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It took the market about a week to catch up to the fact that the Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek had released an open-source AI model that rivaled those from prominent U.S. companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic — and that, most importantly, it had managed to do so much more cheaply and efficiently than its domestic competitors. The news cratered not only tech stocks such as Nvidia, but energy stocks, as well, leading to assumptions that investors thought more-energy efficient AI would reduce energy demand in the sector overall.
But will it really? While some in climate world assumed the same and celebrated the seemingly good news, many venture capitalists, AI proponents, and analysts quickly arrived at essentially the opposite conclusion — that cheaper AI will only lead to greater demand for AI. The resulting unfettered proliferation of the technology across a wide array of industries could thus negate the energy efficiency gains, ultimately leading to a substantial net increase in data center power demand overall.
“With cost destruction comes proliferation,” Susan Su, a climate investor at the venture capital firm Toba Capital, told me. “Plus the fact that it’s open source, I think, is a really, really big deal. It puts the power to expand and to deploy and to proliferate into billions of hands.”
If you’ve seen lots of chitchat about Jevons paradox of late, that’s basically what this line of thinking boils down to. After Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella responded to DeepSeek mania by posting the Wikipedia page for this 19th century economic theory on X, many (myself included) got a quick crash course on its origins. The idea is that as technical efficiencies of the Victorian era made burning coal cheaper, demand for — and thus consumption of — coal actually increased.
While this is a distinct possibility in the AI space, it’s by no means a guarantee. “This is very much, I think, an open question,“ energy expert Nat Bullard told me, with regards to whether DeepSeek-type models will spur a reduction or increase in energy demand. “I sort of lean in both directions at once.” Formerly the chief content officer at BloombergNEF and current co-founder of the AI startup Halcyon, a search and information platform for energy professionals, Bullard is personally excited for the greater efficiencies and optionality that new AI models can bring to his business.
But he warns that just because DeepSeek was cheap to train — the company claims it cost about $5.5 million, while domestic models cost hundreds of millions or even billions — doesn’t mean that it’s cheap or energy-efficient to operate. “Training more efficiently does not necessarily mean that you can run it that much more efficiently,” Bullard told me. When a large language model answers a question or provides any type of output, it’s said to be making an “inference.” And as Bullard explains, “That may mean, as we move into an era of more and more inference and not just training, then the [energy] impacts could be rather muted.”
DeepSeek-R1, the name for the model that caused the investor freakout, is also a newer type of LLM that uses more energy in general. Up until literally a few days ago, when OpenAI released o3-mini for free, most casual users were probably interacting with so-called “pretrained” AI models. Fed on gobs of internet text, these LLMs spit out answers based primarily on prediction and pattern recognition. DeepSeek released a model like this, called V3, in September. But last year, more advanced “reasoning” models, which can “think,” in some sense, started blowing up. These models — which include o3-mini, the latest version of Anthropic’s Claude, and the now infamous DeepSeek-R1 — have the ability to try out different strategies to arrive at the correct answer, recognize their mistakes, and improve their outputs, allowing for significant advancements in areas such as math and coding.
But all that artificial reasoning eats up a lot of energy. As Sasha Luccioni, the AI and climate lead at Hugging Face, which makes an open-source platform for AI projects, wrote on LinkedIn, “To set things clear about DeepSeek + sustainability: (it seems that) training is much shorter/cheaper/more efficient than traditional LLMs, *but* inference is longer/more expensive/less efficient because of the chain of thought aspect.” Chain of thought refers to the reasoning process these newer models undertake. Luccioni wrote that she’s currently working to evaluate the energy efficiency of both the DeepSeek V3 and R1 models.
Another factor that could influence energy demand is how fast domestic companies respond to the DeepSeek breakthrough with their own new and improved models. Amy Francetic, co-founder at Buoyant Ventures, doesn’t think we’ll have to wait long. “One effect of DeepSeek is that it will highly motivate all of the large LLMs in the U.S. to go faster,” she told me. And because a lot of the big players are fundamentally constrained by energy availability, she’s crossing her fingers that this means they’ll work smarter, not harder. “Hopefully it causes them to find these similar efficiencies rather than just, you know, pouring more gasoline into a less fuel-efficient vehicle.”
In her recent Substack post, Su described three possible futures when it comes to AI’s role in the clean energy transition. The ideal is that AI demand scales slowly enough that nuclear and renewables scale with it. The least hopeful is that immediate, exponential growth in AI demand leads to a similar expansion of fossil fuels, locking in new dirty infrastructure for decades. “I think that's already been happening,” Su told me. And then there’s the techno-optimist scenario, linked to figures like Sam Altman, which Su doesn’t put much stock in — that AI “drives the energy revolution” by helping to create new energy technologies and efficiencies that more than offset the attendant increase in energy demand.
