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The United Nations calls 24/7 carbon-free energy generation, also known as hourly matching, “the end state of a fully decarbonized electricity system.” It means that every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed is matched with a zero-emissions electricity source, every hour of every day. It’s something that Google and Microsoft are aiming to implement by 2030, and it represents a much more significant climate commitment than today’s default system of annualized matching
So here’s a positive sign: LevelTen Energy, the leading marketplace for power purchase agreements, just raised $65 million in Series D funding, led by the investment firm B Capital with participation from Microsoft, Google, and Prelude Ventures, among others.
The money will help support LevelTen’s work with the Granular Certificate Trading Alliance, a collaboration it started last December in partnership with the Intercontinental Exchange, a data firm that operates global financial marketplaces. Together they’re building a platform for trading and managing “granular certificates,” hourly-matched energy certificates that will help corporations — and ideally the electricity sector at large — move to 24/7 hourly matching. Other partners to the alliance include Google, Microsoft, and the energy companies AES and Constellation.
To date, LevelTen has facilitated over $15.8 billion in power purchase agreements, asset sales, and other clean energy transactions, totaling over 7 gigawatts of clean energy. Overall, the company has raised more than $125 million, with past investors including the My Climate Journey Collective as well as the investment arms of oil and gas companies such as Equinor and TotalEnergies, which are adding renewables to their portfolios.
Bryce Smith, LevelTen’s founder and CEO, told me the platform will launch its first auctions for hourly-matched clean energy by the end of the year, with initial customers expected to be corporate partners like Google and Microsoft themselves.
“Corporates have been leading the way in a lot of respects and they're doing it again on the granular certificate front,” Smith said. He sees it as LevelTen’s job to get more industry players onboard by creating the transaction infrastructure to enable hourly matching. “So there's a bit of a ‘build it and they will come’ aspect to this,” he told me.
Realistically, though, it’s unlikely that the electricity industry will move towards 24/7 clean energy absent some serious incentives to do so. That’s why the Biden administration’s proposed hydrogen tax credit rules could be so powerful. They stipulate that to qualify for the largest IRA subsidies, clean hydrogen must be produced using a relatively new source of carbon-free electricity, generated within the same hour that it’s used and in roughly the same location. If these regulations aren’t deleted or seriously altered by this or another new administration (which they probably will be), power grids would have until 2028 to set up new systems for hourly accounting, thereby laying the groundwork for 24/7 matching across the electricity sector at large.
That potential, tenuous and unlikely though it may be, has LevelTen excited, and the company is leaning hard into hydrogen. LevelTen is a founding member of the Hydrogen Demand Initiative, a coalition formed by the Department of Energy to ensure that the clean hydrogen produced by the seven designated hydrogen hubs is actually sold. The DOE is allocating $1 billion to help catalyze demand, and it’s up to H2DI to figure out how to distribute that. “A component of that is figuring out how to bring buyers and sellers together easily and smoothly,” Smith told me. “And that's the role that we play in creating a marketplace where buyers and sellers can find each other and execute.”
Smith is aware that a change in administration could very well mean a change in the hydrogen tax credit rules, potentially decreasing incentives for green hydrogen and making hydrogen produced from natural gas with carbon capture and storage (“blue hydrogen”) or hydrogen produced without CCS (“gray hydrogen”) more attractive. He said the LevelTen platform would likely support transactions that involve a “variety of hydrogen colors and technologies.”
“What's most important for us always is figuring out how to put a vital technology on the fastest track to scaling,” Smith told me. “And if that means accommodating different colors for some period of time, we have the end goal [of green hydrogen] always in mind.”
As LevelTen scales, it’s also working to get more utilities onto its platform. Smith told me that utility customers have, “really only fairly recently realized that their procurement needs around renewables are massive.”As the push to “electrify everything” gains momentum and data centers suck up more and more power, utilities are increasingly investing in renewable energy to meet their electricity needs, diversify their portfolios and respond to customer demand for clean power. “We're used to seeing really slow, fairly predictable demand and electricity growth from a utility perspective, and that's changing pretty dramatically,” Smith told me.
LevelTen currently operates in 29 countries across North America and Europe, and hopes to use its recent funding to expand into new regions.
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Add it to the evidence that China’s greenhouse gas emissions may be peaking, if they haven’t already.
Exactly where China is in its energy transition remains somewhat fuzzy. Has the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases already hit peak emissions? Will it in 2025? That remains to be seen. But its import data for this year suggests an economy that’s in a rapid transition.
According to government trade data, in the first fourth months of this year, China imported $12.1 billion of coal, $100.4 billion of crude oil, and $18 billion of natural gas. In terms of value, that’s a 27% year over year decline in coal, a 8.5% decline in oil, and a 15.7% decline in natural gas. In terms of volume, it was a 5.3% decline, a slight 0.5% increase, and a 9.2% decline, respectively.
