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The world’s biggest polluter is also the world’s top generator of renewable energy.
Ahead of President Biden’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco on Wednesday, the U.S. and China released a joint statement that represents a breakthrough in the two countries’ climate change negotiations. Most notably, the Asian superpower has finally agreed to set concrete targets to reduce emissions across its economy.
The statement asserts that the U.S. and China will work together and with other parties at the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Abu Dhabi, known as COP28, to “rise up to one of the greatest challenges of our time for present and future generations of humankind.”
Underlying the summit is a stark reality: The world will not be able to limit global warming to internationally agreed-upon levels if China, the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, does not increase its ambition. The country is now responsible for about a third of annual global carbon emissions. China’s combustion of coal alone accounts for 25% of all energy-related emissions in the world.
Yet China is also the world’s top generator of renewable energy and the foremost manufacturer of much of the technology undergirding the transition. Come with me on a tour of the complex, contradictory state of China’s energy transition in eight eye-popping charts.
China’s climate pledges to date have been vague. The country has said its carbon emissions will peak before 2030, for instance, but has not set a firm target for when or at what level — and the target does not apply to other planet-warming gases like methane. But according to an analysis by Climate Action Tracker, under current policies, China’s annual emissions will peak around 2025 and then plateau for the rest of the decade. That’s primarily due to a projection that the country will continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels as its total energy demand grows. But as we’ll see, this is also one of the key uncertainties around China’s transition.
The biggest source of emissions in China is the power sector. More than 60% of its electricity generation came from coal-fired power plants last year. At COP26 in Glasgow, China said it would “phase down coal consumption” beginning in 2026, but unlike the U.S., which hasn’t built a large coal plant in 10 years, China is growing its coal fleet. Last year, the country greenlit the construction of two new coal plants per week on average, according to Global Energy Monitor, and the trend continued into 2023.
China’s coal permitting spree is the result of rising anxieties among leadership over energy security in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine, and now the Israel-Hamas war, Kevin Tu, a non-resident fellow at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. He said China “undoubtedly” overemphasized security in its energy decision-making and that these plants were at risk of becoming stranded assets.
But as Cornell University professor and Heatmap contributor Jeremy Wallace wrote earlier this year, China’s coal plants haven’t even been running at full capacity, and are “shifting to a role of backing-up renewables.” The International Energy Agency predicted last month that China will “gradually use its coal-fired power more to provide flexibility and less to deliver bulk energy.”
China may also begin trying to capture the carbon emitted from its coal plants, with the help of the U.S. One of the points of agreement reached this week was an aim to “advance at least 5 large-scale cooperative [carbon capture, utilization, and storage] projects each by 2030.”
Even though China is building coal plants like there’s no tomorrow, the proportion of its overall energy consumption coming from fossil fuels is actually dropping quite rapidly — at a much faster rate than in the U.S. The country has reduced fossil fuels to about 82% of its energy mix, and plans to get no more than 75% of its energy from fossil fuels by 2030.
The analysis by Climate Action Tracker shows China “significantly overachieving” that goal, primarily because the country is building wind and solar farms at a truly wild pace.
China will build more solar generation this year than the U.S. has built, period. The country’s 2023 additions of low-carbon resources — solar, wind, nuclear, and hydroelectric — are enough to meet the annual electricity needs of the entire United Kingdom.
Critics of China’s climate commitments look at the country’s unbelievably fast progress on renewables and argue it could easily raise its ambition. The country will most certainly exceed the 1,200 gigawatts of wind and solar it has outlined in its current policy plans.
China is even doing what has become impossible in much of the Western world and growing its nuclear fleet. “This will be the largest expansion of nuclear capacity in history, by far,” Jacopo Buongiorno, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, told CNBC recently.
China has already won the race when it comes to manufacturing clean technologies. Even though the U.S. is pouring billions of dollars into building up its own manufacturing capacity, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever put a real dent in China’s market dominance for lithium-ion battery and solar module production.
It’s much more likely that the U.S. and other developed countries will continue to rely heavily on China for their own energy transitions. Earlier this year, Group of Seven leaders admitted as much when they described their approach to relations with China as “derisking, not decoupling.”
China’s manufacturing prowess could also benefit a far wider swath of the globe. “China has an opportunity to leverage such capabilities to facilitate deploying clean energy globally,” said Gang He, an assistant professor of energy and climate policy at Baruch College, in an email. “Especially in the world's least developed and most vulnerable countries.”
