defining them violate equal protection as set out in recent federal court decisions and Trump executive orders.
The rule that Duffy cites as justification for his actions is itself constitutionally suspect, Super said. “The Administrative Procedure Act requires public comment on new rules, subject to limited exceptions,” which this did not have.
The slapdash way the rule has been rolled out could open up the DOT to lawsuits, whether from the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees the New York City subway, or another entity involved with the Hudson tunnel project.
“Courts throughout history have insisted public comment is important,” Super said. The DOT is “violating procedures for issuing this policy and violating due process in the way they apply it.”
Moore-Otto also pointed out that the DOT release makes no specific claim that these projects are violating the rule.
“What they’re saying, it appears to me, is, New York might be doing this thing that we’ve just decided is illegal and we’re going to cut off your funding and it’s going to take longer because our lawyers aren’t being paid,” he said.
And there are broader issues around infrastructure policy at play beyond the obvious political gamesmanship, Moore-Otto pointed out. Duffy’s announcement links the supposedly unconstitutional women and minority contracting practices to the high costs that plague American infrastructure projects, saying they’re a “waste of taxpayer resources.”
But, Moore-Otto argued, what really ails U.S. infrastructure projects are extensive administrative reviews and the start-stop nature of project development.
“I think people would broadly agree the U.S. takes too much time and money to deliver infrastructure projects, and they are trying to invoke this as a pretext,” Moore-Otto said. “What strikes me as noteworthy is that when we look at why the U.S. does, in fact, take so long and use so much money building, while the rest of the world builds faster and cheaper, is that there’s a lot of stopping and starting of these infrastructure projects.”
“Assuming it’s a prolonged delay, it’s going to probably drive up costs — even though they’re saying it is a cost saving measure,” Moore-Otto added. “I think that should not be lost on anybody.”
On a potential deregulatory slowdown, community solar’s dimming, and Pope Leo on climate
Current conditions: Tropical Storm Imelda is set to gain intensity this week and whip the southeastern U.S. with soaking rain and storm surge • Frigid night air is forecast across northern New England • Typhoon Bualoi is flooding broad swaths of Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos.
The federal government is closed.Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
The federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. this morning after President Donald Trump and Republicans failed to reach a deal with Democrats in Congress on a bill to keep its funding flowing. That could slow the Environmental Protection Agency’s deregulatory effort, E&E News reported Tuesday. “The political crisis that threatens to shutter much of the federal bureaucracy at midnight comes as Administrator Lee Zeldin is racing to unravel high-profile rules on things like climate science, vehicle pollution, power plants, oil and gas wells, and carbon emissions reporting,” reporter Jean Chemnick wrote. An abrupt halt to the agency’s activities would at the very least set back Zeldin’s reform effort, including an agency reorganization set to begin this month.
The Department of the Interior, meanwhile, sent employees an email Tuesday warning that the agency “has contingency plans in place for executing an orderly shutdown of activities that would be affected by any lapse in appropriations forced by Congressional Democrats.” Neither Interior nor the EPA had published updated shutdown plans taking into account staff reductions under the current Trump administration as of Tuesday.
When the Department of Defense bought a 15% stake in MP Materials, the continent’s only active rare earths mine, The Economist called it the most significant entry by the federal government into a private market since the railroads were nationalized in World War I. (Biden administration officials were admittedly jealous, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported.) Now the Trump administration has taken another share of a major mineral project. The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office said Tuesday that it had renegotiated a multi-billion-dollar loan to back construction of Lithium Americas’ Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada. The project, on track to become the Western Hemisphere’s largest lithium producer by 2028, will transform a remote stretch of high Nevada desert into a lithium clay mine, harvesting from one of the world’s richest known deposits.
Under the new deal, the federal government will take a 5% equity stake in Lithium Americas and an additional 5% ownership of the company’s joint venture with General Motors. The Energy Department called its stakes “part of the overall collateral package on a loan, helping to reduce repayment risk for taxpayers.” But the announcement said the “revised agreement” includes “robust loan amendments,” notably “more than $100 million of new equity.”
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Community solar installations are plunging. After a record-breaking 2024, installations of new panels in small-scale cooperative or community solar projects dropped 36% in the first half of this year compared to the same period last year. The passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed the cumulative five-year outlook for community solar by 8% compared to the outlook before the legislation repealed vast chunks of the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s according to a new analysis from Wood Mackenzie.
Yet Jeff Cramer, the chief executive of the Coalition for Community Solar Access, said states are stepping up “with historic expansions like New Jersey’s 3,000 megawatts and Massachusetts’ 900 megawatts.” He added: “These bright spots show what’s possible when policymakers work to unlock capacity. At the same time, this report makes clear the challenges ahead — from federal uncertainty to interconnection delays and program caps — that must be addressed to realize the full potential of community solar and deliver the resilient, affordable power communities are asking for.”
Most Americans say that rising electricity prices have at least “a decent amount” of impact on household finances. “Still, for about 40% of the country, those high prices are more a pinch than a pain,” Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer wrote. That’s the finding of a new Heatmap Pro poll on rising rates. The results had some predictable outcomes, including that more than 70% of voters with household incomes below $50,000 said rising bills were a problem with “a lot of" impact on spending. Upward of 62% of voters earning less than $100,000 described similar issues, as did 59% of white voters without a college degree.
It’s been difficult for “Vatican-watchers” to pin down Pope Leo XIV’s views on most issues. But “on climate change,” The New York Times wrote on Tuesday, “it is clear that he is moved by the topic, and particularly its disproportionate harm to poor and vulnerable people.” The world is about to get a lot more clarity on his views. On Wednesday, the Pontiff is scheduled to give his first address on climate change at a conference taking place at the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo.
The remarks come on the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, a groundbreaking papal document written by the late Pope Francis that overhauled the Catholic Church’s teachings on climate change. The 2015 encyclical was widely credited with pushing forward carbon-cutting negotiations at the global climate summit in Paris that year.
Africa's biggest petrostate is having a solar boom. Nigeria became Africa’s second-largest importer of solar panels over the past year by overtaking Egypt. The imports total 1.7 gigawatts. “It is a response to a problem … You can’t rely on a 24/7 grid in most parts of Nigeria at the moment,” Ashvin Dayal, senior vice-president of power at Rockefeller Foundation, which backed the mini-grid project, told the Financial Times. “Demand is booming for reliable, affordable electricity both for inside the home, but also to run small businesses, to run agricultural appliances, to increase productivity and incomes.”