Which scenario predominates could also depend upon whether greater efficiencies, combined with the adoption of AI by smaller, more shallow-pocketed companies, leads to a change in the scale of data centers. “There’s going to be a lot more people using AI. So maybe that means we don’t need these huge, gigawatt data centers. Maybe we need a lot more smaller, megawatt-size data centers,” Laura Katzman, a principal at Buoyant Ventures, told me. Katzman has conducted research for the firm on data center decarbonization.
Smaller data centers with a subsequently smaller energy footprint could pair well with renewable-powered microgrids, which are less practical and economically feasible for hyperscalers. That could be a big win for solar and wind plus battery storage, Katzman explained, but a boondoggle for companies such as Microsoft, which has famously committed to re-opening Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its data centers. “Because of DeepSeek, the expected price of compute probably doesn’t justify now turning back on some of these nuclear plants, or these other high-cost energy sources,” Katzman told me.
Lastly, it remains to be seen what nascent applications cheaper models will open up. “If somebody, say, in the Philippines or Vietnam has an interest in applying this to their own decarbonization challenge, what would they come up with?” Bullard pondered. “I don’t yet know what people would do with greater capability and lower costs and a different set of problems to solve for. And that’s really exciting to me.”
But even if the AI pessimists are right, and these newer models don’t make AI ubiquitously useful for applications from new drug discovery to easier regulatory filing, Su told me that in a certain sense, it doesn't matter much. “If there was a possibility that somebody had this type of power, and you could have it too, would you sit on the couch? Or would you arms race them? I think that is going to drive energy demand, irrespective of end utility.”
As Su told me, “I do not think there’s actually a saturation point for this.”
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On a surprise agreement, DOE loans, and pipeline permitting
Current conditions: More than 7 million Americans are under risk of tornadoes Tuesday, including in the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee valleys • There is “dreary” weather ahead for the Northeast as rain and cold return • It will feel like 107 degrees Fahrenheit today in Xingtai, China, where the average this time of year is 86 degrees.
The Trump administration has lifted its stop-work order on Empire Wind, an offshore wind project by Equinor that had already started construction south of New York’s Long Island when the Department of the Interior ordered it paused on April 16. New York’s governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul, apparently secured the agreement for construction to resume after three “roughly one-hour calls with President Donald Trump, the most recent on Sunday,” in which she emphasized the energy and job-creating benefits of the project, The Washington Post reports. In a statement, Marguerite Wells, executive director of the Alliance for Clean Energy, cheered the move, saying, “Today, I am reminded how proud I am to be a New Yorker. We thank Governor Hochul for being an early and continuous champion for offshore wind and for bringing her advocacy to the highest levels of government.”
As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Jael Holzman previously reported, the stop-work order on Empire Wind had seriously jeopardized New York State’s chance of meeting its climate and clean energy goals, with offshore wind viewed as the route away from New York City’s reliance on fossil fuels. In AM yesterday, I also covered a report that the offshore wind industry was preparing to respond “with strength” to the roadblocks and opposition from the Trump administration. It reportedly cost Equinor $50 million per week to hold the project while the Trump administration deliberated its merits.
The Department of Energy plans to cancel seven major loans and loan guarantees, including a New Jersey transmission project and a low-income rooftop solar program, Semafor reports, per a “former DOE official close to the process.” The programs had all been conditionally approved under Biden, and also included a low-carbon ammonia factory by Monolith Nebraska, as well as a battery factory, a plastics recycling facility, and two others that had already been canceled by their developers. In sum, the canceled financing amounts to nearly $8.5 billion — which admittedly isn’t much of the roughly $41 billion in Biden-era LPO agreements that were yet unfinalized when Trump took office. At the same time, “it’s revealing that the administration would let these projects — most of which are in sectors where the U.S. is already far behind China — fall by the wayside, rather than take steps to prop them up,” Semafor’s Tim McDonnell notes.
A House Rules Committee document points to potential changes to the reconciliation bill as negotiations continue — including, perhaps, to permitting. The original bill stipulated that CO2, hydrogen, and petroleum pipelines could pay a $10 million fee to bypass the standard permitting process, a move that critics decried as a “pay-to-play privilege for gas pipelines.” Activists and Democrats had slammed the provision, with Evergreen Action arguing it “makes a farce of our permitting process and essentially legalizes corruption,” and that “Americans will be severely impacted by gas pipelines built through their communities.” But in the new version of the bill, the language describing the expedited pipeline permitting “is gone,” Notus writes.