That’s not happening yet. In September 2021, China committed to ending its overseas financing of coal-fired power plants and to support renewable energy development abroad. But while its coal finance came to an abrupt halt, its investment in wind and solar has not gone up accordingly, according to the World Resources Institute.
But in the new joint statement with the U.S., China agreed to “pursue efforts to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030” in addition to accelerating the “substitution” of renewables for fossil fuels in their own countries.
How to make sense of all of this?
Earlier this week, CarbonBrief had quite an optimistic take on the data. It found that China’s rate of low-carbon energy expansion is on track to outpace the annual increase in electricity demand — telling a different story than Climate Action Tracker projected about that first key uncertainty I mentioned. This could push emissions “into an extended period of structural decline,” the authors wrote. But it all depends on whether wind and solar interests can overcome China’s powerful coal lobby.
“What China really needs is to conduct some serious institutional reform to make its power system more friendly toward renewables,” Tu told me. “The problem in China is that the coal interest group makes such reform very difficult.”
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On billions for clean energy, Orsted layoffs, and public housing heat pumps
Current conditions: A tropical rainstorm is forming in the Atlantic that’s forecast to barrel along the East Coast through early next week, threatening major coastal flooding and power outages • Hurricane Priscilla is weakening as it tracks northward toward California • The Caucasus region is sweltering in summer-like heat, with the nation of Georgia enduring temperatures of up to 93 degrees Fahrenheit in October.
Base Power, the Texas power company that leases batteries to homeowners and taps the energy for the grid, on Tuesday announced a $1 billion financing round. The Series C funding is set to supercharge the Austin-based company’s meteoric growth. Since starting just two years ago, Base has deployed more than 100 megawatts of residential battery capacity, making it one of the fastest growing distributed energy companies in the nation. The company now plans to build a factory in the old headquarters of the Austin American-Statesman, the leading daily newspaper in the Texan capital. The funding round included major investors who are increasing their stakes, including Valor Equity Partners, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, and at least nine new venture capital investors, including Lowercarbon, Avenir, and Positive Sum. “The chance to reinvent our power system comes once in a generation,” Zach Dell, chief executive and co-founder of Base Power, said in a statement. “The challenge ahead requires the best engineers and operators to solve it and we’re scaling the team to make our abundant energy future a reality.”
The deal came a day after Brookfield Asset Management, the Canadian-American private equity giant, raised a record $23.5 billion for its clean energy fund. At least $5 billion has already been spent on investments such as the renewable power operator Neoen, the energy developer Geronimo Power, and the Indian wind and solar giant Evren. “Energy demand is growing fast, driven by the growth of artificial intelligence as well as electrification in industry and transportation,” Connor Teskey, Brookfield’s president and renewable power chief, said in a press release. “Against this backdrop we need an ‘any and all’ approach to energy investment that will continue to favor low carbon resources.”
Orsted has been facing down headwinds for months. The Danish offshore wind giant has absorbed the Trump administration’s wrath as the White House deployed multiple federal agencies to thwart progress on building seaward turbines in the Northeastern U.S. Then lower-than-forecast winds this year dinged Orsted’s projected earnings for 2025. When the company issued new stock to fund its efforts to fight back against Trump, the energy giant was forced to sell the shares at a steep discount, as I wrote in this newsletter last month. Despite all that, the company has managed to raise the money it needed. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Orsted had raised $9.4 billion. Existing shareholders subscribed for 99.3% of the new shares on offer, but demand for the remaining shares was “extraordinarily high,” the company said.
That wasn’t enough to stave off job cuts. Early Thursday morning, the company announced plans to lay off 2,000 employees between now and 2027. The cuts represented roughly one-quarter of the company’s 8,000-person global workforce. “This is a necessary consequence of our decision to focus our business and the fact that we'll be finalizing our large construction portfolio in the coming years — which is why we'll need fewer employees,” Rasmus Errboe, Orsted’s chief executive, said in a statement published on CNBC. "At the same time, we want to create a more efficient and flexible organization and a more competitive Orsted, ready to bid on new value-accretive offshore wind projects.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom. Mario Tama/Getty Images
California operates the world’s largest geothermal power station, The Geysers, and generates up to 5% of its power from the Earth’s heat. But the state is far behind its neighbors on developing new plants based on next-generation technology. Most of the startups racing to commercialize novel methods are headquartered or building pilot plants in states such as Utah, Nevada, and Texas. A pair of bills to make doing business in California easier for geothermal companies was supposed to change that. Yet while Governor Gavin Newsom signed one statute into law that makes it easier for state regulators to certify geothermal plants, he vetoed a permitting reform bill to which the industry had pegged its hopes. “Every geothermal developer and energy org I talked to was excited about this bill,” Thomas Hochman, who heads the energy program at the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, wrote in a post on X. “The legislature did everything right, passing it unanimously. They even reworked it to accommodate certain classic California concerns, such as prevailing wage requirements.”
