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VC funding has plummeted so far in 2023. It has also moved to new kinds of startups.
Venture capital investments in climate tech startups have plummeted 40% this year compared with the first half of 2022, according to a report out on Friday from Climate Tech VC, a market intelligence platform that tracks the space.
The trend is in part a reflection of a larger downturn across the broader startup landscape, which one prominent investor predicted earlier this year would lead to a “Mass Extinction Event” that “will make the ‘08 financial crisis look quaint.” Startups in all sectors are struggling to fundraise, thanks to macro conditions like the Federal Reserve raising interest rates to fight inflation and the related collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
But the picture may not be quite as dire for climate solutions, which saw less of a decline than overall VC funding, which was down more than 50% in the first quarter of the year, compared to 2022, according to Pitchbook. Some areas, like startups working to cut emissions from buildings and heavy industry, are even seeing a boost, likely due to incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. So far it’s more of a great reshuffling than a Great Recession.
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“I wouldn't say this is the second coming of clean tech 1.0,” Kim Zou, the co-founder of Climate Tech VC, told me. She was referencing a period in the early 2000s when venture capitalists poured billions into green technology companies and lost more than half of their money. “It's not that all of a sudden, it's a sharp drop off. It's actually that 2021, 2022, one could say that period was a bit of an abnormal peak,” she said.
Helen Lin, a partner at the VC firm At One Ventures, agreed that what’s happening is more of a market correction and a “return to fundamentals” than a calamity. In 2021, as the country was coming out of the worst of the COVID-10 pandemic, there was “a little bit of a bubble forming,” she told me. Lin said company valuations were overly optimistic and investors got a little sloppy, letting go of key metrics for later stage investments like revenue.
“It feels like when you're in one of those kiddie swimming pools and all the kids are thrashing about all at once, and there is all this frothy noise in the water, that's basically how it felt,” she said. “All these kids jumped in the pool because VC looked easy in 2021, there were deals everywhere.”
While overall funding for climate technology startups is down, interest in the sector is clearly not drying up. There was actually an increase in the number of deals made in the first six months of this year compared with last year by about 8%. But most of those deals were at the seed stage, where total funding also grew by 20%. Meanwhile, growth stage funding dropped a significant 64% — twice as high as the drop in growth VC across the economy.
Courtesy of Climate Tech VC
To Zou, that reflects one of the primary challenges with climate technology, which is that companies face a much sharper “valley of death” than in other sectors. Many of the solutions needed are hard technologies that require a lot more capital to get past the proof-of-concept stage. Companies may have to build factories and work out new supply chains, both of which are expensive undertakings.
There’s also been a shift in the types of climate technologies VCs are funding. In 2021, investors made their big bets in electric vehicles and batteries with companies like Rivian and Northvolt raising more than $2 billion each. Now, VCs seem to be less interested in the end-products that directly reduce emissions, like EVs, and more interested in early stage companies that could enable more EVs to get deployed, like those specializing in mining, EV charging optimization, and fleet management.
Lin said that similarly, while enthusiasm for alternative protein companies has cooled slightly after industry leaders Beyond Meat and Impossible reported declining revenues last year, that’s not the full story. There’s still a lot of interest in funding innovative alternative protein startups, but more as a “functional ingredient” to supply to other food companies, rather than as a consumer product.
Investor interest in carbon management startups may also be shuffling around. VC funding in the sector has so far dried up by more than 50% after a big increase last year. Claire Nelson, co-founder of the carbon mineralization startup Cella, which just closed a seed funding round of $3.3 million, told me that investments seem to be shifting from the technologies that capture carbon to the support infrastructure, like carbon transportation and storage. Cella is developing novel injection and monitoring methods for carbon sequestration.
Courtesy of Climate Tech VC
On the flipside, the report notes that startups working to cut emissions from the built environment, like heat pump companies, and from heavy industries, like cement and steel, saw a 7% increase in funding, likely due to new government subsidies in both the E.U. and the U.S. targeting those sectors.
