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For every level of laundry needs.
Americans love laundry. Of the common household chores, it is
by far the most popular — and the most energy-intensive. Washing and drying a load of laundry every two days for a year generates roughly the same emissions as driving from Chicago to New York and back again in a gasoline-powered passenger vehicle. Nearly three-quarters of those emissions come from drying alone; meanwhile, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average washing machine generates up to 8% of a home’s total energy use. The whole process can cost up to $150 per year in electricity alone, depending on where you live and the frequency of your washes.
With some regulatory prodding, manufacturers have tried to improve water and energy efficiency in new appliances and have rolled out fancy new features like “smart” water-level sensors, vibration reduction technologies, and microfiber-catching filters. But not every house — or budget — has room for the latest and greatest technologies, and systems that would work well in an airy Los Angeles laundry room might make less sense in a drafty apartment in Minnesota.
Heatmap is here to remove some of the guesswork from upgrading one of your home’s most-used appliances. Here is our expert panel’s insight into when and how to purchase a new washer and dryer for your home.
Joanna Mauer is the deputy director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a non-profit advocacy group pushing for stricter energy efficiency legislation. In her role at ASAP, Mauer works with the Department of Energy on its efficiency rules for residential appliances. She has previously worked for the Environmental Protection Agency and the Center for Integrative Environmental Research.
Amber McDaniel is the head of content at Sustainable Jungle, a website and podcast that publishes tips, tricks, and product reviews, including for major household appliances, with a focus on environmentally friendly solutions.
Scott Flint is a licensed California appliance tech with 30 years of experience. He is known as the Fix-It Guy on his YouTube channel, where he promotes the upkeep and repair of home appliances to extend their use. He has also written extensively about washers and dryers for publications such as The Family Handyman, Taste Of Home, and Earth911.
Peruse the latest washers and dryers and you’ll see features like sensors that adjust the water level to match the load of laundry, voice-activated start buttons, WiFi-enabled push notifications for when it’s time to move a load to the dryer, and more. And while there are environmentally friendly upsides to some of these features, “the more simple the machine, the less likely that things will fail,” Flint told me. In his experience repairing hundreds of washers and dryers over the years, “People save money on their initial purchase and the machine is going to last longer if you can minimize the features.”
The Energy Star certification is a great starting point in your shopping journey. But it shouldn’t be the be-all, end-all of your research. Energy Star represents a range of efficiency standards from different brands, with only the top models earning a “ Most Efficient” distinction.
You’ll still want to read reviews to get a better understanding of the reliability of the products you’re looking at, too. Though many new features on the market promise water and energy savings, they’re harder to repair yourself, meaning any potential fixes can get expensive. They can also have shorter lifespans than simpler models.
Eco-friendly washers and dryers are great for a whole laundry list (get it?) of reasons: They lower your household energy bill, they reduce emissions, they reduce wasted water, they’re often easier to install, and they can be gentler on your clothes. But they don’t necessarily save you time. Energy-efficient electric dryers can take up to twice as long to dry your clothes than traditional gas dryers. Still, all of our expert panelists agreed the upsides outweigh the drawbacks.
Yes, this is a buying guide for purchasing a new washer and dryer. But before you spend money on new appliances, you should consider working with what you already have.
If you’re dealing with an old or sub-optimally functional machine and wondering whether now is the time to upgrade, repairing your existing washer or dryer can actually be a smarter and thriftier solution; in fact, Consumer Reportsonly recommends replacing a dryer if it’s over 10 years old, electric, and cost less than $700 when you initially purchased it. Often, whatever’s going on doesn’t even require a professional to fix. “I think only rarely — let’s say about 20% of the time — would most people need to call in a technician,” Flint told me. Most washer and dryer problems are something you can fix using “normal household tools.” (More on that later.)
Keep in mind, even if you have an old washer or dryer that isn’t very energy efficient, “that’s still not even going to come close to touching the amount of energy that was used to produce and ship a new machine,” McDaniel told me. When your washer or dryer “actually fully stops working and it’s not doing what you need it to do — that’s when it’s time to upgrade.”
Typically, 1.5 to 3.4 cubic feet of capacity is suitable for a one- to two-person household, 3.5 to 4.4 cubic feet will do for two to three people, and 4.5 or more cubic feet will serve a household with more than three people. But having a new baby or pets might mean you do more loads of laundry than an average household, in which case sizing up is better.