In a letter announcing his veto, the governor claimed that the law would have added new fees for geothermal projects. But an executive at Zanskar — the startup that, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported last month, is using new technology to locate and tap into conventional geothermal resources — called the governor’s argument “weak sauce.” Far from burdening the industry, Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards said on X, “this was a clean shot to accelerate geothermal today, and he whiffed it.”
Last month, Generate Capital trumpeted the appointment of its first new chief executive in its 11-year history as the leading infrastructure investment firm sought to realign its approach to survive a tumultuous time in clean-energy financing. Less publicly, as Katie wrote in a scoop last night, it also kicked off company-wide job cuts. In an interview with Katie, Jonah Goldman, the firm’s head of external affairs, said the company “grew quickly and made some mistakes,” and now planned to lay off 50 people.
Generate once invested in “leading-edge technologies,” according to co-founder Jigar Shah, who left the firm to serve as the head of the Biden-era DOE Loan Programs Office. That included investments in projects involving fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, and battery storage. But from the outside, he said on the Open Circuits podcast he now co-hosts, the firm appears to have moved away from taking these riskier but potentially more lucrative bets. “They ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team, and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, Hey, we have all this stuff to sell. And the people that they went to said, Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar.”
Three of New England’s largest public housing agencies signed deals with the heat pump manufacturer Gradient to replace aging electric heaters and air conditioners with the company’s 120-volt, two-way units that provide both heating and cooling. The Boston Housing Authority, New England’s largest public housing agency, will kick off the deal by installing 100 all-weather, two-way units that both heat and cool at the Hassan Apartments, a complex for seniors and adults with disabilities in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. The housing authorities in neighboring Chelsea and Lynn — two formerly industrial, working-class cities just outside Boston — will follow the same approach.
Public housing agencies have long served a vital role in helping to popularize new, more efficient appliances. The New York City Housing Authority, for example, is credited with creating the market for efficient mini fridges in the 1990s. Last year, NYCHA — the nation’s largest public housing system — signed a similar deal with Gradient for heat pumps. Months later, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo exclusively reported at the time, NYCHA picked a winner in its $32 million contest for an efficient new induction stove for its apartments.
Three chemists — Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar Yaghi — won the Nobel Prize for “groundbreaking discoveries” that "may contribute to solving some of humankind’s greatest challenges, from pollution to water scarcity.” Just a few grams of the so-called molecular organic frameworks the scientists pioneered could have as much surface area as a soccer field, which can be used to lock gas molecules in place in carbon capture or harvest freshwater from the atmosphere.
The country’s underwhelming new climate pledge is more than just bad news for the world — it reveals a serious governing mistake.
Five years ago, China’s longtime leader Xi Jinping shocked and delighted the world by declaring in a video presentation to the United Nations that his country would peak its carbon emissions this decade and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. He tried to rekindle that magic late last month in another virtual address to the UN, announcing China’s updated pledge under the Paris Agreement.
This time, the reaction was far more tepid. Given the disastrous state of American climate policy under President Donald Trump, some observers declared — as the longtime expert Li Shuo did in The New York Times — that China is “the adult in the room on climate now.” Most others were disappointed, arguing that China had merely “played it safe” and pointing out the new pledge “falls well short” of what’s needed to hit the Paris Agreement’s targets.
Yet China’s dithering is more than just an environmental failure — it is a governing mistake. China’s weak climate pledge isn’t just bad news for the world; it shows an indecisive leadership that is undermining its country’s own competitiveness by sticking with dirty coal rather than transitioning rapidly to a cleaner future.
The new pledge — known in UN jargon as a nationally determined contribution, or NDC — reveals a disconnect between the government’s official position and the optimistic discourse that now surrounds China’s clean energy sector. China today is described as the world’s first electrostate; it stands at the vanguard of the solar and EV revolution, some say, ready to remake the world order against a coalition of petrostate dinosaurs.
The NDC makes it obvious that the Chinese government does not yet view itself in such a fashion. China might look like an adult, but it more closely resembles a gangly teenager who is still getting used to their body after a growth spurt. As the analyst Kingsmill Bond recently put it on Heatmap’s podcast Shift Key, Chinese clean tech manufacturers have unlocked a cleaner and cheaper path to economic development. It isn’t yet clear that China is brave enough to commit to it. If China is the adult in the room, in other words, we’re screwed.
