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This is the first story in a Heatmap series on the “green freeze” under Trump.
The renewables industry was struggling even before Donald Trump made his return to the White House. High interest rates, snarled supply chains, and inflation had already dealt staggering blows to offshore wind; California turned hostile to the residential solar market; and even as deployment of utility-scale solar accelerated, profits haven’t necessarily followed. (Those were still reserved for the fossil fuel industry.)
Then Trump came into office, issuing a barrage of executive orders that, at best, didn’t help, and at worst threatened to choke off the industry’s remaining avenues for growth. Now, Republican legislators are eyeing the Inflation Reduction Act for red meat to feed their tax cut machine; Elon Musk — himself the richest green tech entrepreneur of all time — is captaining an effort to slash the size of the federal government, particularly environmental programs; and the federal regulatory apparatus has essentially ground to a halt.
The early days of the Trump presidency have turned a clean energy slump into a kind of green freeze, with projects being cancelled and clean energy investors in many cases fixating on hypothetical policy changes, as opposed to the ins and outs of any given quarter. This creates a kind of trap for green energy companies, which are being punished in the immediate term for bad results while investors sit on the sidelines until the final resolution of the IRA comes into focus.
Speaking about the solar industry specifically, Morningstar analyst Brett Castelli told me that near term viability is not going to be about the specifics of any given company’s financial performance. “It’s going to be about how much the IRA is potentially changed.”
That’s likely the case across the green energy sectors. The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which tracks a number of renewables companies, is down 14% since November 5, and down 20% in the past year. “All businesses like certainty,” Castelli said. “The renewables market right now is facing a high degree of uncertainty in regards to what changes are coming to the IRA.”
But not every company has been affected equally. Those that were already flagging have been quick to blame the political environment, while others have gamely tried to explain to investors and the public how their lines of business align with the Trump administration’s priorities.
Executives at the residential solar company Sunnova — whose stock has fallen to below a dollar a share since it issued a “going concern” notice, essentially notifying investors that its existence as a company was under threat — mentioned “policy” or “political” or “politicians” six times in its earnings call last week. Chief Executive John Berger told an analyst that the reason for the going concern notice was that “the overall environment is terrible. I mean, it’s the political environment, the capital markets,” and that the company “struggled to close some things after the election.”
Berger stepped down Monday, and Sunnova’s former chief operating officer Paul Mathews immediately took over. Mathews “will focus on disciplined growth, stronger cash generation, cost efficiency, and enhancing the customer experience,” the company said.
Other companies have told investors and the public that they’re scrapping expansion plans, in many cases due to a policy change or a market change running downhill from policy.
“Manufacturing is probably where we see the biggest concern,” Maheep Mandloi, a stock analyst at Mizuho Securities, told me. “A lot of solar and battery projects are getting pushed out.”
Among them, battery manufacturer KORE Power, said in February that it was canceling a $1 billion battery project in Arizona. The Arizona facility was going to be supported with federal financing, specifically a loan from the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office for up to $850 million, but the conditional commitment never turned into cash in hand before the end of the Biden administration. Its new chief executive, Jay Bellows, told Canary Media that the company wanted to retrofit an existing facility into a battery plant instead.
Aspen Aerogels, which makes thermal barriers for batteries in electric vehicles, told investors in February that it wouldn’t move forward with a planned new plant in Statesboro, Georgia, and would instead “maximize capacity” at its Rhode Island plant. The company’s chief financial officer noted that it had already “decided to right-time” its Statesboro project in early 2023, “pre-empting a reset in EV demand expectations.”
And just last week, Ascend Elements, a battery materials company, said it was scrapping plans to manufacture cathode active material at its Hopkinsville, Kentucky plant, the Times Leader reported Thursday. Ascend said that it had agreed with the Department of Energy to cancel a $164 million grant that would support cathode active material (a key battery component) manufacturing, although a separate, $316 million grant for cathode precursor technology “remains active.”
But optimism still abounds — and it has nothing to do with any hopes about the fate of grants and tax credits under the IRA. Regardless of the law’s fate, the exuberance over artificial intelligence may prove to be an even greater subsidy.