The impact of climate tech funding is more than a financial concern. The International Energy Agency estimates that nearly half of the emissions reductions required to reach net-zero by 2050 will have to come from technologies that aren’t yet commercially available. VC firms don’t just provide the capital for startups to get off the ground, but they also provide a support system for scientists who may have never scaled a business in their lives, said Lin.
“You need people that know how to be the connective tissue between people who speak the language of science, and people who speak the language of scaling up a business in a commercial way,” she told me. “These are all the day-to-day tasks that we work on in a very real way with our portfolio companies.”
Historically, the latter half of the year has been when most VC is deployed, so time will tell if the report truly does reflect a market correction, or foretells a more worrisome trend.
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In a press conference about the newly recast program’s first loan guarantee, Energy Secretary Chris Wright teased his project finance philosophy.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Thursday announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for American Electric Power to replace 5,000 miles of transmission lines with more advanced wires that can carry more electricity. He also hinted at his vision for how the Trump administration could recast the role of the department's Loan Programs Office in the years to come.
The LPO actually announced that it had finalized an agreement, conditionally made in January under the Biden administration, to back AEP’s plan. The loan guarantee will enable AEP to secure lower-cost financing for the project, for an eventual estimated saving to energy consumers of $275 million over the lifetime of the loan.
“These are the kind of projects where we’re going to partner with businesses to make our energy system more efficient, more reliable, ultimately lower cost,” Wright said on a call with reporters.
And yet in the past few months, the department has also canceled loan guarantees and grants for other transmission projects that were expected to provide those same benefits — including the Grain Belt Express, an 800-mile line set to bring low-cost wind power from Kansas to the Chicago metropolitan area in Illinois.
“We don’t care about authorship,” Wright told reporters, acknowledging that the AEP loan was conditionally approved by the Biden administration. “Not all of them were nonsense. The ones that are in the interest of the American taxpayers, in the interest of the American ratepayers, and there’s a helpful role for government capital — we’re happy to support those.”
When asked specifically why AEP’s proposal met his criteria while the Grain Belt Express didn’t, Wright first made an argument about cost. “I have nothing against the Grain Belt Express,” he said. “I suspect it’ll still be developed. But it’s far more expensive on a per mile basis since it’s a brand new transmission line.”
His subsequent comments, however, hinted at a more significant shift in approach. He went on to argue that the project came with an unacceptable amount of risk since the developers didn’t have buyers yet for the power coming down the line. It was trying to “close on arbitrage,” he said, by buying up cheap wind power that was stranded in Kansas and bringing it to a larger market. “It’s a more commercial enterprise,” he said. “That’s done with private entrepreneurs and private capital.”
It’s important to note that the Grain Belt Express loan guarantee would have been issued under an innovation-focused program within the Loan Programs Office that was specifically geared toward higher risk projects that banks won’t otherwise touch. The AEP project is part of a different program focused on more mature technologies, with a goal of reducing the cost of major utility infrastructure upgrades to ratepayers.
When I floated Wright’s comments by Jigar Shah, the former head of the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration, he was flummoxed. “It’s nonsensical,” he said. To Shah, taking Wright’s risk aversion to its logical conclusion would mean, for instance, that the office should not fund any nuclear energy projects. “If this becomes a new standard, that means nuclear is dead in the United States,” he said.
AEP is the first developer to secure a loan guarantee under the Energy Dominance Financing Program, Congress’ new name a Biden-era program within LPO that offered loan guarantees to utilities to “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace energy infrastructure.” Initially called the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Financing Program and created by the Inflation Reduction Act, it focused on projects with climate benefits, like making efficiency upgrades to power plants or installing renewables on the site of a former coal plant.
In the Biden administration’s view, AEP’s project would “contribute to emissions reductions by supporting existing and new clean generation by expanding transmission capacity in the regions in which they operate.”