Let’s start by giving credit where due. For a country that had never offered an absolute emissions reduction target before, Xi’s promise — to cut emissions by 7% to 10% by 2035 — is a kind of progress. But observers expected China to go much further. Researchers at the University of Maryland and the Center for Research on Clean Air, for example, each suggested that emissions could decline by roughly 30% by that year. Only a reduction of this magnitude would actually keep the planet on a trajectory sufficiently close to the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
Many inside China’s policy apparatus considered such ambitious cuts to be infeasible; for instance, Teng Fei, deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Institute of Energy, Environment and Economy, described a 30% reduction as “extreme.” Conversations with knowledgeable insiders, however, suggested a headline reduction of up to 15% was viewed as plausible. In that light, the decision to commit a mere 7% to 10% can only be seen as disappointing.
The NDC obviously represents a floor and not a ceiling, and China has historically only made climate promises that it knows it will keep. But even then, China’s leadership has given itself tremendous wiggle room. This can be seen in part by what is not in Xi’s pledge: any firm commitment about when, exactly, China’s emissions will peak. (His previous pledge only said that it would happen in the 2020s.) While it’s quite possible that 2024 or 2025 will end up being the peak, as some expect, the new pledge creates a perverse incentive to delay and pollute more now. The speech also contained little on non-CO2 greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide — which, given China’s previous commitment to reach net zero on all warming gases by 2060, seems like a significant blind spot.
Other commitments are only impressive until you scratch the surface. Xi pledged that China would install 3,600 gigawatts of solar and wind capacity by 2035. That may sound daunting: The United States, the world’s No. 2 country for renewables capacity, has a combined 400 gigawatts of solar and wind. But China already has about 1,600 gigawatts installed. So China’s promise, in essence, is to add around 200 gigawatts of solar and wind each year until 2035 — and while that would be a huge number for any other country, it actually represents a significant slowdown for China. The country added 360 gigawatts of wind and solar combined last year, and has already installed more than 200 gigawatts of solar alone in the first eight months of this one. In this light, China’s renewables pledge seems ominous.
More distressingly for climate action, it is unclear if this comparatively slower pace of clean electricity addition will actually allow China’s electricity sector to decarbonize. As the electricity analyst David Fishman has noted, China’s overall electricity demand grew faster than its clean electricity generation last year, leaving a roughly 100 terawatt-hour gap — despite all that new solar and wind (and despite 16 gigawatts of new nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, too). Coal filled this gap. Last year, China began construction of almost 100 gigawatts of new coal plants even though its existing coal fleet already operates less than half of the time. These new plants represented more than 90% of the world’s new coal capacity in 2024.
China’s climate strategy — like every other country’s — requires electrifying large swaths of its economy. If new renewables diminish to only 200 gigawatts a year, then it seems implausible that its renewable additions could meet demand growth — let alone eat away substantial amounts of coal-fired generation — unless its economic growth significantly slows.
Yet the news gets worse. Taken alone, the NDC’s weakness may speak of mere caution on China’s part, yet a number of policy changes to China’s electricity markets and industrial policy over the past year suggest its government is now slow-walking the energy transition.
In 2024, for instance, China started making capacity payments to coal-fired power plants. These payments were ostensibly designed to lubricate a plant’s economics as it shifted from 24/7 operation to a supporting role backing up wind and solar. Yet only coal plants — and not, for instance, batteries — were offered these funds, even though batteries can play a similar role more cheaply and China already makes them in scads. Even more striking, coal plants have been pocketing these funds without changing their behavior or even producing less electricity
At the same time, China’s central leadership has cut the revenues that new solar and wind farms receive from generating power. New solar and wind plants are now scheduled to receive less than the same benchmark price that coal receives — although the details of that discount vary by province and remain uncertain in most of them. Observers hope that this lower price, along with a more market-based dispatch scheme, will eventually allow renewables-heavy electricity systems to charge lower rates to consumers and displace more expensive coal power. However, there’s little clarity on if and when that will happen, and in the meantime, new renewables installations are plummeting as developers wait for more information to emerge.
Chinese industrial policy is exacerbating these trends. The world has long talked about Chinese overcapacity. Now even conversation in the Western media has progressed to discussing “involution” — a broader term that centers on the intensive competition that characterizes Chinese capitalism (and society). It suggests that Chinese firms are competing themselves out of business.