In contrast to Sunnova, Sunrun — another residential solar company whose stock price has flagged since the election, but whose ability to stay in business has not been questioned — put a much more neutral spin on the political environment. Chief Executive Mary Powell told investors during the company’s earnings call in late February, “The fundamental long-term demand drivers for our business are incredibly strong and unrelated to any political party affiliation. Americans want greater energy independence and control of their lives and their pocketbooks. The country also needs more power from all sources to fuel rapid growth in electrification and data centers, and our growing fleet of energy resources will be part of the solution.”
Where once executives focused their rah-rah optimism on the declining costs of renewables, today they’re talking up their products’ quick path to deployment. The speed with which renewables can be built and switched on — especially solar and storage — compares favorably to the four-to-five year development timelines for new gas-fired plants. NextEra chief executive John Ketchum told analysts in a January earnings call “you can build a wind project in 12 months, a storage facility in 15, and a solar project in 18 months.”
That’s either the light at the end of the tunnel or the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, depending on your level of fatalism or skepticism.
This oncoming demand could reignite the renewables industry even if it potentially loses access to generous IRA subsidies, Ben Hubbard, the chief executive of the infrastructure advisory firm Nexus Holdings, told me.
“The hyperscale datacenter demand is pretty massive, and when you have to really start massively upgrading your transmission and distribution infrastructure, those rates get passed on, unfortunately, to the average ratepayer like me and you and everybody else.” With higher rates, renewables could become profitable and investable on their own, without IRA subsidies, Hubbard said.
NextEra, a major renewables developer that also operates a natural gas fleet, has been one of the main promoters of the “speed to power” narrative. In its January earnings call, Ketchum told analysts, “We’re expecting load demand to increase over 80% over the next five years, six-fold over the next 20 years. And if you think about generation types and needing all of the above, they’re not all created equally in terms of timing.”
Although the Trump administration is seeking to unleash fossil fuel development, power plants don’t build themselves. They need, at the very least, turbines, and those gas turbines are not easy to get your hands on. As Heatmap has reported, manufacturer GE Vernova has only modest plans to increase capacity, and is already getting reservations for turbine slots in 2027 and 2028.
“With gas-fired generation, the country is starting from a standing start,” NextEra CEO Ketchum said on the earnings call. “We need shovels in the ground today because our customers need the power right now.”
Developers and investors hope this means that data center developers and utilities will become both voracious and omnivorous in their power demand.
“I think what you’re going to see is the big tech companies, especially, are going to just have to eat the cost if they want to win the AI race,” Hubbard told me. “They’re going to take natural gas fuel, and they’re going to take biomass power, and they’re going to take solar. They’re going to take it all, because it’s almost insignificant relative to getting ahead of AI demand.”
Most of the industry, however, is gamely working through an environment where their day-to-day business may be fine, but their investors are still in wait-and-see mode.
“The common feedback we hear from a lot of investors is, ‘I’ll just probably come back once the dust settles and I know exactly what things are going to change,” Mandloi told me.
That’s even as executives point to a glorious future of AI-driven electricity demand. But investors may be waiting to count their chips from the IRA before they’re willing to take a flyer on powering data centers that are yet to be built.
And there’s nothing certain about the AI boom, either. More computationally efficient Chinese models have thrown that energy narrative into doubt, driving down the share price of Nvidia, which makes the chips that consume all that data center power (along with the share prices of power companies with large natural gas fleets). That stock is down by almost 20% so far this year. If the chip designer’s AI profits are less than previously thought, the electron providers may have to settle for less, as well. Renewables companies are hoping the data center boom will be a case of “if you build it, they will come,” but investors aren’t yet quite willing to buy it.
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On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.
A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.
The Department of Energy yesterday approved a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 liquified natural gas terminal in Louisiana, allowing the facility to export to countries without a free trade agreement. The project hasn’t yet been constructed and is still waiting for final approvals from the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the DOE’s green light means it faces one less hurdle.