Flint told me a common mistake he sees people make is overloading their washing machines, which can destroy an appliance’s rear bearing — the part of the machine that helps the drum rotate smoothly — a repair that is often so costly, it can make more sense to junk the whole machine. On the other hand, running small loads in a large-capacity washing machine can mean wasting water cleaning not-as-many clothes. Consider what washing machine would make the most sense for your needs to maximize efficiency.
Energy and water efficiency are two of the most common considerations when buying a washer and dryer, and are the primary focus of this guide. Some consumers may have additional concerns — McDaniel, for example, recommended looking for a Restriction of Hazardous Substances certification, which signals that an appliance complies with limits on heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Ethical considerations — including a manufacturer’s contributions to armed conflicts, labor practices, and sourcing of conflict minerals — are also worth close inspection. Ethical Consumer offers an excellent guide for finding a brand that best aligns with your values.
“The first thing that we always recommend is: If you need something new, try to go refurbished,” McDaniel told me. Still, there’s a right way and a wrong way to make a major second-hand purchase. McDaniel suggested going through a reputable source that offers a warranty, such as Best Buy (when searching online, make sure to filters for “Energy Star” and “open box” and check the product’s condition).
If you prefer the security of a new product, then it’s time to familiarize yourself with the Energy Star website. You can sort by Energy Star Most Efficient, which are the best of the best, as well as by price, brand, volume, front-load vs. top-load, vented, ventless, heat pump, gas, electric, and more. Energy Star also makes it easy to compare the specs of different products (just tick the “compare” box next to the machines you’re looking at, then scroll to the top to hit the orange “compare” button when you’re ready).
Dryers are the biggest energy suck in most homes, using two to four times as much energy as new washers and nearly twice as much as new refrigerators. McDaniel told me they are also responsible for the greatest wear and tear on clothes. Dryers are an especially American phenomenon; while more than 80% of households in the U.S. own a dryer, just 30% of European households do. That is to say, you probably don’t actually need one, and if you need to save money or space in your laundry routine, this would be the best place to look to make a cut.
“Not relying on a dryer is huge. I only use mine in the wintertime, and in the summer, I line dry my clothes — and the only reason I don’t do that in the winter is I literally don’t have the space inside,” McDaniel said.
Traditional vented dryers — the energy guzzlers of the American home — aren’t the only option anymore, though. The next best thing to a clothesline is a heat pump dryer, which Mauer told me is the “most efficient clothes dryer on the market today,” often far exceeding the Energy Star requirements. Heat pump dryers have a lower maximum temperature, though, so you don’t get that hot-out-of-the-dryer feel when the load is finished. It can also take an hour or more to dry a load of laundry fully. The bright side: Because the heat is lower, heat pump dryers are much gentler on your clothes.
“A big red flag for us is brands that don’t warranty their products in any capacity,” McDaniel told me. Buying a washer or dryer that is durable is important — Flint told me you should expect to get at least a decade of use out of a washer and dryer with proper maintenance and minor repairs — and a warranty is evidence that a company is building a product that they trust to last.
The Electrolux ELFW7637AT has one of the highest energy- and water-efficiency ratings of any washing machine on the market in 2024, with an IMEF of 3.2 and an integrated water factor of 2.6 — both of which are exceptional even by Energy Star’s standards. It also works. Reviewers have lauded its SmartBoost stain removal technology, its internal water heater, and its straightforward controls, although its 85-minute cycle time is a little longer than many other washers on the market.
Both Flint and McDaniel spoke highly of the German brand Miele, which makes this compact washing machine. Though its capacity is about half that of the Electrolux and it didn’t earn Energy Star’s highest level of certification (it has an IMEF of 2.9 and a IWF of 3.2), it is one of the more reliable and best-reviewed washers on the market.
Admittedly, you have to pay for that kind of dependability — Miele is a high-end brand with a sticker price that reflects it. The WXI860 gets high marks for its cleaning ability, including fill-and-forget auto-dispensing features, and boasts 72% lower energy consumption than conventional washers. Additionally, Miele has “a honeycomb-drum technology, so that when it puts the clothes in the spin cycle, it creates a thin film of water between the drum wall and the laundry,” McDaniel told me, which helps prevent clothing fibers from getting caught. “Little features like that that help keep our clothes in circulation for longer are also more sustainable.”