The market-leader BYD, for instance, has become synonymous with the Chinese battery-powered auto renaissance, but there are fears that even this seeming titan might have corrupted itself on the way. The company has larded an incredible amount of debt onto its books to fuel its race to the top of the sales charts; now, murmurs abound that the firm might be “the Evergrande of EVs” — a reference to the housing developer that collapsed into bankruptcy earlier this decade with hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. In recent months, BYD’s engine seems to be sputtering, with sales dropping in September 2025 compared with last year.
As such, the government has come in to try to negotiate new terms of competition so that firms do not end up doing irreparable harm to themselves and their future prospects. It is doing so in other sectors as well: In solar, it has tried to create a cartel of polysilicon manufacturers, a solar OPEC of sorts, to make sure that the pricing of that key input to the photovoltaic supply chain is at a level where the producers can survive.
This may all seem positive — and there is certainly an argument that the government could play a role in helping these new sectors negotiate the difficult waters that they find themselves in. But I interpret these efforts as further slow-walking of the energy transition. A slight reframing can help to understand why.
What is literally happening in these meetings? The government is bringing private actors into the same room to bang their heads together and deal with the reality that the current economic system is not working, largely because of intense competition — a problem likely best solved by forcing some of the firms and production capacity to shrink. Firms are unprofitable because exuberant supply has zoomed past current demand, and the country’s markets and politics are not prepared to navigate the potentially needed bankruptcies or their fallout. So the government is intervening, designing actions to generate the outcomes it desires.
Yet there is something contradictory about the government’s approach. A decarbonized world, after all, will be a world without significant numbers of internal combustion vehicles, so traditional automakers will eventually need to shut down or shift into EVs — yet their executives aren’t being dragged in for the same scolding. Likewise, a decarbonized world will be a world without as many coal mines and coal-fired power plants. Firms in the power sector should be scolded for continuing coal production at scale.
These are problems of the mid-transition, as the scholars Emily Grubert and Sara Hastings-Simon have described decarbonization’s current era. But China is further along in this transition than other states, and it could lead in the management and planning required for the transition as well.
China is stuck. For four decades, China’s growth rested on moving abundant cheap labor from low-productivity agriculture to higher productivity sectors, often in urban areas. The physical construction of China’s cities underpinned this development and became its own distorting bubble, launching a cycle of real-estate speculation. The government pricked this bubble in 2020, but since then, Chinese macroeconomic strength has failed to return.
Despite the glimmering nature of its most modern cities, China remains decidedly middle income, with a GDP per capita equivalent to Serbia. Many countries that have grown out of poverty have reached this middle income territory — but then become mired there rather than continuing to develop. This pattern, described as “the middle income trap,” has worried Chinese policymakers for years.
The country is obviously hoping that its new clean industries can offer a substitute motor to power China out of its middle-income status. Its leadership’s apparent decision to slow walk the energy transition, however, looks like a classic example of this “trap.” The leadership seems unwilling to jettison older industries in favor of the higher-value added industries of the future. The fact that the government has previously subsidized these industries just shows the complexity of the political economy challenges facing the regime.
The NDC’s announcement could be seen as an easy win given Trump’s climate backwardness. Clearly that’s what Xi was counting on. But China is too important to be understood only in contrast to the United States — and we should not applaud something that not only fails to recognize global climate targets, but also underplays China’s own development strategy. The country is nearing the release of its next five-year plan. Perhaps that document will incorporate more ambitious targets for the energy transition and decarbonization.
This summer, I visited Ordos in Inner Mongolia, a coal mining region that is now also home to some of China’s huge renewable energy megabases and a zero-carbon industrial park. Tens of thousands still labor in Ordos’ mines and coal-hungry factories, yet they seem like a relic of an earlier age when compared to the scale and precision of the new green industrial facilities. The dirty coal mines may still have history and profits on their side, but it is clear that the future will see their decline and replacement with green technology. I hope that Xi Jinping and the rest of the Chinese political elite come to the same conclusion, and fast.
“We grew quickly and made some mistakes,” Generate executive Jonah Goldman told Heatmap.
In a tumultuous time for clean energy financing, leading infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital is seeking to realign its approach. Last month the firm trumpeted its appointment of a new CEO, the first in its 11-year history. Less publicly, it also implemented firm-wide layoffs, representatives confirmed to Heatmap.
