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On the solar siege, New York’s climate law, and radioactive data center
On nuclear tax credits, BLM controversy, and a fusion maverick’s fundraise
Four takeaways from a stormy year.
There are two titanic forces in the clean energy market, and whichever one is stronger will determine the path of the post-One Big Beautiful Bill Act industry.
First there’s federal policy, which, thanks to OBBBA and the Trump administration’s war on renewable permitting, is making things more difficult for developers. Then there’s the technology: Soaring electricity demand from data centers, providing the business case for everything from co-located batteries and solar to small modular nuclear reactors.
“2025 is the storm at night, and there were all these cross-cutting winds that hit the boat. The ones that came from the front are the tariffs and the tax changes and wind cancellations or pauses,” Alfred Johnson, cofounder and chief executive of the clean energy finance platform Crux, told me. “Then the tailwinds at the back were interest rates, the continuation of many [other tax credits] in the OBBBA — including storage credits, nuclear credits, manufacturing credits — and substantial demand coming for the electricity and the components. And when the storm cleared in the morning, the boat is further ahead in the water than you would have anticipated.”
That’s the bifurcated story Crux — a marketplace for tax equity, tax credits, and debt financing — is telling in its 2025 market intelligence report, released Tuesday. There were splits in when investment happened and in which sectors were favored. There were better and worse times for investment. And there were countervailing forces pushing on the clean energy market.
Here’s how Crux views the clean energy financing market as it enters an uncertain time.
Crux found a split in activity between the first and second halves of last year across a number of markets. A lot of that could be chalked up to investors trying to front-run a partial or full repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, which became all but inevitable following the 2024 election.
Overall there was $120 billion worth of lending to “clean power, fuels, and manufacturing projects” in 2025. That’s more than in 2024, but still a “materially lower growth rate” — 5.8% year over year, compared to 22% in 2024.
“Investment activity was front-loaded during the first half of 2025,” the report found, peaking in the first three months of the year and then declining through “the second and third quarters “as some investors waited to see how debate over the OBBB would resolve itself.” There was capital to be raised throughout 2025, but it “became increasingly selective over the course of the year,” Crux found.
Some $63 billion of tax credits changed hands — but again, there was a slowdown in the second half of the year due to uncertainty around how the OBBBA affected the market. Similarly, pricing for tax credits softened in the second half of the year, and deals got smaller.
Solar and storage “continued to represent a dominant share of current-year spot tax credit activity in 2025,” the Crux report says, making up just over half of the tax credit market. While solar on its own made up just over a third of the market, “storage-linked categories expanded most rapidly on a percentage basis, led by standalone storage, followed by solar and storage,” the team found.
Citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing that utility-scale storage deployment grew 72% over the course of 2025, from 11 gigawatts to 19 gigawatts, Johnson told me that storage is “categorically booming.”
“Storage was a major outlier and source of growth,” he said. “We continue as a country to provide a lot of support on top of a lot of demand for batteries, and that, in our view, is going to lead to a lot of continued deployment in the battery sector.”
But what about EVs? The large batteries in electric cars are a major source of demand that help catalyze the battery supply chain from the lithium and cobalt to the battery cells and packs. While the EV market may be getting hammered by inconsistent policy, battery manufacturing is still going strong, Johnson said, thanks to the demand for energy storage.
“There was a lot of pearl-clutching about what would happen to the battery supply chain with less policy support and EVs being less in favor,” he told me. “What you have seen is some number of those battery manufacturers have rotated their delivery and their product into grid-connected battery storage because that market has so much demand in it. So you’re still seeing a lot of that demand flow through into the need for capacity.”
Crux found that nearly a quarter of the Fortune 1000 companies are participating in the tax credit market. Their rising participation “drove the aggregate growth in the market and supported pricing despite rising market uncertainty following passage of the OBBB,” the report found.
When the market was just tax equity deals, in which investors partner directly with developers on a project in exchange for the value of the tax credits, it had only “a few dozen participants,” Johnson said. By 2023, a year after the Inflation Reduction Act allowed for those credits to be traded on third-party platform, it had around 50, he told me. Now that number is closer to 250.
“It’s becoming a more common part of the tax planning and cash management strategies that large companies are deploying,” Johnson said, pointing to data showing that tax credit buyers had effective tax rates three percentage points lower than non-buyers.