Mauer swears by heat pump dryers, and there are a number of good choices on the market right now. Beko is a favorite of the Sustainable Jungle team, in part because it has a filtration system to stop microplastics from synthetic fabrics from entering the waterways, as well as the company’s ambitious commitments to low-waste and recycled materials. This ventless Beko heat pump dryer is tiny but mighty, making it a great fit for small spaces (it can even fit under the kitchen counter), and it boasts a 2023 “Most Efficient” rating from Energy Star.
Being a heat pump dryer, though, it can take a while to dry clothes — one tester found it took 227 minutes to dry a large, bulky load to 100% — but plan ahead and Beko can give you major savings in the long run. Or, if the Beko isn’t quite what you’re looking for, check out Miele, which makes its own well-reviewed heat pump dryer (although it is small and pricy).
If a heat-pump dryer isn’t right for your lifestyle, the Electrolux ELFE7637AT is one of the more impressive electric dryers on the market right now, earning the Energy Star seal of approval. While it still isn’t super fast (fast takes a lot of heat, which takes a lot of energy, which makes a machine less efficient), reviewers say it can get a large load to 100% dry in 60 minutes if need be. It’s also the best-rated electric dryer on Consumer Reports’ list that isn’t one of the Samsung, LG, or GE models that Flint frequently gets called out to fix.
This combo washer-dryer uses heat pump technology in its dryer, making it one of the more energy-efficient single-unit models on the market. Unlike some of the other options on this list, however, its larger 4.8 cubic foot drum size is big enough for a two- or three-person household. While combo washer/dryers still have some downsides over their two-piece counterparts, including decreased efficiency in cleaning and especially drying, this is one of the better-reviewed units on the market.
Flint told me that you can often find older Kenmore Whirlpool series 80 machines on Craigslist that are “ really good, and tend to sell for about $250 when refurbished, and often come with a one-year warranty.” The only detriment, he said, is that they’re top-loaders — which waste a lot of water — but “if somebody just really needs a tough machine that is going to last, that was a really good design.”
Congratulations! You’re now the proud owner of a new washer and dryer. What happens now?
New washers and dryers are unfortunately not designed with longevity in mind — but that doesn’t mean you need to replace them if something goes wrong after four or five years.
“I can go up to a washing machine that is sitting in the dump, and I can open up the door, and I can spin the spin basket, and I can tell that it’s a perfectly good machine,” Flint told me.
Flint estimates that only about 20% of the time do people actually need to call in a technician to repair their appliances, pointing to fixes like replacing a blown fuse, unsticking a front-load washer that won’t spin, and swapping out a moldy washer door gasket as deceptively simple tasks. Get acquainted with DIY YouTube channels like Flint’s or repair blogs that explain solutions to common problems.
Still, sometimes you need to call in the big guns. In that case, Flint recommends doing your due diligence on a review service like Yelp beforehand.
Once you find someone you like, reach out with the model number of your machine and the symptom you’re experiencing and the technician “should be able to provide you a quote without coming out if they know what they’re doing,” Flint said. If someone does have to come out to figure out what’s going on, then that visit should be free. “Don’t go with someone who’s going to charge you to come out and diagnose the problem and then charge you to fix it.” Repairs to a front-loading washer will probably run around $170, according to Consumer Reports.
You can extend the life of your washer or dryer by following a few more rules of thumb.
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The EV-maker is now a culture war totem, plus some AI.
During Alan Greenspan’s decade-plus run leading the Federal Reserve, investors and the financial media were convinced that there was a “Greenspan put” underlying the stock market. The basic idea was that if the markets fell too much or too sharply, the Fed would intervene and put a floor on prices analogous to a “put” option on a stock, which allows an investor to sell a stock at a specific price, even if it’s currently selling for less. The existence of this put — which was, to be clear, never a stated policy — was thought to push stock prices up, as it gave investors more confidence that their assets could only fall so far.
While current Fed Chair Jerome Powell would be loath to comment on a specific volatile security, we may be seeing the emergence of a kind of sociopolitical put for Tesla, one coming from the White House and conservative media instead of the Federal Reserve.
The company’s high-flying stock shed over $100 billion of value on Monday, falling around 15% and leaving the price down around 50% from its previous all-time high. While the market as a whole also swooned, especially high-value technology companies like Nvidia and Meta, Tesla was the worst hit. Analysts attributed the particularly steep fall to concerns that CEO Elon Musk was spending too much time in Washington, and that the politicization of the brand had made it toxic to buyers in Europe and among liberals in the United States.