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rebranded the program and removed any requirements that projects reduce emissions. On Thursday’s call, Wright seemed to imply that it wasn’t just the Biden-era loan program that had been renamed. “The Loan Program Office is being rechristened the Energy Dominant Financing — it is the rechristening of the same department,” he said in response to a question about the office’s remaining loan authority. The Department of Energy did not respond to my request for clarification.
None of that means that the potential emissions benefits from AEP’s project won’t materialize. Limited transmission capacity is one of the biggest obstacles for bringing new wind and solar power online, and reconductoring could also reduce line losses, making the overall grid more efficient.
The transmission project — which includes plans to rebuild some power lines and reconductor others — will ultimately increase capacity by more than 100%, a spokesperson for AEP told me. The first phase will involve upgrades to about 100 miles of wires across Ohio and Oklahoma, while future phases will tackle lines in Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia, with the intent of meeting growing demand from data centers and manufacturing development, according to a press release.
When reporters asked Wright about the other conditional loan guarantees the Biden administration had issued under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program that are still pending, the secretary stressed that he was looking for applicants that had identified a clear set of projects they would implement. “Many were done in a hurry, without really even having the projects that the loans would be associated with identified. You can end up with a grab bag of projects without a lot of say for where the money went,” he said.
Wright accused the Biden administration of failing to ask applicants to detail the impact the projects would have on taxpayers and ratepayers — a key question his colleagues are now asking.
Shah disagreed with that portrayal. The whole point of the program was to reduce interest rates for utilities and require them to pass on the benefit to ratepayers. All of the projects awarded conditional commitments met that bar, he said.
He warned that if the Trump administration didn’t honor the remaining conditional commitments to utilities under the program — all 10 of them — it risked losing the trust of any new companies it attempts to make similar deals with.
“Most of the nuclear projects that they’re looking to chase are not going to get closed until 2028. And so what signal are they sending? That projects that get approved in the last year of an administration are not going to be honored in the next administration?”
On a new loan guarantee, a Nord Stream 2 revival, and AI-aided oil recovery
Current conditions: As Tropical Storm Lorenzo looks likely to dissipate over water by Friday, AccuWeather has slashed the season’s forecast to six hurricanes from nine • Severe thunderstorms near Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, are likely too spotty to relieve long-standing drought in the Mississippi River Basin • The Netrokona district of northeastern Bangladesh is scorching in temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
A rendering of the future Cascade Advanced Energy Facility. Amazon
A year after Amazon invested in the small modular reactor developer X-energy, the tech giant has unveiled its plans to build a nearly gigawatt-sized plant in southeastern Washington, where it will install the nuclear company’s next-generation technology for the first time. The Cascade Advanced Energy Facility is set to begin construction “by the end of this decade,” with hopes of generating power from up to a dozen of X-energy’s 80-megawatt high-temperature gas-cooled reactors sometime “in the 2030s.” Amazon plans to build the plant in three phases, with four reactors at each stage, eventually reaching 960 megawatts in capacity. Located in Richland, Washington, along the Columbia River, the facility will nearly double the output of the Pacific Northwest’s only nuclear plant, the nearby Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station.
In a sign of what Heatmap’s Katie Brigham called “the nuclear dealmaking boom” back in August, rival microreactor developer Oklo suggested at a recent public meeting in Tennessee that it may propose building some of its reactors near the Oak Ridge site of its debut nuclear waste recycling project, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported Monday. On Tuesday, meanwhile, the U.S. Army announced its new Janus program, which aims to supply bases by 2028 with microreactors like the ones Oklo aims to build, which generate 20 megawatts of electricity or less. The reactors would be owned and operated by private companies. “What resilience means to us is that we have power, no matter what, 24-7,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army, told The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has largely revoked deals made under the previous administration since President Donald Trump returned to office. But on Thursday morning, the agency’s in-house lender announced a $1.6 billion loan guarantee to a subsidiary of utility giant American Electric Power to upgrade and rebuild about 5,000 miles of transmission lines across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. “This loan guarantee will not only help modernize the grid and expand transmission capacity but will help position the United States to win the AI race and grow our manufacturing base,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said in a press release.
