Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
For clean energy developers, whose projects’ upfront costs make them sensitive to the price of borrowing money, a hold is better than a hike. But a reduction is better than a hold.
GE Vernova’s gas turbine business is going gangbusters as data centers drive demand for new generators. Its nuclear-focused joint venture with the Japanese industrial giant Hitachi, meanwhile, is making real progress toward building out an order book for its 300-megawatt small modular reactor, the BWRX-300. Now the General Electric spinout is making a big bet on the future of the transmission buildout. On Wednesday, the company announced a deal to pay $9 billion for Trench Group, a global manufacturer of high-voltage transmission equipment and grid components. The deal is expected to close at the end of next year. “Trench’s differentiated high-voltage grid technology, strong execution, and deep customer relationships are key enablers of the modernized, resilient grid required to keep pace with the electricity supercycle,” GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik said in a press release.
It’s far from the only company betting on future grid construction. Hitachi announced a $1 billion investment into a U.S. transformer factory last year. Meanwhile, a former Tesla executive just launched a startup called Heron Power aiming to make transformers specifically designed to patch more data centers and renewables onto the grid. There’s plenty of money to go around: As you may recall, the Department of Energy has in recent weeks pumped billions of dollars into upgrading the U.S. power grid.
More than 40 clean tech startups urged both parties in Congress to pass permitting reform legislation before the session ends. In a letter published Thursday morning and shared exclusively with me for this newsletter, the companies said the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act “helps innovators spend more time building and less time waiting.” Signatories included geothermal heavyweights Fervo Energy, Quaise, and Zanskar; carbon removal company Heirloom, and fusion giants Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Realta. The bill, they continued, “restores confidence that American projects can move from concept to construction on predictable timelines.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on the other hand, came out with its own statement warning lawmakers against the bill. In its view, BAAJA would “lock in dirty energy for decades” and make it “harder for people to show they are harmed by pollution.” The group will undoubtedly find sympathetic audiences at the upper rungs of the Democratic Party. In remarks my colleague Jael Holzman obtained, John Podesta, the Biden White House’s senior climate policy advisor, said at a conference last week that he worried the bill could hand Trump “a loaded Howitzer.”
Sign up to receive Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Man bites dog: New York City might just have something to learn from Connecticut. In 2011, New York’s neighbor established the nation’s first green bank. As of this year, the agency has directed more than $3 billion toward things like developing solar and storage systems on public housing. “What we saw in Connecticut was a way to get community-scale renewable projects built that markets alone were not delivering,” Jason Kowalski, the executive director of the Public Renewables Project, told me. “With New York City, similarly, we’re looking to fill market gaps.” In a new report released Wednesday, his group — along with fellow left-leaning energy policy advocates Public Power NY and the Climate & Community Institute — proposed that New York City create its own green bank, modeled on Connecticut’s experiment. “We’re not thinking about public versus private,” Kowalski added. “We’re thinking of public versus nothing. We’re targeting places where nothing is getting built. This is a mechanism for building revenue-positive projects that are not being built because of the transaction costs or because there is no planning function that’s brought in to plan at any scale.” The proposal could find sympathetic eyes in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. The democratic socialist has embraced venturing where, since the 1990s, government has rarely gone. City Hall brokered a deal two weeks ago to chip in $30 million for New York University’s next-generation computing lab in exchange for 15% of the proceeds from any technology the facility develops and sells. As you may recall, I called the agreement “New Dealism for quantum computing.”
Public financiers could also come in handy as cities undertake the costly renovations and infrastructure upgrades needed to survive in a hotter, more meteorologically chaotic world. The European Commission this week unveiled new climate rules requiring governments to establish who is responsible for protecting citizens from climate disasters, Euronews reported. Brussels wants major cities to prepare for as much as 3 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial norms. That’s more than double the warming we are already getting a taste of from El Niño.
Cement produces roughly 8% of global emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide — four times the output of airplanes. Cutting emissions across the wider economy requires building a lot of stuff. Paradoxically, that means using a lot more cement, adding to emissions. But a growing suite of startups is rolling out new technological approaches to make low-carbon cement. One of them just announced a major deal with Meta. The Facebook owner agreed to buy environmental attribute certificates associated with 200,000 tons of San Jose-based Fortera’s low-carbon cement. “Agreements of this scale and duration are what unlock financing and move projects from plans to production,” Fortera CEO Ryan Gilliam said in a statement. “They also show the market that low-carbon cement is a product that buyers are serious about and planning around for years to come.” The clean cement sector has been, as my colleague Katie Brigham wrote, riding the artificial intelligence wave.
An antimony mine in Tajikistan. STRINGER/AFP via Getty Images
Antimony is a lustrous, silvery-gray metalloid. It’s needed for solar panel glass and all kinds of batteries. And the U.S. overwhelmingly relies on imports of it from China and Tajikistan. Maybe not for long, Mining Technology hinted. On Wednesday, Alaska’s Department of Natural Resource gave its final approvals to the startup Nova Minerals. The project, funded with nearly $45 million from the Department of Defense, aims to begin production next year.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the nature of Meta’s purchase from Fortera.
