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Why the grid of the future might hinge on these 10 projects.

The energy transition happens one project at a time. Cutting carbon emissions is not simply a matter of shutting down coal plants or switching to electric cars. It calls for a vast number of individual construction projects to coalesce into a whole new energy system, one that can generate, transmit, and distribute new forms of clean power. Even with the right architecture of regulations and subsidies in place, each project must still conquer a series of obstacles that can require years of planning, fundraising, and cajoling, followed by exhaustive review before they can begin building, let alone operating.
These 10 projects represent the spectrum of solutions that could enable a transition to a carbon-free energy system. The list includes vastly scaled up versions of mature technologies like wind and solar power alongside the traditional energy infrastructure necessary to move that power around. Many of the most experimental or first-of-a-kind projects on this list are competing to play the role of “clean firm” power on the grid of the future. Form’s batteries, Fervo’s geothermal plants, NET Power’s natural gas with carbon capture, and TerraPower’s molten salt nuclear reactor could each — in theory — dispatch power when it’s needed and run for as long as necessary, unconstrained by the weather. Others, like Project Cypress, are geared at solving more distant problems, like cleaning up the legacy carbon in the atmosphere.
But they do not all have a clear path to success. Each one has already faced challenges, and many of them are likely to face a great number more. We call these the make-or-break energy projects because it's still unclear what the clean energy system of the future is going to look like, but the projects from this list are likely to play a big part in it — if, that is, they get there.

Type of project: Solar farm
Developer: Intersect Power
Location: Desert Center, Riverside County, California.
Size: 400 megawatts of generation and 650 megawatts of storage
Operation date: Possibly 2025
Cost: $990 million
Why it matters: Facing opposition from local retirees angered by the large number of projects popping up in the area, as well as from conservation-focused groups — such as Basin and Range Watch, which opposes many utility-scale energy projects in desert areas — Easley will be a test of whether California’s reforms to limit the timeframe of appeals to the state’s environmental reviews can actually work in getting a project approved and online faster.
The early signs are promising. A nearby solar project by the same developer, Intersect Power, recently went into operation after getting approved by the Bureau of Land Management in January 2022. Easley could be operational “as early as late 2025,” according to a Plan of Development prepared for Intersect Power.
Easley is also an example of what’s increasingly becoming standard in California, at both the residential and utility-scale level: pairing solar with storage. The California grid increasingly relies on batteries to keep the lights on as solar ramps up and down in the mornings and, especially, the evenings. The state has procured a massive amount of storage and has adjusted how utilities pay for rooftop solar in a way that encourages pairing battery systems with rooftop solar panels. This both stabilizes the grid and helps further decarbonize it, as batteries that are physically close to intermittent renewables are more likely to abate carbon emissions.

Type: Energy storage
Developer: Form Energy and Great River Energy
Location: Cambridge, Minnesota
Size: 150 megawatt hours
Operation date: End of 2025
Cost: Unknown; Goal of less than 1/10th cost of utility-scale lithium-ion batteries per megawatt hour
Why it matters: Form Energy first made waves in 2020 when it announced a contract with Great River Energy, a Minnesota electric utility, to build a battery that could store 100 hours’ worth of electricity, which was simply unheard of. Other energy storage companies were just trying to break the 4-hour limitation of lithium-ion, aiming for 8 hours or, at most, 12. Days-long energy storage would be a game changer for maintaining reliability during extreme weather events, storing renewable energy for stretches of cloudy days or windless nights or kicking in when demand peaks. At first, Form’s project was shrouded in mystery. How, exactly, would it do this? But a year later, the company revealed the secret chemistry behind its breakthrough: iron and oxygen. The batteries are filled with iron pellets that, when exposed to oxygen, rust, releasing electrons to the grid. They “charge” by running in reverse, using the electrical current from the grid to convert the rust back to iron.
Since then, the hype has continued to build. Form has raised nearly $1 billion from venture capital and been awarded tens of millions more ingovernment grants. It has signed contracts with six utilities to deploy projects in California, New York, Virginia, Georgia, and Colorado, in addition to Minnesota. All this, despite not having completed a single project yet.
