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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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The company, Nuclearn, aims to speed development and licensing processes with the help of a specially trained large language model.
You’d be hard-pressed to dream up a buzzier clean tech concept than an AI platform custom-designed for the nuclear industry. Yet Phoenix-based startup Nuclearn has been betting on the role of artificial intelligence in the booming nuclear sector since 2021 — predating the wide launch of ChatGPT and the Trump administration’s recent embrace of nuclear energy.
Now the funds are rolling in. The company announced today that it raised a $10.5 million Series A round led by the climate tech venture fund Blue Bear Capital. With this cash, Nuclearn plans to expand its repertoire of AI offerings, which spans everything from identifying and documenting faults in a reactor to project scheduling, engineering evaluations, and licensing and permitting for new or modified reactors.
To expedite these processes, the company has developed its own, nuclear-specific language model, built atop existing open source models and trained on public data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government agencies, Nuclearn’s cofounder and CFO, Jerrold Vincent, told me. This allows the model to pick up on “a lot of nuclear specifics, whether it’s the acronyms, vernacular, specific processes, even just sometimes the way [the nuclear industry] thinks about certain types of issues and the level of scrutiny they put on one thing versus another,” he explained.
By way of example, Vincent told me that one of the startup’s current customers is working on a licensing application and wanted to conduct some background research to identify potential gaps or areas where the NRC might raise additional questions. Every other time the company has pre-checked an application like this, Vincent said, it was a 400-hour process. Nuclearn helped reduce that timeline to less than a day.
It’s a deeply resonant win for Vincent and his cofounder, Bradley Fox, who are all too familiar with the inefficiencies of the industry themselves. Prior to founding Nuclearn, both worked in data science at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in Arizona, where employees spent thousands of hours every year on “a lot of documentation, a lot of paperwork, a lot of manual work,” Vincent told me.
Natural language processing had some very obvious applications for the nuclear industry. “Everything in nuclear is text. Everything’s written down,” Vincent said. So when some of the seminal research on novel deep learning models started coming out in 2017 and 2018, Vincent and Fox took note, exploring ways they could apply this to their own work. “Those were trends we jumped on very, very early, not because they were particularly fashionable at the time or because there was a lot of hype around it, but because that was the type of techniques we needed to be able to solve these problems,” Vincent told me. “That’s why we got into the language model space half a decade before ChatGPT.”
For the majority of jobs, such as working on permitting or license renewals, Nuclearn uses a software layer on top of its language model to coordinate various AI agents working on tasks linked to different data sets, such as analyzing design functions, safety protocols, or systems degradation over time. The software then integrates these various outputs to generate reports or summary analyses. On the operational side, the company has its own benchmarks to evaluate how its AI tools are performing on nuclear-specific tasks.
There is, of course, a certain poetic irony to the fact that AI is being used to license and manage operations for the very reactors that are now in such high demand for their ability to consistently and cleanly power AI data centers. The better AI gets, the more we need nuclear; the more we need nuclear, the more useful AI-powered tools like Nuclearn become.
To date, the company has integrated its AI platform into the operations of more than 65 reactors both domestically and abroad, which Vincent told me represents a mix of standard commercial reactors and small modular reactors. As the market heats up, demand may well follow. With the Trump administration pushing to accelerate nuclear development, electricity demand rising, and tech giants prioritizing clean, firm power, it’s boom times for companies looking to build everything from conventional nuclear plants to small modular reactors, microreactors, and the long-elusive fusion reactor, each and every one of which will have to be licensed and permitted.
All this activity also means that the nuclear workforce is under strain, especially given that 25% set to retire in the coming decade. “We’ve had knowledge and workforce challenges for several years now, and now it’s getting exacerbated quite substantially from all the macro trends going on,” Vincent told me. Given this situation, he doesn’t anticipate that the adoption of AI tools will necessarily lead to layoffs. These days, he said, the industry is just wondering “how do we do the things we need to do to operate a nuclear power plant safely and efficiently with less people?”
With this new capital, the startup plans to scale its operations to encompass even more aspects of nuclear reactor management. One future use case Vincent anticipates is helping to automate the sourcing of unique, industry-specific parts. There are plants operating today, he told me, that rely on equipment from vendors that may be long out of business. Figuring out how and where to source equivalent components is the type of niche challenge he’s excited to take on.
“It just tends to be very manual, labor intensive, and very documentation heavy,” Vincent told me of the industry as a whole. Luckily, “those are all things that AI is very good at solving these days.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to note some poetic irony.
On Tesla’s losses, Google’s storage push, and trans-Atlantic atomic consensus
Current conditions: Hurricane Kiko is soaking Hawaii and slashing the archipelago with giant waves • Nearly a foot of rain is forecast to fall on parts of Texas, risking flash floods • Dry, windy weather across broad swaths of South Africa is bringing “extremely high” fire risk.