“Like many others in our space, we grew quickly and made some mistakes,” Jonah Goldman, Generate’s head of external affairs, told me. He was responding to a report from infrastructure and energy intelligence platform IJ Global, which last week reported that Generate had “shut down its equity investing arm” and laid off 50 people. While Goldman confirmed that there were indeed layoffs earlier this summer, he would not specify how many employees were let go, and disputed the claim that any particular team was dissolved. “We have not ‘shut down’ any strategies,” he told me. “Our investment team continues to find opportunities across the capital stack.”
Goldman’s comments echoed those of the firm’s new CEO, David Crane, a former undersecretary for infrastructure at the Department of Energy. In an article published to Generate’s website a few weeks ago, Crane admitted that the firm had “deviated from our operational roots,” a reference to the firm’s unconventional investment strategy.
Generate is unique as a sustainability-focused investor, in that it often acts as an owner and operator for the projects it finances rather than taking a passive equity stake The firm also provides tailored project financing options for its partners to help manage risk.
But over the past few years, Generate made a number of large equity investments in companies whose projects it did not directly oversee. These included utility-scale solar and energy storage developer Pine Gate Renewables, which is on the verge of bankruptcy, and green hydrogen developer Ambient Fuels, which was recently acquired by Electric Hydrogen amidst tumult in the industry.
“While other investors had no choice but to act as pure investors, we were distracted from who we are and what we were good at,” Crane wrote, noting that this distraction led to “poor performance in one component of our investment portfolio.” That would appear to be its equity division.
Generate’s model is designed to bridge a critical gap in the climate tech ecosystem known as the “missing middle,” the phase at which a company with some proven tech has outgrown early-stage venture capital but is still considered too risky for most traditional infrastructure investors. Historically, the firm has generated high returns by backing “leading-edge technologies,” Jigar Shah, the firm’s co-founder and former director of the DOE’s Loan Programs Office, said on the Open Circuit podcast he co-hosts. These include investments in projects involving fuel cells, anaerobic digesters, and battery storage.
Shah hasn’t worked at Generate since he joined the Biden administration in 2021. But from the outside, he says, the firm appears to have moved away from taking these riskier but potentially more lucrative bets. “They ended up with 38 people in their capital markets team, and their capital markets team went out to the marketplace and said, Hey, we have all this stuff to sell. And the people that they went to said, Well, that’s interesting, but what we really would love is boring community solar,“ Shah said on the podcast. As he saw it, Generate began making equity investments into lower-risk projects such as community solar, which naturally generated stable but lower returns. Then once interest rates went up post-Covid, that put downward pressure on equity returns.
Shah said it’s these slipping returns that have made it harder for Generate to raise capital over the past two years. Axios Pro recently reported that the firm is now exploring an IPO to bring in additional funding, following hesitation from some of its existing backers to reinvest.
While Goldman acknowledged that “there is some skepticism in the capital markets about our space now,” he disagreed with the idea that Generate has abandoned its focus on leading-edge technologies. “We have invested over the last number of years in a lot of assets that are predictable assets with predictable cash flows that have performed very strongly for our investors. And we continue to have the creativity of the team that’s focused on trying to bring newer technologies to the market to bridge the bankability gap,” he told me.
By way of example, he highlighted two of the firm’s most recent investments, a $200 million loan to Pacific Steel Group for the first green steel mill in California and a $100 million scalable credit facility for green data center developer Soluna, which allows the company to increase its borrowing capacity as new projects come online.
The latter deal was announced just weeks after Crane stepped into his new role. Having served as the CEO of five publicly traded energy companies before joining Generate, Crane is now promising to turn around the firm’s fortunes. With the Trump administration rolling back federal support for clean energy infrastructure and investors remaining cautious, Crane has said that now is the time to jump on undervalued opportunities.
“Right now, there’s a lot of noise telling people to stop writing checks. But this is precisely the time to invest in the infrastructure that will power the next twenty years,” he wrote. Goldman backed this up, telling me, “We believe managers who understand the space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
Just as tech giants such as Google, Salesforce, and Amazon were able to expand rapidly in the wake of the dot-com bubble and consolidate their positions in the market, Generate’s leadership say they’re now well positioned to help select clean energy companies do the same.
It will certainly be a boon for the sector if they can, given the abundance of undercapitalized climate tech opportunities, from clean cement to thermal energy storage, next-generation geothermal, and carbon capture, all looking to build first-of-a-kind projects. And there’s not nearly enough infrastructure funding to go around.
So if Generate has indeed lost the confidence of its investors, it’s critical that Crane, Goldman, and company regain it swiftly. Their ability to do so could shape not only which technologies drive the energy transition, but how quickly they do so.