The Great River Energy Project is set to be the first to come online. Originally, the company said it would be operating by the end of 2023; now it’s expected to start construction later this year and begin operating in early 2025, Vice President of Communications Sarah Bray told Heatmap. First, the company has to complete construction of its first factory in Weirton, West Virginia, where it will be producing all of the batteries. Bray said it expects to start high-volume production later this year.

Type: Onshore wind
Developer: Pattern Energy
Location: Lincoln, Torrance, and San Miguel Counties, New Mexico, with transmission into Arizona
Size: 3,500 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: The project’s developer, Pattern Energy, has secured $11 billion in financing for the wind and associated transmission project. The cost of the project is estimated to be $8 billion.
Why it matters: This would be the biggest wind project in the country and a test case for a variety of energy policy objectives at both the state and federal level. For California, it would be a key step in decarbonizing its grid, as the state right now imports a large amount of its power, not all of which is carbon-free. For the federal government, it meets several goals — using public lands for carbon-free energy development, plus long-distance transmission to spur energy development across the country and link clean power resources in rural areas to major load centers.
It would also mean an ambitious project could overcome long and concerted opposition. The project was first proposed in 2006, and its transmission line cleared environmental review back in 2015, but it has been mired in lawsuit after lawsuit. Most recently, a coalition of conservation groups and Indian tribes sued to halt construction on the power line portion of the project in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley, claiming that their cultural rights had not been adequately respected. In April, a judge allowed construction to continue, ruling that those claims were barred by the existing federal approvals, which had taken years to attain.

Type: Offshore wind
Developer: Equinor
Location: South of Long Island, New York
Size: 810 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: Not available, but an earlier estimate for developing two wind farms was $3 billion. Costs have since risen, but the second farm, Empire Wind 2, is no longer under contract.
Why it matters: The Northeast, and especially New York State, have aggressive aims for decarbonization, with a goal of 70% of the state’s electricity coming from renewables by 2030. The Biden administration also has a specific goal for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030, and New York has a goal of 9 gigawatts by 2035. These types of high-capacity projects will be essential for the Northeast to decarbonize. The windy coast of the Atlantic Ocean is the most potent large-scale renewable resource in the region, and many of the region’s large load centers, such as New York City and Boston, are on the coast.
Offshore wind, while expensive, can present less permitting hassle and local opposition than onshore wind or utility-scale solar. Empire Wind 1 (along with Sunrise Wind) matters tremendously for New York’s offshore wind program, which has been in development for years but has faced escalating costs and project cancellations. Only one offshore wind project is actually operational in the state, South Fork Wind, which was contracted outside the NYSERDA process and has around 130 megawatts of capacity. If Empire manages to get steel in the water and electrons flowing to the coast, it will be a sign that the Northeast’s — and thus the country’s — decarbonization goals are at least somewhat attainable.

Type: Transmission
Developers: Transmission Developers, which is owned by the Blackstone Group
Size: 339 miles / 1,250 megawatts
Operation date: 2026
Cost: $6 billion
Why it matters: The Champlain Hudson Power Express, often referred to as CHPE (affectionately pronounced “chippy”) will deliver 1,250 megawatts of hydropower from Quebec into the New York City grid, which is currently about 90% powered by fossil fuels. It is “the most powerful project you’ll never see,” according to its developers, as it is the largest transmission line in the country to be installed entirely underground and underwater.
The project is essential to New York’s goal to build a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The line will supply an always-available source of clean power to supplement intermittent wind and solar generation and maintain a reliable grid. It has already overcome a number of barriers, including nearly a decade of environmental reviews, uncertainty over whether New York would buy its power, and opposition from conservation advocates concerned about the negative impacts of hydroelectric dams on the environment and on Native communities in Canada.
When it begins operating, New Yorkers won’t just get cleaner power — they should also see air quality benefits almost immediately. The new line is expected to cut air pollution equivalent to that released by 15 of the city’s 16 fossil fuel-fired peaker plants.

Developer: Fervo
Type: Geothermal
Location: Beaver County, Utah
Size: 400 megawatts
Operation date: 2026, although the project isn’t expected to be finished until 2028
Cost: Not disclosed, but Fervo raised $244 million and said that the cash “will support Fervo’s continued operations at Cape Station.”