Then the cavalry came in. Sean Hannity told his Fox News audience that he had bought a Model S, while President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.” By this afternoon, Trump had turned the White House lawn into a sales floor for Musk’s electric vehicles. Tesla shares closed the day up almost 4%, while the market overall closed down after Trump and his advisors’ furious whiplash policy pronouncements on tariffs.
Whether the Tesla put succeeds remains to be seen. The stock is still well, well below its all-time highs, but it may confirm a new way to understand Tesla — not as a company that sells electric vehicles to people concerned about climate change, but rather as a conservative culture war totem that has also made sizable investments in artificial intelligence and robotics.
When Musk bought Twitter and devoted more of his time, energy, money, and public pronouncements to right wing politics, some observers thought that maybe he could lift the dreadful image of electric vehicles among Trump voters. But when Pew did a survey on public attitudes towards electric vehicles back in 2023, it found that “Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, younger adults, and people living in urban areas are among the most likely to say they would consider purchasing an EV” — hardly a broad swathe of Trump’s America. More than two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they weren’t interested in buying an electric car, compared to 30% of Democrats.
On the campaign trail, Trump regularly lambasted EVs, although by the end of the campaign, as Musk’s support became more voluminous, he’s lightened up a bit. In any case, the Biden administration’s pro-electric-vehicle policies were an early target for the Trump administration, and the consumer subsidies for EVs passed under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act are widely considered to be one of the softest targets for repeal.
But newer data shows that the tide may be turning, not so much for electric vehicles, but likely for Tesla itself.
The Wall Street Journalreported survey data last week showing that only 13% of Democrats would consider buying a Tesla, down from 23% from August of 2023, while 26% of Republicans would consider buying a Tesla, up from 15%. Vehicle registration data cited by the Journal suggested a shift in new Tesla purchases from liberal urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, towards more conservative-friendly metropolises like Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, and Miami.
At the same time, many Tesla investors appear to be mostly seeing through the gyrations in the famously volatile stock and relatively unconcerned about month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter sales data. After all, even after the epic fall in Tesla’s stock price, the company is still worth over $700 billion, more than Toyota, General Motors, and Ford combined, each of which sells several times more cars per year than Tesla.
Many investors simply do not view Tesla as a luxury or mass market automaker, instead seeing it as an artificial intelligence and robotics company. When I speak to individual Tesla shareholders, they’re always telling me how great Full Self-Driving is, not how many cars they expect the company to sell in August. In many cases, Musk has made Tesla stockholders a lot of money, so they’re willing to cut him tremendous slack and generally believe that he has the future figured out.
Longtime Tesla investor Ron Baron, who bought hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares from 2014 to 2016, told CNBC Tuesday morning, that Musk “believes that digitization [and] autonomy is going to be driving the future. And he thinks we’re … on the verge of having an era of incredible abundance.”Baron also committed that he hasn’t, won’t, and will never sell. “I’m the last in, I’ll be the last out. So I won’t sell a single share personally until I sell all the shares for clients, and that’s what I’ve done.”
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives, one of the biggest Tesla bulls on the street, has told clients that he expects Tesla’s valuation to exceed $2 trillion, and that its self-driving and robotics business “will represent 90% of the valuation.”
Another longtime Tesla bull, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas, told clients in a note Monday that Tesla remained a “Top Pick,” and that his price target was still $430, compared to the stock’s $230.58 close price on the day. His bull case, he said, was $800, which would give the company a valuation over $2.5 trillion.
When the stock lags, Jonas wrote, investors see Tesla as a car company. “In December with the stock testing $500/share, the prevailing sentiment was that the company is an AI ‘winner’ with untapped exposure to embodied AI expressions such as humanoid robotics,” Jonas wrote. “Today with the stock down 50% our investor conversations are focused on management distraction, brand degradation and lost auto sales.”
In a note to clients Tuesday, Ives beseeched Musk to “step up as CEO,” and lamented that there has been “little to no sign of Musk at any Tesla factory or manufacturing facility the last two months.” But his bullishness for Tesla was undaunted. He argued that the scheduled launch of unsupervised Full Self-Driving in June “kicks off the autonomous era at Tesla that we value at $1 trillion alone on a sum-of-the-parts valuation.”
“Autonomous will be the biggest transformation to the auto industry in modern day history,” Ives wrote, “and in our view Tesla will own the autonomous market in the U.S. and globally.”