The move came a day after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to fire thousands of federal workers amid the ongoing government shutdown. At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Clinton appointee based in California, granted labor unions’ request for a temporary restraining order to halt the dismissals. The hearing took place at the same time White House budget director Russ Vought appeared on the late conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s podcast to preview his plans to lay off as many as 10,000 federal workers as the shutdown continued. The hearing will pause the job cuts for the roughly 4,000 workers who received notice so far. Illson said during the hearing that she granted the temporary restraining order because administration officials had “taken advantage of the lapse in government spending, government functioning, to assume that all bets are off, that the laws don’t apply to them anymore, and that they can impose the structures that they like on the government situation that they don’t like,” News From The States reported. “Things are being done before they’re thought through — very much ready, fire, aim.” Nearly 200 employees at the Department of Energy began receiving notices last week, as I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter.
The underwater explosion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline connecting Germany to Russia’s gas supply remains one of the world’s biggest geopolitical whodunnits, and Berlin’s fellow European Union members seem keen to keep it that way. In just the past two days, Poland and Italy blocked extradition requests to send suspected saboteurs to Germany for trial. But the Germans aren’t just looking to figure out who’s responsible for destroying the megaproject. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy is considering restarting the certification process for the pipeline, the daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported Wednesday. The previous German government had ruled out a restart of the pipeline in March after news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s business allies were angling to restore the project. In June, the new government under conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz began examining legal avenues to block any future plans to reactivate the pipeline, the Financial Times reported at the time. But under current law, the economic ministry said this week a restart “cannot be ruled out in the medium term.”
Ohio passed a new law to fast-track energy projects on former coal mines and brownfields, Canary Media reported Wednesday. Called House Bill 15, the legislation took effect in August and lets the state’s Department of Development designate the former industrial sites as “priority investment areas” at the request of local governments. Roughly a third of Ohio’s 88 counties ban wind, solar, or both, but the language in the bill makes clear that “it was meant to be technology-neutral,” Rebecca Mellino, a climate and energy policy associate at The Nature Conservancy, told Canary’s Kathiann M. Kowalski.
A transition from coal could yield significant health benefits, as The New York Times reported on Tuesday. A recent study found that, when a coal-processing facility near Pittsburgh shut down, the number of emergency room visits for respiratory issues in the surrounding area dropped by about 20% in the month following the closure.
The world’s annual consumption of oil isn’t expected to peak until the mid-2030s, and by 2050 it will reach a cumulative 1 trillion barrels, according to the consultancy Wood Mackenzie’s forecast. But production that’s either already onstream or ready for development is expected to gradually decline to 650 billion barrels per year by the mid century. What will make up the difference? “Traditional exploration will play its part but can’t get anywhere near bridging a gap of this scale,” Wood Mackenzie analysts wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. “Even the 21st century’s biggest new play, Guyana, with 15 billion barrels of oil, barely makes a dent.” To identify potential new resources, Wood Mackenzie rolled out a new AI-powered benchmark called Analogues, which “uses a machine learning method known as clustering to identify each field’s closest matches across 60 different attributes spanning rock properties, fluid characteristics, and commercial factors.” The AI tool could increase the share of recoverable conventional oil reserves by nearly 42%.
A chart showing how the AI "analogues" could bolster oil drilling. Wood Mackenzie
Fusion energy is rapidly accelerating in the U.S., and the Department of Energy is poised to release a national plan for speeding up the deployment of the technology. In the meantime, states can prepare by beefing up regulatory capacity, speeding up permitting, clearing interconnection queues, and creating special tax credits. That’s according to a new roadmap from the Clean Air Task Force. “As fusion energy moves closer to commercial reality, states have a window of opportunity to prepare,” Jack Moore, a fusion policy consultant at CATF, wrote in a blog post. “Proactive policy design today can help states position themselves to create an effective environment for fusion energy deployment tomorrow.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated accurately reflect oil demand by 2050.