Why it matters: This enhanced geothermal project is not the first one for Fervo. The company’s Nevada site, Project Red, began providing power for Google data centers in Nevada in November 2023. This planned site, however, will be far bigger: Fervo currently has authorization from the Bureau of Land Management for up to 29 exploratory wells, while the Project Red site had just two. Cape Station broke ground in September 2023, and in the first six months of drilling, Fervo said it reduced costs from drilling by 70% compared to its Project Red wells.
As the grid decarbonizes and major power consumers like technology companies insist on having clean power for their operations, there will be massive and growing demand for so-called “clean firm” power, carbon-free power that is available all the time. Conventional wind and solar is intermittent, and existing battery technology only allows for limited output over time. Fervo’s “enhanced geothermal” technology uses techniques borrowed from the oil and gas industry to be able to produce geothermal power essentially anywhere where there are hot enough rocks underneath the surface of the Earth, as opposed to conventional geothermal, which depends on locating hot enough fluid or stream.
If Fervo can demonstrate that it can produce power at scale at costs comparable to existing conventional geothermal projects, it can expect a massive market for it and demand for more projects.

Type: Nuclear
Developer: TerraPower
Location: Kemmerrer, Wyoming
Size: 345 megawatts
Operation date: Not available, but the company said in 2021 that it plans to be operational “in the next seven years.” Updated to the 2024 application, that would put it on track for a 2030 completion date.
Cost: Not available, but TerraPower has raised around $1 billion and the federal government has pledged around $2 billion to support the project, which TerraPower has said it will “match … dollar for dollar.”
Why it matters: TerraPower is just one of many companies flogging designs for advanced nuclear reactors, which are smaller and promise to be cheaper to build than America’s existing light-water nuclear reactor fleet. The construction permit application the company submitted in March was a first for a commercial advanced reactor. TerraPower matters as much for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as it does for anyone else, as it’s a test of whether the NRC can meet Congress and the White House’s preference for a more accelerated approval process for advanced nuclear power.
TerraPower’s design, if successful, would be a landmark for the American nuclear industry. The reactor design calls for cooling with liquid sodium instead of the standard water-cooling of American nuclear plants. This technique promises eventual lower construction costs because it requires less pressure than water (meaning less need for expensive safety systems) and can also store heat, turning the reactor into both a generator and an energy storage system.
While there are a number of existing advanced nuclear designs, several of which involve liquid sodium, Natrium could potentially play well with a renewable-heavy grid by providing steady, unchanging output like a current nuclear reactor as well as discharging stored energy in response to renewables falling off the grid.

Type: Hydrogen
Developer: Hy Stor Energy
Location: Project components located throughout Mississippi, with some in Eastern Louisiana
Size: Goal of 340,000 metric tons per year (phase one)
Operation date: 2027
Cost: Initially reported as $3 billion; recently reported as more than $10 billion. (In response to an inquiry from Heatmap, the company replied that it “will be in the multiple billions of dollars.”
Why it matters: Truly carbon-free hydrogen could unlock big emissions reductions across the economy, from fertilizer production, to steelmaking, to marine shipping. But few companies are going to the lengths that Hy Stor is gto ensure its product is really clean. The company is building the first off-grid hydrogen production facility powered entirely by wind and solar. That means Hy Stor will have no problem claiming the new hydrogen production tax credit, which requires companies to match their operations with clean energy sources by the hour — a provision that’s been contested by large portions of the hydrogen industry.
For a company that has never built anything before, the scale of Hy Stor’s Mississippi project is ambitious. The company has acquired about 70,000 acres across Mississippi and Louisiana, along with 10 underground salt domes — mounds of salt buried beneath the Earth’s surface that can be dissolved to form cavernous, skyscraper-sized storage facilities for hydrogen. Those salt domes are the key to Hy Stor’s approach, and what enables the company to rely on intermittent renewables. By storing vast amounts of hydrogen, the company will be able to deliver a steady supply to customers and will also have a backup source of energy for its own operations when wind and solar are less available.
Chief Commercial Officer Claire Behar told Heatmap the company has obtained many of the necessary permits, including for its salt caverns and the plant’s water use. It plans to begin construction at the beginning of 2025, and to have the first phase of the project “in service at scale” by 2027. Hy Stor recently announced a deal to purchase its electrolyzers, devices that split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, from a Norwegian company called Nel Hydrogen. It has also signed up a few customers, including a local port and a green steel company.