CP2 was awaiting DOE’s go-ahead when the Biden administration announced its now notorious pause on approvals for new LNG export facilities. The project’s opponents argue it’s a “carbon bomb.” Analysis from the National Resources Defense Council suggested the greenhouse gases from the project would be equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road, while the Sierra Club found it would amount to about 190 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
President Trump met with 15 to 20 major oil and gas executives from the American Petroleum Institute at the White House yesterday. This was the president’s first meeting with fossil fuel bosses since his second term began in January. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were also in the room. Everyone is staying pretty quiet about what exactly was said, but according to Burgum and Wright, the conversation focused heavily on permitting reform and bolstering the grid. Reuters reported that “executives had been expected to express concerns over Trump’s tariffs and stress the industry view that higher oil prices are needed to help meet Trump’s promise to grow domestic production.” Burgum, however, stressed that oil prices didn’t come up in the chat. “Price is set by supply and demand,” he said. “There was nothing we could say in that room that could change that one iota, and so it wasn’t really a topic of discussion.” The price of U.S. crude has dropped 13% since Trump returned to office, according to CNBC, on a combination of recession fears triggered by Trump’s tariffs and rising oil output from OPEC countries.
The U.S. installed 1,250 megawatts of residential battery storage last year, the highest amount ever and nearly 60% more than in 2023, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Overall, battery storage installations across all sectors hit a new record in 2024 at 12.3 gigawatts of new capacity. Storage is expected to continue to grow next year, but uncertainties around tariffs and tax incentives could slow things down.
China is delaying approval for construction of BYD’s Mexico plant because authorities worry the electric carmaker’s technology could leak into the United States, according to the Financial Times. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.,” sources told the FT. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer writes, BYD continues to set the global standard for EV innovation, and “American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up.” This week the company unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
Tesla has recalled 46,096 Cybertrucks over an exterior trim panel that can fall off and become a road hazard. This is the eighth recall for the truck since it went on sale at the end of 2023.
This fusion startup is ahead of schedule.
Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.
Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”
The company thinks it can achieve simplicity via its artificial intelligence software, which controls the reactor’s magnetic field keeping the unruly plasma at the heart of the fusion reaction confined and stabilized. Unlike typical stellarators, which rely on the ultra-precise manufacturing and installment of dozens of huge, twisted magnets, Thea’s design uses exactly 450 smaller, simpler planar magnets, arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration. These magnets are still able to generate a helical magnetic field — thought to keep the plasma better stabilized than a tokamak — because each magnet is individually controlled via the company’s software, just like “the array of pixels in your computer screen,” Berzin told me.
“We’re able to utilize the control system that we built and very specifically modulate and control each magnet slightly differently,” Berzin explained, allowing Thea to “make those really complicated, really precise magnetic fields that you need for a stellarator, but with simple hardware.”
This should make manufacturing a whole lot easier and cheaper, Berzin told me. If one of Thea’s magnets is mounted somewhat imperfectly, or wear and tear of the power plant slightly shifts its location or degrades its performance over time, Thea’s AI system can automatically compensate. “It then can just tune that magnet slightly differently — it turns that magnet down, it turns the one next to it up, and the magnetic field stays perfect,” Berzin explained. As he told me, a system that relies on hardware precision is generally much more expensive than a system that depends on well-designed software. The idea is that Thea’s magnets can thus be mass manufactured in a way that’s conducive to “a business versus a science project.”
In 2023, Thea published a technical report proving out the physics behind its so-called “planar coil stellarator,” which allowed the company to raise its $20 million Series A last year, led by the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures. To validate the hardware behind its initial concept, Thea built a 3x3 array of magnets, representative of one section of its overall “donut” shaped reactor. This array was then integrated with Thea’s software and brought online towards the end of last year.
The results that Thea announced today were obtained during testing last month, and prove that the company can create and precisely control the complex magnetic field shapes necessary for fusion power. These results will allow the company to raise a Series B in the “next couple of years,” Berzin said. During this time, Thea will be working to scale up manufacturing such that it can progress from making one or two magnets per week to making multiple per day at its New Jersey-based facility.
The company’s engineers are also planning to stress test their AI software, such that it can adapt to a range of issues that could arise after decades of fusion power plant operation. “So we’re going to start breaking hardware in this device over the next month or two,” Berzin told me. “We’re purposely going to mismount a magnet by a centimeter, put it back in and not tell the control system what we did. And then we’re going to purposely short out some of the magnetic coils.” If the system can create a strong, stable magnetic field anyway, this will serve as further proof of concept for Thea’s software-oriented approach to a simplified reactor design.
The company is still years away from producing actual fusion power though. Like many others in the space, Thea hopes to bring fusion electrons to the grid sometime in the 2030s. Maybe this simple hardware, advanced software approach is what will finally do the trick.