The most effective put of all may not be anything Trump says or does, but rather investors’ optimism about the future — as long as it’s Elon Musk’s future.
The uncertainty created by Trump’s erratic policymaking could not have come at a worse time for the industry.
This is the second story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
Climate tech investment rode to record highs during the Biden administration, supercharged by a surge in ESG investing and net-zero commitments, the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, and at least initially, low interest rates. Though the market had already dropped somewhat from its recent peak, climate tech investors told me that the Trump administration is now shepherding in a detrimental overcorrection. The president’s fossil fuel-friendly rhetoric, dubiously legal IIJA and IRA funding freezes, and aggressive tariffs, have left climate tech startups in the worst possible place: a state of deep uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of economic progress,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me.
The lack of clarity is understandably causing investors to throw on the brakes. “We’ve talked internally about, let’s be a little bit more cautious, let’s be a little more judicious with our dollars right now,” Gabriel Kra, co-founder at the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures, told me. “We’re not out in the market, but I would think this would be a really tough time to try and go out and raise a new fund.”
This reluctance comes at a particularly bad time for climate tech startups, many of which are now reaching a point where they are ready to scale up and build first-of-a-kind infrastructure projects and factories. That takes serious capital, the kind that wasn’t as necessary during Trump’s first term, or even much of Biden’s, when many of these companies were in a more nascent research and development or proof-of-concept stage.
I also heard from investors that the pace of Trump’s actions and the extent of the economic upheaval across every sector feels unique this time around. “We’re entering a pretty different economic construct,” Beebe told me, citing the swirling unknowns around how Trump’s policies will impact economic indicators such as inflation and interest rates. “We haven’t seen this kind of economic warfare in decades,” he said.
Even before Trump took office, it was notoriously difficult for climate companies to raise funding in the so-called “missing middle,” when startups are too mature for early-stage venture capital but not mature enough for traditional infrastructure investors to take a bet on them. This is exactly the point at which government support — say, a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office or a grant from the DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations — could be most useful in helping a company prove its commercial viability.
But now that Trump has frozen funding — even some that’s been contractually obligated — companies are left with fewer options than ever to reach scale.
One investor who wished to remain anonymous in order to speak more openly told me that “a lot of the missing middle companies are living in a dicier world.” A 2023 white paper on “capital imbalances in the energy transition” from S2G Investments, a firm that supports both early-stage and growth-stage companies, found that from 2017 to 2022, only 20% of climate capital flowed toward companies at this critical inflection point, while 43% went to early-stage companies and 37% towards established technologies. For companies at this precarious growth stage, a funding delay on the order of months could be the difference between life and death, the investor added. Many of these companies may also be reliant on debt financing, they explained. “Unless they’ve been extremely disciplined, they could run into a situation where they’re just not able to service that debt.”
The months or even years that it could take for Trump’s rash funding rescission to wind through the courts will end up killing some companies, Beebe told me. “And unfortunately, that’s what people on the other side of this debate would like, is just to litigate and escalate. And even if they ultimately lose, they’ve won, because startups just don’t have the balance sheets that big companies would,” he explained.
Kra’s Prelude Ventures has a number of prominent companies in its portfolio that have benefitted from DOE grants. This includes Electric Hydrogen, which received a $43.3 million DOE grant to scale electrolyzer manufacturing; Form Energy, which received $150 million to help build a long-duration battery storage manufacturing plant; Boston Metal, which was awarded $50 million for a green steel facility; and Heirloom, which is a part of the $600 million Project Cypress Direct Air Capture hub. DOE funding is often doled out in tranches, with some usually provided upfront and further payments tied to specific project milestones. So even if a grant has officially been awarded, that doesn’t mean all of the funding has been disbursed, giving the Trump administration an opening to break government contracts and claw it back.
Kra told me that a few of his firm’s companies were on the verge of securing government funding before Trump took office, or have a project in the works that is now on hold. “We and the board are working closely with those companies to figure out what to do,” he told me. “If the mandates or supports aren’t there for that company, you’ve got to figure out how to make that cash last a bunch longer so you can still meet some commercially meaningful milestones.”
In this environment, Kra said his firm will be taking a closer look at companies that claim they will be able to attract federal funds. “Let’s make sure we understand what they can do without that non-dilutive capital, without those grants, without that project level support,” he told me, noting that “several” companies in his portfolio will also be impacted by Trump’s ever-changing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. Prelude Ventures is working with its portfolio companies to figure how to “smooth out the hit,” Kra told me later via email, but inevitably the tariffs “will affect the prices consumers pay in the short and long run.”