Type: Carbon removal
Developers: Climeworks, Heirloom, and Battelle
Location: Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana
Size: Goal of capturing 1 million metric tons per year
Operation date: About 2030
Cost: Total project cost unknown; eligible for up to $600 million from the Department of Energy for its Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs Program.
Why it matters: Project Cypress might be the most ambitious project to remove carbon from the atmosphere under development in the world. It is a collaboration by two leading direct air capture companies, Heirloom Carbon Technologies and Climeworks, which were among the first to demonstrate their ability to capture carbon directly from the air and store it at commercial scale. Now, the two will be attempting to scale up exponentially, from capturing a few thousands tons per year to a combined million.
Last August, the Department of Energy selected Project Cypress to be one of four direct air capture hubs it will support with $3.5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In March, the project was awarded its first infusion of $50 million, but the developers will have to do extensive community engagement to continue receiving funding. Battelle, the project developer, told Heatmap the project has also received an additional $51 million in private investment.
Between financing, permitting challenges, renewable energy sourcing, and community opposition, the project is sure to face a bumpy road ahead. The project and its developers have no ties to the oil and gas industry, but that hasn’t done much to win over the support of environmental justice advocates, who see the project as a dangerous distraction from cutting emissions and pollution in Louisiana. But if Project Cypress is successful, it will show the world what direct air capture looks like at climate-relevant scales.

Type: Carbon capture
Developer: NET Power
Location: Ector County, Texas
Size: 300 megawatts
Operation date: Late 2027 or early 2028
Cost: About $1 billion
Why it matters: Oil and gas CEOs love to say that the problem is not fossil fuels, the problem is emissions. NET Power’s technology — a natural gas power plant with zero emissions, carbon or otherwise — could prove to be the ultimate vindication of that statement. In short, NET Power’s system recycles most of the CO2 it produces and uses it to generate more energy. It also utilizes pure oxygen, unlike typical natural gas plants that take in regular air, which is mostly nitrogen. This means that any remaining CO2 not recycled in the plant is relatively pure and easy to capture.
NET Power opened a 50 megawatt demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas, in 2018, and is developing a 300 megawatt commercial plant in Ector County, Texas, in partnership with Occidental Petroleum, Baker Hughes, and Constellation Energy. On a recent earnings call, CEO Danny Rice said the project was “expected to have a lower levelized cost per kilowatt hour than new nuclear, new geothermal, and new hydro.”
The company generated a lot of excitement among energy experts in the fall of 2021 when it announced that its La Porte project had successfully delivered power to the Texas grid. It also raised a lot of money when it went public last summer. But things have been somewhat rocky since. During a December earnings call, NET Power’s president told investors that its first commercial plant would be delayed by at least a year due to supply chain challenges. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company also applied for funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations last year, but was not selected. It has not yet found any third parties to license its technology or offtakers to buy energy from the Ector County plant, and noted in its recent filings that while the La Porte pilot project delivered electricity to the grid, it did not, in fact, deliver “net” power — meaning that it used more power than it generated.
A spokesperson for the company told Heatmap the La Porte facility was solely intended to “prove the technical viability of the NET Power Cycle” and not intended to produce net power. So everything’s now riding on Project Permian.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct a typographical error in the amount of private investment Project Cypress has received.
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Rob talks New Jersey past, present, and future with Employ America’s Skanda Amarnath.
Electricity prices are the biggest economic issue in the New Jersey governor’s race, which is perhaps next month’s most closely watched election. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic candidate and frontrunner, has pledged to freeze power prices for state residents after getting elected. Can she do that?
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks to Skanda Amarnath, the executive director of Employ America, a center-left think tank that aims to encourage a “full-employment, robust-growth economy.” He’s also a nearly lifelong NJ resident. They chat about how New Jersey got such expensive electricity, whether the nuclear construction boom is real, and what lessons nuclear companies should take from economic history.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: Is there a nuclear bubble? … As people who are interested in long-term decarbonization, number one, this is quite reminiscent of the environment that hit clean energy companies right as Biden was taking office. And number two, is there a nuclear bubble, and what does this mean for how we should think about nuclear going forward? Because at the end of this, I think the only way that any of this helps the climate is if we build a lot more plants.