There is still a long way to go in negotiations, as hardliners and moderates remain at odds. The Rules Committee’s vote on a final version of the reconciliation bill is scheduled for 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, in order to stay on track for a possible floor vote this week — although others are skeptical of the feasibility of that timeline.
Clean power manufacturing is expected to grow from supporting 122,000 American jobs today to more than 575,000 by 2030 if all announced manufacturing facilities become operational, a new report by the American Clean Power Association found. The report similarly expects the economic output generated by those facilities to grow from contributing $18 billion to the U.S. GDP today to $86 billion by the end of the decade. “Today’s report shows that the manufacturing activities across the clean energy sector drive a ripple effect of economic growth that extends far beyond factory walls, reaching every corner of the country,” Jason Grumet, the CEO of ACP, said in a statement.
While clean energy manufacturing has taken a hit under the Trump administration, with more than $8 billion in projects canceled, closed, or downsized in the first quarter of 2025 due to concerns about access to Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and loan financing, as well as greater economic turbulence, ACP found that many investments are concentrated in rural areas and Republican states. With 200 manufacturing facilities in the pipeline, the report calls for preserving energy tax credits, “facilitating a true all-of-the-above energy strategy,” and creating “a stable and strategic trade environment,” among other policies.
An anti-nuclear protest near Lingen, Germany, in 2023.David Hecker/Getty Images
Germany’s longtime opposition to treating nuclear power on par with renewables in EU energy policy appears to have ended. France, which gets about 70% of its power from atomic energy, had long pushed for broader adoption in Europe — and been stymied by Germany’s former chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who was skeptical of labeling atomic energy “green.” But the nation will pivot to join France under Germany’s new conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, leaving Austria as the last remaining holdout in the EU, Reuters reports. “When France and Germany agree, it is much easier for Europe to move forward,” Lars-Hendrik Röller, who served as chief economic adviser to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, told the Financial Times. The pivot is not just about meeting energy needs, however; as one German official also told FT, “We are now actually finally open to talk to France about nuclear deterrence for Europe. Better late than never.”
“I only drained about 25 miles of range from the battery after powering my fridge and other devices for days.” —Scooter Doll, writing for Electrek about how he used his Rivian R1S as a backup energy source for three days after last week’s tornadoes knocked out his power.
The buzzy clean energy tax credit marketplace expanded into debt right in the nick of time.
The Inflation Reduction Act opened up a whole new avenue for project financing when it allowed clean energy developers to sell the tax credits that they earned on their projects to any willing buyer on the open market. It also opened up a lucrative fintech opportunity: A digital marketplace where buyers and sellers of these credits could easily transact.
One of the first — and certainly most successful — startups to jump on this opportunity was Crux Climate. But by the time Crux announced its $50 million Series B funding round last month, however, some Congressional Republicans were already considering axing tax credit transferability in their budget proposal. Then last week, the House of Representatives’ Ways and Means committee followed through on this rumored threat, proposing a plan to get rid of transferability for all credits by 2028 (though the details are still in flux). So what’s to become of Crux now?
Everything’s going to be okay, Crux’s co-founder CEO Alfred Johnson told me late last week. In fact, “the business is in great shape,” he said. I was a tad confused. But as Johnson reminded me, the company always planned on being more than a mere tax credit marketplace. The question is whether developers will buy into this vision of Crux as the everything store for project financing.
In March, right before the company announced its Series B, Crux launched a debt marketplace, where developers and manufacturers can access financial tools such as short-term bridge loans, construction financing, and flexible lines of credit to fund the buildout of renewables projects. “The market size for transferable credits is $30 billion per year, while the market size for project finance debt is more than seven-and-half times as big: $230 billion,” Johnson told me.
This new offering may have come just in the nick of time. It’s also likely just the first in a series of platform expansions, some of which are already in the works.
“There are many more multibillion-dollar markets among the thousands of developers, manufacturers, investors, and corporate buyers that make up the market for U.S. energy and manufacturing project finance,” Johnson told me. Playing in all those markets is a lofty goal for a company that was founded just two years ago, but so far Crux has been good at defying expectations. After all, it’s been profitable since its second year, Johnson told me, a rare and rapid rise for an early-stage startup.