“Fossil fuel demand still trends down,” Lauri Myllyvirta, the co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, wrote on X in response to the news.
Morgan Stanley analysts predicted Friday in a note to clients that this “weak downstream demand” for coal in China would “continue to hinder coal import volume.”
Another piece of China’s emissions and coal usage puzzle came from Indonesia, which is a major coal exporter. Citing data from trade data service Kpler, Reuters reported Friday that Indonesia’s thermal coal exports “have dropped to their lowest in three years” thanks to “weak demand in China and India,” the world’s two biggest coal importers. Indonesia’s thermal coal exports dropped 12% annually to 150 million tons in the first third of the year, Reuters reported.
China’s official goal is to hit peak emissions by 2030 and reach “carbon neutrality” by 2060. The country’s electricity grid is largely fueled by coal (with hydropower coming in at number two), as is its prolific production of steel and cement, which is energy and, specifically, coal-intensive. For a few years in the 2010s, more cement was poured in China than in the whole 20th century in the United States. China also accounts for about half of the world’s steel production.
At the same time, China’s electricity demand growth is being largely met by renewables, implying that China can expand its economy without its economy-wide, annual emissions going up. This is in part due to a massive deployment of renewables. In 2023, China installed enough non-carbon-emitting electricity generation to meet the total electricity demand of all of France.
China’s productive capacity has shifted in a way that’s less carbon intensive, experts on the Chinese energy system and economy have told Heatmap. The economy isshifting more toward manufacturing and away from the steel-and-cement intensive breakneck urbanization of the past few decades, thanks to a dramatically slowing homebuilding sector.
Chinese urban residential construction was using almost 300 million tons of steel per year at its peak in 2019, according to research by the Reserve Bank of Australia, about a third of the country’s total steel usage. (Steel consumption for residential construction would fall by about half by 2023.) By contrast, the whole United States economy consumes less than 100 million tons of steel per year.
To the extent the overall Chinese economy slows down due to the trade war with the United States, coal usage — and thus greenhouse gas emissions — would slow as well. Although that hasn’t happened yet — China also released export data on Friday that showed sustained growth, in spite of the tariff barriers thrown up by the Trump administration.
The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
The company managed to put a positive spin on tariffs.
The residential solar company Sunrun is, like much of the rest of the clean energy business, getting hit by tariffs. The company told investors in its first quarter earnings report Tuesday that about half its supply of solar modules comes from overseas, and thus is subject to import taxes. It’s trying to secure more modules domestically “as availability increases,” Sunrun said, but “costs are higher and availability limited near-term.”
“We do not directly import any solar equipment from China, although producers in China are important for various upstream components used by our suppliers,” Sunrun chief executive Mary Powell said on the call, indicating that having an entirely-China-free supply chain is likely impossible in the renewable energy industry.
Hardware makes up about a third of the company’s costs, according to Powell. “This cost will increase from tariffs,” she said, although some advance purchasing done before the end of last year will help mitigate that. All told, tariffs could lower the company’s cash generation by $100 million to $200 million, chief financial officer Danny Abajian said.
But — and here’s where things get interesting — the company also offered a positive spin on tariffs.
In a slide presentation to investors, the company said that “sustained, severe tariffs may drive the country to a recession.” Sounds bad, right?
But no, not for Sunrun. A recession could mean “lower long term interest rates,” which, since the company relies heavily on securitizing solar leases and benefits from lower interest rates, could round in the company’s favor.
In its annual report released in February, the company mentioned that “higher rates increase our cost of capital and decrease the amount of capital available to us to finance the deployment of new solar energy systems.” On Wednesday, the company estimated that a 10% tariff, which is the baseline rate in the Trump “Liberation Day” tariffs, could be offset with a half percentage point decline in the company’s cost of capital, although it didn’t provide any further details behind the calculation.
Even in the absence of interest rate relief, a recession could still be okay for Sunrun.
“Historically, recessions have driven more demand for our products,” the company said in its presentation, arguing that because their solar systems offer savings compared to utility rates, they become more attractive when households get more money conscious.
Sunrun shares are up almost 10% today, as the company showed more growth than expected.
For what it’s worth, the much-ballyhooed decline in long-term interest rates as a result of Trump’s tariffs hasn’t actually happened, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve on Wednesday decided to keep the federal funds rate at 4.5%, the third time in a row the board of governors have chosen to maintain the status quo. The yield on 10-year treasuries, often used as a benchmark for interest rates, is up slightly since “Liberation Day” on April 2 and sits today at 4.34%, compared to 4.19% before Trump’s tariffs announcements.