Skanda Amarnath: We are definitely in a moment when there’s a lot of froth. I don’t want to say everything — it’s always like, it’ll feel unfair and not accurate to go after every single proposition that’s in markets. Like for example, Rick Perry’s Fermi America, they did an IPO and raised a lot of capital pretty successfully. And they have a plan for how they want to build a lot of stuff out — gas, solar, batteries. They want to build four AP1000s, the large, light-water reactors that are seen as the most recent that we’ve built in the United States, and they think they could do them at the same speed that China builds those same reactors.
On the surface of it, there are parts of it that seem interesting and promising. On the other hand, there’s also parts of it that feel very much wrapped up in the speculative frenzy. It gets more exaggerated when you get to like examples like Oklo. They seem to be very politically connected, specifically to Chris Wright. That plus some very small milestone successes in the fuel supply chain are now being sort of magnified into, They’re going be very successful in building out there first of a kind technology. And even in the space of small modular reactors, what they’re offering seems at least substantially more risky than what may be — outside of the space, so even compared to GE’s proposition for a small boiling water reactor, the technology that’s involved with like Oklo is kind of out there.
And one of the things, the lessons of nuclear, if you look through the history, is the more new stuff you’re doing, the harder it is, the more likely it is that you will get heartburn in terms of cost, in terms of schedule, and you never want to do this again. And it’ll involve a lot of bankruptcy, as it did with the case of the Georgia reactors that were built in the last decade. And so this is a sign that there’s clearly a lot of hype and a lot of willingness to take risk, and it’s not really backed up by fundamentals. That can be sometimes overrated in a boom. But that is something that people will look to in a bust and say, what were we doing here? Why was the price of the stock so high?
Mentioned:
How Electricity Got So Expensive
New Jersey’s Next Governor Probably Can’t Do Much About Electricity Prices, by Matt Zeitlin for Heatmap
Previously on Shift Key: The Last Computing-Driven Electricity Demand Boom That Wasn’t
Meta lays off 600 workers
Amazon lays off 14,000 workers
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Hydrostor is building the future of energy with Advanced Compressed Air Energy Storage. Delivering clean, reliable power with 500-megawatt facilities sited on 100 acres, Hydrostor’s energy storage projects are transforming the grid and creating thousands of American jobs. Learn more at hydrostor.ca.
A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
The storm currently battering Jamaica is the third Category 5 to form in the Atlantic Ocean this year, matching the previous record.
As Hurricane Melissa cuts its slow, deadly path across Jamaica on its way to Cuba, meteorologists have been left to marvel and puzzle over its “rapid intensification” — from around 70 miles per hour winds on Sunday to 185 on Tuesday, from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in just a few days, from Category 2 occurring in less than 24 hours.
The storm is “one of the most powerful hurricane landfalls on record in the Atlantic basin,” the National Weather Service said Tuesday afternoon. Though the NWS expected “continued weakening” as the storm crossed Jamaica, “Melissa is expected to reach southeastern Cuba as an extremely dangerous major hurricane, and it will still be a strong hurricane when it moves across the southeastern Bahamas.”
So how did the storm get so strong, so fast? One reason may be the exceptionally warm Caribbean and Atlantic.
“The part of the Atlantic where Hurricane Melissa is churning is like a boiler that has been left on for too long. The ocean waters are around 30 degrees Celsius, 2 to 3 degrees above normal, and the warmth runs deep,” University of Redding research scientist Akshay Deoras said in a public statement. (Those exceedingly warm temperatures are “up to 700 times more likely due to human-caused climate change,” the climate communication group Climate Central said in a press release.)
Based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded in 2024 that “tropical cyclone intensities globally are projected to increase” due to anthropogenic climate change, and that “rapid intensification is also projected to increase.”
NOAA also noted that research suggested “an observed increase in the probability of rapid intensification” for tropical cyclones from 1982 to 2017 The review was still circumspect, however, labeling “increased intensities” and “rapid intensification” as “examples of possible emerging human influences.”