This thing is a certified clunker.
Americans certainly got the message about the end of the EV tax credit. With the $7,500 benefit set to disappear at the end of September, electric vehicle sales surged to record numbers in the third quarter of 2025 as buyers raced to beat the deadline.
The rising tide lifted just about all EVs — but not the struggling Tesla Cybertruck. According to new numbers from Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold just 5,385 Cybertrucks from July to September, less than half as many as it delivered during the same period in 2024. The company is now expected to sell around 20,000 of the metal EVs this calendar year. That’s down from around 50,000 last year, and less than 10% of the 250,000 total Elon Musk once predicted as the truck’s annual sales figure.
Cybertruck was well on its way to flop status before these sales numbers. With its purposefully jarring aesthetic, the EV for edgelords was never going to be as popular as Musk proclaimed, and that was before his relationship to Donald Trump and online provocations pushed many more people away from the Tesla brand. Cost didn’t help, either. Tesla once said it would sell a $40,000 basic version of Cybertruck, a price point that might have enticed some buyers beyond the Musk fanboys who became early adopters, but the cheapest one you can actually buy today is around $60,000.
Still, the vehicle’s third-quarter performance is particularly damning in comparison to nationwide EV sales, where the tax credit’s demise ignited a fire sale. Americans bought more than 430,000 EVs during the quarter, an increase of about 40% from the second quarter of 2025 and about 30% from the third quarter of last year. Popular vehicles including the Chevy Equinox EV, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Honda Prologue surged to sales of more than 20,000 during the quarter. Electric trucks including the Rivian R1T, Ford F-150 Lightning, and GMC Hummer EV saw sales increases despite having high prices that rival the Cybertruck’s.
Tesla itself, despite months of bad press, did well, too. The brand’s share of the overall EV market continues to wane, reaching a new low of 41%. But the surge temporarily stabilized its tumbling sales, with plenty of people snatching up Model 3s and Model Ys while the getting was good. Those two vehicles remained the two best-selling EVs in America, with Tesla selling more than 114,000 Model Ys and more than 53,000 Model 3s.
Yet the good times did nothing to spur driver interest in Cybertruck. In fact, public enthusiasm for the vehicle might be even lower than it seems, because it turns out that one of the top customers for Musk’s electric tank is Musk himself. Electrek reports that his other companies, such as SpaceX and xAI, have been accumulating Cybertrucks as their company cars. Tesla is replacing some of its own fleet with Cybertrucks, as well.
The move makes sense for Musk. Because of weak overall demand, Cybertrucks are sitting idle on lots; selling them to his businesses at least puts them to work. The scheme also might improve the appearance of Tesla’s sales numbers, Electrek speculates. By locking in some of these sales with a downpayment before the end of September, Tesla can deliver Cybertrucks to Musk’s other business in the weeks to come and still get the tax credit on them. The approach could boost sales numbers for a fourth quarter that’s likely to be difficult with the disappearance of the federal incentive.
Now that Cybertruck has become Elon’s Edsel, Tesla’s hopes for an EV sales revival lie largely with the new “Standard” versions of its two best-sellers. These trim levels strip away some of the amenities from the Models 3 and Y to bring their starting prices down to $37,000 and $40,000, respectively. It’s far from clear that this will succeed. Anyone shopping for an EV solely on price could wait for the upcoming new versions of the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Bolt, which are expected to come in at $30,000 or less. The Equinox’s $35,000 starting price, five-grand less than even the budget Model Y crossover, has spurred its recent success.
Still, with 320-plus miles of estimated range and at least some of Tesla’s best features, the budget versions could be compelling cars at those prices. At the very least, they’ll speak to more drivers than the Cybertruck does.