While investors can’t avoid the impacts of all government policies and impulses, the growth-stage firm G2 Venture Partners has long tried to inoculate itself against the vicissitudes of government financing. “None of our companies actually have any exposure to DOE loans,” Brook Porter, a partner and co-founder at G2, told me in an email, nor have they received government grants. If you add up the revenue from all of the companies in G2’s portfolio, which is made up mainly of sustainability-focused startups, only about 3% “has any exposure to the IRA,” Porter told me. So even if the law’s generous clean energy tax credits are slashed or the programs it supports are left to languish, G2’s companies will likely soldier on.
Then there are the venture capitalists themselves. Many of the investors I spoke with emphasized that not all firms will have the ability or will to weather this storm. “I definitely believe many generalist funds who dabbled in climate will pull back,” Beebe told me. Porter agreed. “The generalists are much more interested in AI, then I think in climate,” he said. It’s not as if there’s been a rash of generalist investors announcing pullbacks, though Kra told me he knows of “a couple of firms” that are rethinking their climate investment strategies, potentially opting to fold these investments under an umbrella category such as “hard tech” instead of highlighting a sectoral focus on energy or climate, specifically.
Last month, the investment firm Coatue, which has about $70 billion in assets under management, raised around $250 million for a climate-focused fund, showing it’s not all doom and gloom for the generalists’ climate ambitions. But Porter told me this is exactly the type of large firm he wouldexpect to back out soon, citing Tiger Global Management and Softbank as others that started investing heavily during climate tech’s boom years from 2020 to 2022 that he could imagine winding down that line of business.
Strategic investors such as oil companies have also been quick to dial back their clean energy ambitions and refocus their sights on the fossil fuels championed by the Trump administration. “Corporate venture is very cyclical,” Beebe told me, explaining that large companies tend to make venture investments when they have excess budget or when a sector looks hot, but tighten the purse strings during periods of uncertainty.
But Cody Simms, a managing partner at the climate tech investment firm MCJ, told me that at the moment, he actually sees the corporate venture ecosystem as “quite strong and quite active.” The firm’s investments include the low-carbon cement company Sublime Systems, which last year got strategic backing from two of the world’s largest building materials companies, and the methane capture company Windfall Bio, which has received strategic funding from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund. Simms noted that this momentum could represent an overexuberance among corporations who just recently stood up their climate-focused venture arms, and “we’ll see if it continues into the next few years.”
Notably, Sublime and Windfall Bio both also have millions in DOE grants, and another of MCJ’s portfolio companies, bio-based chemicals maker Solugen, has a “conditional commitment” from the LPO for a loan guarantee of over $200 million. Since that money isn’t yet obligated, there’s a good chance it might never actually materialize, which could stall construction on the company’s in-progress biomanufacturing facility.
Simms told me that the main thing he’s encouraging MCJ’s portfolio companies to do at this stage is to contact their local representatives — not to advocate for climate action in general, but rather “to push on the very specific tax credit that they are planning to use and to talk about how it creates jobs locally in their districts.”
Getting startups to shift the narrative away from decarbonization and climate and toward their multitudinous co-benefits — from energy security to supply chain resilience — is of course a strategy many are already deploying to one degree or another. And investors were quick to remind me that the landscape may not be quite as bleak as it appears.
“We’ve made more investments, and we have a pipeline of more attractive investments now than we have in the last couple of years,” Porter told me. That’s because in spite of whatever havoc the Trump administration is wreaking, a lot of climate tech companies are reaching a critical juncture that could position the sector overall for “a record number of IPOs this year and next,” Porter said. The question is, “will these macro uncertainties — political, economic, financial uncertainty — hold companies back from going public?”
As with so many economic downturns and periods of instability, investors also see this as a moment for the true blue startups and venture capitalists to prove their worth and business acumen in an environment that’s working against them. “Now we have the hardcore founders, the people who really are driven by building economically viable, long-term, massively impactful companies, and the investors who understand the markets very well, coming together around clean business models that aren’t dependent on swinging from one subsidy vine to the next subsidy vine,” Beebe told me.
“There is no opportunity that’s an absolute no, even in this current situation, across the entire space,” the anonymous climate tech investor told me. “And so this might be one of the most important points — I won’t say a high point, necessarily — but it might be a moment of truth that the energy transition needs to embrace.”