The Internal Revenue Service rolled out final rules for a new set of production and investment tax credits — the so-called tech neutral tax credits that applied to “any clean energy facility that achieves net-zero greenhouse gas emissions,” not just specific technologies chosen by Congress — in early 2025, just before the Biden administration left office.
Since then, these credits “have entered a choppy market,” the Crux report says.
“Crux’s survey of tax equity sponsors shows that most have limited investment in projects claiming the tech-neutral … credits,” which it attributed to concerns around stringent source requirements companies related to so-called foreign entities of concern must meet to claim these newer credits compared to the legacy investment and production tax credits.
Crux found modest but still measurable discounts for the tech-neutral tax credits compared to their predecessors of about 1 to 2 cents on the dollar for newer projects. (Projects that started construction before the end of 2024 were still eligible for the legacy credits.)
When talking to tax equity investors, Crux found that just 10%“reported actively pursuing tech-neutral tax credits,” while 90% said they would “only look at these credits under certain circumstances.”
“It’s mostly a comfort thing,” Johnson said. That may yet abate — he pointed out that “you saw preference in the early market for wind and solar credits versus advanced manufacturing and fuels and nuclear,” as new credits were developed, but eventually the market became more comfortable with funding new technologies and working with new credits, Johnson said.
“The new guidance that came out from the department on FEOC answers some of those questions,” Johnson said. “We think that that will drive some amount of additional market volume.”
On the California atom, Russian nuclear theft, and Taiwan’s geothermal hope
Current conditions: A blockbuster blizzard blanketed the Northeast in up to 2 feet of snow, trigger outages for nearly 500,000 households • Hot, dry Harmattan conditions are blowing into Nigeria out of the Sahara, leaving the capital, Abuja, and the largest city, Lagos, roasting in nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit • Much of South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Victoria are bracing for severe thunderstorms and flooding.
A chart shows the expected new generating additions in the U.S. grid's pipeline. EIA
By the end of this year, U.S. developers are on pace to add 86 gigawatts of new utility-scale generating capacity to the American grid. Just 7% of that will come from natural gas. The other 93%? Solar, batteries, and wind, according to the latest inventory by the Energy Information Administration. Utility-scale solar projects alone will provide 51% of the new generating capacity, followed by batteries at 28%, and wind at 14%. Critics of renewables, such as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, would point out that generating capacity does not equal generation, and that as has happened recently, gas, coal, and nuclear power may well end up pumping out a lot of the electricity this year. But rapid expansion of renewables and batteries comes largely despite the Trump administration’s efforts to curb the growth of what top officials dismiss as “unreliable” sources of power. Surging electricity demand from data centers has left gas turbines backordered; geothermal plants are still at an early stage; and new nuclear reactors are still years away. That makes solar and wind, already some of the cheapest sources to build, the only obvious options to bring new generation online as quickly as possible. In a sense, Trump may have helped nudge 2026’s boom into existence by phasing off federal tax credits for renewables this year, spurring a rush to get projects started and lock in the writeoffs.
That doesn’t mean the solar, battery, and wind sectors aren’t facing steep challenges. Just last week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman rounded up four local fights on opposite coasts, including over a big solar farm in Oregon.
California could consider building anything from a large-scale Westinghouse AP1000 to a next-generation microreactor if a new bill to clarify the state’s ban on new nuclear power plants passes into law. On Friday, Assemblymember Lisa Calderon, a Democrat from Southern California, introduced AB2647 to modify the state moratorium put in place in 1976, three years before the Three Mile Island accident, to allow for construction of modern nuclear reactors. The legislation would exempt all reactor designs certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission after January 1, 2005. That clears the way for an AP1000, which was approved in 2006, and today is the only new design in commercial operation in the U.S., or any of the new small modular reactors and microreactors now racing to come to market. The bill is bringing together disparate factions in the California legislature. Progressive Assemblymember Alex Lee co-sponsored the legislation, while Senator Brian Jones, the highest ranking Republican in the state’s upper chamber, is backing a Senate version of the legislation.
