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Q&A

The Renewable Energy Investor Optimistic About the Future

A conversation with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital

The Q&A subject.
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Today’s conversation is with Mary King, a vice president handling venture strategy at Aligned Capital, which has invested in developers like Summit Ridge and Brightnight. I reached out to Mary as a part of the broader range of conversations I’ve had with industry professionals since it has become clear Republicans in Congress will be taking a chainsaw to the Inflation Reduction Act. I wanted to ask her about investment philosophies in this trying time and how the landscape for putting capital into renewable energy has shifted. But Mary’s quite open with her view: these technologies aren’t going anywhere.

The following conversation has been lightly edited and abridged for clarity.

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Hotspots

Democratic Climate Hawk Fights Battery Storage Project

And more news around renewable energy conflicts.

The United States.
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1. Nantucket County, Massachusetts – The SouthCoast offshore wind project will be forced to abandon its existing power purchase agreements with Massachusetts and Rhode Island if the Trump administration’s wind permitting freeze continues, according to court filings submitted last week.

  • SouthCoast is a crucial example of a systemic dilemma I reported on months back: Wind projects the Biden administration said it fully permitted will likely still be delayed by a blanket permitting freeze because wind energy requires such large infrastructure that projects need regular green lights from the federal government for new activities.
  • In case you missed it, the anti-wind permitting freeze has been a continued issue for SouthCoast and has led to scrapped negotiations on future power deals with Massachusetts.

2. Tippacanoe County, Indiana – This county has now passed a full solar moratorium but is looking at grandfathering one large utility-scale project: RWE and Geenex’s Rainbow Trout solar farm.

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Spotlight

The Trump Solar Farm Slowdown

Permitting delays and missed deadlines are bedeviling solar developers and activist groups alike. What’s going on?

Donald Trump and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

It’s no longer possible to say the Trump administration is moving solar projects along as one of the nation’s largest solar farms is being quietly delayed and even observers fighting the project aren’t sure why.

Months ago, it looked like Trump was going to start greenlighting large-scale solar with an emphasis out West. Agency spokespeople told me Trump’s 60-day pause on permitting solar projects had been lifted and then the Bureau of Land Management formally approved its first utility-scale project under this administration, Leeward Renewable Energy’s Elisabeth solar project in Arizona, and BLM also unveiled other solar projects it “reasonably” expected would be developed in the area surrounding Elisabeth.

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