What is well known is that hurricanes require warm water to form — at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit, according to NOAA. “As long as the base of this weather system remains over warm water and its top is not sheared apart by high-altitude winds, it will strengthen and grow.”
A 2023 paper by hurricane researcher Andra Garner argued that between 1971 and 2020, rates of intensification of Atlantic tropical storms “have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans,” and specifically that the number of these storms that intensify from Category 1 or weaker “into a major hurricane” — as Melissa did so quickly — “has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era.”
“Hurricane Melissa has been astonishing to watch — even as someone who studies how these storms are impacted by a warming climate, and as someone who knows that this kind of dangerous storm is likely to become more common as we warm the planet,” Garner told me by email. She likened the warm ocean waters to “an extra shot of caffeine in your morning coffee — it’s not only enough to get the storm going, it’s an extra boost that can really super-charge the storm.”
This year has been an outlier for the Atlantic with three Category 5 storms, University of Miami senior research associate Brian McNoldy wrote on his blog. “For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes,” with wind speeds reaching and exceeding 157 miles per hour, he wrote. “The previous year was 2005. This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.” One of those Category 5 storms in 2005 was Hurricane Katrina.
Jamaican emergency response officials said that thousands of people were already in shelters amidst storm surge, flooding, power outages, and landslides. Even as the center of the storm passed over Jamaica Tuesday evening, the National Weather Service warned that “damaging winds, catastrophic flash flooding and life-threatening storm surge continues in Jamaica.”
With Trump turning the might of the federal government against the decarbonization economy, these investors are getting ready to consolidate — and, hopefully, profit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, investors have been quick to remind me that some of the world’s strongest, most resilient companies have emerged from periods of uncertainty, taking shape and cementing their market position amid profound economic upheaval.
On the one hand, this can sound like folks grasping at optimism during a time when Washington is taking a hammer to both clean energy policies and valuable sources of government funding. But on the other hand — well, it’s true. Google emerged from the dot-com crash with its market lead solidified, Airbnb launched amid the global financial crisis, and Sunrun rose to dominance after the first clean tech bubble burst.
The circumstances may change, but behind all of these against-the-odds successes are investors who saw opportunity where others saw risk. In the climate tech landscape of 2025, well-capitalized investors are eyeing some of the more mature sectors being battered by federal policy or market uncertainty — think solar, wind, biogas, and electric transportation — rather than the fresh-faced startups pursuing more cutting edge tech.
“History does not repeat, but it certainly rhymes,” Andrew Beebe, managing director at Obvious Ventures, told me. He was working as the chief commercial officer at the solar company Suntech Power when the first climate tech bubble collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, venture capital and project financing dried up instantly, as banks and investors faced heavy losses from their exposure to risky assets. This time around, “there’s plenty of capital at all stages of venture,” as well as infrastructure investing, he said. That means firms can afford to swoop in to finance or acquire undervalued startups and established companies alike.
“I think you’re gonna see a lot of projects in development change hands,” Beebe told me.
Investors don’t generally publicize when the companies or projects that they’re backing become “distressed assets,” i.e. are in financial trouble, nor do they broadcast when their explicit goal is to turn said projects around. But that’s often what opportunistic investing entails.
“As investors in the energy and infrastructure space — which is inherently in transition — we take it as a very important point of our strategy to be opportunistic,” Giulia Siccardo, a managing director at Quinbrook, told me. (Prior to joining the investment firm, Siccardo was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Manufacturing & Energy Supply Chains under President Biden.)
Quinbrook sees opportunities in biogas and renewable natural gas, a sector that once enjoyed “very cushioned margins” thanks to investor interest in corporate sustainability, Siccardo told me, but which has lately gone into a “rapid decline.” But she’s also looking at solar and storage, where developers are rushing to build projects before tax credits expire, as well as grid and transmission infrastructure, given the dire need for upgrades and buildout as load growth increases.
As of now, the only investment Quinbrook has explicitly described as opportunistic is its acquisition of a biomethane facility in Junction City, Oregon. When it opened in 2013, the facility used food waste — which otherwise would have emitted methane in a landfill — to produce renewable biogas for clean electricity generation. But after Shell acquired the plant, it switched to converting cow manure and agricultural residue into renewable natural gas for heavy-duty transportation fuels, a process that it’s operated commercially since 2021. Siccardo declined to provide information about the plant’s performance at the time of Quinbrook’s acquisition, though presumably, it has yet to reach its total production capacity of 730,000 million British thermal units per year — enough to supply about 12,000 U.S. households.