Crux shared some exclusive numbers with me that illustrate some ways in which it’s starting to outgrow its roots. For one, Johnson told me that Crux’s revenue for the first one-and-a-half quarters of this year is nearly 10 times higher than for the same period last year. While he wouldn’t reveal what portion of that was comprised of tax credit deals versus debt financing deals, he did say that in the two months since the debt marketplace launched, “lenders have issued $1.3 billion of term sheets.” Those are nonbinding loan offers, $700 million of which have turned into actual deals so far. “It took more than a year for the tax credit market to reach similar throughput," Johnson said.
In the meantime, Crux is by no means giving up on the embattled transferable tax credit marketplace. The company sounded a relatively optimistic note last week as it published a list of takeaways from the Ways and Means Committee’s proposal, stating, “This is the starting point and we anticipate that the final bill will take a more favorable stance on transferability and tax credits.” The company looks like it’s preparing to fight for that outcome, too, as a few months ago it hired new teams of tax lobbyists and brought on Hasan Nazar, former federal policy lead at Tesla, to direct these lobbying efforts.
Johnson said that the debut of Crux’s debt marketplace had developers, manufacturers, and investors rushing to its website in numbers not seen since the company launched. It logged more “inbound interest” on that one day in March than when it announced its Series A and its Series B — that is, more than on both of those days combined.
“We didn’t invest in Crux with the belief that this would be a transferable tax credit business forever,” David Haber, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, told me. The venture capital firm led the company’s $18.2 million Series A funding round. “We viewed that as a great wedge product to bootstrap a financial exchange that could help facilitate the types of financial products needed for this ecosystem,” he said. Clay Dumas of Lowercarbon Capital, which led Crux’s Series B, also saw the company as a so-called “wedge” into a “multi-hundred-billion-dollar opportunity to finance energy and advanced manufacturing through debt and a wide range of other products.”
Not all investors felt as confident that companies built around tax credit transferability could become a one-stop financing shop, however. As of now, most of Crux’s direct competitors — such as Basis Climate, Reunion Infrastructure, and Common Forge — haven’t expanded into other parts of the climate capital stack.
“We know the fundamental risk that a stroke of the pen can have in any of these sort of marketplaces,” Juan Muldoon, a partner at the climate software VC firm Energize Capital, told me. Thus far, Energize has not funded any tax credit-based marketplace, diligence platform, or underwriting tool. “We wanted to wait for signs of resilience and more complete platforms, more complete business models, versus solving for things that might be more transient in value,” Muldoon said. Last week’s committee proposals validate Energize’s core investment strategy, he added — supporting nimble software companies that can withstand political headwinds and change tacks quickly.
Crux certainly hopes that expanding into the debt market will put any fears of its potential transience to rest. After all, Johnson told me, “all parts of the capital stack are opaque, illiquid, bespoke and manual.” That includes not only transferable tax credits, but also debt and equity financing. “These are private transactions that require a ton of documentation, models, advisory lawyers. But it doesn't have to be as bad as it is,” he said.
But if the transferable tax credits do indeed disappear, many renewable energy developers may be forced to return to one of the most opaque funding mechanisms of all: tax equity financing, which Crux is not currently set up to facilitate. As my colleague Emily Pontecorvo recently explained, prior to the passage of the IRA, renewable energy developers who wanted to liquidate their tax credits had to partner with tax equity investors — usually banks — who would give them cash in exchange for an equity stake in their clean energy project and the benefits of their tax credits. But forming these types of partnerships is both legally complicated and costly, and thus not a viable option for many smaller developers.
Presumably, Crux could shake up and simplify this space, too. And while it’s made no official commitments to a tax equity product, the company’s website has been reconfigured to advertise it as the go-to platform to “source new opportunities for lending, equity, and tax credit transfers,” as it commits to “financing the future of energy.”
Crux has its work cut out for it, though, as often the more complex the financial transaction, the more customized it must be. “The competitors are offline advisors for the most part,” Haber told me. Thus, standardizing and digitizing as many esoteric and project specific elements of the capital stack as possible is going to be, as he put it, “their opportunity and their challenge.”
Johnson says Crux is up for it. “It’s never going to be, you know, one click buy it on Amazon. That’s a ridiculous and implausible concept for deals of this size and importance. But these negotiations and transactions can be so much better.” Efficiency, at the very least, seems to be something we can all get behind. So as the partisan fighting over tax credits and transferability commences and the clean energy incentives start to fall, maybe at least this one climate tech darling can weather the storm.
Direct air capture isn’t doing everything its advocates promised — yet. That doesn’t make it a scam.
Two events last week thrust direct air capture carbon removal into the spotlight — one promising, though controversial for some, the other mendacious and ill-informed.
