The Infrastructure Investor Still Bullish on Renewables

The Inflation Reduction Act sparked a predictable surge in clean energy-related investments from the law’s signing in 2022 through the 2024 election, before President Trump’s second term ushered in an era of cancellations, closures, and downsizing. Of the domestic projects announced since the IRA’s passage, a total of 35 have been nixed or scaled back so far this year — more than in all of 2023 and 2024 combined, according to estimates from the environmental advocacy organization E2. This accounts for over $22 billion in lost investment and 16,500 in lost jobs.

“There’s a drastic decrease in the amount of new [clean energy] investments,” E2’s Michael Timberlake told me. After the IRA’s passage, he explained, nearly every month saw over a billion dollars invested in new clean energy projects. But since December of last year, monthly investment has come in below a billion dollars more often than not.

Domestic electric vehicle and battery manufacturing projects have been hit the hardest, as these sectors are staring down a federal bureaucracy clearly hostile to their tech on the one hand and Chinese competitors that are already leagues ahead of them on the other. But there is a bright spot: E2’s data shows that the grim outlook for clean energy projects is largely confined to the manufacturing sector. Many large-scale energy generation projects might actually, maybe, be mostly okay.

That’s what Jonah Goldman of the infrastructure investment firm Generate Capital is banking on. As electricity demand rises for the first time in over a decade, the need to deploy cost-competitive grid energy is only increasing. Thus, Goldman sees plenty of reason to continue investing in a renewables buildout — solar especially, which can often be deployed more quickly, flexibly, and economically than any other form of generation, politics aside.

“What is not a question really anymore is whether these projects are going to get built,” Goldman told me. “There’s just not another option. Even if you think of doubling our investment in gas generation, you still don’t get to this incredible increase in power demand that we need in order to reach the projections that we’re getting.”

Taking a closer look at the post-IRA projects that have been either canceled or scaled back shows that solar is indeed the most resilient investment of the bunch. Since the IRA’s passage, about 12% of announced solar projects have been canceled or downsized, compared to 25% of wind projects, 19% of EV projects, and 34% of EV battery projects. Only three of the 35 projects hit this year were related to solar, and only one of those was for solar generation.

Despite the overall dour domestic investment outlook, Timberlake thus agrees with Goldman that solar in particular isn’t grinding to a halt anytime soon. The market signal for clean energy, Timberlake said, is “indisputable.” The buildout might happen more slowly than it otherwise would have, as the administration continues to unspool regulatory red tape for these projects, but it’ll happen.

And, of course, it will get more expensive. Because while Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill maintains investment and production tax credits for most clean energy technologies through 2033, it cuts credits for solar and wind projects that either start construction after July 2026, or, if they haven’t started by then, are placed in service after 2027.

While Goldman hates what that will do to electricity prices, he doesn’t seem too worried about it hurting Generate’s ability to invest. For the moment, he told me, this timeline leaves the firm with a strong pipeline of opportunities not only in solar, but also in other categories like battery energy storage, geothermal, and sustainable fuels that have largely retained their IRA incentives. “You’re still talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of available investments that don’t wear that risk at all,” he said.

In fact, there are also already so many renewables projects under construction or set to begin soon that “we’ve got more investable opportunities than we have capital to invest,” Goldman explained. Rather than a lull, the tax credit cutoff date is now creating an incentive for investors to throw their support behind projects that appear poised to meet the deadlines.

That won’t last forever. After the credits phase out, investment could certainly dip, Goldman said, “until either those incentives are restored — which they still could be — or the market figures out how to effectively price those projects without that incentive.” Because tax-credit eligible projects that began construction prior to July 2026 will still be coming online for the next few years, Goldman predicts the lull could start around 2029.

He’s not convinced the incentives are gone for good, though. Solar and wind tax credits have suffered through many periods of uncertainty during their decades-long history, always ultimately enduring. And while the industry shouldn’t bank on a mid-term congressional shakeup laying the groundwork for a credit extension, it’s always a possibility — especially given looming electricity price hikes. That could rile up voters enough to begin chipping away at the partisan divides that have formed around clean energy, fossil fuels, and how the heck to power all of these AI data centers.

“We’re no longer talking about a political issue, despite the fact that they made this a political issue.” Goldman told me. “What we need is more electrons on the grid for as affordable a price as possible. And some of those will be generated from gas, and some of those will be generated from renewables.”

The U.S. is also not the only place for infrastructure investors to make money. While domestic clean energy investment may be down, the first half of 2025 saw global private infrastructure funding increase significantly compared with the prior two years. Data center and renewables-focused funds drove the trend, making up 45% and 36% of total investment raised, respectively. The “power and transmission” sector — which includes fossil fuel-fired generation — comprised a mere 12%.

But given that climate funds from all corners of the globe do primarily invest in the U.S., this certainly points to a sustained interest in building domestic clean energy infrastructure. Or, as Goldman put it, “the fundamentals of the market are complicated but only pointing in one direction — a deep thirst for quick, buildable power. And there’s only certain technologies that can fill that deep thirst.”