The extension of the clean fuel production tax credit, plus the potential for hyperscalers to purchase RNG credits, are still driving demand, however. And that’s increased Siccardo’s confidence in pursuing investments and acquisitions in the space. “That’s a market that, from a policy standpoint, has actually been pretty stable — and you might even say favored — by the One Big Beautiful Bill relative to other technologies,” she explained.
Solar, meanwhile, is still cheap and quick to deploy, with or without the tax credits, Siccardo told me. “If you strip away all subsidies, and are just looking at, what is the technology that’s delivering the lowest cost electron, and which technology has the least supply chain bottlenecks right now in North America —- that drives you to solar and storage,” she said.
Another leading infrastructure investment firm, Generate Capital, is also looking to cash in on the moment. After replacing its CEO and enacting company-wide layoffs, Generate’s head of external affairs, Jonah Goldman, told me that “managers who understand the [climate] space and who can take advantage of the opportunities that are underpriced in this tougher market environment are set up to succeed.”
The firm also sees major opportunities when it comes to good old solar and storage projects. In an open letter, Generate’s new CEO, David Crane, wrote that “for the first time in nearly four decades, the U.S. has an insatiable need for more power: as much as we can produce, as soon as we can, wherever and however we can produce it.”
Crane sees it as the duty of Generate and other investors to use mergers and acquisitions as a tool to help clean tech scale and mature. “If companies across our subsectors were publicly traded, the market itself would act as a centripetal force towards industry consolidation,” he wrote. But because many clean energy companies are privately funded, Crane said “it is up to us, the providers of that private capital, to force industry improvement, through consolidation and otherwise.”
Helping solar companies accelerate their construction timelines to lock in tax credit eligibility has actually become an opportunistic market of its own, Chris Creed, a managing partner at Galvanize Climate Solutions and co-head of its credit division, told me. “Helping those companies that need to start or complete their projects within a predetermined time frame because of changes in the tax credit framework became an investable opportunity for us,” Creed told me. “We have a number of deals in our near term pipeline that basically came about as a result of that.”
Given that some solar companies are bound to fare better than others, he agreed that mergers and acquisitions were likely — among competitors as well as involving companies working in different stages of a supply chain. “It wouldn’t shock me if you saw some horizontal consolidation or some vertical integration,” Creed told me.
Consolidation can only go so far, though. So while investors seem to agree that solar, storage, and even the administration’s nemesis — wind — are positioned for a long and fruitful future, when it comes to more emergent technologies, not all will survive the headwinds. Beebe thinks there’s been “irrational exuberance” around both green hydrogen and direct air capture, for example, and that seasoned investors will give those spaces a pass.
Electric mobility — e.g. EVs, electric planes, and even electrified shipping — and grid scalability — which includes upgrades to make the grid more efficient, flexible, and optimized — are two sectors that Beebe is betting will survive the turmoil.
But for all investors that have the capability to do so, for now, “the easy bet is just to move your money outside the U.S.” Beebe told me.
We might be starting to see just that. Quinbrook also invests in the U.K. and Australia, and just announced its first Canadian investment last week. It acquired an ownership stake in Elemental Clean Fuels, an energy developer making renewable fuels such as RNG, low-carbon methanol, and — yes — clean hydrogen.
Last week, Generate announced that it had closed $43 million in funding from the Canadian company Fiera Infrastructure Private Debt for its North American portfolio of anaerobic digestion projects, which produce renewable natural gas — Generate’s first cross-currency, cross-border deal.
Creed still has confidence in the U.S. market, however, telling me he’s “very bullish on American innovation.” He certainly acknowledges that it’s a tough time out there for any investor deciding where to park their money, but thinks that ultimately, “that volatility should manifest itself as excess returns to investors who are able to figure out their investment strategy and deploy in this environment.”
Exactly what firms will manage this remains an open question, and the opportunities may be short-lived — but it’s a race that plenty of investors are getting in on.