Since Friday, I can report exclusively in this newsletter, the bill has two new supporters. Patrick Ahrens, a Silicon Valley-area Democrat, has signed on as a backer, and the Sheet Metal Workers union has said it would support the bill. “Pinching myself,” Ryan Pickering — a reactor developer and Berkeley-based activist who helped lead the successful campaign to cancel the closure of the state’s last plant, the Diablo Canyon nuclear station — responded when I texted him to ask about the bill. “California has an epic history in nuclear energy. We built 11 reactors across this state and once envisioned up to 14 gigawatts of nuclear electricity. This technology is part of our inheritance as Californians,” he said. “Assembly Bill 2647 gives California the opportunity to begin building nuclear energy again.”
If you have ever crossed the Queensboro Bridge from Manhattan’s 59th Street over to Long Island City in Queens, you have no doubt seen the Ravenswood Generating Station. The four candycane-colored smokestacks of New York City’s largest power plant, a more than 2-gigawatt facility equipped to burn both fuel oil and natural gas, rise on the lefthand side of the bridge, looming over the East River. Just a few years ago, its owner, LS Power, envisioned transforming the plant through a subsidiary called Rise Light and Power, which aimed to build a large-scale battery hub fed by new transmission lines connecting the facility to nearby offshore wind farms and onshore turbines upstate. Now, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo reported in a Friday scoop, the company is selling Ravenswood to the Texas energy giant NRG. It’s not yet clear what the sale means for the so-called Renewable Ravenswood plan, which Emily wrote was already “hanging by a thread.”
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Since the start of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has maintained clear designs on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Europe’s largest atomic generating station, located in an occupied province of eastern Ukraine, has been offline for the past four years. But, in a bid to shore up on the Kremlin’s desired war prizes as peace negotiations sputter, Russia’s nuclear regulator Rostekhnadzor has issued a 10-year operating license for Unit 2 of the plant. In its announcement, NucNet reported Friday, Rostekhnadzor said the move would open the door to building more Russian nuclear plants in the region. Rosatom, Moscow’s state-owned nuclear company, has submitted an application for an operating license for Unit 6, and aims to do the same for units 3, 4, and 5 by the end of this year.
The neighboring country most eager to contain Russia, meanwhile, took a big step toward building its first nuclear plant. The Supreme Administrative Court in Poland, whose debut facility is going with American technology, rejected an environmental complaint aimed at halting construction of AP1000 reactors at the site on the Baltic sea.
Earlier this month, I told you about Equinor’s plans to scale back its investments in carbon capture and sequestration, despite Norway’s world-leading progress on pumping captured CO2 back underground. Now the Norwegian energy giant is quitting on one of the European Union’s landmark projects to prove hydrogen fuel can be produced at scale using natural gas equipped with CCS. The company last week abandoned a gigawatt-sized blue hydrogen plant in the Netherlands as demand for the fuel stalls. Some may welcome the blue hydrogen recession. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote last year, a major blue hydrogen plant in Louisiana had been poised to add more emissions than it saved.
Things are looking sunnier in South America for green hydrogen, the carbon-free version of the fuel made from blasting freshwater with enough renewable electricity to separate out H from H2O. Colombia just completed a feasibility study on the country’s first industrial-scale green hydrogen project, set to generate 120,000 metric tons of green ammonia per year at a remarkably low price, according to Hydrogen Insight. At the opposite end of the continent, Uruguay’s 1.1-gigawatt green hydrogen-fueled methanol plant last week lined up a major offtaker that plans to buy the chemical to make lower-carbon gasoline. The purchaser? A fuel company based in a major artery of European trade, Germany’s Port of Hamburg.
Taiwan is in an energy crisis. The self-governing island, whose “silicon shield” against China is predicated on its capacity to manufacture enough energy-intensive semiconductors to be invaluable to the global economy, shut down its last nuclear reactor last year. By exiting atomic energy while struggling to build offshore wind turbines, the government in Taipei has rendered Taiwan almost entirely dependent on imported fuels. In an age when, as Russia has shown in Ukraine, blackouts are key weapons, the People’s Liberation Army need only make liquified natural gas dangerous to ship through the Taiwan Strait to cause blackouts. But geothermal power, development of which stalled out after the 1970s, offers a unique tool for Taiwan. Located on the Pacific Rim, the island has lots of hot rocks. Now it finally has a growing geothermal industry again, too. The CPC Corporation Taiwan said just before Lunar New Year started last week that it had just started generating power from the 5.4-megawatt Yilan Tuchang Geothermal plant. While small, it’s now the largest geothermal plant in Taiwan.