China's clean-energy investments are paying green dividends. Ember
China’s clean energy boom is bringing a global decline in fossil fuel demand into sight amid declines in usage in the buildings, vehicles, and industries of the world’s second-largest economy, according to the think tank Ember’s latest China Energy Transition Review. The report, released Tuesday morning, found that exports of solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps are soaring, particularly to emerging economies, making the possibility of developing nations making possible an “energy leapfrog” over the coal phase of growth. From 2015 to 2023, China’s end consumption of fossil fuels fell 1.7% across buildings, industry and transport, while electricity use as a replacement rose by 65%. In power generation, fossil output dropped 2% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year, as wind and solar generation soared by 16% and 43%, respectively. Last year alone, Beijing invested $625 billion in clean energy, 31% of the global total.
“China is now the main engine of the global clean energy transition,” Muyi Yang, coordinating lead author of Ember’s 2025 analysis, said in a statement. “Policy and investment decisions made in China over the last two decades are fundamentally changing the basis of China’s own energy system, and enabling other countries to also move swiftly from fossil to clean.”
As Americans scramble to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month, fewer of those cars are Teslas. The preliminary August data Cox Automotive released on Monday showed the best month for EVs in U.S. history was the worst for Tesla ever recorded. EVs climbed to almost 10% of total car sales last month, but Tesla’s share fell to 38%, with 55,000 cars sold all month. That’s up just 3% compared to July and down 6% from the year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. By contrast, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted, Tesla commanded about 80% of U.S. EV sales in 2020.
Also on Tuesday, the company unveiled two new energy storage products that could boost its utility division. At the RE+ conference in Las Vegas, Tesla presented the Megapack 3, the latest generation of its utility-scale battery system, and the Megablock, which integrates the Megapack 3 with transformers and switchgear. Batteries were Tesla’s fastest growing business in the first quarter of this year, as Matthew reported in April, but the company feared that tariffs would affect the business. “The energy segment — which includes the company’s battery energy storage businesses for residences (Powerwall) and for utility-scale generation (Megapack) — has recently been a bright spot for the company, even as its car sales have leveled off and declined.”
Google inked a deal with the Salt River Project, the utility serving much of Arizona’s largest metropolis, to test the performance of long-duration energy storage projects. The first-of-a-kind research collaboration aims to “better understand the real-world performance of emerging non-lithium ion long duration energy storage technologies” in the Phoenix area, the power company said in a press release. Google will fund a portion of the costs and evaluate data on the pilot projects’ operational success. “We believe that long duration energy storage will play an essential role in meeting SRP’s sustainability goals and ensuring grid reliability,” Chico Hunter, the nonprofit Salt River Project’s manager of innovation and development, said in a statement.
As I reported in this newsletter in July, Google also backed the Italian carbon dioxide-based storage startup Energy Dome as the tech giant pushes to expand its portfolio of technologies to power its data centers 24/7.
The European Union has been a solid backer of fusion energy research. But the anti-nuclear trifecta of Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg has long thwarted bloc-wide efforts to bolster fission, which provides the bulk of the continent’s electricity. With Berlin finally joining Paris in backing traditional nuclear power, that blockade is no longer holding. The European Commission has proposed spending $11.5 billion on bolstering research in both fusion and fission, the trade publication NucNet reported Monday.
Meanwhile in the United States, where nuclear power remains broadly supported across the political spectrum, the biggest question is how quickly new reactors can come online. The data center industry has now called on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to streamline licensing of new reactors to help meet its surging demand for electricity. In a letter to NRC Chair David Wright shared with E&E News, the Data Center Coalition, a trade group representing server farms, urged the agency to update its regulations to ensure quicker deployment of advanced reactors. “Increasingly, DCC members are forming strategic partnerships and committing to offtake agreements with utilities and nuclear technology developers, injecting new momentum into this strategic sector,” wrote Cy McNeill, the group’s director of federal affairs. “We are approaching the cusp of a truly revitalized nuclear sector.”
The push comes amid what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called a “nuclear power dealmaking boom.”
Patagonia’s billionaire founder helped popularize the greenest trend in apparel — buying less of higher quality, longer-lasting clothing. Now the retailer is pushing to bring that same ethos to the food business. The company’s edible offerings of tinned fish and crackers designed for hiking is now expanding into baby foods, oils, and sauces, The New York Times reported in a new profile of the retailer. Fifty years from now, founder Yvon Chouinard told the newsletter, “I could see the food business being bigger than the apparel business.”
U.S. EV sales have been way up — just not for the domestic champion, which sank to its worst-ever market share in August.
Americans are rushing to buy electric vehicles ahead of the expiration of the $7,500 consumer tax credit at the end of this month.
And fewer of those cars are Teslas.