On Friday, Occidental announced a potential $500 million joint venture investment from Adnoc’s XRG, the lower-carbon investment wing for the United Arab Emirates state-run oil company in Oxy’s South Texas DAC Hub project. The facility is part of the $3.5 billion federal DAC hubs program created through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Although the DAC hubs program has strong bipartisan support, it has faced relative uncertainty under the new administration, calling into question American leadership on the future of the industry.
Earlier in the week, Climeworks, another major DAC hubs award winner, announced a reduction in force, due in part to “pending clarity for our next plant in the U.S.” Coupled with this news, a sensationalized exposé by Icelandic news outlet Heimildin detailed challenges with the first two Climeworks facilities, including commentary that called both the company and the technology a “scam” and the “Theranos of the energy industry.”
DAC has never been entirely welcome among climate advocates. To a certain extent, its critics are right: The process of pulling carbon directly out of the ambient air and storing it permanently underground is both energy- and capital-intensive, and it has obvious utility for the oil and gas industry, which has seized on DAC’s potential to erase past emissions as a way to argue that the transition away from fossil energy isn’t actually necessary.
But these critics start to lose the thread when they call the technology a “fig leaf” for oil and gas or an “expensive, dangerous distraction,” and most egregiously when they point to the lack of actual carbon dioxide removed using the technology as an argument against future deployments.
There is a scientific consensus behind the need for carbon dioxide removal that these critiques dance around. As the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lays out in its most recent scientific report, “CDR is required to limit warming to 1.5 [degrees Celsius],” and is “part of all modeled scenarios that limit warming to 2 [degrees] by 2100.” Even when critics recognize the need for permanent CDR, they frequently fail to provide any plausible pathway to gigaton scale. The fact is that DAC doesn’t have an established, liquid market, like electricity, steel, cement, or any other commodity. That any one DAC business is struggling as it attempts to scale is not an indictment of the company, but rather an illustration of the challenge it is taking on to commercialize a first-of-a-kind technologies that naturally has first-of-a-kind issues while also building a brand new market for the crucial climate service it provides. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The commercial model for the nascent CDR industry is largely the sale of carbon removal credits for delivery in future years. This isn’t unique to CDR — it’s even analogous to the power purchase agreements that scaled renewable energy. Futures contracts are standard practice, and certainly not indicative of a “scam.”
DAC’s high energy needs are frequently cited as a reason for concern among skeptics. As the Princeton Net Zero America study notes, however, the total energy needed to reduce emissions in a net-zero system without DAC increases because we would need more power to produce e-fuels. (Jesse Jenkins, one of the leaders of the Net Zero America study, is also a co-host of Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast.) This criticism also fails to take into account the reduction in energy intensity that companies are already achieving by various means. That group includes Climeworks, which has introduced more efficient sorbents; Heirloom, which is working on deploying passive mineralization; and Holocene, which was recently acquired by Oxy and employs the low regeneration temperature solvents.
The costs and efficiency of DAC today, just like the cost and efficiency of solar 20 years ago, are likely to improve significantly in the future as the technology and market become more efficient and reliable. Early DAC deployments may have a relatively high cost now, but even today, DAC is cost-competitive with emissions mitigation in aviation.
The industry currently stands at a precipice. Will DAC cross the chasm from pilot facilities to meaningful deployment? Or fall off the hype wagon into the dustbin of cool ideas that were always 10 years away? Beneath the innuendo and false claims, the reporting from Reykjavik shows what everyone in DAC knew — that it has a messy, non-linear path to scale. That does not disprove the argument that it is also a necessary technology that is not only valuable to remove emissions, but also is drawing billions in investment, and driving local economic development.
And there is plenty of good news. The XRG joint venture with Adnoc shows that a sophisticated strategic investor views American DAC as promising. (The local South Texas community is excited, too.) The Oxy Stratos facility in West Texas has already brought thousands of new construction jobs, and will bring hundreds of more permanent jobs to the heart of oil country — a new industry to make use of their unique and valuable skill sets. Project Bantam, a multi-modal operation that was the largest in the U.S. when it launched last summer, is operating in Oklahoma.
The Heimildin story was written to be a salacious takedown, and DAC opponents wasted no time in saying, “We told you so.” The issue with that reaction is the story isn’t unique to Climeworks, or even to DAC. The same story could have been written 20 years ago about solar and batteries. It could be written tomorrow about advanced geothermal or long-duration energy storage. It is the boring, mundane outcome of trying to build a difficult technology with the policy and business hand we are dealt.
The road to DAC at scale will be scattered with bumps, failed projects, and folded companies. We should be cheering these folks on, not taking shots from the cheap, increasingly warm seats.