This week’s conversation is with Jon Powers, founder of the investment firm CleanCapital. I reached out to Powers because I wanted to get a better understanding of how renewable energy investments were shifting one year into the Trump administration. What followed was a candid, detailed look inside the thinking of how the big money in cleantech actually views Trump’s war on renewable energy permitting.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Alright, so let’s start off with a big question: How do investors in clean energy view Trump’s permitting freeze?
So, let’s take a step back. Look at the trend over the last decade. The industry’s boomed, manufacturing jobs are happening, the labor force has grown, investments are coming.
We [Clean Capital] are backed by infrastructure life insurance money. It’s money that wasn’t in this market 10 years ago. It’s there because these are long-term infrastructure assets. They see the opportunity. What are they looking for? Certainty. If somebody takes your life insurance money, and they invest it, they want to know it’s going to be there in 20 years in case they need to pay it out. These are really great assets – they’re paying for electricity, the panels hold up, etcetera.
With investors, the more you can manage that risk, the more capital there is out there and the better cost of capital there is for the project. If I was taking high cost private equity money to fund a project, you have to pay for the equipment and the cost of the financing. The more you can bring down the cost of financing – which has happened over the last decade – the cheaper the power can be on the back-end. You can use cheaper money to build.
Once you get that type of capital, you need certainty. That certainty had developed. The election of President Trump threw that into a little bit of disarray. We’re seeing that being implemented today, and they’re doing everything they can to throw wrenches into the growth of what we’ve been doing. They passed the bill affecting the tax credits, and the work they’re doing on permitting to slow roll projects, all of that uncertainty is damaging the projects and more importantly costs everyone down the road by raising the cost of electricity, in turn making projects more expensive in the first place. It’s not a nice recipe for people buying electricity.
But in September, I went to the RE+ conference in California – I thought that was going to be a funeral march but it wasn’t. People were saying, Now we have to shift and adjust. This is a huge industry. How do we get those adjustments and move forward?
Investors looked at it the same way. Yes, how will things like permitting affect the timeline of getting to build? But the fundamentals of supply and demand haven’t changed and in fact are working more in favor of us than before, so we’re figuring out where to invest on that potential. Also, yes federal is key, but state permitting is crucial. When you’re talking about distributed generation going out of a facility next to a data center, or a Wal-Mart, or an Amazon warehouse, that demand very much still exists and projects are being built in that middle market today.
What you’re seeing is a recalibration of risk among investors to understand where we put our money today. And we’re seeing some international money pulling back, and it all comes back to that concept of certainty.
To what extent does the international money moving out of the U.S. have to do with what Trump has done to offshore wind? Is that trade policy? Help us understand why that is happening.
I think it’s not trade policy, per se. Maybe that’s happening on the technology side. But what I’m talking about is money going into infrastructure and assets – for a couple of years, we were one of the hottest places to invest.
Think about a European pension fund who is taking money from a country in Europe and wanting to invest it somewhere they’ll get their money back. That type of capital has definitely been re-evaluating where they’ll put their money, and parallel, some of the larger utility players are starting to re-evaluate or even back out of projects because they’re concerned about questions around large-scale utility solar development, specifically.
Taking a step back to something else you said about federal permitting not being as crucial as state permitting–
That’s about the size of the project. Huge utility projects may still need federal approvals for transmission.
Okay. But when it comes to the trendline on community relations and social conflict, are we seeing renewable energy permitting risk increase in the U.S.? Decrease? Stay the same?
That has less to do with the administration but more of a well-structured fossil fuel campaign. Anti-climate, very dark money. I am not an expert on where the money comes from, but folks have tried to map that out. Now you’re even seeing local communities pass stuff like no energy storage [ordinances].
What’s interesting is that in those communities, we as an industry are not really present providing facts to counter this. That’s very frustrating for folks. We’re seeing these pass and honestly asking, Who was there?
Is the federal permitting freeze impacting investment too?
Definitely.
It’s not like you put money into a project all at once, right? It happens in these chunks. Let’s say there’s 10 steps for investing in a project. A little bit of money at step one, more money at step two, and it gradually gets more until you build the project. The middle area – permitting, getting approval from utilities – is really critical to the investments. So you’re seeing a little bit of a pause in when and how we make investments, because we sometimes don’t know if we’ll make it to, say, step six.
I actually think we’ll see the most impact from this in data center costs.
Can you explain that a bit more for me?
Look at northern Virginia for a second. There wasn’t a lot of new electricity added to that market but you all of the sudden upped demand for electricity by 20 percent. We’re literally seeing today all these utilities putting in rate hikes for consumers because it is literally a supply-demand question. If you can’t build new supply, it's going to be consumers paying for it, and even if you could build a new natural gas plant – at minimum that will happen four-to-six years from now. So over the next four years, we’ll see costs go up.
We’re building projects today that we invested in two years ago. That policy landscape we invested in two years ago hasn’t changed from what we invested into. But the policy landscape then changed dramatically.
If you wipe out half of what was coming in, there’s nothing backfilling that.