The Chinese carmaker says it can charge EVs in 5 minutes. Can America ever catch up?
The Chinese automaker BYD might have cracked one of the toughest problems in electric cars.
On Tuesday, BYD unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes. That’s made possible because of a 1,000-volt architecture and what BYD describes as matching charging capability, which could theoretically add nearly one mile of range every second.
It’s still not entirely clear whether the technology actually works, although BYD has a good track record on that front. But it suggests that the highest-end EVs worldwide could soon add range as fast as gasoline-powered cars can now, eliminating one of the biggest obstacles to EV adoption.
The new charging platform won’t work everywhere. BYD says that it will also build 4,000 chargers across China that will be able to take advantage of these maximum speeds. If this pans out, then BYD will be able to charge its newest vehicles twice as fast as Tesla’s next generation of superchargers can.
“This is a good thing,” Jeremy Wallace, a Chinese studies professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “Yes, it’s a Chinese company. And there are geopolitical implications to that. But the better the technology gets, the easier it is to decarbonize.”
“As someone who has waited in line for chargers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, I look forward to the day when charging doesn’t take that long,” he added.
The announcement also suggests that the Chinese EV sector remains as dynamic as ever and continues to set the global standard for EV innovation — and that American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up. The Trump administration is doing little to help the industry catch up: It has proposed repealing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers, which provide demand-side support for the fledgling industry, and the Environmental Protection Agency is working to roll back tailpipe-pollution rules that have furnished early profits to EV makers, including Tesla. Against that background, what — if anything — can U.S. companies do to catch up?
The situation isn’t totally hopeless, but it’s not great.
BYD’s mega-charging capability is made possible by two underlying innovations. First, BYD’s new platform — the wiring, battery, and motors that make up the electronic guts of the car — will be capable of channeling up to 1,000 volts. That is only a small step-change above the best platforms available elsewhere— the forthcoming Gravity SUV from the American carmaker Lucid is built on a 926-volt platform, while the Cybertruck’s platform is 800 volts — but BYD will be able to leverage its technological firepower with mass manufacturing capacity unrivaled by any other brand.
Second, BYD’s forthcoming chargers will be capable of using the platform’s full voltage. These chargers may need to be built close to power grid infrastructure because of the amount of electricity that they will demand.
But sitting underneath these innovations is a sprawling technological ecosystem that keeps all Chinese electronics companies ahead — and that guarantees Chinese advantages well into the future.
“China’s decisive advantage over the U.S. when it comes to innovation is that it has an entrenched workforce that is able to continuously iterate on technological advances,” Dan Wang, a researcher of China’s technology industry and a fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, told me.
The country is able to innovate so relentlessly because of its abundance of process knowledge, Wang said. This community of engineering practice may have been seeded by Apple’s iPhone-manufacturing effort in the aughts and Tesla’s carmaking prowess in the 2010s, but it has now taken on a life of its own.
“Shenzhen is the center of the world’s hardware manufacturing industry because it has workers rubbing shoulders with academics rubbing shoulders with investors rubbing shoulders with engineers,” Wang told me. “And you have a more hustle-type culture because it’s so much harder to maintain technological moats and technological differentiation, because people are so competitive in these sorts of spaces.”
In a way, Shenzhen is the modern-day version of the hardware and software ecosystem that used to exist in northern California — Silicon Valley. But while the California technology industry now largely focuses on software, China has taken over the hardware side.
That allows the country to debut new technological innovations much faster than any other country can, he added. “The comparison I hear is that if you have a new charging platform or a new battery chemistry, Volkswagen and BMW will say, We’ll hustle to put this into our systems, and we’ll put it in five years from now. Tesla might say, we’ll hustle and get it in a year from now.”
“China can say, we’ll put it in three months from now,” he said.“You have a much more focused concentration of talent in China, which collapses coordination time.”
That culture has allowed the same companies and engineers to rapidly advance in manufacturing skill and complexity. It has helped CATL, which originally made batteries for smartphones, to become one of the world’s top EV battery makers. And it has helped BYD — which is close to unseating Tesla as the world’s No. 1 seller of electric vehicles — move from making lackluster gasoline cars to some of the world’s best and cheapest EVs.
It will be a while until America can duplicate that manufacturing capability, partly because of the number of headwinds it faces, Wang said.