Preliminary data from Cox Automotive for August, first shared with Reuters, shows that the month was the best for EVs in U.S. history, with just over 146,000 units sold, comprising almost 10% of total car sales that month. At the same time, Tesla’s share of the EV market hit its lowest recorded level, down to a (still sizable) 38%.
Cox’s data puts Tesla sales at 55,000 for the month, which is up a little more than 3% from July but down over 6% from a year prior, while the company’s total market share fell from just over 40% in July and 45% in the first half of the year. In 2020, by contrast, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales was about 80%. Overall, Cox estimated that Tesla sales in the U.S. are down about 9% so far this year.
“The U.S. EV market is in a far more dynamic place than a few years ago,” Corey Cantor, the research director at the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me in an email. “Most automakers now offer electric vehicle models in multiple segments. There are multiple electric vehicles available below the average price point of a new car at $48,000.”
Entering this new phase means that the EV market is getting less Tesla-centric, almost by definition. Morgan Stanley reported that electric vehicle sales were up 23% in August from a year ago, while overall car sales were up 7.5% — although even amidst this industry-wide growth, Tesla sales fell more than 3% year over year, while electric vehicle sales were up 42%.
Much of that EV market growth comes down to timing. “Early indications are that EV sales are in fact surging over the past two months, following the changes that will phase the credit out at the end of this month. We’ve seen record sales for EV models last month, such as the Honda Prologue,” Cantor said. This likely means some portion of these sales are being “pulled forward” from buyers trying to beat the deadline and these sales numbers will not persist through the rest of the year.
As Tesla’s stranglehold over the U.S. EV market may be weakening, so too is its hold on the international market. Thanks to CEO Elon Musk’s association with right wing politics in the U.S. and abroad, and to fierce competition from Chinese EV leader BYD, Tesla’s sales have fallen dramatically in Europe. Globally, BYD overtook Tesla in sales last year.
None of that seems to matter much to Tesla’s leadership, or to its shareholders. On Friday, the company’s board of directors put forward a new compensation plan for Musk that would boost his ownership of the company to around 25% and put him in line for a $1 trillion payday if he meets growth and performance targets over the next decade.
A Delaware court last year threw out an earlier Musk pay package, arguing that Musk was too close to the board of directors for them to objectively determine his pay in the interest of all the company’s shareholders. (He subsequently relocated Tesla’s official headquarters to Austin, Texas, explicitly to avoid Delaware jurisdiction.) Musk has said that he wants to own about 25% of the company, a significant upgrade from the roughly 15% he owns currently.
Tesla’s board said in a recent regulatory disclosure that Musk had “reiterated that, if he were to remain at Tesla, it was a critical consideration that he have at least a 25% voting interest in Tesla,” and that “Mr. Musk also raised the possibility that he may pursue other interests that may afford him greater influence if he did not receive such assurances.”
The board’s disclosure also confirmed that Musk sees the future of Tesla as going far beyond selling cars to people. The filing said that “through its discussions with Mr. Musk,” the special committee in charge of coming up with his compensation had “identified four core product lines that would drive Tesla’s future transformation”: Tesla’s vehicle fleet, automation (i.e. Full Self-Driving) software, its robotaxi product, and humanoid robots. Tesla’s robotaxi service is available on a select basis in Austin, with no date yet indicated for a wider rollout, while its humanoid robots — which Musk has said will one day make up 80% of the company’s value — are due to reach “scale production” next year, Musk said on a recent earnings call.
Tesla stock actually rose on the news of the proposed compensation package, likely because Tesla shareholders viewed it as a way to retain Musk and keep his attention on the company.
Longtime Tesla bull Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said in note to investors that the compensation deal now means that Musk “has an incentive to focus on Tesla more than ever.” Jonas also, like many Tesla bulls, sees its business of selling cars to people as just a small portion of its overall value — in his case, $76 a share, compared to his $410 a share price target or the roughly $346 a share price the stock was trading at on Monday afternoon.
Still, the company today is largely a pretty normal car company, at least according to its income statement. In the second quarter of its current fiscal year, some $16.6 billion of Tesla’s $22.5 billion in revenue came from cars, with $2.8 billion coming from its energy business and $3 billion coming from “services and other revenues.”
Declining market share in its biggest product line isn’t completely meaningless, even if many Tesla shareholders see a glorious future for the company beyond the automobile trade.
Looking ahead, Cantor said to expect the EV market to get even more diverse.
“Moving forward, we will continue to see automakers innovate in the EV space. Timelines may change and models will vary by automaker, but high-profile launches expected over the next year include the Rivian R2, a new version of the Chevrolet Bolt EV, as well as more affordable models by Lucid and Kia,” Cantor said in his email.
“While the 30D [consumer electric vehicle tax] credit’s phase out will have a real impact on sales the next quarter or two here in the U.S.,” he added, “the long-term trend of excitement and innovation continues to be in the launch of new electric vehicles.”