On the energy secretary’s keynote, Ontario’s electricity surcharge, and record solar power
Current conditions: Critical fire weather returns to New Mexico and Texas and will remain through Saturday • Sharks have been spotted in flooded canals along Australia’s Gold Coast after Cyclone Alfred dropped more than two feet of rain • A tanker carrying jet fuel is still burning after it collided with a cargo ship in the North Sea yesterday. The ship was transporting toxic chemicals that could devastate ecosystems along England’s northeast coast.
In a keynote speech at the energy industry’s annual CERAWeek conference, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told executives and policymakers that the Trump administration sees climate change as “a side effect of building the modern world,” and said that “everything in life involves trade-offs." He pledged to “end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change” and insisted he’s not a climate change denier, but rather a “climate realist.” According toThe New York Times, “Mr. Wright’s speech was greeted with enthusiastic applause.” Wright also reportedly told fossil fuel bosses he intended to speed up permitting for their projects.
Other things overheard at Day 1 of CERAWeek:
The premier of Canada’s Ontario province announced he is hiking fees on electricity exported to the U.S. by 25%, escalating the trade war kicked off by President Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods, including a 10% tariff on Canadian energy resources. The decision could affect prices in Minnesota, New York, and Michigan, which get some of their electricity from the province. Ontario Premier Doug Ford estimated the surcharge will add about $70 to the monthly bills of affected customers. “I will not hesitate to increase this charge,” Ford said. “If the United States escalates, I will not hesitate to shut the electricity off completely.” The U.S. tariffs went into effect on March 4. Trump issued another 30-day pause just days later, but Ford said Ontario “will not relent” until the threat of tariffs is gone for good.
There was a lot of news from the White House yesterday that relates to climate and the energy transition. Here’s a quick rundown:
The EPA cancelled hundreds of environmental justice grants: EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency nixed 400 grants across environmental justice programs and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs worth $1.7 billion. Zeldin said this round of cuts “was our biggest yet.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rescinded Biden memos about infrastructure projects: The two memos encouraged states to prioritize climate change resilience in infrastructure projects funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and to include under-represented groups when planning projects.
The military ended funding for climate studies: This one technically broke on Friday. The Department of Defense is scrapping its funding for social science research, which covers climate change studies. In a post on X, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DOD “does not do climate change crap. We do training and war fighting.”
Meanwhile, a second nonprofit – the Coalition for Green Capital – filed a lawsuit against Citibank over climate grant money awarded under the Inflation Reduction Act but frozen by Zeldin’s EPA. Climate United filed a similar lawsuit (but targeting the EPA, as well as Citibank) on Saturday.
A new report from the Princeton ZERO Lab’s REPEAT Project examines the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s plans to kill existing EV tax credits and repeal EPA tailpipe regulations. It finds that, compared to a scenario in which the current policies are kept in place:
“In other words, killing the IRA tax credits for EVs will decimate the nascent renaissance in vehicle and battery manufacturing investment and employment we’re currently seeing play out across the United States,” said Jesse Jenkins, an assistant professor and expert in energy systems engineering and policy at Princeton University and head of the REPEAT Project. (Jenkins is also the co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.)
REPEAT Project
The U.S. installed nearly 50 gigawatts of new solar power capacity last year, up 21% from 2023, according to a new report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. That’s a record, and the largest annual grid capacity increase from any energy technology in the U.S. in more than 20 years. Combined with storage, solar represents 84% of all new grid capacity added in 2024.
SEIA and Wood Mackenzie
Last year was “the year of materialization of the IRA,” with supply chains becoming more resilient and interest from utilities and corporate buyers growing. Installations are expected to remain steady this year, with little growth, because of policy uncertainty. Total U.S. solar capacity is expected to reach 739 GW by 2035, but this depends on policy. The worst case scenario shows a 130 GW decline in deployment through 2035, which would represent $250 billion in lost investments.
“Last year’s record-level of installations was aided by several solar policies and credits within the Inflation Reduction Act that helped drive interest in the solar market,” said Sylvia Levya Martinez, a principal analyst of North America utility-scale solar for Wood Mackenzie. “We still have many challenges ahead, including unprecedented load growth on the power grid. If many of these policies were eliminated or significantly altered, it would be very detrimental to the industry’s continued growth.”
Tesla shares plunged yesterday by 15%, marking the company’s worst day on the market since 2020 and erasing its post-election stock bump.